Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1

THE COMING RACE

The New Humanity

THE world is in the throes of a new creation and the pangs of that new birth have made mother Earth restless. It is no longer a far-off ideal that our imagination struggles to visualise, nor a prophecy that yet remains to be fulfilled. It is Here and Now.

Although we may not know it, the New Man-the divine race of humanity is already among us. It may be in our next neighbour, in our nearest brother, even in myself. Only a thin veil covers it. It marches just behind the line. It waits for an occasion to throw off the veil and place itself in the forefront. We are living in strenuous times in which age-long institutions are going down and new -forces rearing their heads, old habits are being cast off and new impulsions acquired. In every sphere of life, we see the urgent demand for a recasting, a fresh valuation of things. From the base to the summit, from the economic and political life to the artistic and spiritual, humanity is being shaken to bring out a new expression and articulation. There is the hidden surge of a Power, the secret stress of a Spirit that can no longer suffer to remain in the shade and behind the mask, but wills to come out in the broad daylight and be recognised in its plenary virtues.

That Power, that Spirit has been growing and gathering its strength during all the millenniums that humanity has lived through. On the momentous day when man appeared on earth, the Higher Man also took his birth. Since the hour the Spirit refused to be imprisoned in its animal sheath and came out as man, it approached by that very uplift a greater freedom and a vaster movement. It was the crest of that underground wave which peered over the surface from age to age, from clime to clime through the experiences of poets and prophets and sages -  the Head of the Sacrificial Horse galloping towards the Dawn.

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And now the days of captivity or rather of inner preparation are at an end. The voice in the wilderness was necessary, for it was a call and a communion in the silence of the soul. Today the silence seeks utterance. Today the shell is ripe enough to break and to bring out the mature and full-grown being. The king that was in hiding comes in glory and triumph, in his complete regalia.

Another humanity is rising out of the present human species. The beings of the new order are everywhere and it is they who will soon hold sway over earth, be the head and front of the terrestrial evolution in the cycle that is approaching as it was with man in the cycle that is passing away. What will this new order of being be like? It will be what man is not, also what man is. It will not be man, because it will overstep the limita­tions and incapacities inherent in man; and it will be man by the realisation of those fundamental aspirations and yearnings that have troubled and consoled the deeper strata-the soul-in him throughout the varied experiences of his terrestrial life.

The New Man will be Master-and not slave. He will be master, first, of himself and then of the world. Man as he actually is, is but a slave. He has no personal voice or choice; the determining soul, the Ishwara, in him is sleep-bound and hushed. He is a mere plaything in the hands of nature and circumstances. Therefore it is that Science has become his supreme Dharmashastra; for science seeks to teach us the moods of Nature and the methods of propitiating her. Our actual ideal of man is that of the cleverest slave. But the New Man will have found himself and by and according to his inner will, mould and create his world. He will not be in awe of Nature and in an attitude of perpetual apprehension. and hesitation, but will ground himself on a secret harmony and union that will declare him as the lord. We will recognise the New Man by his very gait and manner, by a certain kingly ease and dominion in every shade of his expression.

Not that this sovereign power will have anything to do. with aggression or over-bearingness. It will not be a power that feels itself only by creating an eternal opponent-Erbfeind -  by coming in constant clash with a rival that seeks to gain victory by subjugating. It will not be Nietzschean "will to power,"

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which is, at best, a supreme Asuric power. It will rather be a Divine Power, for the strength it will exert and the victory it will achieve will not come from the ego-it is the ego which requires an object outside and against to feel and affirm itself but it will come from a higher personal self which is one with the cosmic soul and therefore with other personal souls. The Asura, in spite of, or rather, because of his aggressive vehemence betrays a lack of the sovereign power that is calm and at ease and self-sufficient. The Devic power does not assert hut simply accomplishes; the forces of the world act not as its opponent but as its instrument. Thus the New Man shall affirm his individual sovereignty and do so to perfection by expressing through it his unity with the cosmic powers, with the infinite godhead. And by being Swarat, Self-Master, he will become Samrat, world-master.

This mastery will be effected not merely in will, but in mind and heart also. For the New Man will know not by the intellect which is egocentric and therefore limited, not by ratiocination which is an indirect and doubtful process, but by direct vision, an inner communion, a soul revelation. The new knowledge will be vast and profound and creative, based as it will be upon the reality of things and not upon their shadows. Truth will shine through every experience and every utterance -  "a truth shall have its seat on our speech and mind' and hearing", so have the Vedas said. The mind and intellect will not be active and constructive agents but the luminous channel of a self-luminous knowledge. And the heart too which is now the field of passion and egoism will be cleared of its noise and obscurity; a serener sky will shed its pure warmth and translucent glow. The knot will be rent asunder-bhidyate hridaya granthih -  and the vast and mighty streams of another ocean will flow through. We will love not merely those to whom we are akin but God's creatures, one and all; we will love not with the yearning and hunger of a mortal but with the wide and intense Rasa that lies in the divine identity of souls.

And the new society will be based not upon competition, nor even upon co-operation. It will not be an open conflict, neither will it be a convenient compromise of rival individual interests. It will be the organic expression of the collective soul of humanity, working and achieving through each and every

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individual soul its most wide-winging freedom, manifesting the godhead that is, proper to each and every one. It will be an organisation, most delicate and subtle and supple, the members of which will have no need to live upon one another but in and through one another. It will be, if you like, a henotheistic hierarchy in which everyone will be the greatest, since everyone is all and all everyone simultaneously.

The New Humanity will be something in the mould that we give to the gods. It will supply the link that we see missing between gods and men; it will be the race of embodied gods. Man will attain that thing which has been his first desire and earliest dream, for which he coveted the gods -  Immortality, amritatwam. The mortalities that cut and divide, limit and bind man make him the sorrowful being he is. These are due to his ignorance and weakness and egoism. These are due to his soul itself. It is the soul that requires change, a new birth, as Christ demanded. Ours is a little soul that has severed itself from the larger and mightier self that it is. And therefore does it die every moment and even while living is afraid to live and so lives poorly and miserably. But the age is now upon us when the god-like soul anointed with its immortal royalties is ready to emerge and claim our salutation.

The breath and the surge of the new creation cannot be mistaken. The question that confronts us today is no longer whether the New Man, the Super-humanity, will come or if at all, when; but the question we have to answer is who among us are ready to be its receptacle, its instrument and embodiment.

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The Creative Soul

THE difference between living organism and dead matter is that while the former is endowed with creative activity, the latter has only passive receptivity. Life adds, synthetises, new-creates – gives more than what it receives; matter only sums up, gathers, reflects, gives just what it receives. Life is living, glad and green through its creative genius. Creation in some form or other must be the core of everything that seeks vitality and growth, vigour and delight. Not only so, but a thing in order to be real must possess a creative function. We consider a shadow or an echo unreal precisely because they do not create but merely image or repeat, they do not bring out anything new but simply reflect what is given. The whole of existence is real because it is eternally creative.

So the problem that concerns man, the riddle that humanity has to solve is how to find out and follow the path of creativity. If we are not to be dead matter nor mere shadowy illusions we must be creative. A misconception that has vitiated our outlook in general and has been the most potent cause of a sterilising atavism in the moral evolution of humanity is that creativity is an aristocratic virtue, that it belongs only to the chosen few. A great poet or a mighty man of action creates indeed, but such a creator does not appear very frequently. A Shakespeare or a Napoleon is a rare phenomenon; they are, in reality, an exception to the general run of mankind. It is enough if we others can understand and follow them – Mahajano yena gatah – let the great souls initiate and create, the common souls have only to repeat and imitate.

But this is not as it should be, nor is it the truth of the matter. Every individual soul, however placed it may be, is by nature creative; every individual being lives to discover and to create.

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The inmost reality of man is not a passive receptacle, a mere responsive medium but it is a dynamo – a power-station generating and throwing out energy that produces and creates.

Now the centre of this energy, the matrix of creativity is the soul itself, one's own soul. If you want to create – live, grow and be real-find yourself, be yourself. The simple old wisdom still remains the eternal wisdom. It is because we fall off from our soul that we wander into side-paths, paths that do not belong to our real nature and hence that lead to imitation and repetition, decay and death. This is what happens to what we call common souls. The force of circumstances, the pressure of environment or simply the momentum of custom or habit compel them to choose the easiest and the readiest way that may lie before them. They do not consult the demand of the inner being but the requirement of the moment. Our bodily needs, our vital hungers and our mental prejudices obsess and obscure the impulsions that thrill the hidden spirit. We hasten to gratify the immediate and forget the eternal, we clutch at the shadow and let go the substance. We are carried away in the flux and tumult of life. It is a mixed and collective whirl – a Weltgeist that moves and governs us. We are helpless straws drifting in the current. But manhood demands that we stop and pause, pull ourselves out of the Maelstrom and be what we are. We must shape things as we want and not allow things to shape us as they want.

Let each take cognisance of the godhead that is within him – for self is God – and in the strength of the soul-divinity create his universe. It does not matter what sort of universe he- creates, so long as he creates it. The world created by a Buddha is not the same as that created by a Napoleon, nor should they be the same. It does not prove anything that I cannot become a Kalidasa; for that matter Kalidasa cannot become what I am. If you have not the genius of a Shankara it does not mean that you have no genius at all. Be and become yourself – ma gridhah kasyachit dhanam, says the Upanishad. The fountain-head of creative genius lies there, in the free choice and the particular delight –the self-determination of the spirit within you and not in the desire for your neighbor’s riches. The world has become dull and uniform and mechanical, since everybody

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endeavours to become not himself, but always somebody else. Imitation is servitude and servitude brings in grief.

In one's own soul lies the very height and profundity of a god-head. Each soul by bringing out the note that is his, makes for the most wondrous symphony. Once a man knows what he is and holds fast to it, refusing to be drawn away by any necessity or temptation, he begins to uncover himself, to do what his inmost nature demands and takes joy in, that is to say, begins to create. Indeed there may be much difference in the forms that different souls take. But because each is itself, therefore each is grounded upon the fundamental equality of things. All our valuations are in reference to some standard or other set up with a particular end in view, but that is a question of the practical world which in no way takes away from the intrinsic value of the greatness of the soul. So long as the thing is there, the how of it does not matter. Infinite are the ways of manifesta­tion and all of them the very highest and the most sublime, provided they are a manifestation of the soul itself, provided they rise and flow from the same level. Whether it is Agni or Indra, Varuna, Mitra or the Aswins, it is the same supreme and divine inflatus.

The cosmic soul is true. But that truth is borne out, effec­tuated only by the truth of the individual soul. When the individual soul becomes itself fully and integrally, by that very fact it becomes also the cosmic soul. The individuals are the channels through which flows the Universal and the Infinite in its multiple emphasis. Each is a particular figure, aspect – Bhava, a particular angle of vision of All. The vision is entire and the figure perfect if it is not refracted by the lower and denser parts of our being. And for that the individual must first come to itself and shine in its opal clarity and translucency.

Not to do what others do, but what your soul impels you to do. Not to be others but your own self. Not to be anything but the very cosmic and infinite divinity of your soul. Therein lies your highest freedom and perfect delight. And there you are supremely creative. Each soul has a  consort – Prakriti, Nature -which it creates out of its own rib. And in this field of infinite creativity the soul lives, moves and has its being.

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Rationalism

WHAT is Reason, the faculty that is said to be the proud privilege of man, the sovereign instrument he alone possesses for the purpose of knowing? What is the value of knowledge that Reason gives? For it is the manner of knowing, the particular faculty or instrument by which we know, that determines the nature and content of knowledge. Reason is the collecting of available sense-perceptions and a certain mode of working upon them. It has three component elements that have been defined as observation, classification and deduction. Now, the very composition of Reason shows that it cannot be a perfect instrument of knowledge; the limitations are the inherent limitations of the component elements. As regards observation there is a two-fold limitation. First, observation is a relative term and variable quantity. One observes through the prism of one's own observing faculty, through the bias of one's own personality and no two persons can have absolutely the same manner of observation. So Science has recognised the necessity of personal equation and has created an imaginary observer, a "mean man" as the standard of reference. And this already takes us far away from the truth, from the reality. Secondly, observation is limited by its scope. All the facts of the world, all sense-perceptions possible and actual cannot be included within any observation however large, however collective it may be. We have to go always upon a limited amount of data, we are able to construct only a partial and sketchy view of the surface of existence. And then it is these few and doubtful facts that Reason seeks to arrange and classify. That classification may hold good for certain immediate ends, for a temporary understanding of the world and its forces, either in order to satisfy our curiosity or to gain some practical utility. For when

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we want to consider the world only in its immediate relation to us, a few and even doubtful facts are sufficient-the more immediate the relation, the more immaterial the doubtfulness and insufficiency of facts. We may quite confidently go a step in darkness, but to walk a mile we do require light and certainty. Our scientific classification has a background of uncertainty, if not, of falsity; and our deduction also, even while correct within a very narrow range of space and time, cannot escape the fundamental vices of observation and classification upon which it is based.

It might be said, however, that the guarantee or sanction of Reason does not lie in the extent of its application, nor can its subjective nature (or ego-centric predication, as philosophers would term it) vitiate the validity of its conclusions. There is, in fact, an inherent unity and harmony between Reason and Reality. If we know a little of Reality, we know the whole; if we know the subjective, we know also the objective. As in the part, so in the whole; as it is within, so it is without. If you say that I will die, you need not wait for my actual death to have the proof of your statement. The generalising power inherent in Reason is the guarantee of the certitude to which it leads. Reason is valid, as it does not betray us. If it were such as anti-intellectuals make it out to be, we would be making nothing but false steps, would always remain entangled in contradictions. The very success of Reason is proof of its being a reliable and perfect instrument for the knowledge of Truth and Reality. It is beside the mark to prove otherwise, simply by analysing the nature of Reason and showing the fundamental deficiencies of that nature. It is rather to the credit of Reason that being as it is, it is none the less a successful and trustworthy agent.

Now the question is, does Reason never fail? Is it such a perfect instrument as intellectualists think it to be? There is ground for serious misgivings. Reason says, for example, that the earth revolves round the sun: and reason, it is argued, is right, for we see that all the' facts are conformable _ to it, even facts that were hitherto unknown and are now coming into our ken. But the difficulty is that Reason did not say that always in the past and may not say that always in the future. The old astronomers could explain the universe by holding quite a contrary theory and could fit into it all their astronomical data.

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A future scientist may come and explain the matter in quite a different way from either. It is only a choice of workable theories that Reason seems to offer; we do not know the fact itself, apart perhaps from exactly the amount that immediate sense-perception gives to each of us. Or again, if we take an example of another category, we may ask, does God exist? A candid Rationalist would say that he does not know although he has his own opinion about the matter. Evidently, Reason cannot solve all the problems that it meets; it can judge only truths that are of a certain type.

It may be answered that Reason is a faculty which gives us progressive knowledge of the reality, but as a knowing instrument it is perfect, at least it is the only instrument at our disposal; even if it gives a false, incomplete or blurred image of the reality, it has the means and capacity of correcting and completing itself. It offers theories, no doubt; but what are theories? They are simply the gradually increasing adaptation of the knowing subject to the object to be known, the evolving revelation of reality to our perception of it. Reason is the power which carries on that process of adaptation and revelation; we can safely rely upon Reason and trust It to carry on its work with increasing success.

But in knowledge it is precisely finality that we seek for and no mere progressive, asymptotic, rapprochement ad infinitum. No less than the Practical Reason, the Theoretical Reason also demands a categorical imperative, a clean affirmation or denial. If Reason cannot do that, it must be regarded as inefficient. It is poor consolation to man that Reason is gradually finding out the truth or that it is trying to grapple with the problems of God, Soul and Immortality and will one day pronounce its verdict. Whether we have or have not any other instrument of knowledge is a different question altogether. But in the meanwhile Reason stands condemned by the evidence of its own limitation.

It may be retorted that if Reason is condemned, it is condemned by itself and by no other authority. All argumentation against Reason is a function of Reason itself. The deficiencies of Reason we find out by the rational faculty alone. If Reason was to die, it is because it consents to commit suicide; there is no other power that kills it. But to this our answer is that

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Reason has this miraculous power of self-destruction; or, to put it philosophically, Reason is, at best, an organ of self-criticism and perhaps the organ par excellence for that purpose. But criticism is one thing and creation another. And whether we know or act, it is fundamentally a process of creation; at least, without this element of creation there can be no knowledge, no act. In knowledge there is a luminous creativity, Revelation or Categorical Imperative which Reason does not and cannot supply but vaguely strains to seize. For that element we have to search elsewhere, not in Reason.

Does this mean that real knowledge is irrational or against Reason? Not so necessarily. There is a super-rational power for knowledge and Reason may either be a channel or an obstacle. If we take our stand upon Reason and then proceed to know, if we take the forms and categories of Reason as the inviolable schemata of knowledge, then indeed Reason becomes an obstacle to that super-rational power. If, on the other hand, Reason does not offer any set-form from beforehand, does not insist upon its own conditions, is passive and simply receives and reflects what is given to it, then it becomes a luminous and sure channel for that higher and real knowledge.

The fact is that Reason is a lower manifestation of knowledge, it is an attempt to express on the mental level a power that exceeds it. It is the section of a vast and unitarian Consciousness-Power; the section may be necessary under certain conditions and circumstances, but unless it is viewed in its relation to the ensemble, unless it gives up its exclusive absolutism, it will be perforce arbitrary and misleading. It would still remain helpful and useful,. but its help and use would be always limited in scope and temporary in effectivity.

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The Intuition of the Age

ALL movements - whether of thought or of life, whether in the individual or in the mass-proceed from a fundamental intuition which lies in the background as the logical presupposition, the psychological motive and the spiritual force. A certain attitude of the soul, a certain angle of vision is what is posited first; all other things-all thoughts and feelings and activities are but necessary attempts to express, to demonstrate, to realise on the conscious and dynamic levels, in the outer world, the truth which has thus already been seized in some secret core of our being. The intuition may not, of course, be present to the conscious mind, it may not be ostensibly sought for, one may even deny the existence of such a preconceived notion and proceed to establish truth on a tabula rasa; none the less it is this hidden bias that judges, this secret consciousness that formulates, this unknown power that fashions.

Now, what is the intuition that lies behind the movements of the new age? What is the intimate realisation, the underlying view-point which is guiding and modelling all our efforts and achievements-our science and art, our poetry and philosophy, our religion and society? For, there is such a common and fundamental note which is being voiced forth by the human spirit through all the multitude of its present-day activities.

A new impulse is there, no one can deny, and it has vast possibilities before it, that also one need not hesitate to accept. But in order that we may best fructuate what has been spontaneously sown,. we must first recognise it, be luminously conscious of it and develop it along its proper line of growth. For, also certain it is that this new impulse or intuition, however true and strong in itself, is still groping and erring and miscarrying; it is still wasting much of its energy in tentative

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things, in mere experiments, in even clear failures. The fact is that the" intuition has not yet become an enlightened one, it is still moving, as we shall presently explain, in the dark vital regions of man. And vitalism is naturally and closely affianced to pragmatism, that is to say, the mere vital impulse seeks immediately to execute itself, it looks for external effects, for changes in the form, in the machinery only. Thus it is that we see in art and literature discussions centred upon the scheme of composition, as whether the new poetry should be lyrical or dramatic, popular or aristocratic, metrical or free of metre, and in practical life we talk of remodelling the state by new methods of representation and governance, of purging society by bills and legislation, of reforming humanity by a business pact.

All this may be good and necessary, but there is the danger of leaving altogether out of account the one thing needful. We must then pause and turn back, look behind the apparent impulsion that effectuates to the Will that drives, behind the ideas and ideals of the mind to the soul that informs and inspires; we must carry ourselves up the stream and concentrate upon the original source, the creative intuition that lies hidden somewhere. And then only all the new stirrings that we feel in our heart-our urges and ideals and visions will attain an effective clarity, an unshaken purpose and an inevitable achievement.

That is to say, the change has been in the soul of man him-self, the being has veered round and taken a new orientation. It is this which one must envisage, recognise and consciously possess, in order that one may best fulfil the call of the age. But what we are doing instead is to observe the mere external signs and symbols and symptoms, to fix upon the distant quiverings, the echoes on the outermost rim, which are not always faithful representations, but very often distorted images of the truth and life at the centre and source and matrix. We must know that if there has been going on a redistribution and new-marshalling of forces, it is because the fiat has come from the Etat Major.

Now, in order to understand the new orientation of the spirit of the present age, we may profitably ask what was the inspiration of the past age, the characteristic note which has failed to

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satisfy us and which we are endeavouring to transform. We know that that age was the Scientific age or the age of Reason. Its great prophets were Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists or if you mount further up in time, we may begin from Bacon and the humanists. Its motto was first, "The proper study of mankind is man" and secondly, Reason is the supreme organon of knowledge, the highest deity in man - la Déesse Raison. And it is precisely against these two basic principles that the new age has entered its protest. In face of Humanism, Nietzsche has posited the Superman and in face of Reason Bergson has posited Intuition.

The worship of man as something essentially and exclusively human necessitates as a corollary, the other doctrine, viz. the deification of Reason; and vice versa. Humanism and Scientism go together and the whole spirit and mentality of the age that is passing may be summed up in those two words. So Nietzsche says, "All our modern world is captured in the net of the Alexandrine culture and has, for its ideal, the theoretical man, armed with the most powerful instruments of knowledge, toiling in the service of science and whose prototype and original ancestor is Socrates." Indeed, it may be generally asserted that the nation whose prophet and sage claimed to have brought down Philosophia from heaven to dwell upon earth among men was precisely the nation, endowed with a clear and logical intellect, that was the very embodiment of rationality and reasonableness. As a matter of fact, it would not be far, wrong to say that it is the Hellenic culture which has been moulding humanity for ages; at least, it is this which has been the predominating factor, the vital and dynamic element in man's nature. Greece when it died was reborn in Rome; Rome, in its return, found new life in France; and France means Europe. What Europe has been and still is for the world and humanity one knows only too much. And yet, the Hellenic genius has not been the sole motive power and constituent element; there has been another leaven' which worked constantly within, if intermittently without. If Europe represented mind and man and this side of existence, Asia always reflected that which transcends the mind-the spirit, the Gods and the Beyonds.

However, we are concerned more with the immediate past,

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the mentality that laid its supreme stress upon the human rationality. What that epoch did not understand was that Reason could be overstepped, that there was something higher, something greater than Reason; Reason being the sovereign faculty, it was thought there could be nothing beyond, unless it were déraison. The human attribute par excellence is Reason. Exactly so. But the fact is that man is not bound by his humanity and that reason can be transformed and sublimated into other more powerful faculties.

Now, the question is, what is the insufficiency of Reason? How does it limit man? And what is the Superman into which man is asked or is being impelled to grow?

Reason is insufficient and unsatisfactory because, as Bergson explains, it does not and cannot embrace life as a whole, seize man and the world in an integral realisation. The greater part of the vast mystery of existence escapes its envergure. Reason is that faculty which is for analysing, defining, classifying and fixing things. It is a power that has grown in man in order that he may best manipulate the things of the world. It is utilitarian, practical in its nature and outlook. And as practical dealing requires that things should be stable and separate entities, therefore Reason cannot but see things in solid and in the frag­ments of a solid. It cuts up existence into distinct parts and diverse elements; and these again it seeks to relate and aggre­gate, in accordance with what it calls "laws". Such a process has been necessary for man in conducting life and action successfully. Originally a bye-product of active life, Reason gradually separated itself and came finally to have an inde­pendent status and function, became or sought to become the instrument of knowledge,. of Truth.

But although Reason has been and is useful for the practical, we may say almost, the manual aspect of life, life itself it leaves unexplained and uncomprehended. For life is mobility, a continuous flow that has nowhere any gap or stop and things have in reality no isolated or separate existence, they merge and mingle into one another and form an indissoluble whole. Therefore the forms and categories that Reason imposes upon existence are more or less arbitrary; they are shackles that seek to bind up and limit life, but are often rent asunder in the very effort. So the civilisation that has its origin in Reason and

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progresses with discoveries and inventions - devices for artfully manipulating nature - has been essentially and pre-eminently mechanical in its structure and outlook. It has become more and more efficient perhaps, but less and less soul-inspired, less and less-endowed with the free-flowing sap of organic growth and vitality.

So instead of the rational principle, the new age wants the principle of Nature or Life. Even as regards knowledge Reason is not the only, nor the best instrument. For animals have properly no reason; the nature-principle of knowledge in the animal is Instinct - the faculty that acts so faultlessly, so marvellously where Reason can only pause and be perplexed. This is not to say that man is to or can go back to this primitive and animal function; but certainly he can replace it by some­thing akin which is as natural and yet purified and self-conscious - illumined instinct, we may say or Intuition, as Bergson terms it. And Nietzsche's definition of the Superman has also a similar orientation and significance; for, according to him, the Superman is man who has outgrown his Reason, who is not bound by the standards and the conventions deter­mined by Reason for a special purpose. The Superman is one who has gone beyond "good and evil," who has shaken off from his nature and character elements that are "human, all too human" - who is the embodiment of life-force in its absolute purity and strength and freedom.

This then is the mantra of the new age - Life with Intuition as its guide and not Reason and mechanical efficiency, not Man but Superman. The right mantra has been found, the principle itself is irreproachable. But the interpretation, the application, does not seem to have been always happy. For, Nietzsche's conception of the' Superman is full of obvious lacunae. If we have so long been adoring the intellectual man, Nietzsche asks us, on the other hand, to deify the vital man. According to him the superman is he who has (I) the supreme sense of the ego, (2) the sovereign will to power and (3) who lives dangerously. All this means an Asura. that is to say, one who has, it may be, dominion over his animal and vital impulsions in order, of course, that he may best gratify them - but who has not purified them. Purification does not necessarily mean, annihilation but it does mean sublimation and transformation.

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So if you have to transcend man, you have to transcend egoism also. For a conscious egoism is the very characteristic of man and by increasing your sense of egoism you do not supersede man but simply aggrandise your humanity, fashion it on a larger, a titanic scale. And then the will to power is not the only will that requires fulfilment, there is also the will to knowledge and the will to love. In man these three fundamental constitutive elements coexist, although they do it, more often than not, at the expense of each other and in a state of continual disharmony. The superman, if he is to be the man "who has surmounted himself", must embody a poise of being in which all the three find a fusion and harmony - a perfect synthesis. Again, to live dangerously may be heroic, but it is not divine. To live dangerously means to have eternal opponents, that is to say, to live ever on the same level with the forces you want to dominate. To have the sense that one has to fight and control means that one is not as yet the sovereign lord, for one has to strive and strain and attain. The supreme lord is he who is perfectly equanimous with himself and with the world. He has not to batter things into a shape in order to create. He creates means, he manifests. He wills and he achieves -"God said 'let there be light' and there was light."

As a matter of fact, the superman is not, as Nietzsche thinks him to be, the highest embodiment of the biological force of Nature, not even as modified and refined by the aesthetic and aristocratic virtues of which the higher reaches of humanity seem capable. For that is after all humanity only accentuated in certain other fundamentally human modes of existence. It does not carry far enough the process of surmounting. In reality it is not a surmounting but a new channelling. Instead of the ethical and intellectual man, we get the vital and aesthetic man. It may be a change but not a transfiguration.

And the faculty of Intuition said to be the characteristic of the New Man does not mean all that it should, if we confine ourselves to Bergson's definition of it. Bergson says that Intuition is a sort of sympathy, a community of feeling or sensibility with the urge of the life-reality. The difference between the sympathy of Instinct. and the sympathy of Intuition being that while the former is an unconscious or semi-conscious power, the latter is illumined and self-conscious. Now this view

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emphasises only the feeling-tone of Intuition, the vital sensibility that attends the direct communion with the life movement. But Intuition is not only purified feeling and sensibility, it is also purified vision and knowledge. It unites us not only with the movement of life, but also opens out to our sight the Truths, the fundamental realities behind that movement. Bergson does not, of course, point to any existence behind the continuous flux of life-power - the elan vital. He seems to deny any static truth or truths to be seen and seized in any scheme of knowledge.. To him the dynamic flow - the Heraclitian panta reei is the ultimate reality. It is precisely to this view of things that Bergson owes his conception of Intuition. Since existence is a continuum of Mind-Energy, the only way to know it is to be in harmony or unison with it, to move along its current. The conception of knowledge as a fixing and delimiting of things is necessarily an anomaly in this scheme. But the question is, is matter the only static and separative reality? Is the flux of vital Mind-Energy the ultimate truth?

Matter forms the lowest level of reality. Above it is the elan vital. Above the elan vital there is yet the domain of the Spirit. And the Spirit is a static substance and at the same a dynamic creative power. It is Being (Sat) that realises or expresses itself through certain typal nuclei or nodi of consciousness (chit) in a continuous becoming, in a flow of creative activity (ananda). The dynamism of the vital energy is only a refraction or pre­cipitation of the dynamism of the spirit; and so also static matter is only the substance of the spirit concretised and solidified. It is in an uplift both of matter and vital force to their prototypes - swarupa and swabhava - in the Spirit that lies the real transformation and transfiguration of the humanity of man.

This is the truth that is trying to dawn upon - the new age. Not matter but that which forms the substance of matter, not intellect but a vaster consciousness that informs the intellect, not man as he is, an aberration in the cosmic order, but as he may and shall be the embodiment and fulfilment of that order - this is the secret Intuition which, as yet dimly envisaged, nevertheless secretly inspires all the human activities of today. Only, the truth is being interpreted, as we have said, in terms of vital life. The intellectual and physical man

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gave us one aspect of the reality, but neither is the vital and psychical man the complete reality. The one acquisition of this shifting of the viewpoint has been that we are now in touch with the natural and deeper movement of humanity and not as before merely with its artificial scaffolding. The Alexandrine civilisation of humanity, in Nietzsche's phrase, was a sort of divagation from nature, it was following a loop away from the direct path of natural evolution. And the new Renaissance of today has precisely corrected this aberration of humanity and brought it again in a line with the natural cosmic order.

Certainly this does not go far enough into the motive of the change. The cosmic order does not mean mentalised vitalism which is also in its turn a section of the integral reality. It means the order of the spirit, it means the transfiguration of the physical, the vital and the intellectual into the supernal Sub­stance, Power and Light of that Spirit. The real transcendence of humanity is not the transcendence of one or other of its levels but the total transcendence to an altogether different status and the transmutation of humanity in the mould of that status-not a Nietzschean Titan nor a Bergsonian Dionysus but the tranquil vision and delight and dynamism of the Spirit-the incarnation of a god-head.

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The Nietzschean Antichrist

NIETZSCHE as the apostle of force is a name now familiar to all the world. The hero, the warrior who never tamely accepts suffering and submission and defeat under any condition but fights always and fights to conquer – such is the ideal man, according to Nietzsche, – the champion of strength, of greatness, of mightiness. The dominating personality infused with the supreme "will to power" – he is Ubermensch, the Superman. Sentiment does not move the mountains, emotion diffuses itself only in vague aspiration. The motive power, the creative fiat does not dwell in the heart but somewhere higher. The way of the Cross, the path of love and charity and pity does not lead to the kingdom of Heaven. The world has tried it for the last twenty centuries of its Christian civilisation and the result is that we are still living in a luxuriant abundance of misery and sordidness and littleness. This is how Nietzsche thinks and feels. He finds no virtue in the old regimes and he revolts from them. He wants a speedy and radical remedy and teaches that by violence only the Kingdom of Heaven can be seized. For, to Nietzsche the world is only a clash of forces and the Superman therefore is one who is the embodiment of the greatest force. Nietzsche does not care for the good, it is the great that moves him. The good, the moral is of man, conventional and has only a fictitious value. The great, the non-moral is, on the other hand, divine. That only has a value of its own. The good is nothing but a sort of makeshift arrangement which man makes for himself in order to live commodiously and which changes according to his temperament. But the great is one with the Supreme Wisdom and is absolute and imperative. The good cannot create the great; it is the great that makes for the good. This is what he really means when he says, "They

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say that a good cause sanctifies war but I tell thee it is a good war that sanctifies all cause." For the goodness of your cause you judge by your personal predilections, by your false conventionalities, by a standard that you set up in your ignorance – But a good war, the output of strength in any cause is in itself a cause of salvation. For thereby you are the champion of that ultimate verity which conduces to the ultimate good. Do not shrink, he would say, to be even like the cyclone and the avalanche, destructive, indeed, but grand and puissant and therefore truer emblems of the Beyond – Jenseits – than the weak, the little, the pitiful that do not dare to destroy and by that very fact cannot hope to create.

This is the Nietzsche we all know. But there is another aspect of his which the world has yet been slow to recognise. For, at bottom, Nietzsche is not all storm and fury. If his Superman is a Destroying Angel, he is none the less an angel. If he is endowed with a supreme sense of strength and power, there is also secreted in the core of his heart a sense of the beautiful that illumines his somewhat sombre aspect. For although Nietzsche is by birth a Slavo-Teuton, by culture and education he is pre-eminently Hellenic. His earliest works are on the subject of Greek tragedy and form what he describes as an "Apollonian dream." And to this dream, to this Greek aesthetic sense more than to any thing else he sacrifices justice and pity and charity. To him the weak and the miserable, the sick and the maimed are a sort of blot, a kind of ulcer on the beautiful face of humanity. The herd that wallow in suffering and relish suffering disfigure the aspect of the world and should therefore be relentlessly mowed out of existence. By being pitiful to them we give our tacit assent to their persistence. And it is precisely because of this that Nietzsche has a horror of Christianity. For compassion gives indulgence to all the ugliness of the world and thus renders that ugliness a necessary and indispensable element of existence. To protect the weak, to sympathise with the lowly brings about more of weakness and more of lowliness. Nietzsche has an aristocratic taste par excellence – what he aims at is health and vigour and beauty. But above all it is an aristocracy of the spirit, an aristocracy endowed with all the richness and beauty of the soul that Nietzsche wants to establish. The beggar of the street is the

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symbol of ugliness, of the poverty of the spirit. And the so-called aristocrat, die millionaire of today is as poor and ugly as any helpless leper. The soul of either of them is made of the same dirty, sickly stuff. The tattered rags, the crouching heart, the effiminate nerve, the unenlightened soul are the standing ugliness of the world and they have no place in the ideal, the perfect humanity. Humanity, according to Nietzsche, is made in order to be beautiful, to conceive the beautiful, to create the

beautiful. Nietzsche's Superman has its perfect image in a Grecian statue of Zeus cut out in white marble-Olympian grandeur shedding in every lineament Apollonian beauty and Dionysian vigour.

The real secret of Nietzsche's philosophy is not an adoration of brute force, of blind irrational joy in fighting and killing. Far from it, Nietzsche has no kinship with Treitschke or Bernhardi. What Nietzsche wanted was a world purged of littleness and ugliness, a humanity, not of saints, perhaps, but of heroes, lofty in their ideal, great in their achievement, majestic in their empire-a race of titanic gods breathing the glory of heaven itself.

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On Communism

The Basis of Social Reconstruction

ANY real reconstruction of society, any permanent reformation of the world presupposes a real reconstruction, a permanent reformation of human nature. Otherwise any amount of casting and recasting the mere machineries would not bring about any appreciable result, but leave the thing as it is. Change the laws as much as you like, but if you do not change the nature of man, the world will not change. For it is man that makes laws and not laws that make man. Laws express at best the demand which man feels within himself. A truth must realise itself in human nature before it can be codified. You may certainly legalise an ideal, but that does not necessarily mean realising it. The realisation must come first in nature and character, then it is naturally translated into laws and institutions. A man lives the laws of his soul and being and not the law given him by the shastras. He violates the shastras, modifies them, utilises them according to the greater imperative of his Swabhava.

The French Revolution wanted to remould human society and its ideal was liberty, equality and fraternity. It pulled down the old machinery and set up a new one in its stead. And the result? "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" remained always in effect a cry in the wilderness. Another wave of idealism is now running over the earth and the Bolshevists are its most fiercely practical exponents. Instead of dealing merely with the political machinery, the Socialistic Revolution tries to break and remake, above all, the social machinery. But judged from the results as yet attained and the tendencies at work, few are the reasons to hope but many to fear the worst. Even education does not seem to promise us anything better. Which nation was better educated - in the sense we understood and still commonly understand the word - than Germany?  

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And yet we have no hesitation today to call them Huns and Barbarians. That education is not giving us the right thing is proved further by the fact that we are constantly changing our programmes and curriculums, everyday remodelling old institutions and founding new ones. Even a revolution in the educational system will not bring about the desired millennium, so long as we lay so much stress upon the system and not upon man himself. And finally, look to all the religions of the world - we have enough of creeds and dogmas, of sermons and mantras, of churches and temples - and yet human life and society do not seem to be any the more worthy for it.

Are we then to say that human nature is irrevocably vitiated by an original sin and that all our efforts at reformation and regeneration are, as the Indian saying goes, like trying to straighten out the crooked tail of a dog?

It is this persuasion which, has led many spiritual souls, siddhas, to declare that theirs is not the kingdom upon this earth, but that the kingdom of Heaven is within. And it is why great lovers of humanity have sought not to eradicate but only to mitigate, as far as possible, the ills of life. Earth and life, it is said, contain in their last analysis certain ugly and loathsome realities which are an inevitable and inexorable part of their substance and to eliminate one means to annihilate the other. What can be done is to throw a veil over the nether regions in human nature, to put a ban on their urges and velleities and to create opportunities to make social arrangements so that the higher impulses only find free play while the lower impulses, for want of scope and indulgence, may fall down to a harmless level. This is what the Reformists hope and want and no more. Life is based upon animality, the soul is encased in an earth-sheath - man needs must procreate, man needs must seek food. But what 'human effort can achieve is to set up barriers and limitations and form channels and openings, which will restrain these impulses, allow them a necessary modicum of play and which for the greater part will serve to encourage and enhance the nobler urges in man. Of course, there will remain always the possibility of the whole scaffolding coming down with a crash and the aboriginal in man running riot in his nudity. But we have to accept the chance and make the best of what materials we have in hand.

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No doubt this is a most dismal kind of pessimism. But it is the logical conclusion of all optimism that bases itself upon a particular view of human nature. If we question that pessimism, we have to question the very grounds of our optimism also. As a matter of fact, all our idealism has been so long infructuous and will be so in the future, if we do not shift our foundation and start from a different Intuition - Weltanschauung.

Our ideals have been mental constructions, rather than spiritual realities - realities of the deepest and highest being. And the power by which we sought to realise those ideals was mainly the insistence of our emotional urges, rather than Nature's Truth-Power. For this must be understood that the mental, the vital and the physical form a nexus of reality which works in its own inexorable law and so long as we are within them we cannot but obey the laws that guide them. Of these three strata which form the human adhara, it is the vital which holds the key to man's nature. It is the executive power, the force that fashions the realities on the physical plane; it is what creates the character. The power of thought and sentiment is often much too exaggerated, even so the power of tl1.e body, that of physical and external rules and regulations. The mental or the physical or both together can mould the vital only to a limited extent, to the extent which is allowed by the inherent law of the vital. If the demands of the mental and the physical are stretched too far and are not suffered by the vital, a crash and catastrophe is bound to come in the end.

This is the meaning of the Reformist's pessimism. So long as we remain within the domain of the triple nexus, we must always take account of an original sin, an aboriginal irredeem-ability in human nature. And it, is this fact which a too hasty optimistic idealism is apt to ignore. The point, however, is that man need not be necessarily bound to this triple chord of life. He can go beyond, transcend himself and find a reality which is the basis of even this lower poise of the mental and vital and physical. Only in order to get into that higher poise we must really transcend the lower, that is to say, we must not be 'Satisfied with experiencing or envisaging it through the mind and heart but must directly commune with it, be it. There is a higher law that rules there, a power that is the truth-substance of even the vital and hence can remould it with a sovereign  

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inevitability, according to a pattern which may not and is not the pattern of mental and emotional idealism, but the pattern of a supreme spiritual realism.

What then is required is a complete spiritual regeneration in man, a new structure of his soul and substance-not merely the realisation of the highest and supreme Truth in mental and emotional consciousness, but the translation and application of the law of that truth in the power of the vital. It is here that failed all the great spiritual or rather religious movements of the past. They were content with evoking the divine in the mental being, but left the vital becoming to be governed by the habitual un-divine or at the most to be just illumined by a distant and faint glow which served, however, more to distort than express the Divine.

The Divine Nature only can permanently reform the vital nature that is ours. Neither laws and institutions, which are the results of that vital nature, nor ideas and ideals which are often a mere revolt from and more often an auxiliary to it, can command the power to regenerate society. If it is thought improbable for any group of men to attain to that God Nature, then there is hardly any hope for mankind. But improbable or probable, that is the only way which man has to try and test, and there is none other.  

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A Theory of Yoga

The Parting of the Ways

To be divine or to remain human — this is the one choice that is now before Nature in her upward march of evolution. What is the exact significance of this choice?

To remain human means to continue the fundamental nature of man. In what consists the humanity of man? We can ascertain it by distinguishing what forms the animality of the animal, since that will give us the differentia that nature has evolved to raise man over the animal. The animal, again, has a characteristic differentiating it from the vegetable world, which latter, in its turn, has something to mark it off from the inorganic world. The inorganic, the vegetable, the animal and finally man — these are the four great steps of Nature's evolutionary course.

The differentia, in each case, lies in the degree and nature of consciousness, since it is consciousness that forms the substance and determines the mode of being. Now, the inorganic is characterised by un-consciousness, the vegetable by sub-consciousness, the animal by consciousness and man by self-consciousness. Man knows that he knows, an animal only knows; a plant does not even know, it merely feels or senses; matter cannot do that even, it simply acts or rather is acted upon. We are not concerned here, however, with the last two forms of being; we will speak of the first two only.

We say, then, that man is distinguished from the animal by his having consciousness as it has, but added to it the consciousness of self. Man acts and feels and knows as much as the animal does; but also he knows that he acts, he knows that he feels, he knows that he knows — and this is a thing the animal cannot do. It is the awakening of the sense of selfin every mode of being that characterises man, and it is owing to this consciousness

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of an ego behind, of a permanent unit of reference, which has modified even the functions of knowing and feeling and acting, has refashioned them in a mould which is not quite that of the animal, in spite of a general similarity.

So the humanity of man consists in his consciousness of the self or ego. Is there no other higher mode of consciousness? Or is self-consciousness the acme, the utmost limit to which consciousness can raise itself? If it is so, then we are bound to conclude that humanity will remain eternally human in its fundamental nature; the only progress, if progress at all we choose to call it, will consist perhaps in accentuating this consciousness of the self and in expressing it through a greater variety of stresses, through a richer combination of its colour and light and shade and rhythm. But also, this may not be so —there may be the possibility of a further step, a transcending of the consciousness of the self. It seems unnatural and improbable that having risen from un-consciousness to self-consciousness through a series of continuous marches, Nature should suddenly stop and consider what she had achieved to be her final end. Has Nature become bankrupt of her creative genius, exhausted of her upward drive? Has she to remain content with only a clever manipulation, a mere shuffling and re-arranging of the materials already produced?

As a matter of fact it is not so. The glimpses of a higher form of consciousness we can see even now present in self-consciousness. We have spoken of the different stages of evolution as if they were separate and distinct and incommensurate entities. They may be described as such for the purpose of a logical understanding, but in reality they form a single progressive continuum in which one level gradually fuses into another. And as the higher level takes up the law of the lower and evolves out of it a characteristic function, even so the law of the higher level with its characteristic function is already involved and envisaged in the law of the lower level and its characteristic function. It cannot be asserted positively that because man's special virtue is self-consciousness, animals cannot have that quality on any account. We do see, if we care to observe closely and dispassionately, that animals of the higher order, as they approach the level of humanity, show more and more evident signs of something which is very much

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akin to, if not identical with the human characteristic of self-consciousness.

So, in man also, especially of that order which forms the crown of humanity — in poets and artists and seers and great men of action-can be observed a certain characteristic form of consciousness, which is something other than, greater than the consciousness of the mere self. It is difficult as yet to characterise definitely what that thing is. It is the awakening of the self to something which is beyond itself-it is the cosmic self, the oversoul, the universal being; it is God, it is Turiya, it is satchid-ananda — in so many ways the thing has been sought to be envisaged and expressed. The consciousness of that level has also a great variety of names given to it — Intuition, Revelation, cosmic consciousness, God-consciousness. It is to be noted here, however, that the thing we are referring to, is not the Absolute, the Infinite, the One without a second. It is not, that is to say, the supreme Reality-the Brahman-in its static being, in its undivided and indivisible unity; it is the dynamic Brahman, that status of the supreme Reality where creation, the diversity of Becoming takes rise, it is the Truth-world — Ritam — the domain of typal realities. The distinction is necessary, as there does seem to be such a level of consciousness intermediary, again, between man and the Absolute, between self-consciousness and the supreme consciousness. The simplest thing would be to give that intermediate level of consciousness a negative name-since being as yet human we cannot foresee exactly its composition and function — the super-consciousness.

The inflatus of something vast and transcendent, something which escapes all our familiar schemes of cognisance and yet is insistent with a translucent reality of its own, we do feel sometimes within us invading and enveloping our individuality, lifting up our sense of self and transmuting our personality into a reality which can hardly be called merely human. All this life of ego-bound rationality then melts away and opens out the passage for a life of vision and power. Thus it is the poet has felt when he says, "there is this incalculable element in human life influencing us from the mystery which envelops our being, and when reason is satisfied, there is something deeper than Reason which makes us still uncertain of truth. Above the human reason there is a transcendental sphere to

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which the spirit of men sometimes rises, and the will may be forged there at a lordly smithy and made the unbreakable pivot." — (A.E.)

This passage from the self-conscient to the super-conscient does not imply merely a shifting of the focus of consciousness. The transmutation of consciousness involves a purer illumination, a surer power and a wider compass; it involves also a fundamental change in the very mode of being and living. It gives quite a different life-intuition and a different life-power. The change in the motif brings about a new form altogether, a re-casting and te-shaping and re-energising of the external materials as well. As the lift from mere consciousness to self-consciousness meant all the difference between an animal and a man, so the lift again from self-consciousness to super-consciousness will mean the difference of a whole world between man and the divine creature that is to be.

Indeed it is a divine creature that should be envisaged on the next level of evolution. The mental and the moral, the psychical and the physical transfigurations which must follow the change in the basic substratum do imply such a mutation, the birth of a new species, as it were, fashioned in the nature of the gods. The vision of angels and Siddhas, which man is having ceaselessly since his birth, may be but a prophecy of the future actuality.

This then, it seems to us, is the immediate problem that Nature has set before herself. She is now at the parting of the ways. She has done with man as an essentially human being, she has brought out the fundamental possibilities of humanity and perfected it, so far as perfection may be attained within the cadre by which she chose to limit herself; she is now looking forward to another kind of experiment-the evolving of another life, another being out of her entrails, that will be greater than the humanity we know today, that will be superior even to the supreme that has yet been actualised.

Nature has marched from the unconscious to the sub-conscious, from the sub-conscious to the conscious and from the conscious to the self-conscious; she has to rise yet again from the self-conscious to the super-conscious. The mineral gave place to the plant, the plant gave place to the animal and the animal gave place to man; let man give place to and bring out the divine.

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Principle and Personality

IT is asked of us why do we preach a man and not purely and solely a principle. Our ideal being avowedly the establishment and reign of a new principle of world-order and not gathering recruits for the camp of a sectarian teacher, it seems all the more inconsistent, if not thoroughly ruinous for our cause, that we should lay stress upon a particular individual and incur the danger of overshadowing the universal truths upon which we seek to build human society. Now, it is not that we are unconscious or oblivious of the many evils attendant upon the system of preaching a man – the history of the rise and decay of many sects and societies is there to give us sufficient warning; and yet if we cannot entirely give the go-by to personalities and stick to mere and bare principles, it is because we have clear reasons for it, because we are not unconscious or oblivious either of the evils that beset the system of preaching the principle alone.

Religious bodies that are formed through the bhakti and puja for one man, social reconstructions forced by the will and power of a single individual, have already in the inception this grain of incapacity and disease and death that they are not an integrally self-conscious creation, they are not, as a whole, intelligent and wide awake and therefore constantly responsive to the truths and ideals and realities for which they exist, for which at least, their founder intended them to exist. The light at the apex is the only light and the entire structure is but the shadow of that light; the whole thing has the aspect of a dark mass galvanised into red-hot activity by the passing touch of a dynamo. Immediately however the solitary light fails and the dynamo stops, there is nothing but the original darkness and inertia – toma asit tamasa gudham agre.

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Man, however great and puissant he may be, is a perishable thing. People who gather or are gathered round a man and ding to him through the tie of a personal relation must fall off and scatter when the man passes away and the personal tie loses its hold. What remains is a memory, a gradually fading memory. But memory is hardly a creative force, it is a dead, at best, a moribund thing; the real creative power is Presence'. So when the great man's presence, the power that crystallises is gone, the whole edifice crumbles and vanishes into air or remains a mere name.

Love and admiration for a mahapurusha is not enough, even faith in his gospel is of little avail, nor can actual participation, consecrated work and labour in his cause save the situation; it is only when the principles, the bare realities for which the mahapurusha stands are in the open forum and men have the full and free opportunity of testing and assimilating them, it is only when individuals thus become living embodiments of those principles and realities that we do create a thing universal and permanent, as universal and permanent as earthly things may be. Principles only can embrace and unify the whole of humanity; a particular personality shall always create division and limitation. By placing the man in front, we erect a wall between the Principle and men at large. It is the principles, on the contrary, that should be given the place of honour: our attempt should be to keep back personalities and make as little use of them as possible. Let the principles work and create in their freedom and power, untrammelled by the limitations of any mere human vessel.

We are quite familiar with this cry so rampant in our democratic age – principles and no personalities! And although we admit the justice of it, yet we cannot ignore the trenchant onesidedness which it involves. It is perhaps only a reaction, a swing to the opposite extreme of a mentality given too much to personalities, as the case generally has been in the past. It may be necessary, as a corrective, but it belongs only to a temporary stage. Since, however, we are after a universal iqeal, we must also have an integral method. We shall have to curb many of our susceptibilities, diminish many of our apprehensions and soberly strike a balance between opposite extremes.

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We do not speak like politicians or banias; but the very truth of the matter demands such a policy or line of action. It is very well to talk of principles and principles alone, but what are principles unless they take life and form in a particular individual? They are airy nothings, notions in the brain of logicians and metaphysicians, fit subjects for discussion in the academy, but they are devoid of that vital urge which makes them creative agencies. We have long lines of philosophers, especially European, who most scrupulously avoided all touch of personalities, whose utmost care was to keep principles pure and unsullied; and the upshot was that those principles remained principles only, barren and infructuous, some thing like, in the strong and puissant phrase of Baudelaire –La froide majeste de la femme sterile. And on the contrary, we have had other. peoples, much addicted to personalities – especially in Asia – who did not care so much for abstract principles as for concrete embodiments; and what has been the result here? None can say that they did not produce anything or produced only still-born things. They produced living creatures – ephemeral, some might say, but creatures that lived and moved and had their days.

But, it may be asked, what is the necessity, what is the purpose in making it all a one man show? Granting that principles require personalities for their fructuation and vital functioning, what remains to be envisaged is not one personality but a plural personality, the people at large, as many individuals of the human race as can be consciously imbued with those principles. When principles are made part and parcel of, are concentrated in a single solitary personality, they get "cribbed and cabined," they are vitiated by the idiosyncrasies of the man, they come to have a narrower field of application; they are emptied of the general verities they contain and finally cease to have any effect.

The thing, however, is that what you call principles do not drop from heaven in their virgin purity and all at once lay hold of mankind en masse. It is always through a particular individual that a great principle manifests itself. Principles do not live in the general mind of man and even if they live, they live secreted and unconscious; it is only a puissant personality, who has lived the principle, that can bring it forward into life

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and action, can awaken, like the Vedic Dawn, what was dead in all – mritam kanchana bodhayanti. Men in general are by themselves 'inert and indifferent; they have little leisure or inclination to seek, from any inner urge of their own, for principles and primal truths; they become conscious of these only when expressed and embodied in some great and rare soul. An Avatar, a Messiah or a Prophet is the centre, the focus through which a Truth and Law first dawns and then radiates and spreads abroad. The little lamps are all lighted by the sparks that the great torch scatters.

And yet we yield to none in our demand for holding forth the principles always and ever before the wide open gaze of all. The principle is there to make people self-knowing and self-guiding; and the man is also there to illustrate that principle, to serve as the hope and prophecy of achievement. The living soul is there to touch your soul, if you require the touch; and the principle is there by which to test and testify. For, we do not ask anybody to be a mere automaton, a blind devotee, a soul without individual choice and initiative. On the contrary, we insist on each and every individual to find his own soul and stand on his own Truth – this is the fundamental principle we declare, the only creed – if creed it be that we ask people to note and freely follow. We ask all people to be fully self-dependent and self-illumined, for only thus can a real and solid reconstruction of human nature and society be possible; we do not wish that they should bow down ungrudgingly to anything, be it a principle or a personality. In this respect we claim the very first rank of iconoclasts and anarchists. And along with that, if we still choose to remain an idol-lover and a hero-worshipper, it is because we recognise that our mind, human as it is, being not a simple equation but a complex paradox, the idol or the hero symbolises for us and for those who so will, the very iconoclasm and anarchism-and perhaps other more positive things as well – which we behold within and seek to manifest.

The world is full of ikons and archons; we cannot escape them, even if we try – the world itself being a great ikon and as great an archon. Those who swear by principles, swear always by some personality or other, if not by a living creature then by a lifeless book, if not by Religion then by Science, if

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not by the East then by the West, if not by Buddha or Christ then by Bentham or Voltaire. Only they do it unwittingly – they change one set of personalities for another and believe they have rejected them all. The veils of Maya are a thousand-fold tangle and you think you have entirely escaped her when you have only run away from one fold to fall into another. The wise do not attempt to reject and negate Maya, but consciously accept her-freedom lies in a knowing affirmation. So we too have accepted and affirmed an icon, but we have done it : consciously and knowingly; we are not bound by our idol, we see the truth of it, and we serve and utilise it as best as we may.

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The Basis of Unity

I

A MODERN society or people cannot have religion, that is to say, credal religion, as the basis of its organized collective life. I t was mediaeval society and people that were organized on that line. Indeed mediaevalism means nothing more – and nothing less – than that. But whatever the need and justification in the past, the principle is an anachronism under modern conditions. It was needed, perhaps, to keep alive a truth which goes into the very roots of human life and its deepest aspira­tion; and it was needed also for a dynamic application of that truth on a larger scale and in smaller details, on the mass of mankind and in its day to day life. That was the aim of the Church Militant and the Khilafat; that was the spirit, although in a more Sattwic way, behind the Buddhistic evan­gelism or even Hindu colonization.

The truth behind a credal religion is the aspiration towards the realization of the Divine, some ultimate reality that gives a permanent meaning and value to the human life, to the existence lodged in this 'sphere of sorrow' here below. Credal paraphernalia were necessary to express or buttress this core of spiritual truth when mankind, in the mass, had not attained a certain level of enlightenment in the mind and a certain degree of development in its life-relations. The modern age is modern precisely because it had attained to a necessary extent this mental enlightenment and this life development. So the scheme or scaffolding that was required in the past is no longer unavoidable and can have either no reality at all or only a modified utility.

A modern people is a composite entity, especially with

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regard to its religious affiliation. Not religion, but culture is the basis of modern collective life, national or social. Culture includes in its grain that fineness of temperament which appreciates all truths behind all forms, even when there is a personal allegiance to one particular form.

In India, it is well known, the diversity of affiliations is colossal, sui generis. Two major affiliations have today almost cut the country into two; and desperate remedies are suggested which are worse than the malady itself, as they may kill the patient outright. If it is so, it is, I repeat, the mediaeval spirit that is at:, the bottom of the trouble.

The rise of this spirit in modern times and conditions is a phenomenon that has to be explained and faced: it is a ghost that has come out of the' past and has got to be laid and laid for good. First of all, it is a reaction from modernism; it is a reaction from the modernist denial of certain fundamental and eternal truths, of God, soul, and immortality: it is a reaction from the modernist affirmation of the mere economic man. And it is also a defensive gesture of a particular complex of consciousness that has grown and lives powerfully and now apprehends expurgation and elimination.

In Europe such a contingency did not arise, because the religious spirit, rampant in the days of Inquisitions and St. Bartholomews, died away: it died, and (or, because) it was replaced by a spirit that was felt as being equally, if not more, authentic and, which for the moment, suffused the whole consciousness with a large and high afflatus, commensurate with the amplitude of man's aspiration. I refer, of course, to the spirit of the Renaissance. It was a spirit profane and secular, no doubt, but on that level it brought a catholicity of temper and a richness in varied interest – a humanistic culture, as it is called – which constituted a living and unifying ideal for Europe. That spirit culminated in the great French Revolution which was the final coup de grace to all that still remained of mediaevalism, even in its outer structure, political and economical.

In India the spirit of renascence came very late, late almost by three centuries; and even then it could not flood the whole of the continent in all its nooks and corners, psychological and physical. There were any number of pockets (to use a current

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military phrase) left behind which guarded the spirit of the past and offered persistent and obdurate resistance. Perhaps, such a dispensation was needed in India and inevitable also; inevitable, because the religious spirit is closest to India's soul and is its most direct expression and cannot be uprooted so easily; needed, because India's and the world's future demands it and depends upon it.

Only, the religious spirit has to be bathed and purified and enlightened by the spirit of the renascence: that is to say, one must learn and understand and realize that Spirit is the thing – the one thing needful – Tamevaikam jānatha; 'religions' are its names and forms, appliances and decorations. Let us have by all means the religious spirit, the fundamental experience that is the inmost truth of all religions, that is the matter of our soul; but in our mind and life and body let there be a luminous catholicity, let these organs and instruments be trained to see and compare and appreciate the variety, the numberless facets which the one Spirit naturally presents to the human consciousness. Ekam sat viprāh bahudhā vadanti. It is an ancient truth that man discovered even in his earliest seekings; but it still awaits an adequate expression and application in life.

II

India's historical development is marked by a special characteristic which is at once the expression of her inmost nature and the setting of a problem which she has to solve for herself and for the whole human race. I have spoken of the diversity and divergence of affiliations in a modern social unit. But what distinguishes India from all other peoples is that the diversity and divergence have culminated here in contra­dictoriness and mutual exclusion.

The first extremes that met in India and fought and gradually coalesced to form a single cultural and social whole were, as is well known, the Aryan and the non-Aryan. Indeed, the geologists tell us, the land itself is divided into two parts structurally quite different and distinct, the Deccan plateau and the Himalayan ranges with the Indo-Gangetic plain: the

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former is formed out of the most ancient and stable and, on the whole, horizontally bedded rocks of the earth, while the latter is of comparatively recent origin, formed out of a more flexible and weaker belt (the Himalayan region consisting of a colossal flexing and crumpling of strata). The disparity is so much that a certain group of geologists hold that the Deccan plateau did not at all form part of the Asiatic continent, but had drifted and dashed into it: in fact the Himalayas are the result of this mighty impact. The usual division of an Aryan and a Dravidian race may be due to a memory of the clash of the two continents and their races.

However, coming to historical times, we see wave after wave of the most heterogeneous and disparate elements – Sakas and Huns and Greeks, each bringing its quota of exotic material ­enter into the oceanic Indian life and culture, lose their separate foreign identity and become part and parcel of the common whole. Even so, – a single unitary body was formed out of such varied and shifting materials – not in the political, but in a socio-religious sense. For a catholic religious spirit, not being solely doctrinal and personal, admitted and embraced in its supple and wide texture almost an infinite variety of approaches to the Divine, of forms and norms of apprehending the Beyond. It has been called Hinduism: it is a vast synthesis of multiple affiliations. It expresses the characteristic genius of India and hence Hinduism and Indianism came to be looked upon as synonymous terms. And the same could be defined also as Vedic religion and culture, for its invariable basis – the bed-rock on which it stood firm and erect – was the Vedas, the Knowledge seen by the sages. But there had already-risen a voice of dissidence and discord-that of Buddha, not so much, perhaps, of Buddha as of Buddhism. The Buddhistic enlightenment and discipline did not admit the supreme authority of the Vedas; it sought other bases of truth and reality. It was a great denial; and it meant and worked for a vital schism. The denial of the Vedas by itself, perhaps, would not be serious, but it became so, as it was symptomatic of a deeper divergence. Denying the Vedas, the Buddhistic spirit denied life. It was quite a new thing in the. Indian consciousness and spiritual discipline. And it left such a stamp there that even today it stands as the dominant character of

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the Indian outlook. However, India's synthetic genius rose to the occasion and knew how to bridge the chasm, close up the fissure, and present again a body whole and entire. Buddha became one of the Avataras : the discipline of Nirvana and Maya was reserved as the last duty to be performed at the end of life, as the culmination of a full-length span of action and achievement; the way to Moksha lay through Dharma and Artha and Kama, Sannyasa had to be built upon Brahmacharya and Garhasthya. The integral ideal was epitomized by Kalidasa in his famous lines about the character of the Raghus:

They devoted themselves to study in their boyhood, in youth they pursued the objects of life; when old they took to spiritual austerities, and in the end they died united with the higher consciousness.

Only this process of integration was not done in a day, it took some centuries and had to pass through some unpleasant intermediary stages.

And still this was not the last – it could not be the last – antithesis that had to be synthetized. The dialectical movement led to a more serious and fiercer contradiction. The Buddhistic schism was after all a division brought about from within: it could be said that the two terms of the antinomy belonged to the same genus and were commensurable. The idea or experience of Asat and Maya was not unknown to the Upanishads, only it had not there the exclusive stress which the later developments gave it. Hence quite a different, an altogether foreign body was imported into what was or had come to be a homogeneous entity, and in a considerable mass. Unlike the previous irruptions that merged and were lost in the general life and consciousness, Islam entered as a leaven that maintained its integrity and revolutionized Indian life and culture by infusing into its tone a Semitic accent. After the Islamic impact India could not be what she was before – a change became inevitable even in the major note. It was a psychological cataclysm almost on a par with the geological one that formed her body; but the spirit behind which created the body was working automatically, inexorably towards the

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greater and more difficult synthesis demanded by the situa­tion. Only the thing is to be done now consciously, not through an unconscious process of laissez-faire as on the inferior stages of evolution in the past. And that is the true genesis of the present conflict.

History abounds in instances of racial and cultural im­mixture. Indeed, all major human groupings of today are invariably composite formations. Excepting, perhaps, some primitive - aboriginal tribes there are no pure races existent. The Briton, the Dane, the Anglo-Saxon, and the Norman have combined to form the British; a Frenchman has a Gaul, a Roman, a Frank in him; and a Spaniard's blood would show an Iberian, a Latin, a Gothic, a Moorish element in it. And much more than a people, a culture in modern times has been a veritable cockpit of multifarious and even incongruous elements. There are instances also in which a perfect fusion could not be accomplished, and one element had to be rejected or crushed out. The complete disappearance of the Aztecs and Mayas in South America, the decadence of the Red Indians in North America, of the Negroes in Africa as a result of a fierce clash with European peoples and European culture illustrate the point.

Nature, on the whole, has solved the problem of blood fusion and mental fusion of different peoples, although on a smaller scale. India today presents the problem on a larger scale and on a higher or deeper level. The demand is for a spiritual fusion and unity. Strange to say, although the Spirit is the true bed-rock of unity – since, at bottom, it means identity – it is on this plane that mankind has not yet been able to really meet and coalesce. India's genius has been precisely working in the line of a perfect solution of this supreme problem.

Islam comes with a full-fledged spiritual soul and a mental and vital formation commensurable with that inner being and consciousness. It comes with a dynamic spirit, a warrior mood, that aims at conquering the physical world for the Lord, a temperament which Indian spirituality had not, or had lost long before, if she had anything of it. This was, perhaps, what Vivekananda meant when he spoke graphically of a Hindu soul with a Muslim body. The Islamic dispensation, however, brings with it not only something complementary,

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but also something contradictory, if not for anything else, at least for the strong individuality which does not easily yield to assimilation. Still, in spite of great odds, the process of assimilation was going on slowly and surely. But of late it appears to have come to a dead halt; difficulties have been presented which seem insuperable.

If religious toleration were enough, if that made up man's highest and largest achievement, then Nature need not have attempted to go beyond cultural fusion; a liberal culture is the surest basis for a catholic religious spirit. But such a spirit of toleration and catholicity, although it bespeaks a widened consciousness, does not always enshrine a profundity of being. Nobody is more tolerant and catholic than a dilettante, but an ardent spiritual soul is different.

To be loyal to one's line of self-fulfilment, to follow one's self-law, swadharma, wholly and absolutely – without this no spiritual life is possible – and yet not to come into clash with other lines and loyalties, nay more, to be in positive harmony with them, is a problem which has not been really solved. It was solved, perhaps, in the consciousness of a Ramakrishna, a few individuals here and there, but it has always remained a source of conflict and disharmony in the general mind even in the field of spirituality. The clash of spiritual or religious loyalties has taken such an acute form in India today, they have been carried to the bitter extreme, in order, we venture to say, that the final synthesis might be absolute and irrevocable. This is India's mission to 'York out, and this is the lesson which she brings to the world.

The solution can come, first, by going to the true religion of the Spirit, by being truly spiritual and not merely religious, for, as we have said, real unity lies only in and through the Spirit, since Spirit is one and indivisible; secondly, by bringing down something – a great part, indeed, if not the whole – of this puissant and marvellous Spirit into our life of emotions and sensations and activities.

If it is said that this is an ideal for the few only, not for the mass, our answer to that is the answer of the Gita – Yad yad acharati sreshthah. Let the few then practise and achieve the ideal: the mass will have to follow as far as it is possible and necessary. It is the very character of the evolutionary system of

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Nature, as expressed in the principle of symbiosis, that any considerable change in one place (in one species) is accompanied by a corresponding change in the same direction in other contiguous places (in other associated species) in order that the poise and balance of the system may be maintained.

It is precisely strong nuclei that are needed (even, perhaps, one strong nucleus is sufficient) where the single and integrated spiritual consciousness is an accomplished and established fact: that acts inevitably as a solvent drawing in and assimilating or transforming and re-creating as much, of the surroundings as its own degree and nature of achievement inevitably demand.

India did not and could not stop at mere cultural fusion – which was a supreme gift of the Moguls. She did not and could not stop at another momentous cultural fusion brought about by the European impact. She aimed at something more. Nature demanded of her that she should discover a greater secret of human unity and through progressive experiments apply and establish it in fact. Christianity did" not raise this problem of the greater synthesis, for the Christian peoples were more culture-minded than religious-minded. It was left for an Asiatic people to set the problem and for India to work out the solution.

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Three Degrees of Social Organisation

DECLARATION of Rights is a characteristic modern phenomenon. It is a message of liberty and freedom, – no doubt of secular liberty and freedom – things not very common in the old world; and yet at the same time it is a clarion that calls for and prepares strife and battle. If the conception of Right has sanctified the individual or a unit collectivity, it has also pari passu developed a fissiparous tendency in human organisation. Society based on or living by the principle of Right becomes naturally and inevitably a competitive society. Where man is regarded as nothing more – and, of course, nothing less – than a bundle of rights, human aggregation is bound to be an exact image of Darwinian Nature –red in tooth and claw.

But Right is not the only term on which an ideal or even a decent society can be based. There is another term which can serve equally well, if not better. I am obviously referring to the conception of duty. I tis an old world conception; it isa concep­tion particularly familiar to the East. The Indian term for Right is also the term for duty-adhikara means both. In Europe too, in more recent times, when after the frustration of the dream of a new world envisaged by the French Revolu­tion, man was called upon again to rise and hope, it was Mazzini who brought forward the new or discarded principle as a mantra replacing the other more dangerous one. A hierarchy of duties was given by him as the pattern of a fulfilled ideal life. In India, in our days the distinction between the two attitudes was very strongly insisted upon by the great Viveka­nanda.

Vivekananda said that if human society is to be remodelled, one must first of all learn not to think and act in terms of claims and rights but in terms of duties and obligations. Fulfil your

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duties conscientiously, the rights will take care of themselves; it is such an attitude that can give man the right poise, the right impetus, the right outlook with regard to a collective living. If instead of each one demanding what one considers as one's dues and consequently scrambling and battling for them, and most often not getting them or getting at a ruinous price – what made Arjuna cry, "What shall I do with all this kingdom if in regaining it I lose all my kith and kin dear to me?" – if, indeed, instead of claiming one's right, one were content to know one's duty and do it as it should be done, then not only there would be peace and amity upon earth, but also each one far from losing anything would find miraculously all that one most needs and must have, – the necessary, the right rights and all.

It might be objected here however that actually in the history of humanity the conception of Duty has been no less pugnacious than that of Right. In certain ages and among certain peoples, for example, it was considered the imperative duty of the faithful to kill or convert by force or otherwise as many as possible belonging to other faiths: it was the mission of the good shepherd to burn the impious and the heretic. In recent times, it was a sense of high and solemn duty that perpetrated what has been termed "purges"-brutalities undertaken, it appears, to purify and preserve the integrity of a particular ideological, social or racial aggregate. But the real name of such a spirit is not duty but fanaticism. And there is a considerable difference between the two. Fanaticism may be defined as duty running away with itself; but what we are concerned with here is not the aberration of duty, but duty proper self-poised.

One might claim also on behalf of the doctrine of Right that the right kind of Right brings no harm, it is as already stated another name for liberty, for the privilege of living and it includes the obligation to let live. One can do what one likes provided one does not infringe on an equal right of others to do the same. The measure of one's liberty is equal to the measure of others' liberty.

Here is the crux of the question. The dictum of utilitarian philosophers is a golden rule which is easy to formulate but not so to execute. For the line of demarcation between one's own rights and the equal rights of others is so undefinable and

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variable that a title suit is inevitable in each case. In asserting and establishing and even maintaining one's rights there is always the possibility – almost the certainty – of encroaching upon others' rights.

What is required is not therefore an external delimitation of frontiers between unit and unit, but an inner outlook of nature and a poise of character. And this can be cultivated and brought into action by learning to live by the sense of duty. Even then, even the sense of duty, we have to admit, is not enough. For if it leads or is capable of leading into an aberra­tion, we must have something else to check and control it, some other higher and more potent principle. Indeed, both the conceptions of Duty and Right belong to the domain of mental ideal, although one is usually more aggressive and militant (rajasic) and the other tends to be more tolerant and considerate (sattwic): neither can give an absolute certainty of poise, a clear guarantee of perfect harmony.

Indian wisdom has found this other, a fairer term – a tertium quid, – the mystic factor, sought for by so many philo­sophers on so many counts. That is the very well- known, the very familiar term – Dharma. What is Dharma then? How does it accomplish the miracle which to others seems to have proved an impossibility? Dharma is self-law, that is to say, the law of the Self; it is the rhythm and movement of our inner or inmost being, the spontaneous working out of our truth-conscious nature.

We may perhaps view the three terms Right, Duty and Dharma as degrees of an ascending consciousness. Con­sciousness at Its origin and in its primitive formulation is dominated by the principle of inertia (tamas); in that state things have mostly an undifferentiated collective existence, they helplessly move about acted upon by forces outside them. A rise in growth and evolution brings about differentiation, specialisation, organisation. And this means consciousness of oneself of the distinct and separate existence of each and every­one, in other words, self-assertion, the claim, the right of each individual unit to be itself, to become itself first and foremost. I t is a necessary development; for it signifies the growth of self. consciousness in the units out of a mass unconsciousness or semi-consciousness. It is' the expression of rajas, the mope of

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dynamism, of strife and struggle, it is the corrective of tamas.

In the earliest and primitive society men lived totally in a mass consciousness. Their life was a blind obedience – obe­dience to the chief – the patriarch or pater familias –obedience to the laws and customs of the collectivity to which one belonged. It was called duty; it was called even dharma, but evidently on a lower level, in an inferior formulation. In reality it was more of the nature of the mechanical functioning of an automaton than the exercise of conscious will and deliberate choice, which is the very soul of the conception of duty.

The conception of Right had to appear in order to bring out the principle of individuality, of personal freedom and fulfilment. For, a true healthy collectivity is the association and organisation of free and self-determinate units. The growth of independent individuality naturally means at first clash and rivalry, and a violently competitive society is the result. It is only at this stage that the conception of duty can fruitfully come in and develop in man and his society the mode of sattwa, which is that of light and wisdom, of toleration and harmony. Then only a society is sought to be moulded on the principle of co-ordination and co-operation.

Still, the conception of duty cannot finally and definitively solve the problem. It cannot arrive at a perfect harmonisation of the conflicting claims of individual units; for, duty, as I have already said, is a child of mental idealism, and although the mind can exercise some kind of control over life-forces, it cannot altogether eliminate the seeds of conflict that lie im­bedded in the very nature of life. It is for this reason that there is an element of constraint in duty; it is, as the poet says, the "stern daughter of the Voice of God". One has to compel one­self, one has to use force on oneself to carry out one's duty­ – there is a feeling somehow of its being a bitter pill. The cult of duty means rajas controlled and coerced by sattwa, not the transcendence of rajas. This leads us to the high and supreme conception of Dharma, which is a transcendence of the gunas. Dharma is not an ideal, a standard or a rule that one has to obey: it is the law of self-nature that one inevitably follows, it is easy, spontaneous, delightful. The path of duty is heroic,

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the path of Dharma is of the gods, godly (cf. Virabhava and Divyabhava of the Tantras).

The principle of Dharma then inculcates that each individual must, in order to act, find out his truth of being, his true soul and inmost consciousness: one must entirely _nd integrally merge oneself into that, be identified with it in such a manner that all acts and feelings and thoughts, in fact all movements, inner and outer-spontaneously and irrepressibly well out of that fount and origin. The individual souls, being made of one truth-nature in its multiple modalities, when they live, move and have their being in its essential law and dynamism, there cannot but be absolute harmony and perfect synthesis between all the units, even as the sun and moon and stars, as the Veda says, each following its specific orbit according to its specific nature, never collide or halt – na methate na tasthatuh – ­but weave out a faultless pattern of symphony.

The future society of man is envisaged as something of like nature. When the mortal being will have found his immortal soul and divine self, then each one will be able to give full and free expression to his self-nature (swabhava); then indeed the utmost sweep of dynamism in each and all will not cause clash or conflict; on the contrary, each will increase the other and there will be a global increment and fulfilment – para­sparam bhavayantah. The division and conflict, the stress and strain that belong to the very nature of the inferior level of being and consciousness will then have been transcended. It is only thus that a diviner humanity can be born and replace all the other moulds and types that can never lead to anything final and absolutely satisfactory.

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The World War

ITS INNER BEARINGS

THIS is a war to which even spiritual seekers can hardly remain indifferent with impunity. There are spiritual paths, however, that ask to render unto God what is God's and unto Satan what belongs to Satan; in other words, spirituality is kept apart from what is called worldliness, clean and untouched by the dust and murk of Ignorance-Maya. The injunction accordingly is that they who are worldly must remain worldly, they have no business, no right to meddle with spirituality, and they who are spiritual should, on the other hand, remain strictly spiritual, should have nothing to do with worldliness. Because of this complete divorce between the spiritual and the worldly, the world remains worldly even today, continues to be the empire of unspirituality and obscurity, of suffering and grief, it is unable to become a dynamic and living expression and embodiment of the Spirit.

Not that spiritual men have not served and worked for the welfare of the world; but their work could not be wholly effective, it was mixed, maimed, temporary in effect. This could not be otherwise, for their activity proceeded from inferior and feebler sources of inspiration and consciousness other than those that are purely spiritual. Firstly, little more was possible for them than to exercise an indirect influence; their spiritual realisation could bring into the life of the world only a reminiscence, an echo, just a touch and a ray from another world. Or, secondly, when they did take part in worldly affairs, their activity could not rise much beyond the worldly standard; it remained enclosed within the sphere of the moral and the conventional, took such forms as, for example, charity

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and service and philanthropy. Nothing higher than ideas and ideals confined to the moral, that is to say, the mental plane, could be brought into play in the world and its practical life –even the moral and mental idea itself has often been mistaken for true spirituality. Thus the very ideal of governing or moulding our worldly preoccupations according to a truly spiritual or a supramental or transcendental consciousness was a rare phenomenon and even where the ideal was found, it is doubtful whether the right means and methods were discovered. Yet the sole secret of changing man's destiny and transmuting the world lies in the discovery and application of a supreme spiritual Conscious-Power.

Humanists once affirmed that nothing that concerned man was alien to them, all came within their domain. The spiritual man too can make the affirmation with the same or even a greater emphasis. Indeed the spiritual consciousness in the highest degree and greatest compass must needs govern and fashion man in his entire being, in all his members and func­tions. The ideal, as we have said, has seldom been accepted; generally it has been considered as a chimera and an impos­sibility. That is why, we repeat, even to this day the world has its cup of misery full to the brim – aniryam asukham.

All this has to be said by way of explanation and apology. For if we are spiritual seekers even then, or rather because of. That, we too, we declare, have our say in a matter which looks so mundane as this war. We refuse to own the nature and character so often ascribed to us by the "West, which finds a graphic description -in the well-known lines of Matthew Arnold:

The East bow'd low before the blast

In patient deep disdain.

She let the legions thunder past,

And plunged in thought again.

In fact, however, there is no insurmountable disparity between spirituality and "worldliness", between meditation and the most "terrible work" – ghore karmani: the Gita has definitively proved the truth of the fact millenniums ago. War has not been the monopoly of warriors alone: it will not be

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much of an exaggeration to say that Avatars, the incarnations of the Divine, have done little else besides that. And what of the Divine Mother herself? The main work of an Avatar is often to subdue the evil-doers, those that follow and pull others to follow the Wrong Path. And the Divine Mother, she who harbours in her bosom the supreme Truth and Consciousness and Bliss, is in one of her essential aspects, the slayer of the Demon, of the Asura.

Now, it is precisely with the Asura that we have to deal in the present war. This is not like other wars-it is not a war of one country with another, of one group of Imperialists with another, nor is it merely the fierce endeavour of a particular race or nation for world-domination: it is something more than all that. This war has a deeper, a more solemn, almost a grim significance. Some thinkers in Europe, not the mere political leaders, but those who lead in thought and ideas and ideals, to whom something of the inner world is revealed, have realised the true nature of the present struggle and have expressed it in no uncertain terms. Here is what Jules Romains, one of the foremost thinkers and litterateurs of contemporary France, says:

"Since the end of the Middle Ages, conquerors did harm perhaps to civilization, but they never claimed to bring it into question. They ascribed their excesses and crimes to motives of necessity, but never dreamed for a moment to hold them up as exemplary actions on which subject nations were called upon to fashion their morality, their code, their gospel.. . Since the dawn of modern times the accidents of military history in Europe have never meant for her the end of her most precious spiritual and moral values and a sudden annulment of all the work done by the past generations in the direction of mutual respect, equity, goodwill – or, to put all into a single word, in the direction of humanity."

Modern thinkers do not speak of the Asura – the Demon or the Titan – although the religiously minded sometimes refer to the Anti-Christ; but the real, the inner significance of the terms, is lost to a mind nurtured in science and empiricism; they are considered as more or less imaginative symbols for certain undesirable qualities of nature and character. Yet some have perceived and expressed the external manifestation

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and activities of the Asura in a way sufficient to open men's eyes to the realities involved. Thus they have declared that the present war is a conflict between two ideals, to be sure, but also that the two ideals are so different that they do not belong to the same plane or order; they belong to different planes and different orders. On one side the whole endeavour is to bring man down from the level to which he has arisen in the course of evolution to something like his previous level and to keep him imprisoned there. That this is really their aim, the protagonists and partisans themselves have declared frankly and freely and loudly enough, without any hesitation or reservation. Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' has become the Scripture of the New Order; it has come with a more categorical imperative, a more supernal authority than the Veda, the Bible or the Koran.

When man was a dweller of the forest, – a jungle man, – akin to his forbear the ape, his character was wild and savage, his motives and impulsions crude, violent, egoistic, almost wholly imbedded in, what we call, the lower vital level; the light of the higher intellect and intelligence had not entered into them. Today there is an uprush of similar forces to possess and throw man back to a similar condition. This new order asks only one thing of man, namely, to be strong and powerful, that is to say, fierce, ruthless, cruel and regimented. Regimentation can be said to be the very characteristic of the order, the regimentation of a pack of wild dogs or wolves. A particular country, nation or race-it is German,y in Europe and, in her wake, Japan in Asia – is to be the sovereign nation or master race (Herrenvolk); the rest of mankind – other countries and peoples – should be pushed back to the status of servants and slaves, mere hewers of wood and drawers of water. What the helots were in ancient times, what the serfs were in the mediaeval ages, and what the subject peoples were under the worst forms of modern imperialism, even so will be the entire mankind under the new overlordship, or something still worse. For whatever might have been the external conditions in those ages and systems, the upward aspirations of man were never doubted or questioned-they were fully respected and honoured. The New Order has pulled all that down and cast them to the winds. Furthermore in the new regime, it is not

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merely the slaves that suffer in a degraded condition, the masters also, as individuals, fare no better. The individual here has no respect, no freedom or personal value. This society or community of the masters even will be like a bee-hive or an ant-hill; the individuals are merely functional units, they are but screws and bolts and nuts and wheels in a huge relentless machinery. The higher and inner realities, the spontaneous inspirations and self-creations of a free soul – art, poetry, literature-sweetness and light – the good and the beautiful – are to be banished for ever; they are to be regarded as things of luxury which enervate the heart, diminish the life-force, distort Nature's own virility. Man perhaps would be the worshipper of Science, but of that Science which brings a tyrannical mastery over material Nature, which serves to pile up tools and instruments, arms and armaments, in order to ensure a dire efficiency and a grim order in practical life.

Those that have stood against this Dark Force and its over-shadowing menace – even though perhaps not wholly by choice or free-will, but mostly compelled by circumstances – yet, because of the stand they have taken, now bear the fate of the world on their shoulders, carry the whole future of humanity in their march. It is of course agreed that to have stood against the Asura does not mean that one has become sura, divine or godlike; but to be able to remain human, human instruments of the Divine, however frail, is sufficient for the purpose, that ensures safety from the great calamity. The rule of life of the Asura implies the end of progress, the arrest of all evolution; it means even a reversal for man. The Asura is a fixed type of being. He does not change, his is a hardened mould, a settled immutable form of a particular consciousness, a definite pattern of qualities and activities – gunakarma. Asura-nature means a fundamental ego-centricism, violent and concentrated self-will. Change is possible for the human being; he can go downward, but he can move upward too, if he chooses. In the Puranas a distinction has been made between the domain of enjoyment and the domain of action. Man is the domain of action par excellence; by him and through him evolve new and fresh lines of activity and impulsion. The domain of enjoyment, on the other hand, is where we reap the fruits of our past Karma; it is the result of an accumulated drive of all

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that we have done, of all the movements we have initiated and carried out. It is a status of being where there is only enjoyment, not of becoming where there can be development and new creation. It is a condition of gestation, as it were; there is no new Karma, no initiative or change in the stuff of the consciousness. The Asuras are bhogamaya purusha, beings of enjoyment; their domain is a cumulus of enjoyings. They cannot strike out a fresh line of activity, put forth a new mode of energy that can work out a growth or transformation of nature. Their consciousness is an immutable entity. The Asuras do not mend, they can only end. Man can certainly acquire or imbibe Asuric force or Asura-like qualities and impulsions; externally he can often act very much like the Asura; and yet there is a difference. Along with the dross that soils and obscures human nature, there is something more, a clarity that opens to a higher light, an inner core of noble metal which does not submit to any inferior influence. There is this something More in man which always inspires and enables him to break away from the Asuric nature. Moreover, though there may be an outer resemblance between the Asuric qualities of man and the Asuric qualities of the Asura, there is an intrinsic different, a difference in tone and temper, in rhythm and vibration, proceeding as they do, from different sources. However cruel, hard, selfish, egocentric man may be, he knows, he admits – at times, if hot always, at heart, if not openly, subconsciously, if not wholly consciously – that such is not the ideal way, that these qualities are not qualifications, they are unworthy elements and have to be discarded. But the Asura is ruthless, because he regards ruthlessness as the right thing, as the perfect thing, it is an integral part of his swabhava and swadharma, his law of being and his highest good. Violence is the ornament of his character.

The outrages committed by Spain in America, the oppression of the Christians by Imperial Rome, the brutal treatment of Christians by Christians themselves (the inquisition, that is to say) or the misdeeds of Imperialists generally were wrong and, in many cases, even inhuman and unpardonable. But when we compare with what Nazi Germany has done in Poland or wants to do throughout the world, we find that there is a difference between the two not only in degree, but in kind.

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One is an instance of the weakness of man, of his flesh being frail; the other illustrates the might of the Asura, his very spirit is unwilling. One is undivine; the other antidivine, positively hostile. They who cannot discern this difference are colour-blind: there are eyes to which all deeper shades of colour are black and all lighter shades white.

The Asura triumphs everywhere for a while because his power is well-built, perfectly organised. Human power is constituted differently and acts differently; it is full of faults and flaws to start with and for a long time. There is no gap anywhere in the power of the Asura, no tear or stitch-it is streamlined, solid, of one piece; it is perfection itself in its own kind once for all. Man's being is made up of conflicts and contradictions; he moves step by step, slowly and laboriously, through gradual purification; he grows through endeavour and struggle. Man triumphs over the Asura only in so far as he moulds himself in the ways of the divine power. But in the world, the Divine and his powers remain behind, because the field of actuality in front is still the domain of the As'ura. The outer field, the gross vehicle – body and life and mind – all this is constituted by Ignorance and Falsehood; so the Asura can always establish there his influence and hold sway and has actually done so. Man becomes easily an instrument of the Asura, though often unwittingly; the earth is naturally in the firm grasp of the Asura. For the gods to conquer the earth, to establish their rule in the earth consciousness requires labour and endeavour and time.

No doubt, the violences indulged by men in older times, especially when they acted in groups and packs, were often inflamed and inspired by an Asuric influence. But today it must be clearly seen and recognised that it is the Asura himself with the whole band of his army that has descended upon the earth; they have possessed a powerfully organised human collectivity, shaped it in their mould, using it to complete their conquest of mankind and consolidate their definitive reign upon earth.

As we see it we believe that the whole future of mankind, the entire value of earthly life depends upon the issue of the present deadly combat. The path that man has followed so long tended steadily towards progress and evolution – how-

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ever slow his steps, however burdened with doubt and faintness his mind and heart in the ascent. But now the crucial parting of the ways looms before him. The question is, will the path of progress be closed to him for ever, will he be compelled to revert to a former unregenerate state or even something worse I than that? Or will he remain free to follow that path, rise gradually and infallibly towards perfection, towards a purer, I fuller, higher and vaster luminous life? Will man come down' to live the life of a blind helpless slave under the clutches of I the Asura or even altogether lose his soul and become the legendary demon who carries no head but only a decapitated trunk?

We believe that the war of today is a war between the Asura and men, human instruments of the gods. Man certainly is a weaker vessel in comparison with the Asura – on this material plane of ours; but in man dwells the Divine – and against the divine force and might, no asuric power can ultimately prevail. The human being who has stood against the Asura has by that very act sided with the gods and received the support and benediction of the Divine. The more we become conscious about the nature of this war and consciously take the side of the progressive force, of the divine force supporting it, the more will the Asura be driven to retire, his power diminished, his hold relaxed. But if through ignorance and blind passion, through narrow vision and obscurant prejudice we fail to distinguish the right from the wrong side, the dexter from the sinister, surely we shall invite upon mankind utter misery and desolation. It will be nothing less than a betrayal of the Divine Cause.

The fate of India too is being decided in this world-crisis – on the plains of Flanders, on the steppes of Ukraine, on the farthest expanses of the Pacific. The freedom of India will become inevitable and even imminent in proportion as she becomes cognizant of the underlying character and significance of the present struggle, deliberately takes the side of the evolutionary force, works for the gods, in proportion as she grows to be an instrument of the Divine Power. The instrument that the Divine chooses is often, to all appearances, faulty and defective, but since it has this higher and mightier support, it will surely outgrow all its drawbacks

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and lapses, it will surmount all dangers and obstacles and become unconquerable. This – is what the spiritual seeker means by saying that the Divine Grace can make the lame leap across the mountain. India's destiny today hangs in the balance; it lies in the choice of her path.

A great opportunity is offered to India's soul, a mighty auspicious moment is come, if she can choose. If she chooses rightly, then can she arrive at the perfect fulfilment of her agelong endeavour, her life mission. India has preserved and fostered through the immemorial spiritual living of her saints and seers and sages the invaluable treasure, the vitalising, the immortalising power of spirituality, so that it can be placed at the service of terrestrial life for the deliverance of mankind, for the transfiguration of the human type. It is this for which India lives; by losing this India loses all her reason of existence – raison d'être – the earth and humanity too lose all significance. Today we are in the midst of an incomparable ordeal. If we know how to take the final and crucial step, we come out of it triumphant, a new soul and a new body, and we make the path straight for the Lord. We have to recognise clearly and unequivocally that victory on' one side will mean that the path of the Divine – of progress and evolution and fulfilment – will remain open, become wider and smoother and safer; but if the victory is on the other side, the path will be closed perhaps for ever, at least for many ages and even then the travail will have to be undergone again under the most difficult conditions and circumstances. Not with a political shortsightedness, not out of -the considerations of convenience or diplomacy, of narrow parochial interests, but with the steady vision of the soul that encompasses the supreme welfare of humanity, we have to make our choice, we have to go over to the right side and oppose the wrong one with all the integrity of our life and being. The Allies, as they have been justly called, are really our allies, our friends and comrades, in spite of their thousand faults and defects; they have stood on the side of the Truth whose manifestation and triumph is our goal. Even though they did not know perhaps in, the beginning what they stood for, even though perhaps as yet they do not comprehend the full sense and solemnity of the issues, still they have chosen a side which is ours, and we have to stand by them whole-

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heartedly in an all-round comradeship if we want to be saved from a great perdition.

This war is a great menace; it is also a great opportunity. It can land humanity into a catastrophe; it can also raise it to levels which would not have been within its reach but for the occasion. The Forces of Darkness have precipitated them­selves with all their might upon the world, but by their very downrush have called upon the higher Forces of Light also to descend. The true' use of the opportunity offered to man would be to bring about a change, better still, a reversal, in his consciousness, that is to say, it will be of highest utility if it forces upon him by the pressure of inexorable circumstances – since normally he is so unwilling and incapable to do it through a spontaneous inner awakening – the inescapable decision that he P1ust change and shall change; and the change is to be for or towards the birth of a spiritual consciousness in earthly life. Indeed the war might be viewed" as the birth-pangs of such a spiritual consciousness. Whether the labour would be sublimely fruitful here and how or end in barrenness is the question the Fates and the gods are asking of man – the mortal being – today.

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The Message of the Atomic Bomb

THE moralist – the Christian moralist particularly – has dubbed the atomic bomb as the Devil's engine; while the practical politician retorts that the accursed machine has cut short the war, saved more lives on the whole and reduced the extent and duration of suffering and agony. In any case the new weapon is so radical and devastating in its effectiveness that even politicians do not seem to be without a qualm and heartburning, not in the moral but in the physical and nervous sense. The atom bomb is a bombshell not upon your enemies alone, but it is a boomerang likely to turn back upon yourself, upon the whole of humanity and human civilisation. Archimedes asked for a fulcrum outside the earth to be able to move it out of its orbit; we have found out something with which one hopes and fears one would do much more.

Man's invention of death-dealing weapons has an interesting history. It is, curious to say, the history of his progress and growing civilisation. The primitive man fought with the strength of his God-given limbs – tooth and nail – to which he subsequently added the crudest of weapons, clubs, of wood or flint. A revolution was brought about when iron was discovered and archery invented. Next revolution came with the appearance of gunpowder on the stage. And then the age of gun-cotton and T.N.T. which held sway till the other day. An interim period of poison gas and chemical warfare was threatened, but everything now has gone overboard with the advent of the atomic bomb and the threatened advent of the Cosmic Death-Ray.

In one sense certainly there has been a progress. This march of machinery, this evolution of tools means man's increasing mastery over Nature, even though physical nature. The primitive

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man like the animal is a slave, a puppet driven helplessly by Nature's forces. Both lead more or less a life of reflex action: there is here no free, original initiation of action or movement. The slow discovery of Nature's secrets, the gradual application and utilisation of these secrets in actual life meant, first, a liberation of man's conscious being originally imbedded in Nature's inertial movements, and then, a growing power to react upon Nature and mould and change it according to the will of the conscious being. The result at the outset was a release and organisation on the mental level, in the domain of reason and intelligence. Of course, man found at once that this in­creasing self-consciousness and self-power meant immense possibilities for good, but, unfortunately, for evil also. And so to guard against the latter contingency, rules and regulations were framed to control and canalise the new-found capacities. The Dharma of the Kshatriya, the honour of the Samurai, the code of Chivalry, all meant that. The power to kill was sought to be checked and restrained by such injunctions as, for example, not to hit below the belt, not to fight a disarmed or less armed opponent and so on. The same principle of morals and manners was maintained and continued through the centuries with necessary changes and modifications in application and finds enshrined today in International Covenants and Conventions.

But a new situation has arisen for some time past. The last Great War (World War No. I) was crucial in many ways in the life of humanity. It opened a new direction of man's growth, opened and then closed also apparently. I am referring to the tragedy of the League of Nations. That was an attempt on the part of man (and Nature) to lift the inner life and consciousness to the level of the outer achievements. The attempt failed. Man could not rise to the height demanded of him. Now the second World War became logically more devastating and shattering; it has given the go-by to all ethical standards and codes of honour. The poison gas was not used not because of any moral restraint or disinclination, but because of practical and utilitarian considerations. The Atom Bomb, however, has spoken the word.

That word is a warning that unless man changes, becomes master of himself, he cannot be truly master of the world. He

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cannot command the forces he has unleashed unless he has command over his own nature. The external immensity, the bloated mass that his physical attainments are, unless armoured and animated by an inner growth, will crash by its own weight. The mammoth, the mastodon, the huge pachyderms, in spite of, rather because of their inordinately one-sided growth could not stand the demand of life and perished. Likewise man will not possess the world but the world will engulf and devour him in its aboriginal hunger of unconsciousness, if he does not take a right-about turn and declare his conversion. The Frankenstein that man has raised can no longer be met by merely human devices – reason and morals – but by a higher discovery and initiation.

The Bomb has shaken the physical atmosphere of the earth as no other engine has done. It has shaken the moral atmos­phere too not in a lesser degree. Reason and moral sense could not move man, so Fear has been sent by the Divine Grace. Dante said that God created Hell in his mood of infinite love and justice-that seems to be the inevitable gate through which one has to pass to arrive at the Divine. We are indeed in hell today upon earth, a worse can hardly be tolerated.

Indeed this is the bleak winter of human consciousness – yet can spring be far behind?

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National and International

A LEADING Nationalist has opined that he does not understand the "slogan" of viewing the nation against a background of internationalism. We can only say that the patriot has learnt nothing and forgotten nothing always like the old guards attached to the old regime who do not see how much water has flown below their feet while they stood gazing at the sky or shut themselves up in their ivory tower. Well, a village headman could in the same way assert that he does not know and cares not to know how to look upon his village against the background of the whole nation: still the village exists only in and through the life of the nation. Even so, the nation which grew out of the fusion of clans and tribes has to outgrow itself; it has to live today, if she wishes to live, in and through the life of humanity as a whole.

Kurukshetra is a turning-point in history. The battle was between an old order that had to go and a new order that was taking birth. The old order was supported, on the one hand, by Bhishma and Drona, personating its codes and laws, its morals, and, on the other, by Duryodhana and Sisupala as its dynamic actors and executors. The new order was envisaged by Krishna and its chief protagonists were the five brothers. The old order meant the supremacy of the family and the clan: that was the central unit round which society grew and was held together. Krishna came to break that mould and evolve a higher and larger unit of collective life. It was not yet the nation, but an intermediary stage something like a League of clans, (as we in our day are trying another higher stage in the League of Nations). The Rajasuya celebrates the establishment of this New Order of a larger, a greater human organisation, Dharmarajya, as it was called.

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We have just passed through another, a far greater, a catastrophic Kurukshetra, the last Act (Shanti Parvam) of which we are negotiating at the present moment. The signi­ficance of this cataclysm is clear and evident if we only allow ourselves to be led by the facts and not try to squeeze the facts into the groove of our past prejudices and set notions. All the difficulties that are being encountered on the way to peace and reconstruction arise mainly out of the failure to grasp what Nature has forced upon us. It is as simple as the first axiom of Euclid: Humanity is one and all nations are free and yet interdependent members of that one and single organism. No nation can hope henceforth to stand in its isolated grandeur – not even America or Russia. Subject or dependent nations too who are struggling to be free will be allowed to work out their freedom and independence, on condition that the same is worked out in furtherance and in collaboration with the ideal of human unity. That ideal has become dynamic and insistent – the more man refuses to accept it, the more he will make confusion worse confounded.

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The Right of Absolute Freedom

A NATION cannot claim the right, even in the name of freedom, to do as it pleases. An individual has not that right, the nation too has not. A nation is a member of humanity, there are other members and there is the common welfare of all. A nation by choosing a particular line of action, in asserting its absolute freedom, may go against other nations, or against the general good. Such freedom has to be curbed and controlled. Collective life – if one does not propose to live the life of the solitary – the animal or the saint – is nothing if not such a system of controls. "The whole of politics is an interference with personal liberty. Law is such an interference; protection is such an interference; the rule which makes the will of the majority prevail is such an interference. The right to prevent such use of personal liberty as will injure the interests of the race is the fundamental law of society. From this point of view the nation is only using its primary rights when it restrains the individual from buying or selling foreign goods." Thus spoke a great Nationalist leader in the days of Boycott and Swadeshi. What is said here of the individual can be said of the nation too in relation to the greater good of humanity. The ideal of a nation or state supreme all by itself, with rights that none can challenge, inevitably leads to the cult of the Super-state, the Master-race. If such a monster is not to be tolerated, the only way left is to limit the absolute value of nationhood, to view a nation only as a member in a comity of nations forming the humanity at large.

A nation not free, still in bondage, cannot likewise justify its claim to absolute freedom by all or any means, at all times, in all circumstances. There are times and circumstances when even an enslaved nation has to bide its time. Man, in order to

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assert his freedom and individuality, cannot sign a pact with Mephistopheles; if he does so he must be prepared for the consequences. The same truth holds with regard to the nation. A greater danger may attend a nation than the loss of freedom – the life and soul of humanity itself may be in imminent peril. Such a cataclysmic danger mankind has just passed through or is still passing through. All nations, however circumstanced in the old world, who have stood and fought on the side of humanity, by that very gesture, have acquired the right –and the might too, – to gain freedom and greatness and all good things which would not be possible otherwise.

Within the nation all communities must be ready to give and take and settle down amicably. Within humanity too all nations must live the same principle. The days of free competition must be considered as gone for good; instead the rule of collaboration and co-operation has to be adopted (even between past enemies and rivals). In mutual aid and self-limitation lie also the growth and fulfilment of each collective individuality. That is the great Law of Sacrifice enunciated ages ago by Sri Krishna in the Gita-"By increasing each other all will attain the Summum Bonum."

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Federated Humanity

THE last great war, out of its bloody welter, threw up a mantra for the human consciousness to contemplate and seize and realise: it was self-determination. The present world-war has likewise cast up a mantra that is complementary. The problem of the unification of the whole human race has engaged the attention of seers and sages, idealists and men of action, since time immemorial; but only recently its demand has become categorically imperative for a solution in the field of practical politics. Viewed from another angle, one can say that it is also a problem Nature has set before herself, has been dealing with through the ages, elaborating and leading to a final issue.

The original unit of the human aggregate is the family; it is like the original cell which lies at the back of the entire system that is called the human body or, for that matter, any organic body. A living and stable nucleus is needed round which a crystallisation and growth can occur. The family furnished such a nucleus in the early epochs of humanity. But with the growth of human life there came a time when, for a better and more efficient organization in collective life, larger units were needed. The original unit had to be enlarged in order to meet the demands of a wider and more complex growth. Also it is to be noted that the living body is not merely a conglomeration of cells, all more or less equal and autonomous—something like a democratic or an anarchic organization; but it consists of a grouping of such cells in spheres or regions or systems according to differing functions. And as we rise in the scale of evolution the grouping becomes more and more complex, well-defined and hierarchical. Human collectivity also shows a similar development in organization. The original, the primitive unit—the family—was first taken up into a larger

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unit, the clan; the clan, in its turn, gave place to the tribe and finally the tribe merged into the nation. A similar widening of the unit can also be noticed in man's habitat, in his geographical environment. The primitive man was confined to the village; the village gradually grew into the township and the city state. Then came the regional unit and last of all we arrived at the country.

Until the last great war it seemed that the nation (and country) was the largest living unit that human collectivity could admit without the risk of a break-up. Now it was at this momentous epoch that the first concept or shape of a larger federation-typified in the League of Nations-stirred into life and began to demand its lebensraum. It could not however come to fruition and stability, because the age of isolated nationhood had not yet passed and the principle of self­-determination yet needed its absolute justification.

The present war puts the problem in the most acute way. Shall it be still a nation or shall it be a "commonwealth" that must henceforth be the dynamic unit? Today it is evident, it is a fact established by the sheer force of circumstances that isolated, self-sufficient nations are a thing of the past, even like the tribes of the Hebrews or the clans of the Hittites. A super-nation, that is to say, a commonwealth of nations is the larger unit that Nature is in travail to bring forth and establish. That is the inner meaning of the mighty convulsions shaking and tearing humanity today. The empire of the past—an empire of the Roman type and pattern—was indeed in its own way an attempt in the direction of a closely unified larger humanity; but it was a crude and abortive attempt, as Nature's first attempts mostly are. For the term that was omitted in that greater synthesis was self-determination. Centralisation is certainly the secret of a large organic unity, but not over-centralisation; for this means the submission and sacrifice of all other parts of at! organism to the undue demands and interests of only one organ which is considered as the centre, the metropolis. Such a system dries up in the end the vitality of the organism: the centre, sucking in all nourishment from the outlying members suffers from oedema and the whole eventually decays and disintegrates. That is the lesson the Roman Empire teaches us.

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The autocratic empire is dead and gone: we need not fear its shadow or ghostly regeneration. But the ideal which inspired it in secret and justified its advent and reign is a truth that has still its day. The drive of Nature, of the inner consciousness of humanity was always to find a greater and larger unit for the collective life of mankind. That unit today has to be a federation of free peoples and nations. In the place of nations, several such commonwealths must now form the broad systems of the body politic of human collectivity. That must give the pattern of its texture, the outline of its configura­tion—the shape of things to come. Such unit is no longer a hypothetical proposition, a nebula, a matter of dream and imagination. It has become a practical necessity; first of all, because of the virtual impossibility of any single nation, big or small, standing all by itself alone—military and political and economic exigencies demand inescapable collaboration with others, and secondly, because of the still stricter geo­graphical compulsion—the speed and ease of communication has made the globe so small and all its parts so interdependent that none can possibly afford to be exclusive and self-centred.

The organization of this greater and larger unit is the order of the day. It does not seem possible at this stage to go straight to the whole of humanity at large and make of it one single indivisible entity, obliterating all barriers of race and nation. An intermediate step is still necessary even if that remains the final end. Nationhood has been a helper in that direction; it is now a bar. And yet an indiscriminate internationalism cannot meet the situation today, it overshoots the mark. The march of events and circumstances prescribe that nations should combine to form groups or, as they say in French, societies of nations. The combination, however, must be freely determined, as voluntary partnership in a common labour organisation for common profit and achievement. This problem has to be solved first, then only can the question of nationalism or other allied knots be unravelled. Nature the Sphinx has set the problem before us and we have to answer it here and now, if humanity is to be saved and welded together into a harmonious whole for a divine purpose.

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Vansittartism

GERMANY is considered now, and naturally with great reason, as the arch criminal among nations. Such megalomania, such lust for wanton cruelty, such wild sadism, such abnormal velleities no people, it is said, have ever evinced anywhere on the face of the earth: the manner and the extent of it all are appalling. Hitler is not the malady; removal of the Fuehrer will not cure Germany. The man is only a sign and a symbol. The whole nation is corrupt to the core: it has been inoculated with a virus that cannot be eradicated. The peculiar German character that confronts and bewilders us now, is not a thing of today or even of yesterday; it has been there since Tacitus remarked it. Even Germans themselves know it very well; the best among them have always repudiated their mother country. Certainly there were peoples and nations that acted at times most barbarously and inhumanly. The classical example of the Spanish Terror in America is there. But all pales into insignificance when compared to the German achievement and ideal in this respect. For here is a people violent and cruel, not simply because it is their character to be so and they delight in being so, but because it forms the bedrock of their philosophy of life, their weltanschauung.

This is the very core of the matter. Germany stands for a philosophy of life, for a definite mode of human values. That philosophy was slowly developed, elaborated by the German mind, in various degrees and in various ways through various thinkers and theorists and moralists and statesmen, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. The conception of the State as propounded even by her great philosophers as something self-existent, sacrosanct and almost divine – august and grim, one has to add – is profoundly significant of the type

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of the subconscient dynamic in the nation: it strangely reminds one of the state organised by the bee, the ant or the termite. Hitler has only precipitated the idea, given it a concrete, physical and dynamic form. That philosophy in its outlook has been culturally anti-Latin, religiously anti-Christian. Germany cherishes always in her heart the memory of the day when her hero Arminius routed the Roman legions of Varus. Germany stands for a mode of human consciousness that is not in line with the major current of its evolutionary growth: she harks back to something primeval, infra-rational, infra-human.

Such is the position taken up by Lord Vansittart who has given his name to the new ideology of anti-Germanism. Vansittartism (at least in its extreme variety) has very little hope for the mending of Germany, it practically asks for its ending.

A son of the soil, an eminent erstwhile collaborator of Hitler, who has paid for his apostasy, offered a compromise solution. He says, Germany, as a matter of fact, is not one but two: there is the Eastern Germany (the Northern and the Eastern portion) and there is the Western Germany (the South and the West) and the two are distinct and different – even anta­gonistic-in temperament and character and outlook. The Western Germany is the true Germany, the Germany of light and culture, the Germany that produced the great musicians, poets and idealists, Goethe and Heine and Wagner and Beethoven. The other Germany represents the dark shadow. It is Prussia and Prussianised Germany. This Germany originally belonged to the bleak, wild, savage, barbarous East Europe and was never thoroughly reclaimed and its union with the Western half was more political than psychological. So this ex-lieutenant of Hitler proposed to divide and separate the two altogether and form two countries or nations and thus eliminate the evil influence of Prussianism and unkerism.

The more democratic and liberal elements among the Allies do not also consider that Germany as a whole is smitten with an original sin and is beyond redemption. They say Germany too has men and groups of men who are totally against Hitler and Hitlerism; they may have fallen on evil days, but yet they can be made the nucleus of a new and regenerated Germany.

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Furthermore, they say if Germany has come to be what she is, considerable portion of the responsibility must be shared by the unprogressive and old-world elements among the Allies themselves who helped or pitied or feared the dark Germany.

Hence it is suggested that for the postwar reconstruction of Germany what is required is the re-education of its people. For, only a psychological change can bring about a durable and radical change. But certain proposals towards this end raise serious misgivings, since they mean iron regimentation under foreign control. Even if such a thing were possible and feasible, it is doubtful if the purpose could be best served in this way. Measures have to be taken, no doubt, to uproot Prus­sianism and unkerism and prevent their revival, no false mercy or sympathy should be extended to the enemies of God and man. But this is only a negative step, and cannot be sufficient by itself. A more positive and more important work lies ahead. The re-education of Germany must come from within, if it is to be permanent and effective. What others can do is to help her in this new orientation. As we have said, there are the progressive elements in Germany too, although sub­merged for the moment. The task of reconstruction will pre­cisely consist in calling up and organising and marshalling these forces that are for the Light. The Allied organisation, it may be noted, itself has grown up in this way. When one remembers how Britain stood alone at one time against the all-sweeping victorious march of the Titan, how slowly and gradually America was persuaded to join hands, at first in a lukewarm way, finally with all its heart and soul and might and main, how a new France is being built up out of a mass of ruins, we can hope that the same process will be adopted in the work that lies ahead even after victory, with regard to Italy and with regard to Germany. In the second case the task is difficult but it has got to be done.

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India One and Indivisible

INDIA is one and indivisible, culturally and spiritually; politically too she must be one and indivisible and is, as a matter of fact, already on the way towards that consummation, in spite of appearances to the contrary. It has got to be so, if India is to be strong and powerful, if her voice is to be heard in the comity of nations, if she is to fulfil her mission in the world.

It is no use laying stress on distinctions and differences: we must, on the contrary, put all emphasis upon the funda­mental unity, upon the demand and necessity for a dynamic unity. Naturally there are diverse and even contradictory elements in the make-up of a modern nation. France, for example, was not one, but many to start with and for long. We know of the mortal feud between the Bourguignons and the Armagnacs and the struggle among the Barons generally, some even siding with foreigners against their own country­men (an Indian parallel we have in the story of Prithwiraj and Jayachand), poor Jeanne d'Arc lamenting over the 'much pity' that was in sweet France. There were several rival languages – Breton, Gascon, Provençal, besides the French of Isle de France. Apart from these provincial or regional rivalries there were schisms on religious grounds – Huguenots and Catholics, Jansenists and Arians were flying at each other's throat and made of France a veritable bedlam of confusion and chaos. Well, all that was beaten down and smoothed under the steam-roller of a strong centralised invincible spirit of France, one and indivisible and inexorable, that worked itself out through Jeanne d'Arc and Francis the First and Henry the Great and Richelieu and Napoleon. But all nations have the same story. And it is too late now in the day to start

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explaining the nature and origin of nationhood; it was done long ago by Mazzini and by Renan and once for all.

Indeed, what we see rampant in India today is the mediaeval spirit. This reversion to an older-an extinct, we ought to have been able to say-type of mentality is certainly a fall, a lowering of the collective consciousness. It bas got to be remedied and set right. Whatever the motive forces that lie at the back of the movement, motives of fear or despair or class interest or parochial loyalty, motives of idealism, misguided and ob­scurantist, they have to be taken by the horns and dominated and eliminated. A breath of modernism, some pure air of clear perception and knowledge and wider consciousness must blow through the congested hectic atmosphere of the Indian body politic.

It will do no good to anyone to try to Balkanise India. The Balkan malady is no longer tolerated even in its homeland; it cannot be transported to India in this century and after this Great War. To be and remain free and strong and invincible, India must be and remain indivisible. The strength of the United States of America, of the United Soviets of the Russias, of the British Commonwealth (pace Churchill) lies precisely in each one of them being a large unified aggregate, all members pooling their resources together. India cannot main­tain her freedom, nor utilise her freedom to its utmost effectivity unless she is one and indivisible. The days of small peoples, of isolated independence are gone – gone for ever even like Thebes and Nineveh, like Kosala of Dasarathi and Mathura of Yadupati.

India can be and is to be a federation of autonomous units. But then we must very carefully choose or find out the units, those that are real units and not fractions (especially irrational fractions) and at the same time lay as much stress on federa­tion as on autonomy. To choose or create units on the basis of religion or race or caste or creed, that is exactly what we mean by irrationalism, in other words, mediaevalism. The Units must be, on one side, geographical wholes, and, on the other, cultural (or spiritual – not religious) wholes.

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The Basic Unity

THERE is one unity which cannot be denied to India, because Nature has given it and man cannot withdraw or annul it. It is the geographical, the physical unity. It is so clearly and indelibly marked that it has always been looked upon as a definite unit by all outside its boundaries; one may call in question the cultural unity, if one chooses, one may be sceptic about the spiritual unity, but the unity of the body leaps to the eyes, even as the clear contour of a living organism. As we know, however, an individual human frame may contain many personalities, many Jekylls and Hydes may lodge in the same physical tenement, even so, the physical unity that is India may harbour many and diverse independent elements. Admitting even that, the problem does not end there, it is only the beginning. The problem that is set in such a case is, as has been pointed out by the psychologists, the problem of the integration of personality.

A firm physical unity presupposes, at least posits the possibility of an integral unity. Otherwise the body itself would tend to break up and disintegrate. Such physical cataclysms are not unknown in Nature. However, a geographical unity cannot remain exclusively limited to itself; it brings about other unities by the very pressure, by the capillary action, as it were, of the boundary. The first unity that is called into being is the economic. A Zollverein (Customs Union) has almost always been the starting-point of a national union. Next or along with it comes the political unity. India's political and economic unity has been the great work of the British rule, however that rule might be distasteful to us. It is an illustration of Nature's method of compulsion and violence, when man's voluntary effort fails. India possesses a resounding roll of great

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names who endeavoured to give her this solid political and economic unity; Bharata, Yudhishthira, Asoka, Chandra­gupta, Akbar, Shivaji have all contributed to the evergrowing unification of Indian polity. But still what they realised was not a stable and permanent thing, it was yet fluent and uncertain; it was only the hammerblow, the plastering, as one would say today, from an outside agency that welded, soldered and fixed that unity.

Fissures of late have opened again and they seem to be increasing in depth and width and in number. What appeared to be a unified structure, of one piece, whole and entire, now threatens to crash and fall to pieces. We are asked to deny the unity. The political unity, it is said, is an impossibility, the geographical unity an illusion.

In such a predicament the vision of a prophet counts more than the arguments of a political huckster. That an Indian consciousness is there and has grown and taken more and more concrete shape through the ages is a fact to which history bears testimony and honest commonsense pays homage.

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The Way to Unity

COMMON love, common labour and, above all, as the great French thinker, Ernest Renan,* pointed out, common suf­fering – that is the cement which welds together the disparate elements of a nation-a nation is not formed otherwise. A nation means peoples differing in race and religion, caste and creed and even language, fused together into a composite but indivisible unit. Not pact nor balancing of interests nor sharing of power and profit can permanently combine and unify conflicting groups and collectivities. Hindus and Muslims, the two major sections that are at loggerheads today in India, must be given a field, indeed more than one field, where they can, work together; they must be made to come in contact with each other, to coalesce and dovetail into each other in as many ways and directions as possible. Instead of keeping them separate in water-tight compartments, in barred cages, as it were, lest they pounce upon each other like wild beasts, it would be wiser to throw them together; let them breathe the same air, live the same life, share the same troubles, the same difficulties, solve the same problems. That is how they

*"Dans le passé, un héritage de gloire et de regrets á partager, dans l'avenir un même programme à réaliser; avoir souffert, joui, espéré ensemble, voilà ce qui vaut mieux que des douanes communes et des frontiéres conformes aux idées stratégiques: voilà ce que l'on comprend malgré leg diversités de race et de langue. Je disais tout à l'heure: "avoir souffert ensemble"; oui, la souffrance en commun unit plus que la joie. En fait de souvenirs nationaux, les deuils valent mieux que leg triomphes.. . "

Ernest Renan: "Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?"

Translation: "In the past a heritage of glory and regrets to share, in the future the same programme to realise; to have suffered, enjoyed, hoped together, that indeed is better than common customs and strategic frontiers; that is what one understands in spite of diversities of race and language. I said just now: "to have suffered together"; yes, common suffering unites more than common joy. In respect of the memories of a nation griefs are worth more than triumphs. . . . "

Ernest Renan: "What is a nation?"

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will best understand, appreciate and even love each other, become comrades and companions, not rivals and opponents.

To have union, one must unite – division can never lead to unity. Also this unity is established automatically and irrevo­cably, not by any abstract sense of justice and equality, nor by any romantic or imaginative feeling of fraternity, but by a dynamic living together. A common political and civic and economic life creates a field of force that can draw together into a harmonious working the most contrary and refractory elements.

We have said, however, time and again, that the present war is a great opportunity offered by Nature and Providence, opportunity that comes only once in a way; it is precisely the field of which we speak, the field par excellence, which can compel all centrifugal elements to come together, labour together, enjoy and suffer together and turn and transmute them into the very strongest centripetal components.

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Independence and its Sanction

INDEPENDENCE is not a gift which one can receive from another, it is a prize that has to be won. In the words of the poet Bhasa, used in respect of empire, we can say also of liberty:

Talloke na tu yacyate na tu punardinaya diyate

it is not a thing to be got for the mere asking, nor is it a thing to be made over to a weakling.

The lead Sri Aurobindo gave in this connection has not, sad to say, sufficiently attracted the attention of our people. Indeed what he suggested was exactly, (under the circumstances, the best way to acquire the necessary fitness, organised strength, capacity, the might and consequently the right just the sanction, in other words, that can uphold a demand. We are always ignoring the broad fact that we have not the wherewithal to fight the British, even if it is found necessary to do so for our purpose. A revolution, meaning a chaos and confusion, is not the best means to drive out the "die-hard Imperialism" as we choose to call it. Nor can cunning or expediency or legal jugglery be of any avail, nor work that is perfunctory, desultory, scampy. The force that can compel a change in the British has got to be of a different character: neither emotional excitement nor anger nor spite nor a philo­sophical or moral vindication of our cause can be an adequate lever. We declare it is a war: well then, we will have to arm ourselves as in war. That is to say, we must command a strength that is calm, collected, poised, organised – objectively acquired and marshalled, not simply subjectively thought out or taken for granted. That alone can be the imperative sanction to all our claims and demands, our wishes and aspirations.

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Precisely, the present war brings to our door the opportunity most suited to the acquisition and development of this power and strength. The very things the Indian temperament once had in abundance but now lacks most and has to recover­ – discipline, organization, impersonality and objectivity in work, hard and patient labour, skill of execution in minute details – qualities by virtue of which power is not only acquired, but maintained and fostered – are now made more easily available. These qualities cannot be mastered and developed with such facility and swiftness as under the pressure of the demands of a war. This does not mean that we have got to be militarists. But the world is such that if we wish to live and prosper we must know how to make use of the materials and conditions that are given to us. Many good things are im­bedded among bad ones, and wisdom and commonsense do not advise us to throw out the baby with the bath-water. That is another matter, however.

If we had joined hands with the British in the war-work on their own terms – to try to compel them to our terms is to put the cart before the horse – we would have seen that as we proceeded with the work, more and more of it came auto­matically under our charge, however small or slight it might have looked in the beginning. In the end or very soon we would have found that our possession of the field was an accom­plished fact, there could be no question of denying or refusing, the fact had to be accepted – admitted and ratified. It is the well-known policy of the camel which Aesop described in one of his Fables. We have to establish the inexorable logic of events which definitively solves the riddle, cuts the Gordian knot as it were. A theoretical, that is to say, a moral and legal pact or understanding is but a dam of sands.

Power is best gained and increased in this way, viz., through work, through practical application of it, in its painstaking execution – no matter with what insignificant fund we start with. Let all power come into my hands, let me be legally and verbally recognised as free and invested with plenary power, then alone I can exercise my power, otherwise not – ­this is the cry of romantic idealism, of sentimental hunger: it has all the impatience and incompetence of visionaries – ­illumines – It is not the clear and solid wisdom of experience.

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We naturally consider the British as our enemy and in order to combat and compel them we have been trying to bring together all the differing elements in our midst. Close up the ranks to fight a common enemy-that is our grand strategy. It is an effort that has not succeeded till now and is not likely to succeed soon. We should have looked a little farther ahead: with a longer view we would have spotted the greater enemy, a vastly greater immediate danger. Against that common enemy a larger and effective unification would have been quite feasible and even easy. Indeed, if we had taken the other way round, had first united with the British against the greater common enemy, our union with ourselves – our own peoples and parties – would have been automatically accomplished.

That is how we read the situation. When it looked as though there was no way left at our disposal to compose the acute and bitter differences among the multifarious Indian collectivities and also between the Indians and the British or foreigners, precisely at that critical hour appeared the war bringing a unique opportunity, a call and a message, as it were. There is certainly clash in Nature, but always there is an effort also in her to turn that clash into concord. India had too long been the field par excellenceof discord and it was time that a movement for real harmony should come. Yes, we say, the war was providential to us, a God-send, offering the chance of centuries. But blinded and perverted our human intelligence refused to take it at its worth.

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New World-Conditions

IT is a trite saying that one must change with the changing times. But how many can really do so or know even how to do so? In politics, as in life generally (politics is a part of life, the "precipitated" part, one may say in chemical language), the principle is well-known, though often in a pejorative sense, as policy or tactics. Anyhow the policy pays: for it is one of the main lines, if not the main line of action along which lies success in the practical field. And precisely he who cannot change, who does not see the necessity of change, although conditions and circumstances have changed, is known as the ideologist, the doctrinaire, the fanatic. The no-changer does not change with the times: for, according to him, that is the nature of the weather-cock, the time-server. On the contrary, he seeks to impose his ideas (sometimes called ideals), notions, prejudgments and even prejudices upon time and circumstance. Such an endeavour, on most occasions, can have only a modicum of success; and a blind insistence may even lead to disaster. It may not be difficult to modify some surface movements of the oceanic surge of life, but to control and command it is quite a different proposition. This, however, is not to say that opportunism, slavery to circumstances should be the order of the day. Not at all. One is not asked to sacrifice the bed-rock truth and principle and run after the fleeting mode, the momentary need, the passing interest, to follow always the comfortable line of least resistance. But one has to distinguish. There are things of local and transient utility and there are things of abiding value brought up by deeper world-currents in the conditions and circumstances that face us. When such great occasions – golden opportunities they are called – come, they come with their own norms, and then

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it is foolish to force upon them the narrow strait-jacket forms fabricated by our old habits and preconceived notions. We talk even today of British Imperialism, of the Shylock nature of the white coloniser and exploiter –

A stony adversary, an inhuman wretch,

Uncapable of pity, void and empty

From a1!J dram of mercy.

We do not doubt that it is the deliberate policy of these 'vampires' to keep us Indians down eternally as their serfs and slaves. But whatever be the truth of the fact in the past, it is a pity we do not see that things have changed a good deal and are changing steadily and profoundly and inexorably. It is not, as it is so often demanded, that there has been a change of, heart, in the sense that one has become saintly, self-forgetful, self-sacrificing, altruistic. We, on our part, have not become so and it is idle to expect of others to be so. What has happened is a physical change, a change, almost a revolution in the external conditions of life in the world, in the geographical and economic conditions, for example. The geographical revolution is this that all the nations and peoples of the earth have been thrown together to intermingle, have been forced to come into close and inextricable communion with one another: all barriers of distance and physical inaccessibility have been removed and practically eliminated. The universe may be expanding, but the earth has shrunk and has become very small indeed. A signal example of the kind of blunder that one could commit in this respect was that of the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, who said, not knowing what he said. on the eve of the present war, that Czecho­slovakia was a far-off foreign country whose fate is of no concern or consequence to the British. Well, Time-Spirit must have had a hearty laughter over the wisdom of the statesman: it did not take long for the British to see that Czechoslovakia is dangerously near, indeed, it touches the very frontier of the British Isles. We have flown over the mighty "humps" that separated countries and continents and levelled them and made of the earth one even continuous plain, as it were. Neither the Poles nor the peaks of the Himalayas can hide any longer

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their millennial secrets from man's newly acquired Argus eye. The span and accuracy of our flying capacity have left no corner of the earth to lie in quiet and splendid isolation.

The geographical revolution has led inevitably to the economic revolution which is not less momentous, pregnant with prophecies of brave new things. We all know that the modern world was ushered in with the industrial revolution. As a result of this new dispensation, world and society gradually divided into two camps: on one side, the industrialists and on the other the agriculturists, or, in a general way, the pos­sessors of raw materials. The Imperialists formed the first group, while the latter, dominated by these, belonged to the Colonies. The "backward" countries and people who could not take to industry, but continued the old system became a helpless prey to the industrial nations. Africa and Asia and the South American countries came under the domination of European nations, rather the West European Nations: they became the suppliers of raw materials and also the market for finished products. Also within the same country occupying the imperial status, there came a division, a class division, as it is called. A few industrial magnates or trusts (France had its famous Two-Hundred Families) monopolised all the wealth, became the top-dog, the "Haves", the others were mere hewers of wood and drawers of water, serfs and slaves, the "Have-­Nots". Exploitation was-the motto of the age. The "exploiters" and the "exploited", this trenchant duality was the whole truth of the social scheme and that summed up the entire malady of the collective life. Then came the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution which brought to a head the great crisis and initiated the change-over to new conditions. The French Revolution called up from the rear of social ranks and set in front the Third Estate and gradually formed and crystallised, with the aid of the Industrial Revolution, what is known as the Bourgeoisie. The Russian Revolution went a step farther. It dislodged the bourgeoisie and installed the Fourth Estate, the proletariate, as the head and front of society, its centre of power and governmental authority. In the meantime there was developing in the bourgeois society, too, a kind of socialism which aimed at the uplift and remoulding of the working class into a total social power. But the process could not, go far

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enough. The Industrial League, no doubt, began to release some of its monopolies, delegate some of its power and authority to the Proletariate and sought an armistice and entente; but still it is they who wielded the real power and gave to society the tone and impress of their characteristic authority. The Russian experiment made a bold departure and attempted to build up a new society from the very bottom: the manual labourers, they who produce with the sweat of their brow an9 make a society living and prosperous must 'also be its rulers. Now whatever the success or failure in regard to the perfect ideal, the thing achieved is solid; certain forces have been released that are working inexorably in and through even contrary appearances, they have come to stay and cannot be negatived. The urge, for example, towards a more equitable distribution of wealth and wealth-producing implements; an even balancing of economic values has been growing and gathering strength: it has become an asset of the body social. Instead of an unfettered competition between rival agencies, the mad drive for a jealous and closely guarded appropriation (rather, mis-appropriation) by private cartels, there has arisen an inevitable need for a unitary or co-operative control under a common direction, whether it be that of the state or some other body equally representing the common interest. In other words, the principle of co-operation has now become a living reality, a thing of practical politics. All effort towards progress and amelioration, cure of social ills and regaining of health and strength must lie in that direction: anything going the contrary way shall perforce be out of tune with the Time-Spirit and can cause only confusion, bring in stagnation or even regression.

First of all, the colonies, which mean practically the Eastern hemisphere, can no longer be regarded, even by those who would very much wish to, as the field of exploitation, the granary of raw materials or the dumping ground of finished articles. Industrialism, the spirit and urge of it at least, has reached these places too: the exploiters themselves have been instrumental In bringing it about. The growing industrialism in countries so long held in subjection or tutelage, as safe preserves, need not necessarily mean a further spell of keen competition. If we look closely, we see things moving in a different direction. It is self-evident that all countries do not

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and cannot grow or manufacture all things with equal ease and facility. Countries are naturally compleh1entary or supplementary to each other with regard to their raw produce or industrial manufacture. And an inevitable give and take, mutual understanding and help must follow such an align­ment of economic forces.

It must also be noted that all countries need not and cannot have the same pattern of economic life, even that of a successful economic life. A vast country like India, with the manifold resources of a whole continent, can at once be industrial and agricultural-modern America, to some extent, is an example of this type. She can follow both the lines of economic develop­ment with equal vigour and success. And in the midst of an intensive and extensive agricultural and industrial occupation, there may be still room for the age-long, old-world cottage industry, for the individual artisan or craftsman whose God-­given hand may always give to things an added value beyond the reach of the mere machine.

With this perspective in view, keeping always in front the probable shape of things to come, one must learn to consider the present, look for those forces that make for the new world and thus help the course of evolution and progress. Nature does not care for her past formations, she is not bound to them; she is always throwing up chances and opportunities-varia­tions-for new developments. Nature red in tooth and claw is only one side of the shield; and the picture is not as true today as it was even a few hundred years ago, in spite of the spells of devastating carnage she still allows in her surface movements. It may be that the very pressure and insistence of an inner harmony has brought to the fore, made acute difficulties and contraries that have to be met and solved for good.

International co-operation has become a thing of immediate necessity, of practical utility. We met in San Francisco, not out of the spirit of sheer idealism or altruism but because we were forced to it. Circumstances have come to such a pass that even local needs, natural aspirations can be best met and served in and through international understanding. It is the solution of international problems, the amelioration of international relations first that would more easily lead to the solu­tion of national problems than the other way round, which

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was perhaps the normal direction of the world-forces even a decade or two ago. Such world-organisations as the UNRRA or even the Red Cross, although they do not go deep enough into the root problems and are not powerful enough to mould or control world-forces, appearing more or less as charitable institutions, are still concrete expressions of an urgent im­mediate demand for mutuality and solidarity among the nations, even between warring nations.

The relation between India and Britain is peculiar and has an especial significance. It is not enough to say that Britain is the imperialist overlord and India the subject underling. The two stand for two world-forces and their relation is symbolic. The difficulty that will be solved between them will be a world-difficulty solved; what they achieve in common will be a world-achievement. India means nations in bondage aspiring to be free, peoples living in conditions of want and weakness and internecine quarrel, still struggling towards a harmonious and prosperous organised life; she is the cry of the down-trodden demanding her share of earth's air and light – life-room. Britain represents the other side, the free people, organised, strong and successful. Neither America nor Russia fills this role. America is young; she has a wonderful grasp over life's externals; none can compare or compete with her in the ordering and marshalling of an efficient pattern of life, but what escapes her is the more abiding and deeper truth of life and living. Russia started to create on totally new foundations, indeed the outer aspect here has changed very much. But the forces that ruled Russia's past do not seem to have changed to the same extent. In spite of the rise of the prole­tariate, in spite of all local autonomies, it is doubtful if the true breath of freedom is blowing over the country, if the country is creating out of a deeper soul-vision. Life movement in either of these two countries seems to have a rigid mould; that is because they seek to build or reform, that is to say, fabricate life, in other words, they impose upon life a pattern conceived by notions and prejudgments, even perhaps idio-syncracies. The British are more amenable to change, precisely because they do not force a change and do not know they are changing. The British Empire is more loosely formed, its units have more freedom than is the case with other Empires built

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upon the pattern of the extremely centralised Roman Empire. Truly it has the spirit of a commonwealth. The spirit of decentralisation and federation that is increasing today and has seized even old-world Empires – the Dutch, the French, the Russian – has come largely from the British example. Therefore, the unravelling of the Britain and India tangle would mean the solution of a world-problem. These two countries have been put together precisely because the solution is possible here and an ideal solution for all others to profit by.

The British people do not move by ideals and idealism, as the French do, for example. The French rise naturally in revolt and rebellion and revolution for the sake of an idea – the motto of the Great Revolution was "Liberty or Death". Without an upsetting they cannot bring about a change; for the social moulds are rigid and more presistent. The Anglo-­Saxons, on the contrary, go by an unfailing instinct, as it were, gradually and slowly, but surely and inevitably – “from precedent to precedent", as they themselves say. A life­-intuition guides them: the inherent merit of an ideal has not such a great value in their eye, but if the ideal means a practical utility, a thing demanded by time and circumstances, a clear issue out of a dead impasse, well, they hesitate no longer and go about it in right earnest as practical men of affairs.

Now, there can be no doubt that the British wish, are even eager, to have a settlement with India: they wish to have an India free and united and strong and they are willing to lend their help as far as lies in their power and competence,-not because it is an ideal, something good in the abstract and therefore worth pursuing and they are altruistic or phil­anthropic by nature, but because it is a matter of self-interest to them, it is a thing to be done because of the actual life conditions. A strong free and friendly India is an asset they wish to build and conserve. They feel that the old-world methods of one-sided exploitation is neither possible nor desirable any longer; they must move with the moving times. And, as I have already said, they do not move principally by ideas and notions and brain formations, they are in closer touch with life forces and are more easily responsive to these.

True, there are contrary voices. But as one swallow does not

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make a summer, even so, many such voices cannot perpetuate the past. The name, even the form of Imperialism is there, but the substance of it is how much changed, if one goes behind! The British Empire, as it stands today, is composed of three strands, we may say: the first, the front line, consists of Canada and Australia, the second, of Ireland, Egypt and Irak, and the third, mainly of India. This graded pattern shows that it is something fluid and even progressive, there is nothing rigid and final about it. The very nature of the com­position seems to exert a pressure working for an equality, an equilibrium of partnership building up a genuine Common­wealth. The model is catching. An Imperialistic Russia, that has found a new avatara in Stalin, has become a champion of federalism, as the best way of preserving the imperial integrity!

India should consider the present situation with calmness, detachment and wisdom, not hark back to the past, brooding over the mistakes and misdeeds of her erstwhile masters – they are no longer masters; yes, forgiving and forgetting, one must face squarely the new situation and make the best use of it. India, that claims a spiritual heritage and a high and hoary civilisation, can afford to be idealistic even and envisage a deeper and higher law of Nature, of universal harmony and solidarity, of conscious co-operation. Apart from that, if as practical men, we look to our self-interest, then also it will be wise for us to take up the same line of procedure, viz., what idealism demands. A nation too, like the individual, can be swayed by pride, prejudice, passion, a false sense of prestige and a spirit of vengeance. However natural these reactions may seem to be, in view of the conditions of their incidence, they possess, more often than not, the property of the boom­erang, they hit back the originating source itself. It has been said, for example, that the origin of the present war – the rise of Hitler-is due to the Versailles Treaty that ended the last war, which was, in its turn a war of revenge having its origin on the field of Sedan; this campaign of 1870 again was the natural and inevitable outcome of the Napoleonic conquest. Thus there has been a seesaw movement in national relations without a definite issue. And pessimists of today aver that we are not come to the end of the spiral.

But we do not subscribe to such prognostics. There is no

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inevitability of the kind. "Time must have a stop." The two lower limbs of the dialectic must be rounded in then by a higher reality. For two reasons. First of, all, Nature herself moves towards synthesis and harmony-discord and difference are part only of the process working for that eventual consummation. Secondly, the human spirit is there, with the urge of its inevitable destiny, to create its power in the vision and consciousness of the hidden truth and reality which 'surface contingencies seem often to deny.

Let India's freedom mean precisely this higher synthesis so much needed and so long expected in the life of humanity.

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The Ideals of Human Unity

THE unification of humanity is also a thing decreed. For it is the goal towards which Nature is proceeding slowly but inevitably, bringing into play factors and forces that work out that consummation.

Man is a gregarious animal, a social being. He forms groups and collectivities and lives as a member among others with whom he is related and connected in various ways. These groupings are the units round which man's life crystallises and develops, the nuclei of a growing, an increasingly com­plex and unified organism.

The earliest and the most persistent unit is the family: it may be called the atomic unit of the social body, ultimate and unbreakable, considered as such at least till now. Larger units were formed in course of time or simultaneously out of this original unit. Clan, tribe are extensions of the family. For the movement of extension, of continual enlargement is natural to a living organism, and the urge of the social life in man, his gregarious instinct, his sense of solidarity with his kind is so strong and irrepressible that he cannot rest content with the family alone, but extend its boundaries or make new adhesions to it for the formation of a still larger and more composite unit. The village was such a unit in the early days. It was a collective organization on a territorial basis: originally, however, the village too seems to have been if not wholly, at least in its major portion, an extended family. It gradually grew into a hetero­geneous body, yet strongly unified, not consisting merely of blood-relations but others needed for the social economy.

Various other regional and parochial units also developed: baronies, kingdoms and princedoms, city states, all seeking to further extend and enrich the denotation of the social unit. A

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critical stage was reached when, out of the welter of all these various types of social unities, yet another type, of momentous consequences, emerged, called the nation. The nation absorbed all other lesser unities and soon grew into an extremely com­posite and yet living unity: its strong cohesiveness, in spite of a diversity of the component elements, no less than its ardent aggressiveness, is a remarkable characteristic attending the phenomenon. It looks as though – at least it looked so till the other day – all the other previous attempts at a larger unity, since the formation of the original family unit, had one purpose in view, viz., the bringing forth of the national unit. Next to the family, the nation seems to be the stable unit, the other intervening ones were unstable comparatively and had only a temporary and contributory function.

Nationhood, however, developed into such a firm, solid, self-conscious and selfishly aggressive entity that it has now become almost a barrier to a further enlargement of the unit towards a still greater and wider unification of mankind. But nature cannot be baulked, its straight urge hampered; it takes to by-ways and indirect routes and roundabout channels for its fulfilment. On three different lines a greater and larger unification of mankind has been attempted that goes beyond the unification brought about by the ideal of the country or people or nation. First, the political, that leads to the formation of Empires. But the faults and errors in this type of larger unit have been made very evident. It acts as a steam-roller, no doubt, crushing out and levelling parochial differences and local narrownesses; but it also means the overgrowth of a central organism – called the metropolis-at the expense of other member organisms forming part of the larger collectivity, viz., colonies and dependencies and subject races, which must in the end bring about a collapse and disruption of the whole structure. The Roman Empire was the typical example of this experiment. Next, there was what can be called the racial line. Many attempts have been made in this direction, but nothing very successful has taken shape. Pan-Slavism, Pan-Arabism, Pan-Jewry are some of the expressions of this movement. It has the fatal fault of a basis that is uncertain and doubtful: for a pure race is a myth and in modern conditions the cry must necessarily be a cry in the wilderness. Many races and peoples

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have in the course of human history been thrown together, they have to live together, are compelled to lead a common social, political, economic and cultural life. That indeed was the genesis of nationhood. The hegemony of a so-called Nordic race over the world was one of the monsters produced by this attempt, a reductio ad absurdum of the principle.

The third is the religious principle. Religion, that is to say, institutional religion has also sought to unify mankind on a larger basis, as large indeed as the world itself. The aim of Christendom, of Islam was frankly a conquest of the whole human race for the one jealous Lord. Buddhism and Hinduism did not overtly or with a set purpose attempt any such world­wide proselytism, but their influence and actual working had almost a similar effect: at least in the case of the former, it was like a flood throwing down many local boundaries, over-­flooding distant countries, and peoples, giving them all one unified religious life and culture. But here too we meet the same objectionable feature as there is in the attempt at unity through the racial principle. For religious imperialism cannot succeed in unifying humanity, as amply demonstrated by the Roman Catholic Church; and like political imperialism it was more or less an experiment in the line, effecting nothing beyond a moral atmosphere. Even a federation of religions, contemplated by some idealists, seems hardly a practicable proposition; for it is only a mental conception and has no compelling vital force in it. At best it is only a sign-post, a pointer to the goal Nature and humanity have been endeavouring to evolve and realise.

A new type of imperialism – for imperialism it is in essence has been developing in recent times; and it seems it shall have its day and contribute its share of experimentation towards the goal we are speaking of. I am of course referring to what has been frankly and aptly termed as the Dictatorship of the Proletariate. It is an attempt to cut across all other boundaries and unities of human groupings – racial, national, religious, even familial. It seeks to unify and consolidate one whole stratum of humanity in a single stream-lined steel-frame organisation. At least that was the ideal till yesterday; there seems to be growing here too a movement towards decentralisation. Naturally, even as an organisation that is top-heavy is bound

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to topple down in the end, likewise an organisation that is bottom-heavy, that is to say, restricts to that portion only of its body all sap and dynamism, is also bound to deteriorate and disintegrate. A tree does not live by its branches and leaves and flowers alone, no doubt, nor does it live by its roots alone.

A different type of wider grouping is also being experimented upon nowadays, a federal grouping of national units. The nation is taken in this system as the stable indivisible funda­mental unit, and what is attempted is a free association of independent nations that choose to be linked together because of identity of interests or mutual sympathy in respect of ideal and culture. The British Empire is a remarkable experiment on this line: it is extremely interesting to see how an old-world Empire is. really being liquidated (in spite of a Churchill) and transformed into a commonwealth of free and equal nations. America too has been attempting a Pan-American federation. And in continental Europe, a Western and an Eastern Block of nations seem to be developing, not on ideal lines perhaps at present because of their being based upon the old faulty principle of balance of power hiding behind it a dangerously egoistic and exclusive national consciousness; but that may change when it is seen and experienced that the procedure does not pay, and a more natural and healthier approach may be adopted.

Now out of this complex of forces and ideals, what seems to stand out clearly is this: (i) the family unit remains for practical purposes, – whatever breaking or modification affects its outward forms, the thing seems to be a permanent feature of life organization; (ii) the nation too has attained a firm stability and inviolability; it refuses to be broken or dissolved and in any larger aggregate that is formed this one has to be integrated intact as a living unit. The other types of aggregates seem to be more in the nature of experiments and temporary necessities; when they have served their purpose they fade and disappear or are thrown into the background and persist as vestigial remains. It seems to us that the clan, the tribe, the race are such formations. Regionalism, Imperialism (political, economic or religious) are also not stable aggregates.

Still it is difficult to say as yet what would be the exact form of the intermediate grouping between the nation and

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humanity at large, even if a grouping of nations appear to be a necessity as an intermediate stage, whether such groupings or commonwealths are going to be a permanent feature or whether the nation will finally remain the ultimate unit and humanity will consist of such free equal nations, independent units, all together forming a unified whole.

Anarchism-a certain school of philosophical or spiritual anarchism-presages, however, an agglutinative type of humanity. That is to say, there will be no hierarchy of groupings, in fact there will be no aggregates at all, the individual will be the sole, the first and the last unit. The individual, it is said, will have so developed and perfected its self-nature that by following the law of that nature, it will automatically and spontaneously live and move harmoniously with all the rest; each will be a self-contained unit and there will be a kind of pre-established harmony among all. Even if it be so, however, a hierarchical form of groupings in human organisation need not necessarily be barred out.

On Social Reconstruction

I

IT is one of the great errors of the human mind to take equality as identical with uniformity. When Rousseau started the revolutionary slogan "Men are born equal", men were carried away in the vehemence of the new spirit and thought that there was absolutely no difference between man and man, all difference must be due to injustice, tyranny and corruption in the social system. Rousseau's was a necessary protest and corrective against the rank inequality that was the order of the day. All men are, however, equal not in the sense that all material particles – sea-sands or molecules or atoms, for example – may be equal, that is to say, same in dimension and mass and energy. That is the materialistic mechanistic view, imposed by the first discoveries and conclusions of modern Science, but which has lost much of its cogency in recent times even in respect of the physical world. All men are equal, not in the sense that all have the same uniform value, but that each I1as his own value. It is the recognition of the personal worth of each individual that gives him true equality with others and not the casting of all into the same mould and pattern, fitting all on to the Procrustean bed, which indeed would mean just the negation of equality. This variability is the very basis of a living equality. Physically all men have not the same height or weight or growth, even so internally too all have not the same magnitude of being or similar power of consciousness.

A social organization must have two fundamental objects. The central purpose is to serve and help the individual. That is the first thing to be remembered. Organization for the sake of

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organization is not the end. Organization for the sake of perpetuating a system, however laudable it may be, is not the end either. It is, as I say, by the service that an organization renders to its individual members, and not merely by its mechanical order and efficiency that it is to be judged. This service, I have said, is twofold. First, each individual must find his proper vocation: the right man in the right place. The function of each man must be in accordance with his nature and character. Secondly, each person, while fulfilling his Dharma, (that is the right word) must be trained, must have the opportunity to grow and increase in his being and consciousness. First of all, a prosperous, at least an adequately equipped outer life, and then as adequate a lebensraum for the inner personality to have its free and full play and expression.

A totalitarian equality takes men as blocks or chunks of wood and also cuts and clips them as such whenever and wherever needed, thrusts them indiscriminately into any nook and corner of the social framework for the sake of its upkeep and maintenance. It is something that is characteristic of a modern army – thoroughly mechanised – in which men are not different from the nuts and bolts of a machine, all forming a stream-lined massive unity, where persons and individuals as such have no value or consideration, they are dumb and almost dead materials and when worn out just simply to be replaced by others. If it is to be compared to any living thing, we can think of only the regimentation that obtains in an ant-hill or a bee-hive.

Mechanical and totalitarian equality does injustice, to say the least, to the individual, for it does not take into account the variable value and the particularity of each individual. It usually gives him a position and function in the society to which his inner nature and character do not at all respond. The result of such indifference to individuality is evident also in a modern society based as it is on so-called freedom, that is to say, on open competition and struggle. The tragedy of a Bankim eking out his subsistence as a bureaucratic official is not a rare spectacle but the very rule of the social system in vogue. Indeed the so-called steel-frame of governmental organization of our days sucks in all the best brains and few can survive this process of "evisceration, deprivation, destitution, desiccation and evacuation", to use the glowing and

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graphic words of T. S. Eliot, although in another connection; few can maintain or express after passing through this grinding or sucking machine their inner reality, the truth and beauty personal to them. The poet* regrets:

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid

Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;

but why, why is it so? Because

Chill Penury repress’d their noble rage

And froze the genial current of the soul.

The" chill penury" was nothing else than the uncongenial atmosphere which did not favour the growth of the soul, allow it to follow its own line of development and fulfilment.

At times a remedy was tried: the social pattern was sought to be constructed upon the principle of "Career open to talents"; this was a motto which the great Napoleon endeavoured to carry out in practice. Instead of claims of birth, age or position, he looked for real merit as the "Open Sesame" to the highest ranks involving the gravest. duties and responsibilities. Even he, however, could not preserve or carry out fully his good intentions. The Imperator (the First Consul) tried the experiment, but the Emperor already slipped off from the ideal.

But to tell the truth, this remedy, even if successful, is not enough. Something radical is needed. Indeed, it is because the radical cure is not sought and attempted that the disease continues or reappears even if held in abeyance for a time.

We have said individual or personal worth should be the chief concern of the social governance, to bring it to birth, to maintain and foster. it is its principal function. This means naturally freedom, but not the freedom that is demanded by the individualist as against the socialist or the collectivist. For there freedom means freedom for competition and rivalry, freedom for the egos, for selfish interests to fight and battle and survive who can. That is the motto of the competitive society in which we have been living for some time past. That system has become intolerable and hence all the seismic

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*Thomas Gray

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troubles in society today. What is needed is real freedom. For it is easy to see that under the competitive system the apparent freedom is only apparent, a make-believe. It is not freedom, that is to say, free choice and initiation that can work here, it is the pressure from rivals, the impact of adverse circumstances that determine one's will and choice. In the second place, it is not the deeper urges or capacities that are touched and awakened in this way, it is the superficial impulses and preoccupations that find a vent. Man is here only a link in a chain of reactions over which he has hardly any real control: one's decision is limited by conditions beyond one's reach, one's hands are forced, as the common phrase goes.

The problem then is this: how to arrive at the inner freedom, how to contact the inner man, the true person and personality? For we are aiming at nothing less than the Soul, the Self, the Divine in man, God's purpose in the Individual, the Individual as God's instrument. That is the beau ideal, so to say, in the human personality which all schemes of social reconstruction must have constantly in view.

The question now is to devise ways and means of materialising this ideal. Circumstanced as man is, in doubt and darkness with regard to his inner nature, one most often does not know one's true vocation; those who do know their minds and are sure of their "mission in life" are the fortunate few, and very few indeed they are. Of the vast majority, some discover themselves only at the fag-end of their life or when they are already far too committed and in harness in alien fields and among alien faces; others do not discover themselves at all, they need no such revelation: these form the general mass in which the individuals have not developed so far as to come out into any bold relief, they are cast into the stereotype mould, moved more or less by the same general forces of nature and are indistinguishable from each other. It is upon this mass of uniformity that the totalitarian regimentation bases itself easily and naturally.

Still even if human nature in the mass is like this, what the totalitarian system does is to fix and eternise the mould. To admit Nature as it is and leave it at that, to arrange and organize things within that given framework, is, to say the least, only another form of the old laissez-faire system. Take

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Nature as it is, but go farther and beyond. That is the problem of all human endeavour.

In ancient times too there were conscious attempts to build and remould human society. The Rishis were not merely spiritual seers, but creators of the social order also. They saw by their vision the inner truths of things, they found principles and laws, right principles and correct laws which establish peace and stability, on the one hand, no doubt, but on the other hand serve also as the frame for the growth and fulfilment of the individual being. The king with his executive body was there to see that the laws were observed and honoured. The later law-givers (the makers of codes, smritis) had not the direct and large vision of the Rishis, but they tried their best to maintain the laws as they understood them, elaborate them, change or modify wherever possible or needed under given circumstances. In ancient Europe too, it was Plato who envisaged the ideal Republic, a government of philosophers – the wise who are not actively engaged in the turmoil of life, but stand aloof and detached and can see more of the game and accordingly legislate all the better. In modern times also the rise of a Feuhrer or a Dictator seems to have been a psychological necessity: the mass consciousness is in sore need of a guide, and as the right guide is not easily available, the way of the false prophet is smooth and wide open. As a protection and antidote against such a calamity, we tried here and there to found and organise a government of all talents.

But again, who are the talents and where are they? For a modern society produces at best clever politicians, but very few great souls if at all, who can inspire, guide and create. Not a system or organization, but such centres of forces, with creative vision and power, it is that that mankind sorely needs at this hour. System and organization come after, they can only be the embodiment of a creative vision.

II

The economic status is not the only or even the chief or real status of man in the society. This should be an obvious truth.

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To reform or rebuild the society it is not enough to find a new economic basis, however more equitable and efficient. A man's value does not depend upon his wages nor even upon his wageearning capacity. A man's worth is not the function of his labour. To equate the two has been the capital error of "Das Kapital". That is not the Copernican revolution that is needed in the social body today.

Money was always a power and those who had money were always powerful in all ages and countries. Poverty annuls the entire host of good qualities you may have, says the Sanskrit proverb. Only this money power has been shifted from class to class or section to section in a society. In the modern age the demand and tendency is that those who are the first and immediate agents in the chain of the production of wealth should be given all the profit and all the advantage (barring of course the State itself which has the prior and major claim so long as it exists). The rest are considered as mere parasites. Those who do not thus directly produce or help in producing wealth are a burden upon the society and they have no justifiable place there: either they should change their vocation, declass themselves and become labourers or they must go to the wall, subsist somewhere somehow till they finally pass out of existence.

This theory of money power, in spite of its factual or practical truth, is not the whole truth. This is, I should say, the very old I Ptolemaic social system, in a new garb, which turns round man as an economic – and physical being. The Copernican system would view man chiefly as a psychological centre. A truly rational economic system can be based upon such an inner view of the situation. A merely economic view would take man as nothing more than a wage-earning machine and that will give the society and its government a mechanistic pattern. It will forget this simple truism that a man's worth is not and need not be always commensurate with his wage-earning capacity or even his usefulness as a citizen (in the way the atom-bomb Scientists are proving useful today).

Personal value will mean then not productive value, but creative value, that is to say, the capacity to create values, that means the consideration of the psychological and moral makeup of the individual.

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What is the thing in human society which makes it valuable, worthy of humanity, gives it a place of honour and the right to live and continue to live? It is its culture and civilisation, as everyone knows. Greece or Rome, China or India did not attain, at least according to modern conceptions, a high stage in economic evolution: the production and distribution of wealth, the classification and organization of producers and consumers, their relation and functions were, in many respects, what is called primitive. An American of today would laugh at their uncouth simplicity. And yet America has to bow down to those creators of other values that are truly valuable. And the values are the creations of the great poets, artists, philosophers, law-givers; sages and seers. It is they who made the glory that was Greece or Rome or China or India or Egypt. Indeed they are the builders of Culture, culture which is the inner life of a civilisation. The decline of culture and civilisation means precisely the displacement of the "cultured" man by the economic man. In the present age when economic values have been grossly exaggerated holding the entire social fabric in its stifling grip, the culture spirit has been pushed into the background and made subservient to economic and other cruder forces. That was what Julien Benda, the famous French critic and moralist, once stigmatised as "La Trahison des Clercs"; only, the "clercs" did not voluntarily betray, but circumstanced as they were they could do no better. The process reached its climax – perhaps one should say the very nadir – in the Nazi experiment and something of it still continues in the Russian dispensation. There the intellectuals or the intelligentsia are totally harnessed to the political machine, their capacities are prostituted in the service of a socio-economic plan. Poets and artists and thinkers are made to be protagonists and propagandists of the new order. It is a significant sign of the times how almost the whole body of scientists – the entire Brain Trust of mankind today, one might say – have been mobilised for the fabrication of the Atom Bomb. Otherwise they cannot subsist, they lose all economic status.

In the older order, however, a kindlier treatment was meted out to this class, this class of the creators of values. They had patrons who looked after their physical well-being. They had the necessary freedom and leisure to follow their own bent

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and urge of creativity. Kings and princes, the court and the nobility, in spite of all the evils ascribed to them, and often very justly, have nevertheless been the nursery of art and culture, of all the art and culture of the ancient times. One remembers Shakespeare reading or enacting his drama before the Great Queen, or the poignant scene of Leonardo dying in the arms of Francis the First. Those were the truly great classical ages, and art or man's creative genius hardly ever rose to that height ever since. The downward curve started with the advent and growth of the bourgeoisie when the artist or the creative genius lost their supporters and had to earn their own living by the sweat of their brow. Indeed the greatest tragedies of frustration because of want and privation, occur, not as much among the "lowest" classes who are usually considered as the poorest and the most miserable in society, but in that section from where come the intellectuals, "men of light and leading," to use the epithet they are honoured with. For very few of this group are free to follow their inner trend and urge, but have either to coerce and suppress them or stultify them in the service of lesser alien duties, which mean "forced labour." The punishment for refusing to be drawn away and to falsify oneself is not unoften the withdrawal of the bare necessities of life, in certain cases sheer destitution. A Keats wasting his energies in a work that has no relation to his inner life and light, or a Madhusudan dying in a hospital as a pauper, are examples significant of the nature of the social structure man lives in.

It is one of the great illusions – or perhaps a show plank for propaganda – to think or say that the so-called poorer classes are the poorest and the most miserable. It is not so in fact. Really poor are those who have a standard of life commensurate with their inner nature and consciousness – of beauty and orderliness and material sufficiency and yet their actual status and function in society do not provide them with the necessary where-withals and resources. No amount of philanthropic sentimentalising can suppress or wipe off the fact that the poor do not feel the pinch of poverty so much as do those who are poor and yet are to live and move as not poor. It all depends upon one's standard. One is truly rich or poor not in proportion- to one's income, but" in accordance with one's

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needs and the means to meet them. And all do not have the same needs and requirements. This does not mean that the needs of the princes, the aristocrats, the magnates are greater than those of the mere commoner. No, it means that there are people, there is a section of humanity found more or less in all these classes, but mostly in less fortunate classes, whose needs are intrinsically greater and they require preferential treatment. There should be none poor or miserable in society, well and good. But this should not mean that all the economic resources of the society must be requisitioned only to enrich – to pamper – the poor. For there is a pampering possible in this matter. We know the nouveaux riches, the parvenus and the kind of life they lead with their fair share boldly seized. A levelling, a formal equalisation of the economic status, although it may mean uplift in certain cases, may involve gross injustice to others. The ideal is not equal distribution but rational distribution of wealth, and that distribution should not depend upon any material function, but upon psychological demands. Is this bourgeois economics? Even if it is so, the truth has to be faced and recognised. You can call truth by the name bourgeois and hang it, but it will revive all the same, like the Phoenix out of the ashes.

If it is said that the proletarian – the manual labourer – is given economic freedom not for the sake of that freedom merely, but for the sake of the cultural opportunity also that he will have in that way. None can demur to this noble and generous ideal, but- what must not be forgotten in that preoccupation is the fact that there exists already a culturally predisposed class in the present society who also require immediate care and nourishment so that they may grow and flourish as they should. In our eagerness to take up the enterprise and adventure of reclaiming deserts and heaths and moorlands, there is a chance of our losing sight of the precious fertile lands, rich in possibilities that we already possess. The economic status has to be improved for all who are adversely placed in the modern system, certainly; but for a real improvement based upon just and true needs, for an adjustment that will make for the highest good of the society, what is first required is to ascertain the psychological status which should alone, at least chiefly, determine the economic status.

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In the old Indian social organisation there was at the basis such a psychological pattern and that must have been the reason why the structure lasted through millenniums. It was a hierarchical system but based upon living psychological forces. Each group or section or class in it had inevitably its appropriate function and an assured economic status. The Four Orders – the Brahmin (those whose pursuit was knowledge – acquiring and giving knowledge), the Kshattriya (the fighters, whose business it was to give physical protection), the Vaishya (traders and farmers who were in charge of the wealth of the society, its production and distribution) and the Sudra (servants and mere labourers ) – are a natural division or stratification of the social body based upon the nature and function of its different members. In the original and essential pattern there is no sinister mark of inferiority branded upon what are usually termed as the lower orders, especially the lowest order. If some are considered higher and are honoured and respected as such, it meant simply that the functions and qualities they stand for constitute in some way higher values, it did not mean that the others have no value or are to be spurned or neglected. The brain must be given a higher place than the stomach, although all its support and nourishment come from there. Hierarchy means, in modern terms, that the essential services must pass first, should have certain priorities. And according to the older view-point, the Brahmin, being the emblem and repository of knowledge, was considered as the head of the social body. He is the fount and origin of a culture, the creator of a civilisation; the others protect, nourish and serve, although all are equally necessary for the common welfare.

Fundamentally all human society is built upon this pattern which is psychological and which seems to be Nature's own life-plan. There is always this fourfold stratification or classification of members in any collective human grouping: the Intellectual (taken in the" broadest sense) or the Intelligentsia, the Military, the Trader and the Labourer. In the earlier civilisations – when civilisation was being formed – especially in the East, it ,was the first class. that took precedence over the rest and was especially honoured; for it is they who give the tone and temper and frame of life in the society. In later

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epochs, in the mediaeval age for example, the age of conquerors and conquistadors, and of Digvijaya, man as the warrior, the Kshattriya, the Samurai or the Chivalry was given the place of honour. Next came the age of traders and merchants, and the industrial age with the invention of machines. Today the labourer is rising in his turn to take the prime place. As we have said, a normally healthy society is a harmonious welding of these four elements. A society becomes diseased when only one member gets inflated and all-powerful at the expense of others or whenever there is an unholy alliance of some against the rest. Priest-craft, the Church militant, Fanaticism (religious or ideological), Inquisition are corruptions that show themselves when the first principle, the principle of Brahminhood, becomes exclusive and brings in arrogance and ignorance. Similarly colonisation and imperialism of the type only too familiar to us are aberrations of the spirit that the second principle embodies – the spirit of the Kshattriya. Likewise financial cartels, the industrial magnates, the profiteer, the arriviste are diseased growths in the economic body of a modern society which has forgotten the true Vaishya spirit that seeks to produce wealth in order to share and distribute fairly and equitably. The remedy of these ills society has suffered from is not the introduction of a fourth evil, the tyranny of the Fourth Estate of the proletariate. The Fourth was reduced, it is true, to a state of slavery and serfdom, of untouchability, at its reductio ad absurdum. The cure, we say, is not in blind revolt and an inauguration of the same evil under a new name and form, which means its perpetuation, but in the creation of a new life and soul, that can happen only with the creation of a new head and front Zeus-like that would give birth to the goddess of light and knowledge, inspirer of a true Brahminhood.

We repeat a fair and sure economic basis has to be found for the down-trodden, proletarian or other. For the proletariate is not the only unfortunate in the human society. There are whole groups of the unfortunate in the three other Estates also. Or perhaps if we like we can extend the meaning of the term "proletariate" and include in it all the less favoured sections of all the Four Orders

As already stated, the remedy is to be sought in the salvage

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of the individual. The present trend of social forces is towards movements in the mass. That was necessary perhaps; for larger, wider, indeed world-wide unities have to be found and established for the unification of the whole of humanity. But in the drive towards that-goal Nature seems to have overlooked for the moment the case of the individual, and naturally, man has been blind and one-sided in his attempts to reform and rebuild society and the world. This neglected thread has to be taken up again and put back into the web of social life. The value of the individual, the worth and speciality of each person has to be found and recognised; indeed it is round that centre that society can best be reformed and remade. And this can only be done by a spiritual outlook. For, the true individual is founded in the spirit, the spiritual consciousness; so long as man is limited to his body, life and mind, and his functions are solely determined by his earthly nature, so long he must needs be taken as a mere element in the mass, the cosmic mass. The true individual or person emerges only when something of man's spiritual being finds expression in these lower elements of his nature. And when man totally transcends his inferior sphere of existence and rises into his divine status where things are marshalled and organised through each individual truth-centre, then only there is the chance of a perfect social system descending upon earthly life.

Perhaps this is a far cry from the level of our normal humanity. But things have to be regarded and moulded from the highest heights; otherwise there will be no real solution, there can be only a temporary make-believe and a final frustration.

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Panacea of “Isms”

COMMUNISM

COMMUNISM cannot save humanity. For if it means the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, well, a healthy normal society will not bear or tolerate it long – no Dictatorship, whether of one or of many, is likely to endure or bring in the millennium. In that sense communism is only a fascismo of small people fighting against a fascismo of big people. A society is not normally made up of proletarians only: it does not consist merely of lotuseaters nor does it consist of hewers of wood and drawers of water (peasants and labourers) alone. Even a proletariate society will slowly and inevitably gravitate towards a stratification of its 'own. In its very bosom the bureaucracy, the military, the officialdom of a closed body will form a class of its own. A Lenin cannot prevent the advent of a Stalin. Even if the proletarians form the majority, by far a very large majority, even then the tyranny of the majority is as reprehensible as the tyranny of the minority. Communism pins its faith on struggle – the class struggle, it says, is historically true and morally justifiable. But this is a postulate all are not bound to accept. Then again, if communism means also materialism (dialectical or any other), that also cannot meet and satisfy all the needs and urges of man, indeed it leaves out of account all the deeper yearnings that lie imbedded in him and that cannot be obliterated by a mere denial. For surely man does not live by bread alone, however indispensable that article may be to him: not even culture – the kind admitted by communism, severely intellectual, rational, scientific, pragmatic – can be the be-all and end-all of human civilisation. Communistic Russia attempted to sweep away all

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traces of religion and church and piety; the attempt does not seem to have been very successful.

As a matter of fact, Communism is best taken as a symptom of the disease society suffers from and not as a remedy. The disease is a twofold bondage from which man has always been trying to free himself. It is fundamentally the same "bondage which the great French Revolution sought most vigorously and violently to shake off – an economic and an ideological bondage, that is to say, translated in the terms of those days, the tyranny of the court and the nobility and the tyranny of the Church. The same twofold bondage appears, again today combated by Communism, viz., Capitalism and Bourgeoisie. Originally and essentially, however, Communism meant an economic system in which there is no personal property, all property being held in common. It is an ideal that requires a good deal of ingenuity to be worked out in all details, to say the least. Certain religious sects within restricted membership tried the experiment. Indeed some kind of religious mentality is required, a mentality freed from normal mundane reactions, as a preliminary condition in order that such an attempt might be successful. A perfect or ideal communism may be possible only when man's character and nature has undergone a thorough and radical change. Till then it will be a Utopia passing through various avatars.

SOCIALISM

Nor can socialism remedy all the ills society suffers from, if it merely or mainly means the abolition of private enterprise and the assumption by the State of the entire economic and even cultural or educational apparatus of the society. Even as an economic proposition State Socialism, which is only another name of Totalitarianism, is hardly an unmixed good. First of all, however selfish and profiteering the individual may be, still, one must remember that it is always the individual who is adventurous and inventive, it is he who discovers, creates new things and beautiful things. A collective or global enterprise makes for massiveness and quantity, but it means also uniformity, often a dead uniformity: for variety, for originality, as well as for the aesthetic tone and the human

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touch, the personal element is needed, seems to be indispensable. Education in such a system would mean a set routine and pattern, an efficient machine to bring out consistently and continuously uniform types of men who are more or less 'automatons, mechanical and regimented in their make-up and behaviour. An all-out socialistic Government will bear down and entomb the deeper springs of human consciousness, the magic powers of initiative and creativity that depend upon individual liberty and the free play of personal choice. We do not deny that Socialism is an antidote to another malady in the social body – the parcellation, the fragmentation into a thousand petty interests-all aggressive and combative-of the economic strength of a community, and also the stupendous inequality and maldistribution of wealth and opportunity. But it brings in its own poison.

It is a great illusion, as has been pointed out by many, that a collective and impersonal body cannot be profiteers and war-mongers. A nation as a whole can very well be moved by greed and violence and Sieglust (passion for conquest)­ – Nazism has another name, it is also called National Socialism. Everything depends not upon the form, but the spirit that animates the form. It is the spirit, man's inner nature that is to be handled, dealt with and changed; outer systems and forms have only a secondary importance.

NATIONALISM

Again, Nationalism is also not the summum bonum of collective living. The nation has emerged out of the family and the tribe as a greater unit of the human aggregate. But this does not mean that it is the last word on the subject, that larger units are not to be found or formed. In the present-day juncture it is nationalism that has become a stumbling-block to a fairer solution of human problems. For example, India, Egypt, Ireland, even Poland, whatever may be the justifying reasons, are almost exclusively, chauvinistically, nationalistic. They believe that the attainment of their free, unfettered, separate national existence first will automatically bring in its train all ideal results that have been postponed till now. They do not see, however, that in the actual circumstances an international

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solution has the greater chance of bringing about a happier solution for the nation too, and not the other way round. The more significant urge today is towards this greater aggregation – Pan-America, Pan-Russia, Pan-Arabia, a Western European Block and an Eastern European Block are movements that have been thrown up because of 'a greater necessity in human life and its evolution. Man's stupidity, his failure to grasp the situation, his incapacity to march with Nature, his tendency always to fall back, to return to the outdated past may delay or cause a turn or twist in this healthy movement, but it cannot be permanently thwarted or denied for long. Churchill's memorable call to France, on the eve of her debacle, to join and form with Britain a single national union, however sentimental or even ludicrous it may appear to some, is; as we see it, the cry of humanity itself to transcend the modern barriers of nationhood and rise to a higher status of solidarity and collective consciousness.

INTERNATIONALISM

And yet internationalism is not the one thing needful either. If it means the obliteration of all national values, of all cultural diversity, it will not certainly conduce to the greater enrichment and perfection of humanity. Taken by itself and in its absolute sense, it cannot be a practical success. The fact is being proved every moment these days. Internationalism in the economic sphere, however, seems to have a greater probability and utility than in the merely political sphere. Economics is forcing peoples and nations to live together and move together: it has become the soldering agent in modern times of all the elements – the groups and types of the human family that were so long separate from each other, unknown to each other or clashing with each other. But that is good so far as it goes. Powerful as economic forces are, they are not the only deciding or directing agents in human affairs. That is the great flaw in the "International", the Marxian type of internationalism which has been made familiar to us. Man is not a political animal, in spite of Aristotle, nor is he an economic animal, in spite of Marx and Engels. Mere economics, even when working for a greater unity of mankind, tends to work

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more for uniformity: it reduces man to the position of a machine and a physical or material machine at that. By an irony of fate. the human value for which the international proletariate raised its bann6r of revolt is precisely what suffers in the end. The Beveridge Plan, so much talked of nowadays, made such an appeal, no doubt because of the economic advantages it ensures, but also, by far and large, because it views man as a human being in and against the machine to which he belongs, because it is psychologically a scheme to salvage the manhood of man, so far as is possible, out of a rigidly mechanistic industrial organization

HUMANISM

So the cry is for greater human values. Man needs food and shelter, goes without saying, but he yearns for other things also, air and light: he needs freedom, he needs culture – higher thoughts, finer emotions, nobler urges – the field and expression of personal worth. The acquisition of knowledge, the creation of beauty, the pursuit of philosophy, art, literature, and science in their pure forms and for their own sake are things man holds dear to his heart. Without them life loses its charm and significance. Mind and sensibility must be free to roam, not turned and tied to the exclusive needs and interests of physical life, free, that is to say, to discover and create norms and ideals and truths that are values in themselves and also lend values to the matter-of-fact terrestrial life. It is not sufficient that all men should have work and wages, it is not sufficient that I all should have learnt the three R's, it is not sufficient that they should understand their rights – social, political, economic – and claim and vindicate them. Nor is it sufficient for men to r become merely useful or indispensable– although happy and I contented –members of a collective body. The individual must be free, free in his creative joy to bring out and formulate, in thought, in speech, in action, in all the modes of expression, the truth, the beauty, the good he experiences within. An all­-round culture, a well-developed mind, a well-organised life, a well-formed body, a harmonious working of all the members of the system at a high level of consciousness – that is man's need, for there lies his self-fulfilment. That is the ideal of

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Humanism – which the ancient Græco-Roman culture worshipped, which was again revived by the Renaissance and which once again became a fresh and living force after the great Revolution and is still the high light to which Science and modern knowledge turns.

THE MORE BEYOND

And yet this is not the grand finale, the nee plus ultra. For, man does not stop with man; in the tremendous phrase carved by Nietzsche, "Man is a thing that shall be surpassed." Until and unless man surpasses himself, finds a focus and fulcrum outside and beyond his normal human – too human – self, he cannot entirely and radically change his nature and rebuild his society on an altogether different pattern. Man has to reach his divine status, become the Divine, within and out­side, body and soul; then only can the ills to which he is exposed totally vanish and then alone can he enjoy individually and collectively a perfect life on earth. Naturally man is not expected to accomplish this mighty work alone and unaided, he can rest assured and comforted, for Nature herself is moving inexorably towards that consummation.

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The Malady of The Century

The Malady of The Century

I

WHAT is the malady of our age? It is that man has lost touch with his soul. There were ages no doubt in the past, dark periods, when man's soul retired into the background, was obscured or veiled; but only today there seems to have occurred a definite cleavage, a clear sundering. Man no longer drags the lengthening chain that tied him, in spite of everything, to his divine essence; he has cut it clean and let himself adrift.

The Eternal Enemy appeared and spread out before our enchanted eyes the panorama of earth's riches and glories, not merely riches of comfort and pleasure and well-being, but glories of power and knowledge; we could not resist this time; we hurled ourselves headlong into the valley of temptation, delivering, as the price of the bargain, our soul. Indeed, we are masters of many fields, our knowledge and power extend over an immense variety of regions, uncharted till now. Even like Vishnu the Dwarf, our consciousness has covered with its three strides the entire creation, barring that domain alone where the soul resides.

Our mind, our life and our body have become today far more conscious and consciously powerful – each has found itself and is big with its own proper value. But what was familiarly known as the mind of the mind, the life of the life, the body of the body has vanished and all it meant. The pith has been taken out, We are now playing with the empty stalk; the secret thread on which the pearls of life-movements were strung has been removed and they lie about scattered and disjointed. We have enriched our possessions, we have made

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ourselves more complex and multiple in our becoming: the telescope and the microscope in the physical world, and a subtler sense in the mind also, have extended the superficies of our consciousness. But with all that and in our haste to be busy about too many things, we have forgotten and left out of account the one thing needful.

We have sought to increase our consciousness, but away from the centre of consciousness; so what we have actually gained is not an increase, in the sense of a growth or elevation of consciousness, but an accumulation of consciousnesses, that is to say, many forms and external powers or applications of consciousness. A multiplicity of varied and independent movements of consciousness that jostle and hurt and limit one another, because they are not organized round a fundamental unity, forms the personality of the modern man, which is therefore tending to become on the whole more and more ill-balanced and neurasthenic and attitudinizing, in comparison with the simpler and less equivocal temperament that mankind had in the past. And a good part of the catholicity or liberalism or toleration that appears to be more in evidence in the present-day human consciousness is to be attributed not so much to the sense of unity or identity, that is the natural and inevitable outcome of a real growth in consciousness, but rather to the doubt and indecision and hesitation, to the agnosticism and dilettantism and cynicism of a pluralistic consciousness.

Cut away from the soul, from the central fount of its being, the human consciousness has been, as it were, desiccated and pulverized; it has been thrown wholly upon its multifarious external movements and bears the appearance of a thirsty shifting expanse of desert sands.

II

Indeed a peculiar aridity has invaded the modern consciousness; the sap has dried that once made life fresh and green and glad. It is not that we are turned away from life; on the contrary, we are attached to it more than ever, – but the attachment has come upon us like a morbid hunger. And so

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we have the lust for life, but know not the joy of life. We lay an inordinate stress upon the body, upon what is external and superficial, upon the matter of life, and suffer from a simultaneous recoil and disgust for it. Human nature has been rent in twain and life has lost its unity of rhythm.

The old-world had no experience of this self-division. It had a frank and full joy in things of life, even in their most material forms. And when it turned away from life, it did so in the same spirit, of joy and frankness and wholeness. There was not this immixture, this Hamletian "to be or not to be" – an unregenerate, barbaric life-impulse "sicklied o'er with the pale cast 0' thought" that troubles the modern consciousness.

In old days, while we enjoyed life we were not without the taste for life. We were youthful and in full possession of the dharma of youth. And when we left the world and life we cherished no regret; we did it whole-heartedly. We were young; and our movements were whole and entire. It may be said that that was an age of unthinking innocence; but in the attempt to gain the arid richness of an old-age consciousness, we have lost the simplicity, the spontaneity and the integrality of our non-age. Yes, we have eaten of the fruit of knowledge and our. youth is the price that we have paid. With our present nature we not merely enjoy, but we want to know that we enjoy; we cannot enjoy a thing, unless in the very act we weigh and dissect and scrutinize the object and ourselves too, into the bargain.

This knowledge, or rather, this curiosity does not arise from any depth of our being; it is the product of the meddlesome superficial brain-mind. We have become self-conscious; a vigilant self-consciousness is now the invariable coefficient of all our movements, but it is a self-consciousness that has deviated into mere mental introspection and intellectual analysis. It was the soul's consciousness, although perhaps more often from behind the veil, that once inspired and enlivened human nature in its youth; and life was after all a thing of beauty and joy – for the soul is the one Rasa of existence. We have deposed the Divine King; an anarchy now reigns in human nature which has become the battle-ground of qualities and forces that are, if not always more crude, at least, invariably crooked and perverse. We live and move in the cold and blighting, and withal shallow, glare of the brain-mind.

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III

We of the modern age know many things – perhaps too many; and we yearn and strive to know yet more. We are never content with the knowledge that we have at the moment; our mind is always restive to leap beyond its immediate ken, thinking always that the secret of existence is to be found in what escapes its scrutiny, in what lies just outside the limits of what we happen to know. We are never sure of our knowledge. We are rich in curiosity, subtle in guessing; but always there lacks the sense of assurance and achievement. A certain unrest or malaise pursues our activities, something that gives to our most perfect creation, the impress of an experiment, of what is tentative, transitional, temporary.

The ancients, on the contrary, knew not many things – not so many as we know; but what they knew they knew well, they were sure of their knowledge. Their creations were not perhaps on the whole as rich and varied and subtle – even in a certain sense as deep as those of modern humanity; but they were finished and completed things, net and clear and full of power. The simple unambiguous virile line that we find in Kalidasa or in the Ajanta, in Homer or in the Parthenon, no longer comes out of the hands of a modern artist. Our delight is in the complexity and turbidity of the composition; we are not satisfied with richness only, we require a certain tortuousness and tangledness in the movement. We love the intermingling of many tints, the play of light dying away into haze and mist and obscurity, of shades 11fat blur the sharpness of the contour. Our preoccupation, in Art, is how to create the impression of the many in its all-round simultaneity of forms and movements. The ancients were more simple and modest; they were satisfied with expressing one thing at a time and that simply done.

The ancient Rishis were worshippers of the Sun and the Day; they were called Finders of the Day, Discoverers of the Solar World. They knew what they were about and they sought to make their meaning plain to others who cared to go to them. They were clear in their thought, direct in their perception; their feelings, however deep, were never obscure. We .meet in their atmosphere and in their creative activity no circum-

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ambulating chiaroscuro, nothing of the turbid magic that draws us today towards the uncertain, the unexpected and the disconcerting. It is a world of certitude, of solid reality – even if it be on the highest spiritual levels of consciousness – presenting a bold and precise and clear outline. When we hear them speak we feel they are uttering self-evident truths; there is no need to pause and question. At least so they were to their contemporaries; but the spokesman of our age must needs be a riddle even to ourselves.

To the moderns truth is merely relative; the absolute is an ever-receding reality and has only a theoretical existence. The true reality, whatever it is, we can never reach or possess; we may say that we are approaching it nearer and nearer, but shall never come up to it – there is no end to our pursuit. An eternally progressive rapprochement between our knowledge or realization and the object of it is our destiny and also perhaps our privilege. It is this movement without end or finality that is life and all its zest and beauty. The ancients, on the other hand, aimed and worked at siddhi, that is to say, definite and final achievement. This did not mean, however, that there was a dead stop and they stagnated after siddhi. It means that the consciousness having undergone a change in character, takes a different kind of movement altogether: it proceeds now from truth to truth, from light to light, from siddhi to siddhi. The modern consciousness moves, on the other hand, from un­certainty to uncertainty, at best, from the more obscure to the less obscure.

Ours is an age of hunger – hunger for knowledge, for power, for enjoyment. But we do not know, nor care to know, the conditions under which alone such hunger can really be appeased. First of all, we think that to satisfy our hunger we have simply to go straight and pounce upon the object; we do not consider it at all necessary to look beforehand to our assimilative nature and capacity. Our hunger serves only to multiply the objects of hunger; and the objects of hunger again multiply our hunger; this is the vicious circle in which we are entrapped. We hungered for progress, but what we have succeeded in getting is change and movement, speed and restlessness; we yearned for light, we have found only information; we looked for power, we have mastered

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a few tricks or clever manipulations; we aspired for happiness, we have stopped with stray pleasures and hence with dissatisfaction.

To relieve life of this mingled strain and tension, to lift it out of this ambiguity and uncertainty, to free it from this gravitational force that drives it towards what is superficial and external – to endow it with its real worth, we must find and possess life at a higher level, at its unspoilt source; we must first draw back and re-establish, this time consciously and integrally, the lost connection with our soul, the Divine in our being.

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Aspects of Modernism

"Unity was the sheet-anchor of Science 'up to now. But the latest theories seem to break up the universe into a mass of independent constituents each acting for itself No doubt there is one Force still (if magnetism and electricity can be reduced to one formula as is sought to be done by Einstein), but it is a discontinuous unity in its manifestation at least. Science seems to be coming away from a materialistic Adwaita towards a restatement of the Sankhya idea." – SRI AUROBINDO .

Every age has claimed to be modern and sought to establish its characteristic newness, the hall-mark that separates it from the preceding age.

How then does the twentieth century propose to mark out its difference from the past? "Science and the scientific out look," many would answer. But to others that difference itself might appear antiquated. For, strictly speaking, science was the key-note of the nineteenth century; and although we of the twentieth are enjoying its fruits, putting it to more practical use than our predecessors did, yet it is they who embodied its spirit, its special and proper rule of light and life. We have not discarded the gift, but assimilated it and even seem to have outgrown it; we have added to it or extended and developed it.

Science indeed gave a very decided turn to the slowly advancing humanity. It brought with it something that meant in the march of evolution a saltum, a leap wide and clear; it landed man all of a sudden into a new world, a new state of consciousness. It is this state of consciousness, the fundamental way of being, inculcated by the scientific spirit that is of capital importance and possesses a survival value. It is not the content of Science, but its intent, not its riches, but its secret inspiration,

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its motive power, that will give us a right understanding of the change it has effected. The material aspect of the event has lost much of its value; the mechanical inventions and discoveries, bringing in their train a revolution in the external organization of life, have become a matter of course, and almost a matter of the past. But the reactions set up in the consciousness itself, the variations brought about in the very stuff and constitution of life still maintain a potency for the future and are to be counted.

The scientific spirit, in one word, is rationalisation – rationalisation of Mind as well as of Life. With regard to Mind, rationalisation means to get knowledge exclusively on the data of the senses; it is the formulation, in laws and principles, of facts observed by the physical organs, these laws and principles being the categories of the arranging, classifying, generalising faculty, called reason; its methodology also demands that the laws are to be as few as possible embracing as many facts as possible. Rationalisation of life means the government of life in accordance with these laws, so that the wastage in natural life due to the diversity and disparity off acts may be eliminated, at least minimised, and all movements of life ordered and organised in view of a single and constant purpose (which is perhaps the enhancement of the value of life). This rationalisa­tion means further, in effect, mechanisation or efficiency, as its protagonists would prefer to call it. However, mechanistic efficiency, whether in the matter of knowledge or of life-of mind or of morals was the motto of the early period of the gospel of science, the age of Huxley and Haeckel, of Bentham and the Mills. The formula no longer holds good either in the field of pure knowledge or in its application to life; it does not embody the aspiration and outlook of the contemporary mind, in spite of such inveterate rationalists as Russell and Wells or even Shaw (in Back to Methuselah, for example), who seem to be already becoming an anachronism in the present age.

The contemporary urge is not towards rationalisation, but rather towards irrationalisation. Orthodox science itself is taking greater and greater cognisance today of the irrational move­ments of nature, even of physical nature. Intuition and instinct are now welcomed as surer and truer instruments of knowledge and action than reason.

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Another special feature of the modern consciousness is its "multiple sightedness". The world, as it is presented to us, is no more than an assemblage of view-points; and each point of observation forms its own world-system. There is no one single ultimate truth; if there is any, there is no possibility of its being known or perceived by the mind or the senses. Things exist in relation to one another and for us they have no intrinsic existence apart from the relations. The instrument itself that perceives is the resultant of a system of relations. A truth is only a view-point; and as the view-point shifts, the truth also varies accordingly. The cult of Relativity is a significant expression of the modern consciousness.

Intimately connected with relativity and multiplicity is the principle of fragmentation or atomism (perhaps one should now say “electronism”) – that forms another characteristic element of modernism. The universe, on a final analysis, is now found to be a concourse of vagrant electric charges. Even likewise, human personality too has no longer its old-world character and consistency of being made of one undivided piece – a monolithic structure; it is a composite of innumerable personalities, big and small, apparent and hidden, all huddled together in a case called the body, which itself is not more stable than the shifting desert sands.

It is this pluralisation which has resulted in a necessary polarisation in the human consciousness. We have gained a power which was not only rare but perhaps totally absent in the old world, at least in the general mind; we have reached in a novel way that very wideness or wholeness which was at the outset negatived by the urge towards separativeness and parcellation. Thus the modern mind can take in more view-points than one – even contrary ones – at the same time. The individual has acquired the capacity – to put it in popular language – to enter into another's skin, not to be confined to its own outlook, limited within its linear groove, but to be able, with ease and grace to look through the eyes of others, even though they be on the other side of the arena. A wide and supple, large and subtle perception that goes round the entire contour of the observed object, not a perspective but a global view, is a characteristic capacity of the modern mind. We can see the same thing from all angles and distances; we can turn

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our gaze upon ourselves; we can see ourselves not only with our own way of looking but also as others see us, with equal detachment and impartiality. At least this is the character of the cultured, the representative man of today. Modern art too has sought in some of its significant expressions to demonstrate this) protean nature of truth and reality, to bring out the simultaneity of its multiple modes, to give a living sense of its tangled dynamism.

We spoke of the extreme atomism of modern Science that has thrown into the background the solid unity of creation and is laying emphasis for the moment more upon the division and scattering of forces than upon the cohesiveness and identity of the substratum; still that unity has not been abrogated but has been maintained on the whole, even if as an underlying note. Not only so, the reign of multiplicity, by a curious detour, is working towards a discovery of enhanced unity. The plurality of the modern consciousness is moving towards a richer and intenser unity; it is not a static, but a dynamic unity – a unity that does not suppress or merely transcend the diversity and disparity of its components but holds them together as an immanent force, and brings forth out of each its fullness of individuality. In the same way the present-day movement towards internationalism or supra-nationalism has produced a rebound towards regionalism or infra-nationalism. And the voice of anarchism tends to be as insistent as that of collectivism.

The consciousness of yesterday was a unilateral movement. It rose up high and descended deep into the truth of things, but mostly along a single line. In the horizontal direction also, when it travelled, it effected a linear movement. The consciousness of today is complex and composite; it has lost much of the vertical movement; it does not very easily soar or dive, precisely because it has spread itself out in a multitude of horizontal movements. Our modern consciousness is outward gazing and extensive; it has not the in-gathering and intensive character of the old-world consciousness; but what it has lost in depth and height, it has sought to make up in width.

Simplicity and intensity, sublimity and profundity were the most predominant qualities of man's achievement in the past; what characterises human endeavour in the present is its wideness, richness, complexity. It can also be noted that the

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corruptions of these qualities likewise mark out their respective ages. Fanaticism, for example, the corruption of a good and noble thing, fidelity, means a unilateral mind carried to its extreme; it is a characteristic product of the middle ages in the West as in the East. The modern world in its stead has given us dilettantism and cynicism, corruption of largeness and catholicity.

Consciousness has two primary movements. In one it penetrates, enters straight into the heart of things; in the other it spreads out, goes about and round the object. The combination of the two powers is a rarity; ordinarily man follows the one to the exclusion of the other. The modern age in its wide curiosity has neglected the penetrative and intensive movement and is therefore marred by superficiality. It is eager to go over the entire panorama of creation at one glance, if that is possible, to have a telescopic view of things; but it has been able to take in only the surface, the skin, the crust. Even the entrance into the world of atoms and cells – of protons and electrons, of chromosomes and genes – is not really a penetrative or intensive movement. It is only another form of the movement of pervasion or extension: it is still a going abroad, only on another line, in a different direction, but always fundamentally on the same horizontal plane. The microscope is only an inverted telescope. Our instruments are the external mind and senses and these move laterally and have not the power to leap on to a different level of vision. The earlier ages of mankind, narrow and circumscribed in many respects, possessed nevertheless that intensive and in-gathering movement, which is a kind of movement in the fourth dimension; it was a sixth sense leading into the Behind or Beyond of things.

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Modernism - An Oriental Interpretation

In the past we used to see the world, experience and express life, mainly if not exclusively, in terms of the mind and the heart. These were the two fundamental categories or basic forms in and through which we built up our universe. It was our ideas and ideals, our notions and conceptions, our imagination and sentiment that viewed and interpreted, guided and shaped our earthly existence and creativity. Whether morally or esthetically, the domination of the mind and the heart over life was the characteristic stamp of the movement of the human spirit in the past.

Modernism means the release of life from this subjugation; it means the expression of life's own truths in its own way, life's self-determination: that is the great endeavour and achievement of today. It was a rationalised, emotionalised, idealised life that man sought to live and create yesterday; his art too consisted in showing life through that mask and veil, because it considered that that was the way to bring out the beautiful in life.

The history of the emancipation of the different psychological domains in man is an interesting and instructive study. For the heart and the mind too were not always free and autonomous. An old-world consciousness was ruled or inspired by another faculty – the religious sense. It is a sense, a faculty that has its seat neither in the mind nor even in the heart proper. Some would say it is in an inmost or topmost region, the Self, while others would relegate it to something quite the opposite, the lowest and most external strand in the human consciousness, viz., that of unconsciousness or infra-consciousness, ignorance, fear, superstition.

The domination of the religious sense reached its apogee

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in the Middle Ages when it almost swallowed up and annihilated all other faculties and movements in man. The end of that epoch and the first beginnings of the Modern Age were signalised by the Mind, i.e., the Reason, declaring its independence. This was the Renaissance; and it was then that the seed was sown of modern science and scientism.

Mind – mind in its rational mode – thus emancipated, exercised in its turn a domineering control over man's entire nature. All other members were made a subservient tributary to that which was considered the members par excellence in the rational animal. The seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries form the period of its rule – the former its bright period when it expressed itself in its truth and power, as embodied in what is called classicism in literature; the latter its darker phase, its decline, the manifestation of its weakness. Its death-knell was first sounded by Voltaire who symbolised the mind's destructive criticism of itself, the same which Anatole France in France and Shaw in England have continued in our days almost to a successful issue.

Rousseau brought in the positive element that determined the new poise of humanity. It was the advent of the heart, the coming in of the Romantic-the man of sentiment and sensibility. * But life had not yet had its chance. Life, pure life – the biological domain – first declared its autonomy in art, for example, through the Realists and Naturalists. These pioneers, however, could bring forward mainly the facts, the constituents, the materials that compose life. The stuff was found, but the movement, life's own rhythm, was not there. It was new wine, but more or less in the old bottle. Zola or Maupassant or the Goncourts sought to express a life intrinsic and independent, but the instrument, the mould was still the old one; the manner and the movement, germane to mind and heart, continued to persist.

That mould was broken, and something of the mystery of Life's own rhythm first revealed by the Impressionists. But the Impressionists were too vague and had too much of a genera­lised sense to enter into the core of the matter. They touched

*Another similar cycle can be traced farther back in the past. The classicism of Græco-Latin culture dominated by mind and reason – although it was a kind of higher mind and intuitive reason – was supplanted by the heart movement that Christ and the Christian cult initiated.

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life, caressed its contour and periphery and larger lines, but '1 did not penetrate it, grasp and grip it, bring out the kernel, as it were, break it and express if in its atomic structure and: movement. This is what is being done today.

Life undefiled, without any admixture or influence whatsoever from other elements and domains-that is the one thing that we envisage and create. Life as it 'is in its own substance and truth, as it lives and moves in its own rhythm, life in its stark naturalness, albeit raw and crude, the living ore found in the earth's vein, unpolished but utterly authentic: this is the supreme secret of which we of the modern age are worshippers.

Thus life has come to mean today the life exclusively of the senses, the life that is instinctive, reflexive, automatical in its elan, which is beyond the control of the conscious will and intelligence, the life that is interwoven and unified with body and matter. For it was this life which could never come to its own – not even in man's primitive stage which was more or less a rigid system of taboos, religious and social, in spite of contrary appearances; it was this life which could not express freely and fully its own truth and reality in its own way, under the domination of what are known as the higher movements of the human consciousness. Life in another sense, as part of this higher and aristocratic movement, had had some autonomy and a field and scope of its own even under the old regime. The life-force that inspires noble ambitions, high enterprises, large' creations, vast enjoyments, and proud renunciations, and violent and sweeping passions, has always been to us a familiar element.

Today, however, in pursuit of the mystery of life we have entered into darker and more obscure regions – of cells and genes, of colloid actions and neuron reactions: the elementary instincts, the primary reflexes, the tangle of short and brief vibrations, and half-articulate pulsations of the most physical and material consciousness are the stuff of the life we seek to live and to capture and mirror. The creative and active force in life as well as in art is now invested in the nervous dynamism and sensational perception. The old morals and æsthetics and the sentiments and notions around them are considered today merely conventional and bourgeois; they have given place to

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a freer life-movement, the expression and embodiment of an unrestrained and authentic life, life in its natural, original; unspoilt (and crude and coarse) verity. We are probing into the mystery of the crust.

It appears then that we have come down perilously near the level of the sheer animal; by a curious loop in the cycle of evolution, the most civilised and enlightened type of mankind seems to be retroverting to the status of his original ancestor.

Not quite so, certainly. The consciousness (rather, the self-consciousness) that man has gained in place of the uncon­sciousness or semi-consciousness, characteristic of the general mass in the past, and the growing sense of individuality and personal worth, which is an expression of that consciousness, are his assets, the hall-mark of his present-day nature and outlook and activity. The consciousness may not have always been used wisely, but still it is a light that has illumined him, brought him an awareness of himself and of things, that is new and in a special way close and intimate and revealing. The light is perhaps not of the kind that comes direct from high altitudes – it is, as it were, a transverse ray cutting aslant; nonetheless, through its grace a self-revelation and a self-valuation have been possible in spheres hitherto unsurveyed and lost in darkness, and on a scale equally unprecedented. Life has found a self-light. It is indeed as yet a glare, lurid and uncertain, but it has the capacity to develop into, and call in, the white and tranquil effulgence of the Soul-light and the Supreme Light of which it is the image and precursor.

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The other aspect of European Culture

Two cultures, one of Europe and the other of Asia, are now contending with each other to have sway over humanity; and it has been for some time past a moot problem with the best representatives of either, whether a synthesis, at least a reconciliation of the two is possible or not. Europe's distinctive trait, it has also been pointed out, is her hold upon life and the actualities of material existence; whereas the thing that characterises Asia as a separate organism is her grasp of the Spirit, the realities of a subtle world. Thus considered, the two need not, it is urged, be necessarily contradictory, they may as well be complementary to each other; and if mankind has the will to it, a union, even a fusion of them to form a richer and more complete whole, should not be altogether impracticable.

But there is a point of doubt. Two different and distinct entities, in order to be complementary, must first of all be commensurable; that is to say, both must belong to the same order of reality, there must lie between them something fundamentally common which would give them a similar mode of being, a parallel rhythm of movement. Otherwise, two entities that are not only different but disparate can never be brought together to complement each other.

So it is contended by some dissident voices that Europe and Asia are, as a matter of fact, different and disparate and incommensurable bodies – they belong to categories that are as poles asunder; and therefore the twain can and shall never merge nor meet. For Europe, on the one hand, with her materialistic and mechanistic culture, forms one indivisible unity, her entire life in its manifold expression is moulded according to a definite pattern, forming a closed circle; on the other hand, Asia basing herself upon the spiritual and the

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other world has in quite a different way fashioned an altogether different culture-complex. One cannot take some spiritual element out of Asiatic culture and mix it with some profane element extracted from European culture, serving the product to humanity as its universal Ideal. The details – the multitudinous forms and forces – that make up an integral whole are irrevocably determined by 'a basic intuition which is the soul of that integrality; the entire edifice is a compact unity-each piece of brick, every bit of space is. in its own place and has its own function by virtue of a dominant, a compelling Idea. Like an object of art, even like a living organism, a "body cultural" is inviolable in its self-sufficient and jealous com­pleteness.

In other words, the difference between Europe and Asia is the difference between two species; and there can be no fruitful union between them. So, the meeting and fusion of Europe and Asia is nothing but a barren ideal, a chimera. It is a hope and a desire cherished, no doubt, by sentimental visionaries, but it is bound to come to grief in the end, when brought to face the realities of life and the stern forces that shape the forms of the concrete world.

But is it after all an incontrovertible fact that Europe is Europe and Asia Asia? It is now too late in the day to maintain that Asia was always dreamy and metaphysical and that she always lacked the hold upon concrete reality. On the contrary, every new additional information regarding her past is continually bringing to light the fact that Asia was no less efficient than Europe in matters worldly and material; she had as great, if not greater control over the brute reality than the latter can claim even today. Only her conquest of the spiritual realms was also as efficient and sovereign.

Nor is it a fact that Europe is and has been merely profane and materialistic in her outlook and attainment. The godless and mechanistic civilisatioI1. which is rampant today in Europe is a distemper of comparatively recent growth. Its farthest limit .does not go beyond the sixteenth or the fifteenth century when the first seeds were sown by the Humanists of the Renaissance. It sprouted with the rationalists of the eighteenth century and the French Revolution cleared the ground for its free and untrammelled growth. But only in the nineteenth

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and the twentieth centuries has it reached such vast and disconcerting proportions as to swallow all Europe's other motives and velleities and to appear as the only form of her life-expression. But in the earlier centuries, those that preceded the New Enlightenment, Europe had a different conception of culture and civilisation, she possessed almost another soul. The long period that is known as the mediaeval age was not after all so dark and unregenerate as it has been the familiar custom to represent it. Christian Europe – the Europe of cathedrals and monasteries, of saints and sages, of St. Francis and St. Teresa, of Boehme and Bernard, of Thomas Aquinas and Augustine, had an enlightenment all her own, which was real and living and dynamic, possessing a far-extending and deeply penetrating influence; in as much as it was this that called into being and fashioned the more abiding forces, which underlie Europe's cultural life and social institutions, although latterly "fallen on evil days and on evil tongues".

Even the still more ancient Græco-Latin Europe which was not, to a general and apparent view, quite spiritual or other-worldly, was yet not so exclusively materialistic and profane as modern Europe. Classical culture was rationalistic, without doubt; but that rationalism was the function of a sublimated intelligence and a refined sensibility and served as a vehicle for a Higher Perception – a ratiocinative and ultra-logical mind, like that of Socrates, could yet be so passive and upgazing as to receive and obey the commandments of a Dremon; whereas the rationalism, which is in vogue today and to which orthodox Scientism has affixed its royal sign manual, is the product of mere brain-power, vigorous but crude, of an intellect shut up in its self-complacent cunningness, obfuscated by its infinite but shallow inquisitiveness.

And the secret soul of this Classical culture was not inherited by those who professed to be its champions and adorers – the torch-bearers of the New Enlightenment; no, its direct descendants were to be found among the builders of the Christian civilization. Plato and Pythagoras and Heraclitus and the initiates to the Orphic and the Eleusinian mysteries continued to live in and through Plotinus and Anselm and Paracelsus and the long line 'Of Christian savants and sages. The Middle Age had its own spiritual discoveries and achievements founded

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on the Cult of the Christ; to these it added what it could draw and assimilate from the mystic and spiritual traditions of the Græco-Latin world. The esoteric discipline of the Jewish Kabala also was not without influence in shaping the more secret undercurrents of Europe's creative and formative genius. The composite culture which they grew and developed had undisputed empire over Europe for some ten or twelve centuries; and it was nothing, if not at heart a spiritual and religious and other-worldly culture.

Herein lay Europe's soul; and to it turned often and anon the gaze of those who, among a profane humanity, are still the guardians of the Spirit – poets and artists – who, even in the very midst of the maelstrom of Modernism, sought to hark back, back to the rock of the ages. The mediaevalism and archaicism of which a Rossetti or a Morris, for example, is often accused embodies only a defensive reaction on the part of Europe's soul; it is an attempt to return to her more fundamental life-intuition.

In this connection the history of Ireland's destiny affords an instructive study, since it is symbolic also of Europe's life-course. It was the natural idealism, the inborn spiritual out­look which Ireland possessed of yore – the Druidic Mysteries were more ancient than the Greek culture and formed perhaps the basis of the Orphic and Eleusinian Mysteries-which impelled her foremost to embrace the new revelation brought on by Christianity. As she was among the pioneers to champion the cause of the Christ, she became also the fortress where the new cult found a safe refuge when the old world was being overwhelmed and battered to pieces by the onrush of peoples of a dense and rough-hewn nature. When continental Europe lay a: desert waste under the heels of the barbarians that almost wiped away the last vestiges of the Classical Culture, it was Ireland who nursed and reared the New Child in her bosom and when the time came sent Him out again to reconquer and revivify Europe. Once more when the tide of Modernism began to rise and swell and carry everything before it, Ireland stood firm and threw up an impregnable barrier. The story of Ireland's struggle against Anglo-Saxon domination is at bottom the story of the struggle between Europe's soul power and body power. Ireland was almost slain in the

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combat, physically, but would not lose her soul. And now she rises victorious at long last, her ancient spirit shines resplendent, the voice of the Irish Renaissance that speaks through Yeats and Russell * heralds a new dawn for her and who knows if not for Europe and the whole West?

Is it meant that "Mediaeval obscurantism" was Europe's supreme ideal and that the cry should be: "Back to the Dark Age, into the gloom of Mystic superstitions and Churchian dogmas?" Now, one cannot deny that there was much of obscurantism and darkness in that period of Europe's evolution. And the revolt launched against it by the heralds of the Modern Age was inevitable and justified to some extent; but to say that unadulterated superstition was what constituted the very substance of Middle Age Culture an& that the whole thing was more or less a nightmare, is only to land into another sort of superstition and obscurantism. The best when corrupt does become the worst. The truth of the matter is that in its decline the Middle Age clung to and elaborated only the formal aspect of its culture, leaving aside its inner realisation, its living inspiration. The Renaissance was a movement of reaction and correction against the lifeless formalism, the dry scholasticism of a decadent Middle Age; it sought to infuse a new vitality, by giving a new outlook and intuition to Europe's moribund soul. But, in fact, it has gone a little too far in its career of correction. In its violent enthusiasm to pull down the worn-out edifice of the past and to build anew for the future, it has almost gone to the length of digging up the solid foundation and erasing the fundamental ground-plan upon which Europe's real life and culture reposed and can still safely repose.

If then Europe can cut across the snares that Modernism has spread all about her and get behind the surface turmoils and ebullitions and seek that which she herself once knew and esteemed as the one thing needful, then will she really see what the East means, then only will she find the bond of indissoluble unity with Asia. For the Truth that Europe carried in her bosom is much bigger than anything she ever suspected even in her best days. And she carried it not with the full illumination and power of a Master, but rather in the twilight consciousness of a servant or a devotee.

* "A. E."

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The Truth in its purity flowed there for the most part much under the main current of life, and its formulations in life were not its direct expressions and embodiments but echoes and images. It is Asia who grasps the Truth with the hand of the Master, the Truth in its full and absolute truth and it is Asia who can show in fact and life how to embody it integrally.

Europe's spiritual soul itself in the last analysis will be found to be only a derivative of Asia's own self. For all the Mysteries and Occult Disciplines – the Christian, the Platonic, the Eleusinian and Orphic, the Kabalistic, the Druidic – which lay imbedded in Europe's spiritual and religious genius, when traced further up to the very source, will carry us straight into Asia's lap, perhaps India's.

And Europe in accepting or embracing Asia comes back to the fountain-head pf her own inner being and nature.

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The Spiritual Genius of India

WHAT is it that we precisely mean when we say that India is spiritual? For, that is how we are accustomed to express India's special genius – her backbone, as Vivekananda puts it – the fundamental note of her cultute and nature, which distinguishes her from the rest of the world. What then are the distinguishing marks of spirituality? How does a spiritual collectivity live and move – kim âsita vrajeta kim? And do we find its characteristic gait and feature exclusively or even chiefly in India?

Was not Europe also in her theocratic and mediaeval ages as largely spiritual and as fundamentally religious as India? Churches and cathedrals and monasteries grew like mushrooms in every nook and corner, in all the countries of Europe; it was the clergy who, with their almost unbounded influence and power, moulded and guided the life and aspiration of the people; devotion to God and love of prayer and pilgrimage were as much in the nature of the average European of those times as they are in any Indian of today; every family con­sidered it a duty and an honour to rear up one child at least to be consecrated to the service of God and the Church. The internal as well as the external life of the men of mediaeval Europe was steeped through and through in a religious atmosphere. .

The whole world, in fact, was more or less religious in the early stages of its evolution; for it is characteristic of the primitive nature of man to be god-fearing and addicted to religious rite and ceremony. And Europe too, when she entered on a new cycle of life and began to reconstruct herself after the ruin of the Græco-Latin culture, started with the religion of the Christ and experimented with it during a long period of

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time. But that is what was – Troja fuit. Europe has outgrown her nonage and for a century and a half, since the mighty upheaval of the French Revolution, she has been rapidly shaking off the last vestiges of her mediaevalism. Today she stands clean shorn of all superstition, which she only euphemistically calls religion or spirituality. Not Theology but Science, not Revelation but Reason, not Magic but Logic, not Fiction but Fact, governs her thoughts and guides her activities. Only India, in part under the stress of her own conservative nature, in part under compelling circumstances, still clings to her things of the past, darknesses that have been discarded by the modern illumination. Indian spirituality is nothing but consolidated mediaevalism; it has its companion shibboleth in the cry, "Back to the village" or "Back to the bullock-cart"! One of the main reasons, if not the one reason why India has today no place in the comity of nations, why she is not in the vanguard of civilisation, is precisely this obstinate atavism, this persistent survival of a spirit subversive of all that is modern and progressive.

It is not my purpose here to take up the cause of spirituality and defend it against materialism. Taking it for granted that real spirituality embodies a truth and power by far higher and mightier than anything materialism can offer, and that man's supreme ideal lies there, let us throw a comparing glance on the two types of spirituality, – the one that India knows and the other that Europe knew in the Middle Ages.

To say that Europe was once as religious and spiritual as India herself is not precisely incorrect, but it is to view the matter from too general a stand-point, almost, we may say, grosso modo. In order to arrive at an accurate and precise estima­tion, and to find out the most significant truths, we have to look a little more closely, observe differences in shade and stress, make certain distinctions. For the things that the ordinary mind indiscriminately designates as religion, spiri­tuality and the like, do not always fall in the same category. These names are often applied to distinct realities, each with its particular dharma, norm and form, wide apart from each other, although to the common eye they may appear to be of the same mould and substance.

Thus Religion and Spirituality, two fundamental categories

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that form one realm when held up in opposition to Materialism, are, when considered by themselves, really very different things and may be even contradictory to and destructive of each other. What then is Religion? and what, on the other hand, is Spirituality? Religion starts from and usually ends with a mental and emotional approach to realities beyond the mind; Spirituality goes straight forward to direct vision and communion with the Beyond. Religion labours to experience and express the world of Spirit in and through a turn, often a twist, given by the mental being – manu – in man; it bases itself upon the demands of the mental, the vital and the physical complex – the triple nexus that forms the ordinary human personality and seeks to satisfy them under a holier garb. Spirituality knows the demands of the Spirit alone; it lives in a realm where the body, the life and the mind stand uplifted and transmuted into their utter realities. Religion is the human way of approaching and enjoying the Divine; Spirituality is the divine way of meeting the Divine. Religion, as it is usually practised, is a special art, one – the highest it may be, still only one – among many other pursuits that man looks to for his enjoyment and fulfilment; but spirituality is nothing if it does not swallow up the entire man, take in his each and every preoccupation and new-create it into an inevitable expression of its own master truth. Religion gives us a moral discipline for the internal consciousness, and for the external life, a code of conduct based upon a system of rules and rites and ceremonies; spirituality aims at a revolution in the consciousness and in the being.

Keeping this difference in view, we may at once point out that Europe, when she is non-materialist, is primarily religious and only secondarily spiritual, but India is always primarily spiritual and only secondarily religious. The vein of real spirituality in European culture runs underground and follows narrow and circuitous by-paths; rarely does it appear on the top in sudden and momentary flashes and even then only to dive back again into its subterranean hiding-place; upon the collective life and culture it acts more as an indirect influence, an auxiliary leaven than as. a direct and dynamic Force. In India there is an abundance, a superfluity even, of religious paraphernalia, but it is the note of spirituality that

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rings clear and high above all lesser tones and wields a power vivid and manifest. We could say in terms of modern Biology that spirituality tends to be a recessive character in European culture, while in India, it is dominant.

But when we say that India is spiritual, we do not mean that all or most Indians, or even a very large minority among them, are adepts in spirituality, or that the attachment to life, the passion for earthly possessions, the sway of the six ripus are in any way less prevalent in the Indian character. On the contrary, it may well seem to the casual onlooker whose eyes are occupied with the surface actualities of the situation, that the Indian nature, as it is today, shut out from this world's larger spaces, cut off from its deeper channels and movements of greater magnitude, has been given over more and more to petty worldlinesses that hardly fill the same space even in the life of peoples who are notorious for their worldly and un­spiritual temperament.

It is not so much a question of concrete realisation, of attain­ment and achievement arrived at by the Indian people in their work-a-day life, but primarily and above all a question of ultimate valuation, of what they hold as the supreme ideal, of what they cherish in their heart of hearts, and of the extent to which that standard has obtained general currency among them. It is not a fact with which we are concerned, but the force behind the fact, and the special nature and purpose of that force. It is the power that we discover in the general atmosphere, or that emerges in the stress and rhythm of the cultural life of the people, in the level of its inner consciousness, in the expression of its highest and most wide-spread aspira­tions, in the particular stamp of its soul.

The psychological atmosphere in India is of a luminous tenuity. Here, it appears, the veil between this world and the other has so thinned away that the two meet and interpenetrate easily and freely; immersed in one, you can at the same time bathe in the other. Owing to the cumulative effect of the sadhana of her saints and sages who appeared in countless number down countless ages, or, perhaps, owing to the grace of a descent into her consciousness, or some immanence there, of the breath and light of a Superior World, India has developed and possesses, already prepared, a magnetic field,

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a luminous zone of spiritual consciousness; and to enter into it the Indian has only to turn aside, to go round a corner, to take one step forward. However thick and hard the crust of the Ignorance may lie upon the Indian soul, once that soul awakes and is upon the path, it finds itself on a familiar ground; it is in a domain which it has the impression of having frequented often and anon and for long.

But in Europe the division between this world and the other, in the inner consciousness of the people, is more rigorous, a thick wall divides the two and to pass from the one to the other demands a violent break, a total revolution; and even when the Rubicon is crossed, one feels oneself in unfamiliar surroundings, moving in a shadowy world, and with the uncertain and faltering steps of a child.

The average European has a strong basis of the earth-nature in him; he is heavily enclosed in his physical sheath and firmly placed upon the material world. Therefore he keeps a very stable terrestrial equilibrium and is not easily ousted from his earthly footing; his is not a nature easily upset from its poise, or disturbed by the currents and forces that play about him. But the Indian, both physically and psychically, has a more delicate frame and his footing upon earth is less secure. The balance in his consciousness between the different forces – especially between those of this world and the other – is delicately held; and the adjustment that obtains at a given moment is liable to be disturbed by the least change, either in the inner consciousness, or in the outer conditions.

In other words, when we speak of the spirituality of the Indian people, it is to the disposition of their psychic elements that we refer, to the tone and temper of the soul they possess and to a constant nearness of latent spiritual possibilities, that may at any time materialise, and the consequent possibilities of a spiritual impulse, that may at any time awaken.

Other peoples have other and more concrete virtues to be proud of; but the Indian has his soul as his most characteristic possession.

That is not to say that other peoples of the world are soulless, and that India alone may claim to possess the treasure. But no other people has lived so much in and from the soul, none other has sacrificed so much for the sake of this one thing needful. The

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soul-consciousness in other nations lies veiled behind the more pressing activities and immediate occupations of the external nature; at the most, what is characteristic in them is the soul, not in its pure and fundamental being, but expressed, and therefore encased and limited, within some particular mode of becoming. In India, on the other hand, the external activities and operations have never altogether swamped or clouded this soul-consciousness; they have been either subjugated to it as minor auxiliaries or totally sacrificed as obstacles. The Indian's soul is not imbedded in some far-off region of his unconscious nature; he has succeeded in raising it up and bringing it forward to the level of his waking consciousness – ­as the gold-tusked Divine Boar lifted the Earth out of the dark depths of the primeval deluge to the light of the Day.

The French, for example, have developed as a people a special characteristic and mental turn that has set its pervading impress upon their culture and civilisation, upon their creations and activities; that which distinguishes them is a fine, clear and subtle, rational, logical, artistic and literary mind. France, it has often been said, is the head of modern Europe. The Indians are not in the same way a predominantly intellectual race, in spite of the mighty giants of intellect India has always produced, and still produces. Nor are they a literary race, although a rich and grandiose literature, unrivalled in its own great qualities, is their patrimony. It was the few, a small minority, almost a closed circle, that formed in India the elite whose interest and achievement lay in this field; the characteristic power, the main life-current of the nation, did not flow this way, but followed a different channel. Among the ancients the Greeks, and among the moderns the French alone, can rightfully claim as their special genius, as the hallmark of their corporate life, a high intellectual and literary culture. It is to this treasure, – a serene and yet vigorous and organized rational mind, coupled with a wonderful felicity of expression in speech, – that one turns when one thinks of the special gift that modern France and ancient Greece have brought to the heritage of mankind.

Again, the Japanese, as a people, have developed to a consummate degree the sense of beauty, especially as applied to life and living. No other people, not even the old-world Greeks,

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possessed almost to a man, as do these children of the Rising Sun, so fine and infallible an æsthetic sensibility, – not static or abstract, but of the dynamic kind – uniformly successful in making out of their work-a-day life, even to its smallest accessories, a flawless object of art. It is a wonder to see in japan how, even an unlettered peasant, away in his rustic environment, chooses with unerring taste the site of his house, builds it to the best advantage, arranges everything about it in a faultless rhythm. The whole motion of the life of a Japanese is almost Art incarnate.

Or take again the example of the British people. The practical, successful life instinct, one might even call it the business instinct, of the Anglo-Saxon races is, in its general diffusion, something that borders on the miraculous. Even their Shakespeare is reputed to have been very largely endowed with this national virtue. It is a faculty which has very little to do with calculation, or with much or close thinking, Of with any laborious or subtle mental operation – a quick Of active mind is perhaps the last thing with which the British people can be accredited; this instinct of theirs is something spontaneous, almost aboriginal, moving with the sureness, the ruthlessness of nature's unconscious movements, – it is a tact, native to the force that is life. It is this attribute which the Englishman draws from the collective genius of his race that marks him out from among all others; this is his forte, it is this which has created his nation and made it great and strong.

All other nations have this one, or that other, line of self-expression, special to each; but it is India's characteristic not to have had any such single and definite modus vivendi – what was single and definite in her case was a mode not of living but of being. India looked above all to the very self in things; and in all her life-expression it was the soul per se which mattered to her, – even as the-great Yajnavalkya said to his wife Maitreyi, atmanastu kamaya sarvam priyam bhavati. The expressions of the self had no intrinsic value of their own and mattered only so far as they symbolised or embodied or pointed to the secret reality of the Atman. And perhaps it was on this account that India's creative activities, even in external life, were once upon a time so rich and varied, so stupendous and, full of marvel. Because she was attached and limited to no one

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dominating power of life, she could create infinite forms, so many channels of power for the soul whose realisation was her end and aim.

There was no department of life or culture in which it could be said of India that she was not great, or even, in a way, supreme. From hard practical politics touching our earth, to the nebulous regions of abstract metaphysics, everywhere India expressed the power of her genius equally well. And yet none of these, neither severally nor collectively, constituted her specific genius; none showed the full height to which she could raise herself, none compassed the veritable amplitude of her innermost reality. It is when we come to the domain of the Spirit, of God-realisation that we find the real nature and stature and genius of the Indian people; it is here that India lives and moves as in her own home of Truth. The greatest and the most popular names in Indian history are not names of warriors or statesmen, nor of poets who were only poets, nor of mere intellectual philosophers, however great they might be, but of Rishis, who saw and lived the Truth and commu­ned with the gods, of Avataras who brought down and incarnated here below something of the supreme realities beyond.

The most significant fact in the history of India is the unbroken continuity of the line of her spiritual masters who never ceased to appear even in the midst of her - most dark and distressing ages. Even in a decadent and fast disintegrating India, when the whole of her external life was a mass of ruins, when her political and economical and even her cultural life was brought to stagnation and very near to decomposition, this undying Fire in her secret heart was ever alight and called in the inevitable rebirth and rejuvenation. Ramakrishna, with Vivekananda as his emanation in life dynamic and material, symbolises this great secret of India's evolution. The promise that the Divine held out in the Gila to Bharata's descendant finds a ready fulfilment in India, in Bharata's land, more perhaps than anywhere else in the world; for in India has the. Divine taken birth over and over again to save the pure in heart, to destroy the evil-doer and to establish the Right Law of life.

Other peoples may be the arms and the feet and the head of

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Humanity, but India is its heart, its soul – for she cherishes always within her the Truth that lives for ever, the flaming God-head, the Immortal awake in mortality, as say the Vedas, amrto martyesu rtava.

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Divine Humanism

A GOOD many European scholars and philosophers have found Indian spirituality and Indian culture, at bottom, lacking in what is called 'humanism'.* So our scholars and philosophers on their side have been at pains to rebut the charge and demonstrate the humanistic element in our tradition. It may be asked, however, if such a vindication is at all necessary, or if it is proper to apply a European standard of excellence to things Indian. India may have other measures, other terms of valuation. Even if it is proved that humanism as defined and understood in the West is an unknown thing in India, yet that need not necessarily be taken as a sign of inferiority or deficiency.

But first of all we must know what exactly is meant by humanism. It is, of course, not a doctrine or dogma; it is an attitude, an outlook – the attitude, the outlook that views and weighs the worth of man as man. The essential formula was succinctly given by the Latin poet when he said that nothing human he considered foreign to him. I t is the characteristic of humanism to be interested in man as man and in all things that interest man as man. To this, however, an important corollary is to be added, that it does not concern itself with things that do not concern man's humanity. The original father of humanism was perhaps the father of European culture itself, Socrates, whose mission it was, as he said, to bring down philosophy from heaven to live among men. More precisely the genesis should be ascribed to the Aristotelian tradition of Socratic teaching.

Humanism proper was born – or reborn – with the Renaissance.

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* Only the other day I found a critic in the Manchester Guardian referring to the Gita as something frigid and confused !!

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It was as strongly and vehemently negative and protestant in its nature, on one side, as it was positive and affirmative on the other. For its fundamental character – that which gave it its Very name – was a protest against a turning away from, whatever concerned itself with the supra-human, with God or Self, with heaven or other worlds, with abstract or transcendental realities. The movement was humanistic precisely because it stood against the theological and theocratical mediaeval age.

The Græco-Latin culture was essentially and predominantly humanistic. Even so, the mediaeval culture too, in spite of its theological stress, had a strong basis in humanism. For the religion itself, as has been pointed out, was deeply humanistic, in the sense that it brought salvation and heaven close to the level of human frailty – through the miracle of Grace and the humanity of Christ – and that it envisaged a kingdom of heaven or city of God-the body of Christ – formed of the brotherhood of the human race in its solidarity.

The Indian outlook, it is said, is at a double remove from this type of humanism. It has not the pagan Græco-Roman humanism, nor has it the religious humanism of Christianity. Its spirit can best be rendered in the vigorous imagery of Blake; it surrounds itself

With cold floods of abstraction and

the forests of solitude.

The religious or Christian humanism of the West is in its essential nature the pagan and profane humanism itself, at least an extension of the same. The sympathy that a St. Francis feels for his leprous brother is, after all, a human feeling, a feeling that man has for man; even his love for an animal or an inanimate object is also a very human feeling, transferred to another receptacle and flowing in another direction. It is a play of the normal human heart, only refined and widened; there is no change in kind.

It goes without saying that, in the East too, there is no lack of such sympathy or fellow-feeling either in the saint or in the ordinary man of the world. Still there is a difference. And the critics have felt it, if not understood it rightly. Indian bhuta

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daya and Christian charity do not spring from the same source – I do not speak of the actual popular thing, but of the ideal and ideology; even when the manner of expression is similar or the same in both, the spirit and the significance are different. In the East the liberated man, or the man aiming at liberation, may work for the good and welfare of the world, but also he may not; and, what is more important, when he does so work, the spirit is not that of benevolence or philanthropy, nor is there the ethical sense of duty.

The Indian sage is not and cannot be human in the human way. For the end of his whole spiritual effort is to transcend the human way and establish himself in the divine way, in the way of the Spirit. The feeling he has towards his fellow-beings – ­men and animals, the sentient and the insentient, the entire creation, in fact – is one of identity in the One Self. And, there­fore, he does not need to embrace physically his brother, like the Christian saint, to express or justify the perfect inner union or unity. The basis of his relation with the world and its objects is not the human heart, however purified and widened, but something behind it and hidden by it, the secret soul and self. It was Vivekananda who very often stressed the point that the distinctive characteristic of the Vedantin was that he did not look upon created beings as his brethren, but as himself, as the one and the same self. The profound teaching of the Upanishadic Rishi is – what may appear very egoistic and in­admissible to the Christian saint – that one loves the wife or the son or anybody or anything in the world, not for the sake of the wife or the son or that body or that thing, but for the sake of the self, for the sake of one's own self that is in the object which one seems to love.

The pragmatic man requires an outward gesture, an external emotion to express and demonstrate his kinship with the creation. Indeed the more concrete and tangible the expression, the more human it is considered to be and all the more worthy for it. There are not a few who think that giving alms to the poor is more nobly human than, say, to have the abstract feeling of a wide commonalty, experienced solely in imagination or contemplation in the Wordsworthian way.

There is, indeed, a gradation in the humanistic attitude that rises from grosser and more concrete forms to those that are

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less and less so. At the lowest rung and the most obvious in form and nature is what is called altruism, or more especially, philanthropy, that is to say, doing good to others, some good j that is tangible and apparent, that is esteemed and valued by the world generally. In an altruism refined and sublimated, when it is no longer a matter primarily of doing but of feeling, when, from a more or less physical and material give and take, we rise into a vital and psychological sympathy and inter. communion, we have what is humanism proper. Humanism is transfigured into something still higher and finer when, from the domain of personal or individual feeling" and sympathy, we ascend to cosmic feeling, to self-identification with the All, the One that is Many. This is the experience that seems to be behind the Buddhistic compassion, karuā.

And yet there can be a status even beyond. For, beyond the cosmic reality lies the transcendent reality. It is the Absolute, neti, neti, into which individual and cosmos, all dis. appear and vanish. In compassion, the cosmic communion, there is a trace and an echo of humanism – it is perhaps one of the reasons why Europeans generally are attracted to Buddhism and find it more congenial than Hinduism with its dizzy Vedantic heights. But in the status of the transcendent Self-hood, humanism is totally transcended and transmuted; one dwells there in the Bliss that passeth all feeling.

The Upanishadic summit is not suffused with humanism or touched by it, because it is supra-human, not because there is a lack or deficiency in the human feeling, but because there is a heightening and a transcendence in the consciousness and being. To man, to human valuation, the Bodhisattva may appear to be greater than the Buddha; even so to the sick a physician or a nurse may seem to be a diviner angel than any saint or sage or perhaps God himself – but that is an inferior view-point, that of particular or local interest.

It is sometimes said that to turn away from the things of human concern, to seek liberation and annihilation in the Self and the Beyond, is selfishness, egoism; on the contrary, to sacrifice the personal delight of losing oneself in the Impersonal so that one may live and even suffer in the company of ordinary humanity, in order to succour and serve it, is the nobler aim. But one may ask, if it is egoism and selfishness to seek delight

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in one's own salvation beyond, would it be less selfish and egoistic to enjoy the pleasure of living on a level with humanity with the idea of aiding and uplifting it? Indeed, in either case, the truth discovered by Yajnavalkya, to which we have already referred, stands always justified, – that it is not for the sake of this or that thing that one loves this or that thing, but for the sake of the Self that one loves this or that thing.

The fact of the matter is that here we enter a domain in which the notion of egoism or selfishness has no raison d'être. It is only when one has transcended not only selfishness, but egoism and all sense of individuality that one becomes ready to step into the glory and beatitude of the Self or Brahman or Śunyam. One may actually and irrevocably pass beyond, or one may return from there (or from the brink of it) to work in and on the world – out of compassion, or in obedience to a special call or a higher Will, or because of some other thing; but this second course does not mean that one has attained a higher status of being. We may consider it more human, but it is not necessarily a superior realisation. It is a matter of choice of vocation only, to use a mundane figure. The Personal and the Impersonal are two co-ordinates of the same supreme Reality – some choose (or are chosen by) one and others choose (or chosen by) the other, perhaps as the integral Play or the inscrutable Plan demands and determines, but neither is intrinsically superior to the other. .

The humanism with which Europe is familiar, both in its profane and religious aspects, would look, from an Indian – ­Vedantic – standpoint, all 'human, too human'; it was a European who declared it so. It was for this reason that the Promethean prophet conjured man to transcend his humanity anyhow and rise to a superior status of culture and civilisa­tion – of being and consciousness, as we would say.

Indian spirituality envisages precisely such a transcendence. According to it, the liberated soul, one who lives in and with the Brahman or the Supreme Divine, is he who has discarded the inferior human nature and has taken up the superior divine nature. He has conquered the evil of the lower nature, certainly; but also he has gone beyond the good of that nature. The liberated man is seated above the play of the three Gunas that constitute the inferior hemisphere of manifestation, apara

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prakrti, Human intelligence, human feeling, human sentiment, human motive, even at their best and purest, do not move him. Humanism has naturally no meaning for him. He is no longer human, but supra-human; his being and becoming are the spontaneous expression of a universal and transcendent consciousness. He may not always live and move externally in the non-human way; but even when he appears human in his life and action, his motives are not humanistic, his consciousness lies anchored somewhere else, in the transcendent Will of the Divine that makes him be and do whatever it chooses, human or otherwise.

And yet there is a humanism that is proper to India – it is not 'human humanism', but, as it is called, 'divine humanism'. That is to say, the human formula is maintained, but a new significance, a transcendent connotation is put into it. The general contour of the instrumentation is preserved, but the substance is transmuted. The brain, the heart and the physical consciousness not only change their direction, but their very nature and character. And the Divine Himself is conceived as such a Divine Person – for the norm of the human personality in this view is an eternal verity in the divine consciousness.

Esoteric Christianity also has given us the conception of the Human Divine; but it is somewhat different from the Vaish­nava revelation which has found rather the Divine Human. In other words, as I have already said, one has brought down the divinity nearer to human appreciation and has hurnanised it; in the other, the human has been uplifted and made into an archetypal reality where the human terms are more or less symbols and figures, having not merely a human but a supra­human significance. The entire Vaishnava Lila takes place not on this earth at all, but eternally in the eternal world of the inner consciousness – cinmaya – behind all earthly (and human) manifestation and expression.

It is the cult of the Divine Human which enunciates the mystic truth that Man is greater than all and surpasses even the Vedic Law (which aims usually at the impersonal Absolute). But Man -here is to be understood as the Divine Person in his human norm, not the human man at all, as modern humanists of our country would like to have it. It does not mean the glorification of man's human attributes and movements, even

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if they be most sattwic and idealistic; it refers rather to the divinised type, the archetype that is eternally in the super-­consciousness. And when such a Man lives and acts on earth, he does so in a manner and measure that do not belong to this plane of humanity familiar to us.

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Some Thoughts on the unthinkable

GOD is not an autocrat – a despot like the Czar or the Shahan Shah, pedestalled high above and ruling over his subject-slaves according to his fancy and caprice, issuing ukases and firmans which suffer no delay or hindrance in their execution.

God is, if he is at all to be compared to a king, more like a constitutional sovereign. He does not act as he chooses and pleases. There is a system, a plan, a procedure of governance; there are principles and laws and rules, and he abides by them. There are even agents and intermediaries, officers and servants – instruments through whom he works out his purpose. He is] the supreme dharmaraja, the lord and guardian of the Law. Not that he is pound by his constitution, in the sense that he is a slave to it and cannot alter it, even when he finds it necessary to do so, but that once the rules of the game have been laid, he agrees to follow them so long as he plays the particular game.

The Divine does not announce his presence or advent by miracles, by sudden catastrophes and upheavals. The power, the knowledge or the love that belongs to him is just like the air that surrounds us, whose silent and tranquil, yet constant pressure energises the heart of living things, whose very translucency is the stuff out of which is fashioned Earth's richly variegated life.

The Divine does not compel, he persuades. The individual. soul is born out of the Divine and forms a part and parcel of ; the Divine, but it has been given freedom –freedom to live

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and move as it chooses. And although the Divine Will in the cosmos acts as a continuous pressure in the form of the evolutionary urge pushing inferior Nature gradually towards an unfolding of the Divine's own Consciousness and Nature, inherent in it and overarching it, yet it is a force that lies in the background and its fulfilment is only eventual. There is a long interim period of a full five-act drama in which the soul, through gathering experiences, freely moves and explores and seeks, falters and errs, and finally comes to its own; it comes to realise that the freedom it had, even the freedom to descend and enter into the region of the Ignorance, was accorded to it for the play of self-choice, for the joy of self-discovery, for the delight of self-surrender and self-fulfilment.

The Divine has two aspects in its manifestation, the one in which it is the All, the infinite and equal Brahman, spread wide as to include the two extremes, Knowledge and Ignorance, Birth and Death, impartially containing or consisting of the dualities – it is the Reality that is; the other is the reality that becomes – it is not the All, but the Over-All, the Transcendent that manifests and is being embodied; it is not the duality of Knowledge and Ignorance, but Supra-knowledge; it is not the duality of Birth and Death, but Immortality; it is the Divine in its own Truth-Nature that lies on one side beyond and behind, at the origin, and on the other, involved and submerged in the play of the All and gradually emerging out of the All, transforming it and giving it a concrete form even in the likeness of the original transcendent supra-Nature.

Both the Divines are to be envisaged and established in one single undivided realisation – the static and equal and impartial Brahman forming the basis, the unshakable calm and absolute freedom, and the dynamic emergent Brahman revealing more and more in the manifested creation a definite divine Purpose and Aim and Fulfilment, The one accepts and contains everything, for it is everything; the other, on the basis of that wide acceptation, chooses and selects, keeps back or dissolves and annihilates, in the progression of its increasing light,

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the darkness, the ignorance that form one part of the dual Nature.

The actual manifestation, the world as it stands, is in the hands of the Undivine. The Divine has to establish his reign through a working out of struggling and combating forces. The evil that man does or suffers from comes from his slavery to the Undivine: likewise the good that he is capable of doing or receiving is the sign of his freedom from that slavery and of his openness to the secret Divine.

The Undivine means the obscure separativeness of the Ignorance, the darkness of Inferior Nature. The Divine, from his superior status, has cast himself down and is scattered and concretised as the ignorant creation, he has consented to be degraded and imbedded into Matter, in order to quicken Matter gradually, to illumine and transform it and invest it with the Divine's own glory. The whole dynamics of creation consists in the interaction of these two forces, one apparent and pragmatic and patent, the other behind and involved and latent. The elements and forces of the Ignorance, while they appear to move in the cycles of their inexorable Law, are gradually led by the stress of the involved Spirit, to evolve and change, and finally express and incarnate that which it now negates, that which is the Spirit unveiled in its pristine authenticity.

A day will come when it is the Divine that will reign upon earth, the Divine in his transcendent Delight and Knowledge and Power and Purity, and human life shall embody the Law of the Truth.

The thing may not happen today or within a short period, according to the human standard. Man's smallness, in its impatience, once could not contemplate a span of more than a few thousand years. But we have been forced to learn to calculate earth's life and evolution in astronomical figures, and the human stage is being found to have extended farther and farther into a dim and immemorial past. Millenniums are nothing in the march of the cosmic play. Things are done here in the measures of eternity; it is only the narrowness of the

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human consciousness that wants to cut up what is eternal and infinite into convenient bits and parcels.

The Day will come towards which the whole creation has been moving since the beginning of time, it will come inevitably in due course – it may be today or tomorrow, it may be a decade hence, or it may even be a century or a millennium hence; it will come all the same.

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The Standpoint of Indian Art

INDIAN art is not in truth unreal and unnatural, though it may so appear to the eye of the ordinary man or to an eye habituated to the classical tradition of European art. Indian art, too, does hold the mirror up to Nature; but it is a different kind of Nature, not altogether this outward Nature that the mere physical eye envisages. All art is human creation; it is man's review of Nature; but the particular type of art depends upon the particular 'view-point that the artist takes for his survey. The classical artist surveys his field with the physical eye, from a single point of observation and at a definite angle; it is this which gives him the sine qua non of his artistic composition, anatomy and perspective. And the genius of the artist lies very much in the selection of a vantage ground from which his survey would throw into relief all the different parts of the objective in the order and gradation desired; to this vantage ground the entire construction is organically – one could even say, in this case, geometrically – correlated.

Indian art, too, possesses a perspective and an anatomy; it, too, has a focus of observation which governs and guides the composition, in the ensemble and in detail. Only, it is not the physical eye, but an inner vision, not the angle given by the retina, but the angle of a deeper perception or consciousness. To understand the difference, let us ask ourselves a simple question: when we call back to memory a landscape, how does the picture form itself in the mind? Certainly, it is not an exact photograph of the scenery observed. We cannot, even if we try, re-form in memory the objects in the shape, colour and relative positions they had when they appeared to the physical eye. In the picture represented to the mind's eye, some objects loom large, others are thrown into the back-

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ground and others again do not figure at all; the whole scenery is reshuffled and rearranged in deference to the stress of the mind's interest. Even the structure and build of each object undergoes a change; it does not faithfully re-copy Nature, but gives the mind's version of it, aggrandizing certain parts, suppressing others, reshaping and recolouring the whole aspect, metamorphosing the very contour into something that may not be "natural" or anatomical figure at all. Only we are not introspective enough to observe this phenomenon of the mind's alchemy; we think we are representing with perfect exactitude in the imagination whatever is presented to the senses, whereas in fact we do nothing of the kind; our idea that we do it is a pure illusion.

All art is based upon this peculiar virtue of the mind that naturally and spontaneously transforms or distorts the objective world presented to its purview. The question, then, is only of the degree to which the metamorphosis has been carried. At the one end, there is the art of photography, in which the degree of metamorphosis is at its minimum; at the other, there seems to be no limit, for the mind's capacity to dissolve and recreate the world of sense-perception is infinite – and many modern schools of European art have gone even beyond the limit that the "unnatural" Indian art did not consider it necessary to transgress. Now, the classical artist selects a position as close as he can to the photographer, tries to give the mind's view of Nature and creation, as far as possible, in the style and norm of the sense-perceptions. He takes his stand upon these and from there reaches out towards whatever imaginative reconstructions are justified within the bounds laid out by them. The general ground-plan is, almost rigorously, the form given by the physical eye. The art of the East, and even, to a large extent, the art of mediaeval Europe, followed a different line. Here the scheme of the sense-perceptions was rejected, the artist sought to build on other foundations. His procedure was, first, to get a focus within the mind, to discover a psychological standpoint, and from there and in accordance with the subtler laws and conventions of an inner vision create a world that is unique and stands by itself. The aim was always to build from within, at the most, from within outwards, but not from without, not even from without inwards. This inner

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world has its own laws and they differ from the laws of optics which govern the physical sight; but there is no reason why it should be called unnatural. It is unnatural only in the sense that it does not copy physical Nature; it is quite natural in the 1 sense that it is a faithful reproduction of another, a psychological Nature.

Indian art is pre-eminently and par excellence the art of this inner re-formation and revaluation. It has thrown down com­pletely and clearly the rigid scaffolding of the physical vision. We take here a sudden leap, as it were, into another world, and sometimes the feeling is that everything is reversed; it is not exactly that we feel ourselves standing on our heads, but it is, as if, in the Vedic phrase, the foundations were above and all the rest branched out from them downwards. The artist sees with an eye, and constructs upon a plan that conveys the merest excuse of an actual visible world. There are other schools in the East which have also moved very far away from the naturalistic view; yet they have kept, if not the form, at least, the feeling of actuality in their composition. Thus a Chinese, a Japanese, or a Persian masterpiece cannot be said to be "natural" in the sense in which a Tintoretto, or even a Raphael is natural; yet a sense of naturalness persists, though the appearance is not naturalistic. What Indian art gives is not the feeling of actuality or this sense of naturalness, but a feeling of truth, a sense of reality – of the deepest reality.

Other art shows the world of creative imagination, the world reconstructed by the mind's own formative delight; the Indian artist reveals something more than that – the faculty through which he seeks to create is more properly termed vision, not imagination; it is the movement of an inner consciousness, a spiritual perception, and not that of a more or less outer sensibility. For the Indian artist is a seer or rishi; what he envisages is the mystery, the truth and beauty of another world – a real, not merely a mental or imaginative world, as real as this material creation that we see and touch; it is indeed more real, for it is the basic world, the world of fundamental truths and realities behind this universe of apparent phenomena. It is this that he contemplates, this I upon which his entire consciousness is concentrated; and all his art consists in

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giving a glimpse of it, bodying it forth or expressing it in significant forms and symbols.

European – the Far Western – art gives a front-view of reality; Japanese – the Far Eastern – art gives a side-view; Indian art gives a view from above.* Or we may say, in psychological terms, that European art embodies experiences of the conscious mind and the external senses, Japanese art gives expression to experiences that one has through the subtler touches of the nerves and the sensibility, and Indian art proceeds through a spiritual consciousness and records experiences of the soul.

The frontal view of reality lays its stress upon the display of the form of things, their contour, their aspect in mass and volume and dimension; and the art, inspired and dominated by it, is more or less a sublimated form of the art of photo­graphy. The side-view takes us behind the world of forms, into the world of movement, of rhythm. And behind or above the world of movement, again, there is a world of typal realities, essential form-movements, fundamental modes of consciousness in its universal and transcendent status. It is this that the Indian artist endeavours to envisage and express.

A Greek Apollo or Venus or a Madonna of Raphael is a human form idealized to perfection, – moulded to meet the criterion of beauty which the physical eye demands. The purely æsthetic appeal of such forms consists in the balance and symmetry, the proportion and adjustment, a certain roundedness and uniformity and regularity, which the physical eye especially finds beautiful. This beauty is akin to the beauty of diction in poetry.

Apart from the beauty of the mere form, there is behind it and informing it what may be called the beauty of character, the beauty revealed in the expression of psychological movement. It corresponds to the beauty of rhythm in poetry. Considered æsthetically, the beauty of character, in so far as it is found in what we have called formal art, is a corollary, – an ornamental and secondary theme whose function is to heighten

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*I am tempted to add a fourth view-the view from behind or the occult view -something of which may be found in the art of Egypt in its most ancient and naIve aspects, in the art of archaic Tibet, in the remnants of some of the old. world submerged civilizations, now known as "primitive" (Polynesian, for example).

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the effect of the beauty of form, or create the atmosphere and environment necessary for its display.

A Chinese or a Japanese piece of artistic creation is more of a study in character than in form; but it is a study in character in a deeper sense than the meaning which the term usually bears to an European mind or when it is used in reference to Europe's art-creations.

Character in the European sense means that part of nature which is dynamically expressed in conduct, in behaviour, in external movements. But there is another sense in which the term would refer to the inner mode of being, and not to any outer exemplification in activity, any reaction or set of reactions in the kinetic system, nor even to the mental state, the temperament, immediately inspiring it, but to a still deeper status of consciousness. A Raphael Madonna, for example, purposes to pour wholly into flesh and blood the beauty of motherhood. A Japanese Madonna (a Kwanon), on the other hand, would not present the "natural" features and expressions of motherhood; it would not copy faithfully the model, however idealized, of a woman viewed as mother. It would endeavour rather to bring out something of the subtler reactions in the "nervous" world, the world of pure movements that is behind the world of form; it would record the rhythms and reverberations attendant upon the conception and experience of motherhood somewhere on the other side of our wakeful consciousness. That world is made up not of forms, but of vibrations; and a picture of it, therefore, instead of being a representation in three-dimensional space, would be more like a scheme, a presentation in graph, something like the ideography of the language of the Japanese themselves, something carrying in it the beauty characteristic of the calligraphic art.*

An Indian Madonna owes its conception to an experience at the very other end of consciousness. The Indian artist does not at all think of a human mother; he has not before his mind's

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*It is not my intention to say that the art of character, even in the deeper sense, is totally absent in Europe. On the contrary, it is that which has been growing day by day, – although perhaps often along rather odd lines. It is a moot question how far this orientation is due to the influence of the Eastern, especially, the Far Eastern art. In speaking of Europe, I was referring to the bedrock of the artistic tradition of Europe, its fundamental classical tone.

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eye an idealized mother, nor even a subtilized feeling of

I motherhood. He goes deep into the very origin of things, and, from there seeks to bring out that which belongs to the absolute I and the universal. He endeavours to grasp the sense that : motherhood bears in its ultimate truth and reality. Beyond the form, beyond even the rhythm, he enters into bhāva, the: spiritual substance of things. An Indian Madonna (Ganesh- janani, for example) is not solely or even primarily a human I mother, but the mother, universal and transcendent, of sentient

and insentient creatures and supersentient beings. She embodies not the human affection only, but also the parallel sentiment that finds play in the lower and in the higher creations as well. She expresses in her limbs not only the gladness of the mother animal tending its young, but also the exhilaration that a plant feels in the uprush of its sap while giving out new shoots, and, above all, the supreme ananda which has given birth to the creation itself. The lines that portray such motherhood must have the largeness, the sweep, the authenticity of ele­mental forces, the magic and the mystery of things behind the veil.

It is this quality which has sometimes made Indian art seem deficient in its human appeal: the artist chose deliberately to be non-human, even in the portrayal of human subjects, in order to bring out the universal and the transcendent element in the truth and beauty of things. Man is not the measure of creation, nor human motives the highest or the deepest of nature's movements: at best, man is but a symbol of truths beyond his humanity.

It is this characteristic that struck the European mind in its first contact with the Indian artistic world and called forth the criticism that Indian culture lacks in humanism. It is true, a very sublimated humanism finds remarkable expression in Ajanta, – and perhaps it is here that the Western eye began to learn and appreciate the Indian style of beauty; even in Ajanta, however, in the pieces where the art reaches its very height, mere humanism seems to be at its minimum. And if we go beyond these productions that reflect the mellowness and humaneness of the Buddhist Compassion, if we go into the sanctuary of the Brahmanic art, we find that the experiences embodied there and the method of expression become more

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and more "anonymous"; they have not, that is to say, the local colour of humanity, which alone makes the European mind feel entirely at home. Europe's revulsion of feeling against Indian art came chiefly from her first meeting with the multiple-headed, multiple-armed, expressionless, strangely poised Hindu gods and goddesses, so different in every way from ordinary human types.

Indian art had to be non-human, because its aim was to be supra-human, unnatural, because its very atmosphere was the supra-natural.

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Art and Katharsis

ART, we all know, is concerned with the Beautiful; it is no less intimately connected with the True; the Good too is in like manner part and parcel of the æesthetic movement. For, Art not only delights or illumines, it uplifts also to the same degree. Only it must be noted that the uplifting aimed at or effected is not a mere moral or ethical edification – even as the Truth which Art experiences or expresses is not primarily the truth of external facts and figures in the scientific manner, nor the Beauty it envisages or creates the merely pleasant and the pretty.

There is a didactic Art that looks openly and crudely to moral hygiene. And because of this, there arose, as a protest and in opposition, a free-lance art that sought to pursue art for art's sake and truth for truth's sake – even if that truth and that art were unpleasant and repellent to the morality-ridden sophisticated consciousness. Or perhaps it may have been the other way round: because of the degeneracy of Art from its high and serious and epic nobility and sublimity to lesser levels of æsthetic hedonism and dilettantism that the didactic took its rise and sought to yoke art to duty, to moral welfare and social service. Not that there is an inherent impossibility of moralising art becoming good art in its own way; but great art is essen­tially a-moral – not in the sense of being infra-moral, but in the sense of being supra-moral.

Art does not tend towards the Good in the manner of the moralist. It does not teach or preach that virtue is to be pursued and vice to be shunned, that a good deed is rewarded and a wrong one punished. Poetic justice, of the direct and crude style, is a moral code or dogma, and, if imposed upon the æesthetic movement, serves only to fetter and curb and

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twist it. Art opens the vision to a higher good than what the conventions of moral idealism can frame. Great art does not follow the lines laid down by the ethical mentality, not only because this mentality cannot embody the true truth, but also because it does not give us the Good which art should aim at, that is to say, the purest and the highest good.

Aristotle speaks of the purifying function of the tragic art. How is the purification effected? By the evocation of the feel­ings of pity and terror. For such feelings widen the sympathies, pull us out of our small egoistic personal ephemeral pleasures and put us in contact with what is to be shared and enjoyed in wide commonalty. Tragedy, in this way, initiates the spectator into the enjoyment that is born not of desire and gain but of detachment and freedom.

The uplifting power of Art is inherent in its nature, for Art itself is the outcome of an uplifted nature. Art is the expression of a heightened consciousness. The ordinary consciousness in which man lives and moves is narrow, limited, obscure, falter­ing, unhappy – it is the abode of all that is evil and ugly; it is inartistic. The poetic zeal, enthusiasm or frenzy, when it seizes the consciousness, at once lifts it high into a state that is characterised by wideness and depth and a new and fresh exhilarating intensity of perception and experience. We seem to arrive at the very fountain-head, where things take birth and are full of an unspoilt life and power and beauty and light and harmony. A line burdened with the whole tragedy of earthly existence such as Shakespeare's:

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain...

or the Virgilian syllables ringing, as it were, with the crash of destiny and the doom of the world:

feror ingenti eireumdata noete

Invalidasque tibi tendens, heu! non, tua palmas. . .

even if they make us sad do not depress the soul; it is a divine sadness fraught with a profound calm and a strange poignant sweetness of secret delight. The rhythm and the sound and the suggestions so insinuate themselves into our nerve and blood

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that these seem to be sublimated – as if by a process of oxygenation – to a finer substance, a purer and more limpid and vibrant valency. A consciousness opens in our very flesh and marrow that enables us to pierce the veil of things and pass beyond and understand – see and experience – the why and the how and the whither of it all. It is a consciousness cosmic in its purview and disposition, which even like the Creator could contem­plate all and declare it all as good. Indeed, this is the Good which Art at its highest seeks to envisage and embody – the summum bonum that accompanies a summit consciousness. It is idle to say that all or most poets have this revelatory vision of the Seer – Rishi – but a poet is a poet in so far as he is capable of this vision; otherwise he remains more or less either a moralist or a mere æsthete.

Whatever is ugly and gross, all the ills and evils of life – that is to say, what appears as such to our external mind and senses – when they have passed through the crucible of the poet's consciousness undergoes a sea-change and puts on an otherworldly beauty and value. We know of the alchemy of poetic transformation that was so characteristic of Wordsworth's manner and to which the poet was never tired of referring, how the physical and brute nature – even a most insignificant and meaningless and unshapely object in it attains a spiritual sense and beauty when the poet takes it up and treasures it in his tranquil and luminous and in-gathered consciousness, his "inward eye". A crude feeling, a raw passion, a tumult of the senses, in the same way, sifted through the poetic perception, becomes something that opens magic casements, glimpses the silence of the farthest Hebrides, wafts us into the bliss of the invisible and the beyond.

The voice of Art is sweetly persuasive – kantasmmita, as the Sanskrit rhetoricians say-it is the voice of the beloved, not that of the school-master. The education of Poetry is like the education of Nature: the poet said of the child that “grew in sun and shower” –

And beauty born of murmuring sound

Shall pass into her face.

Even so the beauty of poetic creation, when we contemplate it

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and live in it, automatically and inevitably steals into our consciousness, works a subtle change in our nature and by elevating and refining it makes us, for the moment at least, less crude and obscure and earthy things that we usually are.

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Hamlet - A Crisis of The Evolving Soul

THE consciousness that rules over the tragedy of Hamlet, the destiny that works itself out in the play of the forces portrayed in that great drama, are the consciousness and the destiny of the human soul at a most fateful crisis, a crucial turning-point in the course of its evolution. The soul, lodged in the human embodiment, moves forward and upward, towards a greater and greater self-expression and self-expansion, a continual heightening and widening of its consciousness, a constant subli­mation and transfiguration of its mode of being and living. And in the progressive gradient so pursued, there are certain stages or level-crossings that can be clearly marked out in view of their importance and significance.

Shakespeare himself records, in two other of his major dramas, the mystery of two such stages preceding the one he deals with in Hamlet: one in Macbeth and the other in King Lear. Indeed these three mighty creations form a triology with the Karma of the human soul at different crises as its theme. King Lear represents human consciousness low down in the scale of evolution, almost at its start – a nature primitive and barbarian. We seem to go back into a prehistoric world, a paleolithic age – the domain of utter ignorance, of vulgar greed and hunger, where one sees the rank play of a raw and crude and aboriginal nature. Man is here simply the eater, a true brother of the rest of the animal kind, one in blood with the tiger and the wolf. He is the sheer biological or vital being – ­the Rakshasa – into whom the light of the Mind has not yet descended, at least not to the extent of effecting an appreciable change in his original and primitive texture. It is a world ruled by the mode of tamas. *

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*The angelic Cordelia is a ray that has strayed down from some higher region,

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In Macbeth we move up one step farther; human consciousness attains here a higher level. Something of the mental being enters into the purely vital creature: instead of the Eater, the man with the mere stomach, we have here the Ruler, the Tyrant, the human being with its will – and its arms that execute the will: the dominating motive is no longer hunger and greed and cruelty for cruelty's sake, but power and position and lordship, and the driving force, not blind passion and dark fury – sheer unconsciousness – but deliberate resolution, foreseeing calculation and steady purposiveness; the Rakshasa gives place to the Asura. The Asura is the incarnation of conscious egotism, the will to dominate, to be the sole master and monarch; he is the self-aggrandising ‘vaulting ambition’. He does not seek to possess things for their own sake, not so much to enjoy them as to hold them as symbols of his royalty, of his personal worth and majesty. In Macbeth we have the world of the Asura-a creation of the mode of rajas.

Hamlet is the third stage; it is a vision of sattva-guna and a creation attempted by that vision. The human consciousness that was imprisoned in the vital mind, is released here into the higher or pure mind. The soul escapes from its sheath of sheer hunger and desire and egoism and self-aggrandisement – yearns for light, more light. Lear is a dark mass of unconsciousness, crude and violent, even like the naked and raging elements into whose arms he is thrown; Macbeth is the beginning of consciousness in which one is conscious of one's own self alone, and keenly and deliberately attached to it, – here light has dawned, but a lurid light. Hamlet is consciousness that is seeking to transcend the barrier of the little self and its narrow and vulgar 'appetites and impulses. Man here comes into touch with something that is impersonal, other-regarding, afar; he has grown interests that are not merely mundane, utilitarian, pragmatic, self-centred, but abstract, metaphysical, beyond the individual's own and immediate concern: he has now ideals and aspirations – he is a seeker of the true, the

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to evolve hereafter, not for immediate fruition and fulfilment. It is the Light that shines always even in this naughty world, a spark of the Grace that still relieves the blight that mars an otherwise sinful earth. She is the symbol of a promise or prophecy that will justify itself sometime in the future, but for the moment the burden of the gloom is too much upon her and she is engulfed in it and sacrificed.

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good, the beautiful. He has been initiated into the divine – daiva – nature. Culture, refinement, sensibility, understanding – all the graces of a truly rational being make Hamlet the very flower of an evolving humanity.

Over against the personality of Hamlet stands another which represents false height, the wrong perfection, the counterfeit ideal. Polonius is humanity arrested in its path of straight development and deviated into a cut-de-sac of self-conceit and surface urbanity, apparent cleverness and success and pretentious and copy-book morality. When one has outgrown the barbarian, one runs the risk of becoming a snob or philistine. It is a side table-land, as it were, on mid-heights, the standard perhaps of a commoner humanity, but which the younger ideal has to transcend or avoid or even to destroy, so that it may find itself and live its own life. To the philistine too the mere bio­logical man is a taboo, but he seeks to confine human nature into a scheme of codes and maxims and lifeless injunctions and prohibitions. He is also the man of Reason but without the higher inflatus, the living and creative Something More – the poetry, the vision, the dream that would transfigure the merely pragmatic, practical, worldly wise – the bourgeois – into the princely aristocratic idealist, elevate the drab terre à terre To-day into the glory of a soaring To-morrow.

What is the crisis that confronts the ascending visionary soul? What is the obstacle that the Idealist has to face, the danger zone that he has to traverse in order to arrive at- the realisation of his ideal?

In Hamlet we have a dreamer, an ardent optimist, a young enthusiast who has lived so long in his own rosy world, in his tour d'ivoire, and thought that that was the only world, even the world as it is outside. Also in the simplicity of his faith he dedicated all his love and admiration, all his yearning for a sweet and glorious ideal, to a child of common humanity who appeared to him to be an emblem and promise of Realisation. Alas, the promise had not attained the strength and force that would lead inevitably to maturity and fruition, the child was yet too loyal to its origin to cut away from its moorings and soar with him.

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The crisis then is the revelation to the aspiring dream-lifted soul that the original and aboriginal humanity that seemed to have been traversed and transcended and left far behind is not wholly obliterated; indeed it is still there in its stark reality. The light and air and space and colour of the high dreamland are reared upon dark and dingy abysses, "this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire" is none other than" a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.”¹ All the wisdom and culture and virtue and apparent beauty in human nature cannot prevent a man from becoming an arrant knave and a woman from being a whore, even if she were one's own mother.

This disillusionment is the crisis at which the soul has arrived-this tearing down of the painted arras that hid the naked horror of man's beastly nature and the ugly vanity and stagy show that the world is. The revelation was so sudden and stunning to the innocent and aspiring soul that it lost for the moment all its bearings, its natural strength and capacity and will, and fell from its high status into the slough of dark and despondent impotency.

Another person – Laertes – placed in an analogous situation but not worried by the promptings of idealism and the sense of discrepancy between the ideal and the real, takes the world as it is, considers it all right and moves straight to his purpose; he is not a divided being, but in full and integral pos­session of himself and of his instruments of action-even though this solid pragmatism does not avail him much in the end.

The crisis in Hamlet reminds us of another somewhat similar one, that is the basis and starting-point of the great episode in the Mahabharata – the Gita. Arjuna, the ideal hero and man of action, in absolute self-confidence and certitude, with no doubt or hesitation about anything in the world, advances into the very thick of the bloody strife – and lo! all is changed as with a magic wand! What was to him a moment before a clear duty, an evident act of righteousness, the noblest of deeds, now appears nothing less than an inglorious slaughter. The bow of victory slips from the hand of the mighty warrior and, all nerve and tremor, he sinks down in gloom and dejection and complete confusion.

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¹Hamlet, Act II, Sc. 2.

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Arjuna tided over the crisis as he could avail himself of the knowledge of the way out and the necessary help that was given by the Divine Guide. Hamlet bears the full crash of doom upon his head and makes others also share its consequences with him. At one point, however, he seemed to make just a move towards the right solution of the difficulty. He finds that the avoidance of the Evil by self-destruction – which is a common and natural temptation in like situations-is no solution: it may lead you into a still greater evil. One has to face the evil, stand and fight it. Once this is decided, the right course for the hero (the Aryan fighter, as the Gita would say) would be to live

As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing;

A man that Fortune’s buffets and rewards

Has ta’en with equal thanks – ²

Hamlet thus seems to fall upon the teaching of samata – equanimity – with which the Gita begins Arjuna's initiation into the secret of Deliverance. He has had a glimpse of the divine portals from a distance; but he did not know how to proceed ­in the straight and narrow path; he is diverted into an Asuric handling of the forces of lower nature and is himself broken in the process.

A poignant vision or experience of evil in God's world which otherwise appears so work living in, the perception of the canker in the rose, has been the turning-point of many a destiny. It has been the occasion of the birth of saints and sages, souls that have traversed beyond and found the solution of the enigma. It has also hurled back into confusion and ruin souls that faced the Sphinx but could not answer her riddle – such, for example, as were Hamlet and Faust.

In these latter the human consciousness has reached its high water-mark of normal development. They are the finest expression of man’s capacities and powers in the ordinary nature. Here we have the play of the higher, even perhaps the highest ranges of the Mind – the mind, that is to say, of the poet and the philosopher. But here also stands revealed the counterfoil, the obverse of that high achievement – the feet

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²Hamlet, Act III, Sc. 2.

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of clay on which is reared the head of gold, the flesh that is tied irrevocably to the spirit.

The human soul, as represented in Hamlet, has evolved so far as to stand on a summit from where it can contemplate the entire creation. It has attained a kind of universal consciousness and has the vision of a global movement of nature – even as Arjuna had of the Lord's universal body, and like him is awed and overwhelmed – a harsh world, in which one draws one's breath in pain. But this is a mental summit, and the contradiction that is revealed here can be resolved only by passing beyond into a higher domain of consciousness.

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Modernist Poetry

A Modernist poet sings –

O bright Apollo

“Tin’ andra, tin' heroa, tina theon,"

What god, man or hero

Shall I place a tin wreath upon!

and a modernist critic acclaims it as a marvellous, aye, a stupendous piece of poetic art; it figures, according to him, the very body of the modern consciousness and resthesis. The modern consciousness, it is said, is marked with two characteristics: first, it is polyphonic, that is to say, it is not a simple and unilateral thing, but a composite consisting of many planes and strands, both horizontal and vertical. A modern con­sciousness is a section of world-consciousness extending in space as well as in time; there is, on one hand, the bringing together and intermingling of diverse and even disparate contemporary cultures, produced by free and easy and rapid communication between different parts of the world; on the other hand, there is the connection and communion with all the past civilisations brought about by modern scientific researches. A modern man, who is representative of the age, when he looks close into himself, would find in him a texture of consciousness, the warp of which is spread out from the culture of the Greenlander in the North Pole to that of the Polynesian near the South Pole as well as from the culture of the Anglo-Saxon in the far West to that of the Korean and Nipponese in the far East; and the woof consists of traditions and legends threading past the Egyptian, the Sumerian and Atlantean glyphs and runes, and forward to present-day

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ideologies – totalitarianism and proletarianism or others like and unlike.

A modern artist when he creates, as he cannot but create himself, will have to embrace and express something of this peculiar cosmopolitanism or universalism of today. When Ezra bursts into a Greek hypostrophe or Eliot chants out a Vedic mantra in the very middle of King's English, we have before us the natural and inevitable expression of a fact in our consciousness. Even so, if we are allowed the liberty of comparing the flippant with the serious, even so, a fact of Anglo-vernacular consciousness was given graphic expression in the well-known lines of the famous Bengali poet and dramatist, D. L. Roy, ending in

Amara (we) ...

A queer amalgam of Sasadhar,*

Huxley and goose.

Indeed it has been pointed out that the second great characteristic of modern art is the curious and wondrous amalgam in it of the highly serious and the keenly comic. It is not, however, the Shakespearean manner; for in that old-world poet, the two are merely juxtaposed, but they remain separate; very often they form an ill-assorted couple. At best, it is a mechanical mixture – the æsthetic taste of each remains distinct, although they are dosed together. In a modern poet, in Pound, or to a greater degree, in Eliot, the tragic and the comic, the serious and the flippant, the climax and the bathos are blended together, chemically fused, as part and parcel of a single whole. Take, for example, the lines from Ezra Pound quoted above, the obvious pun (Greek tin' or tina, meaning "some one" and English "tin"), the cheap claptrap, it may be explained, is intentional: the trick is meant to bring out a sense of lightness and even levity in the very heart of seriousness and solemnity. The days of Arnold's high seriousness, of grand style pure and severe, are gone. Today the high lights are no longer set on a high pedestal away and aloof, they are brought down and immixed with the low lights and often the two are indistin­guishable from each other. The grand style rides always on the

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*Old style orthodox Pandit.

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crest of the waves, the ballad style glides in the trough; but the modern style has one foot on either and attempts to make that gait the natural and normal manner of the consciousness and poetic movement. Here, for example, is something in that manner as Eliot may be supposed to illustrate:

At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives

Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,

The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights

Her stove, and lays out food in tins.¹

Well, the question is, has it succeeded? For here, as in every­thing else, nothing succeeds like success. Any theory may be as good as any other, but its test is only in the fait accompli. Neither Pound nor Eliot has that touch of finality and certainty, the definitiveness and authenticity beyond doubt, the Q.E.D. that a major and supreme creator imposes.

Bottrall, a modernist poet himself, says in effect the same thing. His poetic credo runs in this wise:

Nightingales, Anangke, a sunset or the meanest flower

Were formerly the potentiates of poetry,

But now what have they to do with one another

With Dionysus or with me?

Microscopic anatomy of ephemerides,

Power-house stacks, girder-ribs, provide a crude base;

But man is what he eats, and they are not bred

Flesh of our flesh, being unrelated

Experientially, fused in no emotive furnace.²

What Bottrall means is this in plain language: we reject the old-world myths and metaphors, figures and legends, wornout ornaments – moon and star and flower and colour and music – we must have a new set of symbols commensurate with our present-day mentality and environment – stone and steel and teas and talkies; yes, we must go in for new and modern terms, we have certainly to find out a menu appropriate to

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¹ The Waste Land ²The Thyrsus Retipped

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our own æsthetic taste, but, Bottrall warns, and very wisely, that we must first be sure of digesting whatever we choose to eat. In other words, a new poetic mythology is justified only when it is made part and parcel, flesh and blood and bone and marrow, of the poetic consciousness. Bottrall’s epigram "A man is what he eats" can be accepted without demur; only it must also be pointed out that things depend upon how one eats (eating well and digesting thoroughly) as much as what one eats – bread or manna or air and .fire and light.

The modernist may chew well, but, I, am afraid, he feeds upon the husk, the chaff, the offal. Not that these things too cannot be incorporated in the poetic scheme; the spirit of poetry is catholic enough and does not disdain them, but can transfigure them into things of eternal beauty. Still how to characterise an inspiration that is wholly or even largely pre-occupied with such objects? Is it not sure evidence that the inspiration is a low and slow flame and does not possess the transfiguring white heat? Bottrall's own lines do not seem to have that quality, it is merely a lesson – a rhetorical lesson, at best – in poetics.

A poet – a true poet – does not compose to exemplify a theory; he creates out of the fullness of an inner experience. It may be very true that the modern poetic spirit is seeking a new path, a new organisation, a "new order", as it were, in the poetic realm: the past forms and formulae do not encompass or satisfy its present inner urge. But solution of the problem does not lie in a sort of mechanical fabrication of novelties. A new creation is new, that is to say, fresh and living, not because of skilful manipulation of externals, but because of a new, a fresh and living inspiration. The fountain has to be dug deep and the revivifying waters released.

It is a simple truth that we state and it is precisely this that we have missed in the present age. Chaucer created a new poetic world, Shakespeare created another, Milton yet a third, the Romantics – Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and Byron – each of them has a whole world to his credit. But this they achieved, not because of any theory they held or did not hold, but because each of them delved deep and struck open an unfathomed and unspoilt Pierian spring. And this is how it should be. In this age, even in this age of modernism, a few

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poets have actually shown how or what that can be, – a Tagore, a Yeats or A.E., by the bulk of their work, others of lesser envergure, in brief scattered strophes and stanzas - such lines, for example, from Eliot

Who are those hooded hordes swarming

Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth

Ringed by the flat horizon –

or such other out of even Cecil Day .Lewis:

My lover of flesh is wild,

And willing to kiss again;

She is the potency of earth

When woods exhale the rain.

My lover of air, like Artemis

Spectrally embraced,

Shuns the daylight that twists her smile

To mineral distaste.

In general, however, and as we come down to more and more recent times we find we have missed the track. As in the material field today, we seek to create and achieve by science and organisation, by a Teutonic regimentation, as in the moral life we try to save our souls by attending to rules and regula­tions, codes and codicils of conduct, even so a like habit and practice we have brought over into our æsthetic world. But we must remember that Napoleon became the invincible military genius he was, not because he followed the art of war in accordance with laws and canons set down by military experts; neither did Buddha become the Enlightened because of his scrupulous adherence to the edicts which Asoka engraved centuries later on rocks and pillars, nor was Jesus the Christ because of his being an exemplar of the Sermon on the Mount.

The truth of the matter is that the spirit bloweth where it listeth. It is the soul's realisation and dynamic perception that expresses itself inevitably in a living and authentic manner in all that the soul creates. Let the modernist possess a soul, let it find out its own inmost being and he will have all the newness

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and novelty that he needs and seeks. If the soul-consciousness is burdened with a special and unique vision, it will find its play in the most categorically imperative manner.

What the modernist usually expresses is his brain or a part of it, his small vital desires and velleities, his sensational re­actions or some sections of these. He can do that certainly, but he can do that well only when he has reached and touched the soul that is behind them: for once this is found, those become vehicles and instruments, echoes and sparks, symbols and signatures of that one thing needful.

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Tagore - Poet and Seer

A GREAT literature seems to have almost invariably a great name attached to it, one name by which it is known and recognised as great. It is the name of the man who releases the inmost potency of that literature, and who marks at the same time the height to which its creative genius has attained or perhaps can ever attain. Homer and Virgil, Dante and Shakespeare, Goethe and Camoens, Firdausi in Persian and Kalidasa in classical Sanskrit, are such names – numina, each being the presiding deity, the godhead born full-armed out of the poetic consciousness of the race to which he belongs. Even in the case of France whose language and literature are more a democratic and collective and less an individualistic creation, even there one single Name can be pointed out as the life and soul, the very cream of the characteristic poetic genius of the nation. I am, of course, referring to Racine, Racine who, in spite of Moliere and Corneille and Hugo, stands as the most representative French poet, the embodiment of French resthesis par excellence.

Such a great name is Rabindranath Tagore in Bengali literature. We need not forget Bankim Chandra, nor even Madhusudan: still one can safely declare that if Bengali language and literature belonged to any single person as its supreme liberator and fosterer savita and pusa – it is Rabindra­nath. It was he who lifted that language and literature from what had been after all a provincial and parochial status into the domain of the international and universal. Through him a thing of local value was metamorphosed definitively into a thing of world value.

The miracle that Tagore has done is this: he has brought out the very soul of the race –its soul of lyric fervour and

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grace, of intuitive luminosity and poignant sensibility, of beauty and harmony and delicacy. It is this that he has made living and vibrant, raised almost to the highest pitch and amplitude in various modes in the utterance of his nation. What he always expresses, in all his creations, is one aspect or another, a rhythm or a note of the soul movement. It is always a cry of the soul, a profound experience in the inner heart that wells out in the multifarious cadences of his poems. It is the same motif that finds a local habitation and a name in his short stories, perfect gems, masterpieces among world's masterpieces of art. In his dramas and novels it is the same element that has found a wider canvas for a more detailed and graphic notation of its play and movement. I would even include his essays (and certainly his memoirs) within the sweep of the same master-note. An essay by Rabindranath is as characteristic of the poet as any lyric poem of his. This is not to say that the essays are devoid of a solid intellectual content, a close-knit logical argument, an acute and penetrating thought movement, nor is it that his novels or dramas are mere lyrics drawn out arid thinned, lacking in the essential elements of a plot and action and character. What I mean is that over and above these factors which Tagore’s art possesses to a considerable degree, there is an imponderable element, a flavour, a breath from elsewhere that suffuses the entire creation, something that can be characterised only as the soul­-element. It is this presence that makes whatever the poet touches not only living and graceful but instinct with some­thing that belongs to the world of gods, something celestial and divine, something that meets and satisfies man's deepest longing and aspiration.

I have been laying special stress upon this aspect of Tag ore's genius, because humanity is in great need of it 'today, because all has gone wrong with the modern world since it lost touch with its soul and was beguiled into a path lighted by false glimmers and will-o'-the-wisps, hires of a superficial and infra-human consciousness, or into the by-ways and backwashes and aberrations of a sophisticated intellectualism.

Tagore is modern, as modern as reasonably and sensibly one can be; he is a modern, but not a modernist. One is modern when one is inspired and moved by the spirit of the Time, one

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is modernist when one is bound to the letter, to the external formulas of the law of the Zeit-Geist. You remain modern if the new consciousness enters and dwells in your nature and character, you become modernist as soon as it degenerates into a tic and a mannerism.

The passage of mediaevalism to modernism can be defined as the passage from the local and parochial to the general and universal. The mediaeval consciousness is a segmented or linear consciousness: it is the view, at a time, from one particular angle of vision. The modern consciousness, on the other hand, is or tends to be a global view-point, a circular consciousness. The unilateral mentality proper to mediaevalism may be deep and penetrating and far-reaching, extending to the hidden and high realities, even to the highest and the most secret – to God and Soul and Immortality; it would still be a one-sided vision and achievement. It is the characteristic function of-the modern consciousness to survey things not from a single point of view, but from all points of view, even the most disparate and incommensurable. The relativity of all experiences – not necessarily their illusoriness – is the great modern discovery; it is the parent of modern (scientific) scepticism and agnosti­cism; it is also the basis of a large, a global synthesis, which was never possible till now and which is the promise of to-morrow.

Modernism implies a natural broadening of the mind and life, a greater capacity to understand and endorse and ap­preciate divergent and even contrary and contradictory ex­periences and stand-points. Thus, brotherhood to the mediaeval man meant bringing together mankind under the dominion of one cult or creed – it is the extension of a tribal feeling. Brotherhood in a modern consciousness would mean an inner union and commensurability that can subsist even in the midst of a great diversity of taste and feeling and experience.

Tagore is modern in respect of all these higher aptitudes that man has gained today. He has the brilliance and curiosity of an alert and strong intelligence, the refined sensibility of a pagan and scientific intellect, he has an infinite sense of irony and humour and, above all, he has that in him, – a genial plasticity and sympathy and a warm sense of “wide com­monalty”, – which makes him easily a citizen of the world, feeling absolutely at home all over the world.

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The breath of modernism that Tagore has brought into the life and letters of the Bengali race is, I repeat, suffused with a soul-feeling – a sense of refinement and dignity, wideness and catholicity and urbanity in the inner make-up of life-attitude and consciousness, a feeling that one no longer lives in his village, confined to its insular limits, but that one lives a life coterminous with human life at large and at its best; one is cosmopolitan in the noblest sense of the word and one has to move and act and speak in a manner becoming such a position. A high sense of all the aristocratic virtues, plus a certain sun­shine of wit and playful intelligence that prevents the serious and the lofty from becoming grim and Dantesque are part of the gifts that Tagore has brought us and made a living element of our literary and even social character.

Tagore is modern, because his modernism is based upon a truth not local and temporal, but eternal and universal, some­thing that is the very bed-rock of human culture and civilisa­tion. Indeed, Tagore is also ancient, as ancient as the Upani­shads. The great truths, the basic realities experienced and formulated by the ancients ring clear and distinct in the core of all his artistic creation. Tagore's intellectual make-up may be as rationalistic and scientific as that of any typical modern man. Nor does he discard the good things (preya) that earth and life offer to man for his banquet; and he does not say like the bare ascetic: anyā vāco vimuncatha, "abandon every­thing else". But even like one of the Upanishadic Rishis, the great Yajnavalkya, he would possess and enjoy his share of terrestrial as well as of spiritual wealth – ubhayameva. In a world of modernism, although he acknowledges and appre­ciates mental and vital and physical values, he does not give them the place demanded for them. He has never forgotten the one thing needful. He has not lost the moorings of the soul. He has continued to nestle close to the eternal verities that sustain earth and creation and give a high value and purpose to man's life and creative activity.

In these iconoclastic times, we are liable, both in art and in life, to despise and even to deny certain basic factors which were held to be almost indispensable in the old world. The great triads – the True, the Beautiful and the Good, or God, Soul and Immortality – are of no consequence to a modernist

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mind: these mighty words evoke no echo in the heart of a contemporary human being. Art and Life meant in the old world something decent, if not great. They were perhaps, as I have already said, framed within narrow limits, certain rigid principles that cribbed and cabined the human spirit in many ways; but they were not anarchic, they obeyed a law, a dharma, which they considered as an ideal, a standard to look up to and even live up to. The modernist is an anarchic being in all ways. He does not care for old-world verities which seem to him mere convention or superstition. Truth and Beauty and Harmony are non-existent for him: if at all they exist they bear a totally different connotation, the very opposite of that which is normally accepted.

The modernist does not ask: is it good? is it beautiful? He asks: is it effective? is it expressive? And by effectivity and ex­pressiveness he means something nervous and physical. Ex­pressiveness to him would mean the capacity to tear off the. veil over what once was considered not worth the while or decent to uncover. A strange recklessness and shamelessness, an unhealthy and perverse curiosity, characteristic of the Asura and the Pisacha, of the beings of the underworld, mark the movement of the modernist. But I forget. The Modernist is not always an anarchist, for he too seeks to establish a New Order; indeed he arrogates to himself that mission and de­clares it to be his and his alone. Obviously it is not the order of the higher gods of Olympus: these have been ousted and dethroned. We are being led back to the mysteries of an earlier race, reverting to an infra-evolutionary status, into the arcana of Thor and Odin, godlings of an elemental Nature.

In such a world Tagore is a voice and a beacon from over the heights of the old world declaring and revealing the verities that are eternal and never die. They who seek to kill them do so at their peril. Tagore is a great poet: as such he is close to the heart of Bengal. He is a great Seer: as such humanity will claim him as its own.

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The March of Civilisation

The March of Civilisation

        WE are familiar with the phrase "Augustan Age": it is in reference to a particular period in a nation's history when its creative power is at its highest both in respect of quantity and quality, especially in the domain of art and literature, for it is here that the soul of a people finds expression most easily and spontaneously. Indeed, if we look at the panorama that the course of human evolution unfolds, we see epochs of high light in various countries spread out as towering beacons or soaring peaks bathed in sunlight dominating the flat plains or darksome valleys of the usual normal periods. Take the Augustan Age itself which has given the name: it is a very crucial and one of the earlier outflowerings of the human genius on a considerable scale. We know of the appearance of individuals on the stage of life each with a special mission and role in various ages and various countries. They are great men of action, great men of thought, creative artists or spiritual and religious teachers. In India we call them Vibhutis (we can include the Avataras – Divine Incarnations – also in the category). Even so, there is a collective manifestation too, an upsurge in which a whole race or nation takes part and is carried and raised to a higher level of living and achievement. There is a tide in the affairs not only of men, but of peoples also: and masses, large collectivities live on the crest of their consciousness, feeling and thinking deeply and nobly, acting and creating powerfully, with breadth of vision and intensity of aspiration, spreading all around something that is new and not too common, a happy guest come from elsewhere.

        Ancient Greece, the fountainhead of European civilisation – of the world culture reigning today, one can almost say –

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found itself epitomised in the Periclean Age. The light – grace, harmony, sweet reasonableness – that was Greece, reached its highest and largest, its most characteristic growth in that period. Earlier, at the very beginning of her life cycle, there came indeed Homer and no later creation reached a higher or even as high a status of creative power: but it was a solitary peak, it was perhaps an announcement, not the realisation of the national glory. Pericles stood as the guardian, the representative, the emblem and nucleus of a nation-wide efflorescence. Not to speak of the great names associated with the age, even the common people – more than what was normally so characteristic of Greece – felt the tide that was moving high and shared in that elevated sweep of life, of thought and creative activity. Greece withdrew. The stage was made clear for Rome. Julius Caesar carried the Roman genius to its sublimest summit: but it remained for his great nephew to consolidate and give expression to that genius in its most characteristic manner and lent his name to a characteristic high-water mark of human civilisation.

        Greece and Rome may be taken to represent two types of culture. And accordingly we can distinguish two types of elevation or crest-formation of human consciousness – one of light, the other of power. In certain movements one feels the intrusion, the expression of light, that is to say, the play of intelligence, understanding, knowledge, a fresh outlook and consideration of the world and things, a revaluation in other terms and categories of a new consciousness. The greatest, at least, the most representative movement of this kind is that of the Renaissance. It was really a New Illumination: a flood of light poured upon the mind and intellect and understanding of the period. There was a brightness, a brilliance, a happy agility and keenness in the movements of the brain. A largeness of vision, a curious sensibility, a wide and alert consciousness: these are some of the fundamental characteristics of this remarkable New Birth. It is the birth of what has been known as the scientific outlook, in the- broadest sense: it is the threshold of the modern epoch of humanity. All the modern European languages leaped into maturity, as it were, each attaining its definitive form and full-blooded individuality. Art and liter­ature flooded in their magnificent creativeness all nations

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and peoples of the whole continent. The Romantic Revival, starting somewhere about the beginning of the nineteenth century, is another outstanding example of a similar phenomenon, of the descent of light into human consciousness. The light that descended into human consciousness at the time of the Renaissance captured the higher mind and intelligence – the Ray touched as it were the frontal lobe of the brain; the later descent touched the heart, the feelings and emotive sensibility, it evoked more vibrant, living and powerful perceptions, created varied and dynamic sense-complexes, new idealisms and aspirations. The manifestation of Power, the descent or inrush of force – mighty and terrible – has been well recognised and experienced in the great French Revolution. A violence came out from somewhere and seized man and society: man was thrown out of his gear, society broken to pieces. There came a change in the very character and even nature of man: and society had to be built upon other foundations. The past was gone. Divasa gatah Something very similar has happened again more recently, in Russia. The French Revolution brought in the bourgeois culture, the Russian Revolution has rung in the Proletariate.

        In modern India, the movement that led her up to Independence was at a crucial moment a mighty evocation of both Light and Power. It had not perhaps initially the magnitude, the manifest scope or scale of either the Renaissance or the Great Revolutions we mention. But it carried a deeper import, its echo far-reaching into the future of humanity. For it meant nothing less than the spiritual awakening of India and therefore the spiritual regeneration of the whole world: it is the harbinger of the new epoch in human civilisation.

        These larger human movements are in a sense anonymous. They are not essentially the creation of a single man as are some of the well-known religious movements. They throw up great aspiring souls, strong men of action, indeed, but as part of themselves, in their various aspects, facets, centres of expression, lines of expansion. An Augustus, a Pericles, a Leo X, a Louis XIV, or a Vikramaditya are not more than nuclei, as I have already said, centres of reference round which their respective epoch crystallises as a peak culture unit. They are not creators or originators; they are rather organisers.

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A Buddha, a Christ or a Mohammed or even a Napoleon or Caesar or Alexander are truly creators: they bring with them something – some truth, some dynamic revelation – that was not there before. They realise and embody each a particular principle of being, a unique mode of consciousness – a new gift to earth and mankind. Movements truly anonymous, however, have no single nucleus or centre of reference: they are multi-nuclear. The names that adorn the Renaissance are many, it had no single head; the men through whom the great French Revolution unrolled itself were many in number, that is to say, the chiefs, who represented each a face or phase of the surging movement.

        The cosmic spirit works itself out in the world and in human affairs in either of these forms: (1) as embodied in a single personality and (2) as an impersonal movement, sometimes through many personalities, sometimes through a few out­standing personalities and sometimes even quite anonymously as a mass movement. Either mode has each its own special purpose, its function in the cosmic labour, its contribution to the growth and unfoldment of the human consciousness upon earth as a whole. Generally, we may say, when it is an intensive work, when it is a new truth that has to be disclosed and set in man's heart and consciousness, then the individual is called up and undertakes the work: when, however, the truth already somehow found or near at hand is to be spread wide and made familiar to men and established upon earth, then the larger anonymous movements are born and have sway.

        Indeed, these movements, the appearance of great souls upon earth and the manifestation of larger collective surges in human society, are not isolated happenings, having no reference or point of contact with one another. On the con­trary, they are two limbs of a global evolutionary process. In and through them across countries and centuries the spirit of humanity moves towards greater and greater fulfilment. Evolution means the growth of consciousness. In man in his collective existence the growth continues: it lies in two directions. First of all, in extension. A sufficiently large physical body is needed to house the growing life and consciousness: therefore the unicellular organism has developed into the multicellular. In the same way, in the earliest stages of human

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society, the light and power of consciousness, characteristic of that age, found expression among a few only: it was the age of representative individuals, leaders – Rishi, Magi, Patriarch, Judge, King. Next a stage came when the cultural consciousness widened and, instead of scattered individuals or some families, we have a large group, a whole class or section of society who become the guardian of the light: thus arose the Brahmin, the élite, the cultured class, the aristocracy of talents. The light and culture filters down further and embraces larger masses of people who take living interest and share in the creative activities of man, in the higher pre­occupations of mind and thought; this is the age of enlightened bourgeoisie. In comparatively recent times what is familiarly known as the "middle class" was the repository and purveyor of human culture.

        The light sinks further down and extends still more its scope seeking to penetrate and encircle the whole of humanity. The general mass of mankind, the lowest strata of society have to be taken in, elevated and illumined. That must be the natural and inevitable consummation of all progress and evolution. And that is the secret sense and justification of the Proletarian Revolution of today. Although, the many names and forms given to it by its violent partisans do not bring out or sufficiently honour the soul and spirit that informs it.

        This then is the pattern of cultural development as it pro­ceeds in extension and largeness. It moves in ever widening concentric circles. Individuals, small centres few and far between, then larger groups and sections, finally vast masses are touched and moved (and will be moulded one day) by the infiltrating light. That is how in modern times all movements are practically world-wide, encompassing all nations and peoples: there seems to be nothing left that is merely local or parochial. It is a single wave, as it were, that heaves up the whole of humanity. Political, social, economic and even spiritual movements, although not exactly of the same type or pattern, all are interrelated, interlocked, inspired by a common breath and move from one end of the earth to the other. They seem to be but modulations of the same world-theme. A pulse-beat in Korea or Japan is felt across the Pacific in America and across that continent, traversing again,

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the Atlantic it reaches England, sways the old continent in its turn and once more leaps forward through the Asiatic vastnesses back again to its place of origin. The wheel comes indeed full circle: it is one movement girdling the earth. What one thinks or acts in one corner of the globe is thought, and acted simultaneously by others at the farthest corner. Very evidently it is the age of radiography and electronics.

        In the early stages of humanity its history consists of the isolated histories of various peoples and lands: intercommunication was difficult, therefore all communion was of the nature of infiltration and indirect influence. The difference between countries far distant from each other were well marked and very considerable in respect of their cultures and civilisations. To put it in a somewhat scholarly yet graphic manner, we can say, the isometric chart of the tides of civilisation in various countries over the globe in those days presents a very unequal and tortuous figure. On the other hand, a graph depicting the situation in modern times would be formed by lines that are more even, uniform and straight. In other words, the world has become one, homogeneous: a consciousness has grown same or similar on the whole in outlook and life-impulse embracing all peoples and races in a tight embrace. The benefit of the descending or manifesting Light is now open equally and freely to each and every member of the human kind.

        Not only in extension but the growth or evolution has progressed in another direction. There has not only been a quantitative but also a qualitative development. Culture movements have grown in intent, in depth or elevation, in the meaning and significance of the consciousness involved. And they have converged towards a single aim and purpose. That purpose is not only the establishment of the global consciousness, but the expression and embodiment of the highest, the supreme consciousness. The process here too, as in the domain of extension, is one of graduation, advance by stages. The light, the light of awakening consciousness first touches the more easily accessible parts of human nature, the higher domains that are not too much involved in the gross material or animal nature. It is the realm of thoughts and ideas, of idealism, imagination and aspiration: it is man's mind, which

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is the least heavily weighted or ballasted by a downward gravitational pull and the most buoyant and supple – the Ariel in him. It is his head that first receives the glow of the morning sun.

        If we look at Europe once again and cast a glance at its origins, we find at the source the Græco-Roman culture. It was pre-eminently a culture based upon the powers of mind and reason: it included a strong and balanced body (both body natural and body politic) under the aegis of mens sana (a sound mind). The light that was Greece was at its zenith a power of the higher mind and intelligence, intuitively dyna­mic in one – the earlier –phase through Plato, Pythagoras, Heraclitus and the mystic philosophers, and discursively and scientifically rational through the Aristotelian tradition. The practical and robust Roman did not indulge in the loftier and subtler activities of the higher or intuitive mind; his was applied intelligence and its characteristic turn found expres­sion in law and order and governance. Virgil was a representa­tive poet of the race; finely sensitive and yet very self-conscious – earth-bound and mind-bound – as a creative artist: a clear and careful intelligence with an idealistic imagination that is yet sober and fancy-free is the very hall mark of his poetic genius. In the post-Roman age this bias for mental con­sciousness or the play of reason and intellectual understand­ing moved towards the superficial and more formal faculties of the brain ending in what is called scholasticism: it meant stagnation and decadence. It is out of this slough that the Renaissance raised the mind of Europe and bathed it with a new light. That movement gave to the mind a wider scope, an alert curiosity, a keener understanding; it is, as I have said, the beginning of that modern mentality which is known as the scientific outlook, that is to say, study of facts and induction from given data, observation and experience and experiment instead of the other scholastic standpoint which goes by a priori theorising and abstraction and deduction and dog­matism.

        We may follow a little more closely the march of the centuries in their undulating movement. The creative intelligence of the Renaissance too belonged to a region of the higher mind, a kind of inspirational mind. It had not the altitude or even the

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depth of the Greek mind nor its subtler resonances : but it regained and re-established and carried to a new degree the spirit of inquiry and curiosity, an appreciation of human motives and preoccupations, a rational understanding of man and the mechanism of the world. The original intuitive fiat, the imaginative brilliance, the spirit of adventure (in the mental as well as the physical world) that inspired the epoch gradually dwindled: it gave place to an age of consolidation, organisation, stabilisation – the classical age. The seventeenth century Europe marked another peak of Europe's civilisation. That is the Augustan Age to which we have referred. The following century marked a further decline of the Intuition and higher imagination and we come to the eighteenth century terre è terre rationalism. Great figures still adorned that age­ – stalwarts that either stuck to the prevailing norm and gave it a kind of stagnant nobility or already leaned towards the new light that was dawning once more. Pope and Johnson, Montes-­quieu and Voltaire are its high-lights. The nineteenth century brought in another crest wave with a special gift to mankind; apparently it was a reaction to the rigid classicism and dry rationalism of the preceding age, but it came burdened with a more positive mission. Its magic name was Romanticism. Man opened his heart, his higher feeling and nobler emo­tional surge, his subtler sensibility and a general sweep of his vital being to the truths and realities of his own nature and of the cosmic nature. Not the clear white and transparent almost glaring light of reason and logic, of the brain mind, but the rosy or rainbow tint of the emotive and aspiring personality that seeks in and through the cosmic panorama and dreams of

A light that was ne'er on sea or land. . .

A glory that hath passed away from earth.

        The Romantic Revival was a veritable source movement: it was, one can say, a kind of watershed from where various streams of new creation and fresh adventure flowed down in all directions. Its echoes and repurcussions are met with even today and continue. The next stage that followed naturally and inevitably was man's preoccupation with his sense being,

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his external, his physical and material personality. It is the age of Naturalism, Realism, Pragmatism, Scientism: it proclaims the birth of the economic man. From the heart and emotions we drop down into the field of the nervous and sensuous existence, from the vital sphere into the sphere of the body. And that is where we are today. It means that we have been made mare than ever self-conscious on this plane and of this personality of ours. We have been given and are being given greater knowledge of its mechanism; we are intensively (and extensively too) getting familiar with all the drawbacks and lacunae that are there so that we can remedy them – and discover new latent forces too, – and re-create and possess a truly "brave new world".

        That is how the spirit of progress and evolution has worked and advanced in the European world. And one can take it as the pattern of human growth generally; but in the scheme described above we have left out one particular phase and purposely. I refer to the great event of Christ and Christianity. For without that European civilisation loses more than half of its import and value. After the Roman Decline began the ebbtide, the trough, the dark shadow of the deepening abyss of the Middle Ages. But even as the Night fell and darkness closed around, a new light glimmered, a star was born. A hope and a help shone "in a naughty world". It was a ray of consciousness that came from a secret cave, from a domain hidden behind and deep within in the human being. Christ brought a leaven into the normal manifest mode of consciousness, an other­worldly mode into the worldly life. He established a living and dynamic contact with the soul, the inner person in man, the person that is behind but still rules the external personality made of mind and life and body consciousness. The Christ revelation was also characteristic in the sense that it came as a large, almost a mass movement – this approach of the soul personality to earthly life. The movement faded or got adulterated, deformed like all human things; but something remained as a permanent possession of man's heritage.

        This episode links up with the inner story of mankind, its spiritual history. The growing or evolving consciousness of man was not only an outgoing and widening movement: it was also a heightening, an ascent into ranges that are not normally

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perceived, towards summits of our true reality. We have spoken of the Græco-Roman culture as the source and foundation of European civilisation; but apart from that there was a secret vein of life that truly vivified it, led it by an occult but constant influence along channels and achievements that are meant to serve the final goal and purpose. The Mysteries prevalent and practised in Greece itself and Crete and the occult rites of Egyptian priests, the tradition of a secret knowledge and discipline found in the Kabbalah, the legendary worship of gods and goddesses – sometimes confused, sometimes identi­fied with Nature forces – all point to the existence of a line of culture which is known in India as Yoga. If all other culture means knowledge, Yoga is the knowledge of knowledge. As the Upanishad says, there are two categories of knowledge, the superior and-the inferior. The development of the mind and life and body belongs to the domain of Inferior Knowledge: the development of the soul, the discovery of the Spirit means the Superior Knowledge.

        This knowledge remained at the outset scattered, hidden, confined to a few, a company of adepts: it had almost no direct contact with the main current of life. Its religious aspect too was so altered and popularised as to represent and serve the secular life. The systematisation and propagation of that knowledge – at least the aspiration for that knowledge – was attempted on an effective scale in the Hebrew Old Testament. But then a good amount of externalities, of the Inferior Knowledge was mixed up with the inner urge and the soul perception. The Christ with his New Testament came precisely with the mission of cleaning the Augean stables, in place of the dross and coverings, the false and deformed godheads, to instal something of the purest ray of the inner consciousness, the unalloyed urge of the soul, the demand of our spiritual perso­nality. The Church sought to build up society on that basis, attempting a fusion of the spiritual and the temporal power, so that instead of a profane secular world, a mundane or worldly world, there maybe established God's own world, the City of God.

        The drive towards the building of Heaven upon earth and with earth, the materialisation of the Spirit on a cosmic scale, the remodelling of the whole human society in spiritual terms

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was the secret inspiring the other Semitic Revelation, that of Mohammed. The Arab Master sought to bring down and establish and express in life-force what the Rabi of Bethlehem saw and felt in the inner heart--one was a lover, the other a servant warrior of God.

        Turning to India we find a fuller and completer – if not a global-picture of the whole movement. India, we may say, is the spiritual world itself: and she epitomised the curve of human progress in a clearer and more significant manner. Indian history, not its political but its cultural and spiritual history, divides itself naturally into great movements with corresponding epochs each dwelling upon and dealing with one domain in the hierarchy of man's consciousness. The stages and epochs are well known: they are – (l) Vedic, (2) Upanishadic, (3) Darshanas – roughly from Buddha to Shankara, (4) Puranic, (5) Bhagavata or the Age of Bhakti, and finally (6) the Tantric. The last does not mean that it is the latest revelation, the nearest to us in time, but that it represents a kind of complementary movement, it was there all along, for long at least, and in which the others find their fruition and consummation. We shall explain presently. The force of consciousness that came and moved and moulded the first and the earliest epoch was Revelation. It was a power of direct vision and occult will and cosmic perception. Its physical seat is somewhere behind and or just beyond the crown of the head: the peak of man's manifest being that received the first touch of Surya Savitri (the supreme Creative Consciousness) to whom it bowed down uttering the invocation mantra of Gayatri. The Ray then entered the head at the crown and illumined it: the force of consciousness that ruled there is Intuition, the immediate perception of truth and reality, the cosmic consciousness gathered and concentrated at that peak. That is Upanishadic knowledge. If the source and foundation of the Vedic initiation was occult vision, the Upanishad meant a pure and direct Ideation. The next stage in the coming down or propagation of the Light was when it reached further down into the brain and the philosophical outlook grew with rational understanding and discursive argumentation as the channel for expression, the power to be cultivated and the limb to be developed. The Age of the Darshanas or Systems

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of Philosophy started with the Buddha and continued till it reached its peak in Shankaracharya. The age sought to give a bright and strong mental, even an intellectual body to the spiritual light, the consciousness of the highest truth and reality. In the Puranic Age the vital being was touched by the light of the spirit and principally on the highest, the mental level of that domain. It meant the advent of the element of feeling and emotiveness and imagination into the play of the Light, the beginning of their reclamation. This was rendered more concrete and more vibrant and intense in the next stage of the movement. The whole emotional being was taken up into the travailing crucible of consciousness. We may name it also as the age of the Bhagavatas, god-lovers, Bhaktas. It reached its climax in Chaitanya whose physical passion for God denoted that the lower ranges of the vital being (its physical foundations) were now stirred in man to awake and to receive the Light. Finally remains the physical, the most material to be worked upon and made conscious and illumined. That was the task of the Tantras. Viewed in that light one can easily under­stand why especial stress was laid. in that system upon the esoteric discipline of the five m's (pancha makāra), all preoccupied with the handling and harnessing of the grossest physical instincts and the most material instruments. The Tantric discipline bases itself upon Nature Power coiled up in Matter: the release of that all-conquering force through a purification and opening into the consciousness of the Divine Mother, the transcendent creatrix of the universe. The dynamic materialis­ing aspect of consciousness was what inspired the Tantras: the others forming the Vedantic line, on the whole, were based on the primacy of the static being, the Purusha, aloof and withdrawing.

        The Indian consciousness, we say, presented the movement as an intensive and inner, a spiritual process: it dealt with the substance itself, man's very nature and sought to know it from within and shape it consciously. In Europe where the frontal consciousness is more stressed and valued, the more charac­teristic feature of its history is the unfoldment and meta­morphosis of the forms and expressions, the residuary powers, as it -were, of man's evolving personality, individual and social.

        To sum up then. Man progresses through cycles of crest

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movements. They mark an ever-widening circle of the descent of Light, the growth of consciousness. Thus there is at first a small circle of elite, a few chosen people at the top, then gradually the limited aristocracy is widened out into a larger and larger democracy. One may describe the phenomenon in the Indian terms of the Four Orders. In the beginning there is the Brahminic culture, culture confined only to the highest and the fewest possible select representatives. Then came the wave of Kshatriya culture which found a broader scope among a larger community. In India, after the age of the Veda and the Upanishad, came the age of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata which was pre-eminently an age of Kshatriya­-hood. In Europe too it was the bards and minstrels, sages and soothsayers who originally created, preserved and propagated the cultural movement: next came the epoch of the Arthurian legends, the age of chivalry, of knights and templars with their heroic code of conduct and high living. In the epoch that followed, culture was still further broad-based and spread to the Vaishya order. It is the culture of the bourgeoisie: it was brought about, developed and maintained by that class in society preoccupied with the production or earning of wealth. The economic bias of the literature of the period has often been pointed out. Lastly the fourth dimension of culture has made its appearance today when it seeks to be coterminous with the proletariate. With the arrival of the Sudra, culture has extended to the very base of the social pyramid in its widest commonalty.

        This movement of extension, looked at from the standpoint of intensiveness, is also a movement of devolution, of reclama­tion. The Brahminic stage represents culture that is knowledge; it touches the mind, it is the brain that is the recipient and instrument of the Light. The Kshatriya comes into the field when the light, the vibration of awakening, from the mind comes down into the vital energies, from the brain to the heart region. The Vaishya spirit has taken up man still at a lower region, the lower vital: the' economic man that has his gaze fixed upon his stomach and entrails. Lastly, the final stage is reached when physical work, bodily labour, material service have attained supreme importance and are considered almost as the only values worth the name for a human being. To walk

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and work firmly upon Earth the Light needs a strong pair of feet. Therefore, the Veda says, Padbhyām sudro ajāyata, out of the feet of the Cosmic Godhead the Sudra was born.

        That is how man has become and is becoming integrally conscious – conscious in and of all parts of his being. He is awakening and opening to the light that descends from above: indeed the true light, the light of truth is something transcendent and it is that that comes down and slowly inhabits the world and possesses humanity. Its progress marks the steps of evolution. It means the gradual enlightening and illumining of the various layers of our being, the different strands of consciousness from the higher to the lower, from the less dense to the more dense, from mind to the body. It means also in the same process a canalisation, materialisation and fixing upon earth and in the physical being of the increasing powers of the Light.

        The Light as it descends from its own home above to the lower levels of our being expresses itself no doubt in one way, but also gets diminished, modified, even deformed in another respect. The work of purification certainly goes 'on and until that is complete and there comes the fullest expression, it will continue. The action of light on the physical plane, for example, on the body of the Cosmic Being is so blurred and confusing apparently that it looks almost like the action of Darkness. And yet the Dark Night of the soul is not simply the obscurity of Ignorance. It is only the mud that lay diffused or settled in the being which has come up in its gathered mass in the process of churning and cleaning and appears like an obscure screen.

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A Chapter of Human Evolution

THE appearance of the Greeks on the stage of human civilisation is a mystery to historians. They are so different from all that preceded them. There does not seem to exist any logical link between them and the races from whom they are supposed to have descended or whose successors they were. The Minoan or Cretan civilisation is said to be cradle of the Greek, but where is the parallel or proportion between the two, judging from whatever relics have been left over from the older, the more ancient one. Indeed that is the term which best describes the situation. Whatever has gone before the Hellenic culture is ancient; they belong to the Old Regime. Egypt is old, Phoenicia is old, the Hebrews are old, all the other races of the old world are old, not merely chronologically, but psychologically. But Hellas is modern. There is a breath in the Ionian atmosphere, a breath of ozone, as it were, which wafts down to us, even into the air of today. Homer and Solon, Socrates and Aristotle, Pythagoras and Plato are still the presiding gods ruling over the human spirit that was born on Olympus and Ida.

Human evolution took a decisive turn with the advent of the Hellenic culture and civilisation. All crises in evolution are a sudden revelation, an unexpected outburst, a saltum, a leap into the unknown. Now, what the Greeks brought in was the Mind, the luminous Reason, the logical faculty that is married to the senses, no doubt, but still suffused with an inner glow of consciousness. It is the faculty mediating between a more direct and immediate perception of things, Intuition and Instinct, on the one hand, and on the other, the perception given by the senses and a power of control over material things. Take Egypt or Israel or Chaldea, what one finds prominent there is the instinctive-intuitive man, spontaneous – prime-sautier – imaginative,

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mythopoeic, clairvoyant, clairaudient (although not very clear, in the modern and Greek sense), bringing into this world things of the other world and pushing this world as much as possible into the other, maintaining a kind of direct connection and communion between the two. The Greeks are of another mould. They are a rational people; they do not 'I move and act simply or mainly by instinctive reactions, but j even these are filtered in them through a light of the Mind of

Intelligence, a logical pattern, a rational disposition of things; through Mind they seek to know Matter and to control it. It is the modern methodology, that of observation and experiment, in other words, the scientific procedure. The Greeks have had their gods, their mythology; but these are modelled some-what differently: the gods are made more human, too human, j as has often been observed. Zeus and Juno (Hera) are infinitely more human than Isis and Osiris or Moloch and Baal or even the Jewish Jehovah. These vital gods have a sombre air about them, solemn and serious, grim and powerful, but they have not the sunshine, the radiance and smile of Apollo (Apollo Belvedere) or Hermes. The Greeks might have, they must have taken up their gods from a more ancient Pantheon, but they have, after the manner of their sculptor Phidias, remoulded them, shaped and polished them, made them more luminous and nearer and closer to earth and men.¹ Was it not said of Socrates that he brought down the gods from heaven upon earth?

The intermediary faculty – the Paraclete, which the Greeks brought to play is a corner-stone in the edifice of human progress. It is the formative power of the Mind which gives things their shape and disposition, their consistency and cogency as physical realities. There are deeper and higher sources in man, more direct, immediate and revealing, where things have their birth and origin; but this one is necessary for the embodiment, for the building up and maintenance of the subtler and profounder truths in an earthly structure, establish and fix them in the normal consciousness. The Socratic Dialogues are rightly placed at the start of the modern culture; they

¹ The Olympians as opposed to the Chthonian gods. The Olympians were white in colour, the Chthonians black or blood-red: the Olympian temples faced the East, while the Chthonian faced the West and so on.

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set the pattern of modern mentality. That rational turn of mind, that mental intelligence and understanding as elaborated, formulated, codified by the Aristotelian system was the light that shone through the Græco-Latin culture of the Roman days; that was behind the culture and civilisation of the Middle Ages. The changes and revolutions of later days, social or cultural, did not affect it, rather were based upon it and inspired by it. And even today our scientific culture maintains and continues the tradition.

The Mind of Reason is a kind of steel-frame for other movements of consciousness – pure ideas, imaginations or instinctive and sensory notions, or even secret intimations and visions of deeper truths and greater realities – to take body, to find a local habitation and name and be firmly stabilised for experience or utilisation in physical life. There was indeed a hiatus in the human consciousness of the earlier period. Take, for example, the earliest human civilisation at its best, of which we have historical record, the Vedic culture of India: human consciousness is here at its optimum, its depth and height is a thing of wonder. But between that world, an almost occult world and this world of the physical senses there is a gap. That world was occult precisely because of this gap. The physical life and mind could translate and represent the supra-physical only in figures and symbols; the impact was direct, but it expressed itself in hieroglyphs. Life itself was more or less a life of rites and ceremonies, and mind a field of metaphors and legends and parables. The parable, the myth was an inevitability with this type of consciousness and in such a world. The language spoken was also one of images and figures, expressing ideas and perceptions not in the abstract but as concrete objects, represented through concrete objects. It is the Mind of Reason that brought in the age of philosophy, the age of pure and abstract ideas, of the analytic language. A significant point to note is that it was in the Greek language that the pre-position, the backbone almost of the analytical language, started to have an independent and autonomous status. With the Greeks dawned the spirit of Science.

In India we meet a characteristic movement. As I said the Vedas represented the Mythic Age, the age when knowledge was gained or life moulded and developed through Vision and Revelation (Sruti, direct Hearing).

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The Upanishadic Age followed next. Here we may say the descending light touched the higher reaches of the Mind, the mind of pure, fundamental, typical ideas. The consciousness divested itself of much of the mythic and parabolic apparel and, although supremely immediate and intuitive, yet was bathed with the light of the day, the clear sunshine of the normal wakeful state. The first burgeoning of the Rational Mind proper, the stress of intellect and intellectuality started towards the end of the Upanishadic Age with the Mahabharata, for example and the Brahmanas. It flowered in full vigour, however, in the earlier philosophical schools, the Sankhyas perhaps, and in the great Buddhist illumination – Buddha being, we note with interest, almost a contemporary of Socrates and also of the Chinese philosopher or moralist Confucius – a triumvirate almost of mighty mental intelligence ruling over the whole globe and moulding for an entire cycle human culture and destiny. The very name Buddha is significant. It means, no doubt, the Awakened, but awakened in and through the intelligence, the mental Reason, buddhi. The Buddhist tradition is that the Buddhist cycle, the cycle over which Buddha reigns is for two thousand and five hundred years since his withdrawal which takes us, it seems, to about 1956 A.D.

The Veda speaks of Indra who became later on the king of the gods. And Zeus too occupies the same place in Greek Pantheon. Indra is, as has been pointed out by Sri Aurobindo, the Divine Mind, the leader of thought-gods (Maruts), the creator of perfect forms, in which to clothe our truth-realisations in life. The later traditional Indra in India and the Greek Zeus seem to be formulations on a lower level of the original archetypal Indra, where the consciousness was more mentalised, intellectualised, made more rational, sense-bound, external, pragmatic. The legend of Athena being born straight out of the head of Zeus is a pointer as to the nature and character of the gods. The Roman name for Athena, Minerva, is significantly derived by scholars from Latin mens, which means, as we all know, mind.

The Greek Mind, as I said, is the bridge thrown across the gulf existing between the spiritual, the occult, the intuitive and the sensuous, the physical, the material. Since the arrival of

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the Hellenes a highway has been built up, a metalled macada-mised road connecting these two levels of human experience and there is possible now a free and open communication from the one to the other. We need not speak any more of God and the gods and the divine principles indirectly through symbols and similes, but in mental terms which are closer to our normal understanding and we can also utilise the form of our intellection and reasoning to represent and capture something of what lies beyond intellect and reason.

In India we have an echo of the transition, rather perhaps, she held up the type of the transition required. For here the evolution seems to have been more gradual and the steps are more clearly visible leading one to the other. India maintained an unbroken continuity in the cyclic change of the human consciousness. She was coeval with Egypt and Chaldea, Sumeria and Babylon: she communed with them perhaps in similar and parallel terms. And yet she changed or evolved and knew to express herself in other terms in other times. She had talked in mystic terms with the mystics and later on she talked in rational terms with rationalists. And today we see signs of her parleying with the Scientists in scientific terms. That is how India still lives, while Egypt and Chaldea have gone the way of Atlantis and Gondwanaland. For something is enshrined there which is eternal, something living and dynamic which is pressing forward to manifest and embody itself, some supreme truth and reality of the future which she is fostering within her to deliver to nature and humanity-a new humanity with a new nature.

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The Eternal East and West

I

THE East and the West are two recognised wings of humanity. Only the relation between them is somewhat in dispute. According to one view the two are quite separate and irreconcilable entities, because they embody two outlooks that are contradictory to each other. The other view is that they are not contradictory, however distinct they may be; they are complementary or supplementary to each other. The interaction between the two across the centuries recorded in history has been admitted and studied; it considerably influenced the growth and development of each in its line. Only the influence exerted some view with favour, others with disfavour. For some consider the mixture of influence, like that of blood, as a necessary condition of progress and creativity: others again are keen on maintaining, the purity of stock, the particular type of culture to which each is attached and any intrusion of a foreign vein they consider as a lowering, a degeneration of the type.

We all know the great difference between the East and the West that has been pointed out and accepted generally as true is that of the spiritual East and the worldly or materialist West. Crudely and categorically formulated the truth remains no longer true. There is a very large amount of worldliness in the East, on the one hand, and on the other, mystics and spiritual seekers or leaders are not a rare phenomenon in the West. However, it can be said and admitted as a fact that there is in the East an atmosphere that is predominantly spiritual and one can more easily come in contact with it; whereas in the West it is the mental and material culture that predominates

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and the approach to it is nearer and closer to man. The science of the Spirit has received greater attention in the East; it has been studied, experimented, organised, almost consummated there in a supreme manner. Even as the science of Matter has reached its apotheosis in the West.

Recognising the difference, the momentous question confronting us is what should be our next move: must we accept the one and reject the other for the sake of human progress and fulfilment, or that a harmony and synthesis is possible and is demanded ?

For it is not unoften asserted that the so-called spiritual outlook of the East is only a mediaeval outlook. All people in the world, including even the West, were once upon a time predominantly religious and spiritual; that was a certain stage in man's evolution. Europe has passed that stage of myth and imagination, has brought upon the earth and is living the higher illumination that Science reveals. The East did not or could not march with Time and continues the old world 'with its backward glance; it stands arrested in its growth.

This view finds its justification because of a particular outlook on spirituality and non-spirituality. If the Spirit and things spiritual are taken to mean something transcending and rejecting the world and the things of the world, something exclusive of life and its fulfilment here on earth, if on the other hand, the world and its life are given only their face value emptying them of their deeper and transcendent contents – in the manner of the great Laplace who could find no place for God in his map of the world which seemed to be quite complete in itself, if this trenchant division is made in the very definition of the terms, in our primary axioms and postulates, then, of course, we cannot avoid a scission and an eternal struggle. If you consider the Spirit as only pure spirit, an absolute without any relation, as, an ever-fixed and static entity and if we view Matter as purely material and the law of mechanics as supreme and inviolable, then there cannot be a reconciliation or even a meeting between the two. There are some who have a great goodwill, who wish to avoid clash and quarrel and are for concord and harmony. They have tried the reconciliation, but failed. The two positions being fundamentally

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exclusive of each other can, at best, be juxtaposed, but not unified or fused together.

And yet mankind has always sought for an integral, an all comprehending fulfilment, a truth and a realisation that would go round his entire existence. Man has always aspired, in the midst of the transience and imperfection that the world is, for something stable and perfect, in the heart of disharmony for some core of perfect harmony. He termed it God, Atman, Summum Bonum and he sought it sometimes, as he thought necessary, even at the cost of the world and the life, if it is to be found elsewhere. Man aspired also always to find this habitation of his made somewhat better. Dissatisfied with his present state, he sought to mould it, remake it, put into it something which his aspiration and inspiration called the True, the Beautiful, the Good. There was always this double aspiration in man, one of ascent and the other of descent, one vertical and the other horizontal, one leading up and beyond – totally beyond, in its extreme urge – the other probing into the mystery locked up there below, releasing the power to reform or recreate the world, although he was not always sure whether it was a power of mind or of matter.

This double aspiration has found its expression and symbol in the East and the West, each concentrating on one line, some­times even to the neglect or denial of the other. But this division or incompatibility need not be there and must not be there. A new conception of the Spirit and a new conception of Matter are gaining ground more and more, moving towards a true synthesis of the two, making for the creation of a new world and a new human type.

The East is no longer the traditional East of the poet who viewed it as eternally static and meditative, drowned in an "eyeless muse" away and aloof from earth and world. Even if it had and has still in its essential nature a nostalgia for the transcendence, yet it seeks today more and more for a hold upon the physical realities: it seems to remember again what the Upanishadic Rishi sought – the Rishi being asked whether he came for the mundane wealth of a thousand heads of cattle, with golden rings round their horns, or for the knowledge of the Transcendent Reality, replied that he had come for both. And the hidebound materialist West, the positivist scientific

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West, finds this day many fissures and loopholes in the solid Laplacian scheme; as it dives down and enters into the secrecies of even the most material things, curious mysteries surge up and its eyes demand another look and another vision than those to which the mere senses have accustomed them. Physical Scientists bending towards or being compelled to bend towards metaphysics and even mysticism are no longer an anomaly in the scientific world.

The Spirit is not the static transcendent absolute entity only. It is dynamic Force, creative conscious Energy. The spiritual is not mere silence and status it is expression and movement also. Any silence and any status are not the silence and the status of the Spirit – the silence and status of death, for example; so too any expression and movement are not of the Spirit either – but this does not mean that the Spirit cannot have its own expression and movement. God too likewise is not a mere supracosmic being – a somewhat aggrandised human being – treating and dominating man and the world as something foreign and essentially antagonistic to his nature. God himself has made himself all creatures and all worlds. He is That and He is This fundamentally and integrally. Again, at the other end, Matter is not mere dead mechanical matter. It is vibrant energy, but energy that conceals within it life and consciousness. Besides, the whirl and motion of energies is not all, something inherently static looms large behind: you call it ether, field, space or substratum – it is being, one would like to say, infused with a secret consciousness and will.

We say then, symbolically at least, if not literally, that the West is looking to the East for this revelation towards which it is groping or moving in its own way: the secret spirit-consciousness that is alive in and through the material cosmos, that alone gives its total sense and significance. And the secret spirit must embody itself here below in material life, the status must be made supremely dynamic – the transcendent consciousness, even while maintaining its transcendence, has to deploy its immanence in things of the earth and earthly existence. That is what the West brings to the East; that is what the Scientific and materialist look and labour offer to be integrated into the aspiration and realisation of the East.

So then we say that the East starts from the summit and

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surveys reality from above downwards, while the West starts from below and works upward. The two complementary movements can be described in several other graphic terms, Instead of a movement from the summit to the base and of another from the base to the apex, that is to say, a movement: of ascent and of descent, we can speak of a movement from within outward and of that from outside inward, that is to say, from the centre to the periphery and from the periphery to the centre; we can speak also of a movement of contraction, withdrawal or concentration and a movement of expansion; and expression and diffusion. Again, we can refer to a vertical movement and a horizontal movement. All however express the same truth. We postulate one reality, take our stand upon that and work our way towards the other; the two together form the total reality and together can they give the integral life fulfilment.

As I have said, the history of mankind, as a matter of fact, the whole history of creation gives a graphic picture of the interaction of this double movement. There are ages and countries in which one or the other of the two takes precedence and special or exclusive emphasis. But the inner story is always a converging movement.

Parallel lines meet at infinity, each overpasses its own limit and touches and coalesces with the other.

The marriage of Heaven and Earth, of even Heaven and Hell, is a very ancient dream. It is an aspiration ingrained in existence. It is a prophecy that shall be fulfilled and is being worked out every moment.

II

For an integral vision of human achievement and perfection we may consider another interesting contrast between the East and the West. We usually attach the word "freedom" or "liberty" to Western culture and civilisation as expressing its essential character: similarly it is bondage, submission, suppression of the individual and individuality that come up in our mind when we think of Eastern culture and civilisation. The judgment is not without truth, so far as it goes; but looked at

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from a different angle, a deeper standpoint, the true judgment should be, curious to say, just the contrary.

The East does not consider the individual in his social behaviour in terms of freedom and liberty but of service and obligation, not in terms of rights but of duties. The Indian term for right and duty is the same – adhikarā The word originally and usually meant duty, one's sphere of work or service, capacity: the meaning of "right" was secondary and only latterly, probably as a result of the impact from the West, has gained predominance. The West measures human progress by the amount of rights gained for the individual or for the group. It does not seem to have any other standard: submission, obedience, any diminution of the sense of separate individuality meant slavery and loss of human value and dignity. It was the Greek perhaps, with Socrates as the great pioneer, who first declared the supremacy of the individual reason (although he himself obeyed in all things his guardian angel, the Daemon). In India, generally in the East, the value of the individual is estimated in another way. So long as he is in the society, the individual is bound by its demands: he has to serve it according to his best capacity. That is the dharma – the Law – that one has to observe conscientiously. But if he chooses, he can break the bonds forthwith, come out, come out of the society altogether and be free absolutely – that is the only meaning of freedom. In the West the individual is taught to remain in the world and with the society, maintain his individuality and independence and gradually enlarge them in and through the natural fetters and bondages that a collective life and efficient organisation demands and inevitably imposes. The East, on the contrary, asks the individual never to protest and assert his individuality, which is in their view only another name for Ignorant egoism, but to know his position in the social scheme and fulfil the duties and obligations of that position. But the individual has the freedom not to enter into the social frame at all. If he chooses freedom as his ideal, it is the supreme freedom that he must choose, out of the chain of a terrestrial life. He can become the spiritual "outlaw", the sanyāsi, the word means one who has abandoned everything totally and absolutely.

The contrast points to a synthesis parallel to or an extension

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of the one we spoke of earlier. The first thing to note is that the individual is the source of all progress; the individual has the right, as it is also his duty to maintain himself and fulfil himself, grow to his largest and highest dimensions! Secondly, the individual has to take cognisance of the others, the whole humanity, in fact, even for the sake of his own progress. The individual is not an isolated entity, a freak product in Nature, but is integrated into it, a part and parcel of its texture and composition. Indeed the individual has a double role to perform, first to increase himself and secondly to increase others. Using the terms which the Sartrian view of existence has put into vogue, we can say, the individual en soi (in himself) is the individual in commonalty with others, living and moving in and through every other person; and then there is the individual pour soi (for himself), that is to say, existing for himself, apart and away from others, in his own inner absolute autonomy. The individual is individualised, i.e. raises and lifts himself and then becomes the spearhead breaking through the level where Nature stands fixed, leading others to follow and raise themselves. The individual is the power of organised self-consciousness; the growth of the individual means the growth of this power of organised consciousness. And growth means ascension or evolution from level to level. The individual starts from the organic cell, that is the lower end, it progresses through various gradations of the vital and mental worlds till he reaches the culmination of its growth in the Spirit as ātman. But this vertical growth must be reflected in a horizontal growth too. There is a solidarity among the individuals forming the collective humanity so that the progress of one means the progress of others in the same direction, at least a chance and possibility opened for an advance. On the other hand, it may be noted that unless the collectivity rises to a certain level the individual too cannot go very far from it. A higher lift in the individual presupposes a corresponding or some minimum lift in others. There cannot or should not be too great a rift between the individual and the collective:

As I said, the East usually ignores this correspondence and posits an exclusive either-or relation between the two terms. The individual, according to it, can reach its true individuality

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by only dissolving it – in the Infinite. Of course, I am refer­ring to an extreme position which is general in the East and symptomatic of its fundamental character. The West does not concern itself with these higher lines of individual growth and fulfilment, it limits the individual within the social frame and his mundane or profane life; but what we learn from this outlook is the necessity of the collective growth through which only can the individual thrive and grow. It is however a growth in extension, rather than in intensity i.e. depth and height. This outlook errs in the limitation put upon indivi­duality, precisely identifying it more or less with the "egoism" to which the spirituality of the East objects. This normal individual in its normal development cannot go very far, nor can he lead the others, the society or humanity, to a perfect and supreme fulfilment. The ego-bound normal individuality must transcend itself – exactly the thing that the East teaches; only this transcendence need not mean an abolition of all individuality, but a transformation, a higher integration in a spiritualised, a universalised and divinised individuality.

Such an individual will not be like the blind leading the blind, one ego, .in its half-light, with its small narrow mental formation imposing its ignorant and ineffective will upon others in the same state of consciousness, but, as I have said, a universalised individual, who has identified himself with all and everyone in his being and consciousness, who has also at the same time transcended himself and others and attained a supreme unitary consciousness and being. It is such a person who is called the leader of human or terrestrial evolution and they who are of the same make are the pioneers who shall build heaven upon earth.

Towards that consummation, these two great world currents, East and West, are moving carrying each its own truth and contributing to the realisation of the integral truth that is to take body here below.

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A Global Humanity

A GLOBAL view of humanity is becoming more and more insistent, unavoidable and inevitable. It is being forced upon the normal consciousness of mankind so that the ordinary life itself has to be conducted and lived according to the demands of that view. It is this that humanity is one, that mankind as a whole is a single organism. Even like an individual being, the collective being too is a unit, a close knit living unit. As the individual has different parts and limbs, organs and systems, so is humanity composed of nations and races, cultures and religions. And as the parts of the "body natural" do not exist by themselves, independently of one another, each for its own sake without regard for others, so do the various human aggregates that form the "body politic" live and move intimately together, for a common purpose in a united functioning.

There is an aim, a goal to which' humanity moves in obedience to a cosmic purpose, in accordance with a cosmic law. The principle of evolution has given an expression of formula to this cosmic law and purpose, although it is more or less an outward expression and in reference to an outward phenomenon.

The different limbs of an organism are held together and they work together harmoniously. The whole world, as we are finding it today, is indissolubly one. There is an inter. relation and interaction that compel them all to stand together or fall together. This is, however, a static unity and harmony, a harmony that is in the being, in essence. For in the outward working there is always a play of discord – quarrels and rivalries, competition and conflict, struggle and

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battle. Indeed this seems to be the rule, the other seems more an ideal than a fact. The unity that is found actually is rather the unity of a locked fight. Within the individual the same thing is there. There is a maladjustment among the organs and limbs, not only physically but also psychologically. But all the same beyond and beside this play of discord there is an inherent and overruling unity and harmony which creates the personality or individuality of the human person. The characteristic of the human person is his forward-looking gaze-he has a purpose in life. This is exactly the dynamic element, the something more that is needed for the fulfilment of the organic unity. This element is what we know as the principle of progress which is the psychological name for evolution. In other words, there is in man and in the world not only a static unity and harmony in essence, but a progressive unity and harmony in manifestation. The individual moves towards the health and growth of the body and mind and the spirit. If one life is not sufficient for the purpose, as some seers declare, several lives are at the disposal of the individual to achieve it. In what sense can the same or something similar be said of the collective or group life?

There is the view, an old-world view, of eternal recurrence. That is to say, creation is ever the same; it goes through a cycle of changes, but the cycles repeat ad infinitum. There is no progress, no forward movement towards a more and more perfection. Indeed, the cycle of creation is a closed circle. The idea of progress was very much in vogue at one time. It was born under the auspices of Romantic Idealism; it was fostered and strengthened by youthful, Science in the first enthusiasm of her early discoveries, especially that of the fact of biological evolution. There has, however, been a setback since, when it was found that the original picture of evolution – the emergence and growth of species in the course of a few thousand years is far from being true, that evolution means not thousands but millions of years. And when archaeologists discovered that men could build hygienic cities, run democratic states, discuss and argue acutely on recondite problems of life and philosophy, women knew the use of ornaments and jewels of consummate beauty and craftsmanship in epochs when they were expected to be no more than wild denizens of the cave

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or the forest, the belief in human progress, at least along a steady straight line, was very much shaken.

Yet an imperious necessity of the idea, almost as an inevitable ingredient of human consciousness, always exists and constantly makes its presence felt. If recurrence is the law of creation, this idea with its will to fruition is also a recurrent phenomenon. A modern form of it has been given a very dynamic drive in the Marxian gospel. A socio-economic progress, however, is and can be only a part, in fact, a result of a wider and deeper progress.

We say then that the fraternity and unity of mankind has been a constant dream and aspiration, a settled ideal. And in the circumstances of today it is becoming more and mace evident that the idea is a secret fact of existence and that there is an overwhelming urge in Nature to bring it out and establish it as a manifest and concrete reality. If we review the history of mankind once again, not measuring it by its centuries but by its millenniums, not by its apparent habits and outward forms but by inner forces and attitudes, we shall discover that it is the story of the unfoldment of a collective fulfilment, of an ascension in grades of consciousness towards an ever higher and vaster truth and reality.

Viewed as a progressive growth of consciousness and transformation of nature, man's advance has been marked out in a few very definite stages. The first was the purely animal man – Pasu – when man lived merely as a physical being, concerned solely about his body. Then came the Pisacha, the man of vital urges in their crudest form, the man of ignorant passions and dark instincts who has been imaged in the popular mind as the ghoul. At the next stage, with a further release of the consciousness, when the larger vital impulses come into play man becomes the Rakshasa, the demon. Egoistic hunger for possession, enjoyment, enlarged and increased appetite are his characteristics. Next came the Asura, the Titan, the egoistic mental man in his earlier avatar seeking to emerge out of the purely vital nature. Ambition and pride are his guiding spirit. Prometheus is his prototype. There are still two higher types which have been established in the human consciousness and in the world atmosphere as dynamic ideals, if not as common concrete facts of the material

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world. The first is the ethical man, who seeks to govern his life according to some principles of light and purity, such, for example, as unselfishness, altruism, chivalry, self-abnegation, rectitude, truthfulness etc. He is the Sattwic man, as known in India. There is also a still higher category, where consciousness endeavours to go beyond mind, enters into the consciousness of the Spirit; then we have the spiritual man, the saint and the sage. Beyond lie the supra-mental domains formed of the consciousness of the gods.

Man, individually and collectively, has passed and is passing through these steps of evolution. The last one is his goal at the present stage. To be a saint, seer or sage is not enough for man. He must be a god. Indeed when he has succeeded to be a god then only would it be possible for him to become what a saint or a seer or sage has to be in order to fulfil him­self totally and integrally. The human race as a whole is progressing along the same line towards the same consummation. That is the secret purpose and end of Nature, to evolve a growing developing material form housing, embodying higher and wider ranges of consciousness, integrating all elements into a more and more intimate and inviolable unity and harmony. '

This progress towards ever higher and wider consciousness means also in man's social or collective life the formation of larger and larger aggregates, unification of mankind in ever widening groups. From man the solitary animal, through the family, the clan, the tribe to the nation the race has been increasing the circle of its sympathy and kinship. The birth of the modern nation out of regional and local groupings is a triumph of the emerging consciousness in humanity pointing to another signal and supreme triumph, the emergence of the global sense hi man that is to bind humanity as a single indissoluble indivisible unity in actual life.

The aggregates are meant to express, apart from the growing unity, a diversity of achievements in the collective consciousness marking and enriching that unity. The highest, the largest aggregate attained at the present moment is as I have said, that of the nation, the lower and lesser aggregates have been subsumed under it. The principle of integration in its. graded course is precisely this that the new unity absorbs the

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previous lesser units as its components, some find their place in it in a transmuted form and function – those that are of use in the new disposition – others that had truth only for the past disappear or remain as vestiges of an extinct reality. The clan and the tribe have practically disappeared as living realities; the family has been maintaining itself still as a functioning unit, but it has considerably changed its features and in recent times it has been undergoing revolutionary transmutations. The rigours of the system prevailing in the old world have all but gone, they have been reduced to the minimum; the system has become more or less a mere outline, the substance and the details have become very vague and fluid. It may come out with quite a new connotation in the not very distant future. The nation, then, as the living unit of aggregation today, is on the move again towards a yet more enlarged aggregate. Empire was a blind and violent attempt at this greater aggregation. The Commonwealth of more recent times was a conscious, deliberate and healthier endeavour towards the same goal. The various trials with regard to a league of nations is also a conscious and deliberate, although somewhat groping experiment in the same line.

Man's attempt to surpass himself and establish a superhuman race is a conscious and deliberate process and the attempt can be successful only through such an willed discipline, sādhanā. In the same way, a supranational human unity will be possible as a parallel eventuality to the same process of individual discipline.

Humanity is evolving and developing the various groupings to manifest fundamental aspects of its cosmic person. Ancient Egypt, for example, brought us in contact with an occult world and a subliminal consciousness. We know also of the nature of the Hebraic genius, the moral fervour, the serious, almost grim spirit of Righteousness that formed and even now forms a major strain in the European or Christian culture and civilisation. The famous "sweetness and light" of the Hellenic mind supplied the other strain. The Roman genius for law and government is a well-known commonplace of history. Well-known also India's spirituality. All these modes of consciousness are elements – forces, energies and personalities – that build up the godhead of humanity. Peoples and races in

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the past were the scattered limbs of the godhead-scattered and isolated from one another, because of the original uncon­sciousness and sharp egocentricity out of which Nature started its course of evolution. The disjecta membra are being collected together by a growing consciousness.

Such then is the destiny of man and mankind-man to rise to higher heights of consciousness beyond mental reason that are not governed by the principle of division, separation, antithesis but by the principle of unity, identity, mutuality and totality. In other words, he will take his seat in the status of his soul, his inner and inmost being, his divine personality where he is one with all beings and with the world. This is a rare and difficult realisation for man as he is today, but tomorrow it will be his normal nature. The individual will live in his total being and therefore in and through other individuals; as a consequence the nature too in each will undergo a divine transmutation, a marvellous sea-change.

Humanity as a race will then present the figure of a homogeneous unit – it will be a unity of many diversified elements, not simply, however, a composition of discrete individuals, but of varied aggregations of individuals – even as the body is not merely composed of cells, but also these cells are collected in aggregates forming various limbs and systems, each again with its own identity and function. Indeed, the cosmic or global humanity is very likely to be pyramidal in structure-not a flat and level construction. There will be an overall harmony and integration containing a rich variety of gradations – gradations of consciousness, as even now there are: only the whole will be more luminous, that is to say, more. conscious and more concordant; for at the top, on the higher levels, new lights will show themselves and men embodying those lights. They will radiate and spread out, infiltrate into the lower ranges something of their enlightenment and harmony and happiness which will bring about a global purification and a new dispensation; even the material world, the vegetable and mineral domains too may be taken up into this luminous consummation and earth become the Garden of Eden that it once was, suffused with a new glory.

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The Immortal Nation

GIBBON'S Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire must have been the original source of the inspiration that moved later on Spengler and Toynbee and others to posit a life-line for nations and races and mark its various stages of growth and evolution. The general theory put in a nutshell would be like this: mankind is composed of groups or aggregates of individuals and each has a life-history of its own even like an individual human being, in other words, an inescapable cycle of birth, growth, maturity, decline and disintegration. All groups – peoples; races, nations – have to pass through these destined stages, although, naturally, at different times and with a varying tempo. The view implies two conclusions or rather postulates: (l) that whatever is born must die, there is no resurrection or rejuvenation, neither in the individual nor in. the collective life and (2) that humanity remains on the whole more or less the same, there is no global progress: there is no continued march forward towards a kingdom of heaven upon earth, even as there has not been a decline and deterioration from some Golden Age in the past.

Is this so, in point of fact or is it bound to be so, in point of theory? What are the facts? There are at least two human groups or peoples extant that seem to point to a different con­clusion. I speak of China and especially of India. Egypt and Greece and Rome, the Minoans, the early Mesopotamians had their day. They rose, they lived, they died and are no more. But India and China, although almost contemporaneous with any of those earliest civilisations, have not vanished; they continue still today. In respect of India at least it cannot be said that she is not today, is totally different from what she was in her Vedic epoch or even in her Harappa and Mohenjo-daro

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days, in the sense that modern Egypt is not the Egypt of the Pharaohs, nor the Greece of Venizelos the Greece of Pericles.

It is true there were periods of decline and almost total disintegration in India, but she survived and revived. And the revival did not mean a negation of her past and of her origins, a complete severance from her essential life and genius. The spirit and even the fundamental outline of the form in which that spirit moulded itself did not change, they remained constant and the same. It is said the Varna and the Ashrama (roughly translated as caste and order) that give the characteristic structure of Indian society even today characterised also the Vedic society; and the system of village autonomy that survives even today ruled Harappan India also. It has also been pointed out that the administrative system pursued by the British in India was nothing brand new imported from outside, but only a continuation, with minor adaptations, of the system consolidated by the Moguls who again had taken it up from the Mauryas; a system initiated perhaps by still earlier legislators and builders of Indian polity. Mussolini of twentieth century Italy is in no way related to Cato or Julius Caesar of ancient Rome, but Sri Ramakrishna or Sri Aurobindo is a direct descendant of the Vedic Rishis.

What is the cause of this 'strange longevity or stability that India or China enjoys? Whence this capacity to renew life, to rejuvenate the past that survives and persists? Before dealing with this question let us turn for a while to another curious phenomenon : which is allied to it and may throw some light upon it.

It is about the life-span of peoples. The life-span of peoples is not uniform: it differs with different peoples and differs considerably. The Spanish or Portuguese hegemony in modern Europe was after all rather brief – a matter of one century or two – in comparison with the lease enjoyed by Rome or Greece. Indeed it might seem. that the older the nation the longer it lived. Take, for example, the oldest nation recognized as such in history, Egypt; her life-span is to be measured not by centuries but by millenniums. The Hellenic civilisation that succeeded the Egyptian did not last as long and yet it lasted more than its own successor, the Roman, did. How was it then the more ancient people resisted more successfully the forces of

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decline and disintegration? What was it that made the later and younger nations less successful in the battle of life?

Another fact. The Asiatic peoples or nations endured generally longer than their European brethren. I have spoken of India and China, I may now refer to Persia, the old Persia that has a glorious story to tell for more than a thousand years (from Cyrus to the last of the Sassanides) ending or suffering a sea-change with the advent of the Arabs. The Arabs themselves and also the Hebrews were likewise long-lived peoples, although both of them have this especial characteristic that theirs is not a land-locked civilisation, that is to say, they were not peoples wedded to their own land, a mother-country of their own, theirs was a peripatetic genius which went abroad and sought to make their own or make themselves over to and enter into other countries and other cultures. Perhaps this is their way of securing a long life.

The reason for a long life must necessarily be in the mode of life itself. The life lived by later nations had a very dominant politico-economic bias. The government, the political, that is to say, administrative power was of outstanding importance, the economic factor being necessarily an indispensable adjunct. On the other hand, in Egypt, in Greece and in all the Eastern countries, the main stream of life ran in another channel; it was cultural and ideative. What remains of Greece or even of Egypt, what the Eastern countries carry still here and there in a living manner is that element – that which is immortal in mortality, as the Vedic Rishis say. The stone monuments bear a significance and a message even to us, because they embody and point to what moved, inspired and fashioned the consciousness, the inner life of these races. And it is that that outlives the glories of governments and rulers.

What happened usually in ancient times among more ancient peoples, and in Asia generally, happened with characteristic emphasis in India. The physical vastness of China or of India, their teeming populations – much greater than any single nation or country – are sometimes adduced as reasons of the stability or longevity of these two Asiatic peoples. But I suppose Matthew Arnold's graphic vision of the situation – in his famous lines about the dreaming East and the legions thundering past – hits the mark closer, although his was a disparaging,

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not an appreciating note. That is to say, here in India the king, the administrator, the political or economic factor were superficial limbs of the society, they lay at the periphery of the people's consciousness. Wars and revolutions did not affect or touch essentially the life-movement. Here was a people terribly concerned with inner values: these were much more important than an occupation with problems of food and lodging. We are all familiar with the poignant cry of an Indian woman of the Vedic age: what shall I do with the thing that does not give me Immortality?

The truth then is this: the stronger the inner life a nation builds up and organises, the longer it lives and the greater the power it acquires to revive when it falls for a time into decline. Naturally, a good deal depends upon the nature and quality of this inner life. There are certain types of inner life which mean the very source of life, there are others that are only secondary sources. Ancient Greece or even modern France has had a well-developed inner life, but this inner life was very strongly wedded to and welded into the outer life, it lay at least at one remove farther from the true source of life. Ancient Egypt less intellectual, less mentally cultivated, was in contact with the occult, the subliminal base of life, more potent and dynamic springs of consciousness. This was the cause of Egypt's greater longevity and some capacity of renewal. The older people generally lived in, or at least, were in living contact with principles of existence more fundamental and therefore more enduring. The gods of the mind and of the inner vital enjoy a longer immortality than the deities that rule man's outer life and body.

Viewed from this standpoint India stands as a case sui generis. She did not stop short satisfied with the lesser gods. She aspired for the highest One, the supreme spiritual reality and it was her mission, her destiny, to foster it and keep guard over it for the sake of humanity. Whatever the outer vicissitudes, she maintained throughout the inner continuity of her spiritual life and realisation. That is where she drank of the nectar of immortality and that is how she could always revive and renew herself after a period of decline and almost disintegration, because she possessed the mystery of the self. Other peoples were busy about many other things important or

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unimportant in some measure, but here was a race that never forgot the one thing needful. India of today, we repeat, is fundamentally and essentially the India of the Vedas, even in a more literal sense than that China of Mao-tse- Tung (or Sun-yat-Sen) is the China of Lao-tse.

A race dies out altogether or continues to lead a superficial mechanical existence, that is to say, vegetates as an inchoate mass, when it knows to live only in its body, confined only to the demands of the barest physical necessities. The life of a race gains a meaning and a new vitality when a higher light and aspiration inspire and move its spirit; when a deeper and finer sensibility, a nobler ambition stir its affections, when a superior intelligence and understanding illumine its mental horizon, its lease of life is increased by that and also its power of recuperation and renewal. And the further it enters into these basic constants of existence the greater that power of rejuvenation.¹

We may compare with profit perhaps in this regard the life of an individual person with that of a people or nation. Even as an individual has a soul beyond his body and mind, a spiritual personality behind his apparent name and form, a nation too has a soul apart from its political, economic and cultural life. As in the individual, in the aggregate too a spiritual principle seeks to express and incarnate itself. It is this immortal reality in the individual man that reincarnates in life after life surviving apparent death and disintegration. But only those individuals that live consciously a soul-life, express to some extent at least the soul's light in and through the external personality of a mind and body and vitality and maintain a true individuality and a strong and durable forma­tion through the lives; otherwise, the soul is there no doubt, but in its own world, exerts only a very indirect influence and the rest of the personality, the dynamic members disintegrate and are taken up into the general earth atmosphere. Something of the same kind is likely to happen in the case of collective groups too. A nation like India that hitched her wagon of life to a star-the supreme spiritual reality – is bound to regain her

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¹ Toynbee also speaks of the possibility of, national regeneration-freedom from the cycle of decline and death-through religion (although he limits religion to the Christian faith).

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life always through whatever calamities and catastrophes might befall her.

One may note three or four crises, practically rebirths, in India's life history. They correspond roughly with the great racial infiltrations or what is described as such by anthropologists, what others may describe as operations of blood transfusion. There was an original autochthonous people, the early humanity out of the stone age, usually called proto­Dravidians, whose remnants are still found among the older and cruder aboriginal tribes. Then the Dravidian infusion which culminated in the humanity, the Indian humanity, of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro. Next the Aryan avatar. One usually begins Indian history with the Dravido-Aryan civilisation which is taken as the basic foundation, the general layout of the whole structure. The first shock or blow the edifice received was from the Greeks and then the Huns and Scythians – the Tartars– something that struck at the most essential element of Indian culture and character. Psychologically the new leaven was brought in and injected by Gautama Buddha – the un-Vedic Buddha– the external invasion and penetration was possible because of this opening already made from within. This injection was necessary as an antidote to the decline and fall that had set in sometime between the passing of Sri Krishna and the advent of Buddha. But traditional India absorbed this new leaven and came out with a renewed and enriched personality. The next major shaking came with the Islamic inundation. This meant or would have meant a great and even catastrophic reversal, but this too in the course of centuries succeeded only in invigorating and enlarging the life and consciousness of eternal India. The last and perhaps the most dangerous assault came from the Europeans, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French and finally, most of all, from the British. An absolutely matter-of-fact vitalistic Europe overran and overwhelmed a predominantly otherworldly spirit and almost succeeded in obliterating that spirit and replacing it by a replica of its own life-pattern and Weltanschauung. Even such a blow India could survive, not only so, could utilise it for her own purpose, for the greater fulfilment of her mission in life. She is coming out of that

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ordeal a towering personality, a godhead for the remoulding of humanity and earth-life.

It may be argued that all nations and peoples are a mixture' of various races and foreign strands which are gradually, soldered and unified together in course of time. The British nation, for example, is built upon a base of Celtic blood and culture (the original Briton), to which were added one by one the German (Angles and the Saxon), the Danish, the French. But what is to be noted is that the resultant is at the end some. _ thing very different from the start – something unrecognisable when compared with the original pattern and genius. The resultant seems to be arrived at not by a gradual evolution and continuous transformation but by disparate echelons or , breaks, as it were, in the line. In France also or in Italy the] growth and the unification were achieved through violent ;1 revolutions, eruptions and irruptions. In the former, a Gaelic; and Iberian base and in the latter an Etruscan were all but; swept off by the Roman rule which again saw its end at the hand of the Barbarians. The history of Greece offers a typical picture of the destiny of these peoples. Her life-line is sundered completely at three different epochs giving us not one but three different personalities or peoples: at the outset there was the original classical Greece, then the first and milder although sufficiently serious break came with the Roman conquest; the second catastrophic change was wrought by the Goths and Vandals which was stabilised in the Byzantine Empire and the third avatar appeared with the Turkish regime. At the present time, she is acquiring another life and body.

Indeed, viewed from this angle, the whole conscious personality of Europe seems to have been cut across by such hiatuses, two or three of them of a serious kind. Upon a primitive and mythologic stratum was laid the Græco-Roman and then there was a strong Hebraic or Old Testament influence, finally the known Christian or New Testament element; to that must be added the modern New Enlightenment, that is to say, of Science and Rationalism and Materialism. These several strands have not been welded or harmonised together very well. They are very often at variance with each other and combating each other. It is this schizophrenia that lies at the bottom of European malady. Europe has not been

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able to develop a wholly unified or one-pointed spiritual personality. On the other hand, it has developed very well-defined and sharply separated nations in its bosom, a sign and resultant of the lack of complete integration. India has some-times been spoken of as a continent consisting of many and varied nations, and not as a unified nation, she being more like Europe than a particular nation like England or France. We may answer that India possesses a more unified soul than Europe and that is why her sub-nations do not stand out in any intransigent separativeness like the nations in Europe. Even Asia possesses a more unified and integrated soul-personality than Europe; for, as I have said, her peoples stand upon a deeper strand of life and consciousness, something that is in contact with and is inspired by the Spiritual truth and reality. It is more so in India, where one has the very emblem and exemplar of this spiritual unity and the spiritual personality that derives from there.

A nation or people then possesses or is composed of several souls or several layers of an oversoul. Even like the individual it has a physical soul, that is to say, a body consciousness, a vital soul, a mental soul and finally the true or inmost soul, the oversoul. When one lives in any of the inferior souls, one has precarious and disintegrated life – whether it is a nation or an individual. It is only when one is conscious of one's inmost self, then only the person or the people can attain some kind of immortality, the power of rejuvenation in those external parts – the mental, vital and physical – that make up the terrestrial life and that are ever subject to decline, decay and death.

A nation, however, that has achieved something, created something, made a strong formation in the mental or in the vital world may die physically, but the formation, the creation, the achievement remains and continues to be alive in the terrestrial atmosphere, in the general consciousness of man. Ancient Greece is dead, Augustan Rome is gone, but the mind of light that Greece brought into play, the cast of social character that Rome established are among the permanent acquisitions of human culture and civilisation. They have gone into the making of the warp and woof of the standard human life today. Apart, however, from this general survival, could there be a reappearance of the very soul of a nation in another

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nation, in the same way as an individual soul reincarnates itself in another individual body? That question is asked, as sometimes it has been suggested, from certain significant and striking similarities, that ancient Greece incarnated in modern France and that there is a Roman stamp in the British nation. The possibility may not be altogether ruled out of court. But still it must be understood that the two phenomena are not quite identical, there is a difference in nature and kind. Rebirth in the sense of reincarnation is especially an individual phenomenon, the individual forming a divine centre, a focus of consciousness which the group is not; the group is more a field and a frame for the individual in spite of a conscious existence of its own.

In any case, the revival or renaissance of a nation – a collective consciousness and being – is quite possible, and the normal curve of life – birth and growth and death – is not even for it the ineluctable destiny. For like the individual, the group too has that in it or the possibility of that in it which is akin, to – an isotope of – the soul or self, the immortal conscious being.

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Evolution of the Spiritual Consciousness

EVEN the Vedic Rishis used to refer to the ancients, more ancient than they themselves. "The ancients", they said, "worshipped Agni, we too the moderns in our turn worship the same godhead". Or again, "Thus spoke our forefathers"; or, "So have we heard from those who have gone before us" and so on.

Indeed, the tradition in the domain of spiritual discipline seems to have been always to realise once again what has already been realised by others, to rediscover what has already been discovered, to re-establish ancient truths. Others have gone before on the Path, we have only to follow. The teaching, the realisation is handed down uninterruptedly through millenniums from Master to disciple. In other words, the idea is that the fundamental spiritual realisation remains the same always and everywhere: the name and the form only vary according to the age and the surroundings. The one Reality is called variously, says the Veda. Who can say when was the first dawn! The present dawn has followed the track of the infinite series that has gone by and is the first of the infinite series that is to come. So sings Rishi Kanwa. For the core of spiritual realisation is to possess the consciousness, attain the status of the Spirit. This Spirit may be called God by the theist or Nihil by the Negativist or Brahman (the One) by the Positivist (spiritual). But the essential experience, of a cosmic and transcendental reality, does not differ very much. So it is declared that there is only one goal and aim, and there are, at the most, certain broad principles, clear pathways which one has to follow if one is to move in the right direction, advance smoothly and attain infallibly: but these have been well marked out, surveyed and charted and do not admit of

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serious alterations and deviations. The spiritual aspiration is a very definite and unitary movement and its fulfilment is also a definite and invariable status of the consciousness. The spiritual is a type domain, one may say, there is no room here for sudden unforeseen variation or growth or evolution.

Is it so in fact? For if one admits and accepts  the evolutionary character of human nature and consciousness, the outlook becomes somewhat different. According to this view, human civilisation is seen as moving through progressive stages: man at the outset was centrally lodged in and occupied with his body consciousness, he was an annamaya purusa; then he raised himself and was centred in the vital consciousness and so became fundamentally a prāņamaya purusa; next he climbed into the mental consciousness and became the manomaya purusa; from that level again he has been attempting to go further beyond. On each plane the normal life is planned' according to the central character, the law - dharma – of that plane. One can have the religious or spiritual experience on each of these planes, representing various degrees of grow and evolution according to the plane to which it is attached. 1 It is therefore that the Tantra refers to three gradations of spiritual seekers and accordingly three types or lines of spiritual discipline: the animal (paśu bhāva) the heroic (Vīra bhāva) and the godly or divine (deva bhāva). The classification is not merely typal but also hierarchical and evolutionary in character.

The Divine or the spiritual consciousness, instead of being a simple unitary entity, is a vast, complex stratified reality. "There are many chambers in my Father's mansions", says the Bible: many chambers on many storeys, one may add. Also there are different levels or approaches that serve different seekers, each with his own starting-point, his point de repère. When one speaks of union with the Divine or of entering into the spiritual consciousness, one does not refer to the same identical truth or reality as any other. There is a physical Divine, a vital Divine, a mental Divine; and beyond the mind – from where one may consider that the region of true spirit begins-there are other innumerable modes, aspects, manifestations of the Divine.

As we say, there are not only aspects of the Divine, but there are also levels in him. The spiritual consciousness rises tier upon tier and each spur has its own view and outlook, rhythm

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and character. Now, as long as man was chiefly preoccupied with his physico-vital or mentalised physico-vital activities, as long as the burden of his body and life and even mind lay heavy on him and their gravitational pull was normally very strong, almost irresistible, the spiritual impulse in him acted generally and fundamentally as a movement of escape, from them into some thing beyond. It was a negative movement on the whole and it was enough to dissociate, reject, sublimate the lower status and somehow rise into something which is not that (neti): the question was not important at that stage of. the human consciousness about a scientific scrutiny of the Beyond, its precise constitution and composition.

But once there is the possibility gained of a more normalised, familiar and wider reconnaissance of the Beyond, when the human being has been mentalised to a degree and in a manner that makes it inevitable for him to overpass to a higher status and live there habitually, then it becomes an urgent matter of concern to know and find out where one goes exactly, on which level and in what domain, once one is beyond. The question, it is true, engaged the attention of the ancients too; but it was more or less an interesting enquiry, a good part speculative and theoretical; it had not the reality and insistence of the need of the hour. We have today chalked out an almost exhaustive science of the inferior consciousness, of the lower hemisphere – of course, so far as it is possible for such a science to be exhaustive moving in the light of the partial and inferior consciousness. In the same way we need at the present hour a complete and precise science of the Divine Consciousness. As there is a logic of the finite, there is also a logic of the infinite, not merely its magic, and that too has to be discovered and laid out.

Thus, the highest and most comprehensive description of the Divine is perhaps the formula Sat-chit-ananda. But even so, it is a very general and, after all, an inadequate description. It has to be filled in and supplemented by other categories as well, if one may say so. For Sat-chit-ananda presents to us the Sat Brahman. There is also the Asat Brahman. And'

again we must accept a reality which is neither Sat nor Asat – nāsadāsīnno sadāsīt, says the Veda. And as for the filling up of the details in an otherwise almost blank and featureless

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infinity, Sri Aurobindo's charting of that vast unknown – with the categories of the Supermind and its various levels, of the Overmind and its levels too, all forming the Divine Status and Consciousness – is a new, almost a revolutionary revelation, just the required science which the present world needs and demands and for which it has been prepared through all the cycles of evolution.

This means that with the knowledge that is given us today one can determine more or less definitely the altitudes to which the various spiritual realisations of the past rose and one can see also the degrees or graded stages of the evolution of the spiritual consciousness. A broad landmark can be noted here which concerns us at the present moment. The spiritual consciousness has been rising to higher and higher peaks and possessing them one after another. At the present moment we are at a crisis, at a crucial crossing. The spiritual consciousness attained till now and securely held in human possession i

(in man's inner nature) is confined to the highest level of the mind with some infiltration from the Overmind and through that, as a springing board, a leap into an indefinite, almost a blank Beyond. Now the time is come and the conditions are ready for the spiritual consciousness in humanity to arrive at the status above the Overmind, the Supermind, and make that a living reality and build in and through that its normal consciousness.

A progressive revelation of higher and higher and more integral states of the spiritual consciousness in and through the realisations of mystics and sages and seers – divine men – of all ages, such is the process of evolution that marks the life of man upon earth. This spiritual evolution, however, may not be obviously visible in the external life and character of man: it has been a phenomenon more in his inner being and consciousness, an occult phenomenon. Hence there has intervened a veil, a wall of separation between the two. The veil has not been rent precisely because the very highest spiritual potential has not been reached and brought into play. The call of the present age is just to do away with this veil, make of human nature a unified, a streamlined entity, a complete incarnation of the spiritual consciousness in the fullness of its own nature at its source and origin.

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Matter Aspires

MATTER holds and expresses material energy, the subtlest and highest form of which is electric energy. Should Matter be confined to that alone or can it express or create, by and out of itself, non-material energy also? What about mental energy and thought movements-can they too be made a function of Matter?

For example, the computing machine. It has been developed to a marvellous extent. Not only big but complicated calculations are done by it, not only the four major arithmetical operations, but higher algebraic and trigonometrical problems too are tackled successfully. The electronic computer seems to possess a veritable mathematical brain.

It is asked now if the machine is capable of so much mathematics, may it not be capable also of poetic creation? The possibility has been discussed in a very lively and interesting manner in The Hibbert Journal (October, '49 and january, '50). The writer Sir Robert Watson-Watt thinks it is not impossible, indeed quite possible, for a machine to write, for example, a sonnet. Only the question will be with regard to the kind-the quality and standard--of the poetic creation. What will come out of the machine will depend upon what has been put into it, that is to say, what the brain that constructed it succeeded in transplanting into it. The writer after weighing the pros and cons arrives at the remarkable and amusing conclusion that a machine built by a second class brain may succeed in producing a poem of third class merit, but it can never produce anything first class. To produce a first class poem through a machine at least a first class brain' must work at it. But the pity is that a Shakespeare or a Milton would prefer to write straight away a poem himself instead

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of trying to work it out through a machine which may give out in the end only a second class or worse production.

I said it is an amusing discussion. But what is apt to be forgotten in such "scientific" discussions is, as has been pointed out by Rev. Trethowan in his criticism of Sir Robert, that all genuine creation is a freak, that is to say, it is a movement of freedom, of incalculable spontaneity. A machine is exactly the sum of its component parts; it can give that work (both as regards quantity and quality) which is confined within the frame and function of the parts. Man's creative power is precisely this that it can make two and two not merely four but infinity. There is a force of intervention in him which  upsets the rule of the parallelogram of forces that normally governs Matter and even his own physical brain and mind. There is in him truly a deus ex machina. Poetry, art, all creative act is a revelation, an intrusion of a truth, a reality from another plane, of quite a different order, into the rigid actuality and factual determinism.. Man's secret person is a sovereignly free will. A machine is wholly composed of actualities-the given-and brings out only a resultant of the permutation and combination of the data: it is a pure deduction.

But there is another even more interesting aspect of the matter. The attempt of the machine to embody or express something non-mechanical, to leap as high as possible from material objects to psychological values has a special signi­ficance for us today and is not all an amusing or crazy affair. It indicates, what we have been always saying, an involved pressure in Matter, a presence, a force of consciousness secreted there that seeks release and growth and expression.

The scientific spirit, that is to say, man's inquiring mind, even when it specifically deals with Matter and material phenomena, cannot be made to confine, to limit itself to that region alone. It always overleaps itself and stretches beyond its habitual and conventional frontiers. The yearning of Matter for Light is an extraordinary phenomenon of Nature: physically speaking, we have reached the equation of the two. But that light is only a first signpost or symbol: it invites Matter towards higher and freer vibration. The old determinism has given place in the heart of Matter to significant eccentricities which seem to release other types of élan. When

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the brain-mind indulges in fabricating clay-images of God, it is not merely a foolish or idle pastime: it indicates a deep ingrained hunger. All this reveals a will or aspiration in Matter, in what is apparently dead and obscure (acit), to move and reach out towards what is living and luminous and supremely living and luminous (cit). Matter finally is to embody and express the Spirit.

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An Evolutionary Problem

THE London Times Literary Supplement (July 27, 1946), in the course of a critical estimate of Bernard Shaw, writes:

"Mr. Shaw pats Lamarck on the back and accepts his theory that 'living organisms change because they want to'.

If you have no eyes and want to see and keep trying to see, you will finally get eyes. If, like a mole or a subterranean fish, you have eyes and don't want to see, you will lose your eyes. If you like eating the tender tops of trees enough to make you concentrate all your energies on the stretching of your neck, you will eventually get a long neck like the giraffe.

But the metaphysics here are surely false. If a species has no eyes, has never possessed eyes, is unconscious of sight, or of the fact that there are sights to be seen, is unaware of any necessity for sight, how can that species desire sight or will itself into the possession of eyes? We can only will what we need."

I am afraid the metaphysics here found fault with is not surely false, it is the critic's appreciation that is at fault. The metaphysics is perhaps somewhat too physical in its imagery and terminology, that is to say, graphic in the Shavian manner, but the matter seems to us quite all right. What the critic fails to understand is that it is not the conscious idea in the mind that brings about its concrete realisation. What is there at the outset in the evolutionary urge is a life-force, blind, no doubt in the usual sense, but driving towards greater expression and articulation, towards a more and more conscious and clear perception of ends and means. Thus, for example,

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growth simply means a gradual enlargement of that form – but that there is a pattern of ultimate particles – vital quanta – a rhythm and vibration of life energy, that is the origin, the formal and efficient cause, of the material form. Deeper still, behind the blind instinctive urge of life, the unconsciousness that is the inertia of matter, there is a consciousness, a vision, a supernal self-conscious energy that inspires, guides, fashions the whole evolutionary scheme in the large as well as in all details.

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Values Higher and Lower

1

THE problem in the final analysis is as ancient as man's first utterance. Which comes first, which is more important – Spirit or Matter, Body or Soul? Naturally, there have been always two answers, according to one's outlook. Some have declared Annam comes first, Annam is of primary importance, Annam is to be increased, Annam is to be worshipped: or again, earth is the firm status, be founded upon earth – śarīram ādyam. On the other hand, it has also been declared that the Spirit comes first, the Spirit is the true foundation, the roots of creation are up there, not here below: if that is known, then only all this is known; it is by that Light all that shines here shines. And if I miss that, what is the use of all this world of things?

In fact, however, the reality is a polarised entity: and both ends are equally necessary, for each is involved in the other. It is an unreal distinction, due to mind's prejudice and preference, that says one is first and the other next or last, one is more important and the other less. The true truth is that Spirit and Matter are one: for Matter is Spirit involved and Spirit is Matter evolved. The position can be stated in this form also: without Spirit, Matter does not exist; without Matter, Spirit does not manifest.

The balance is upset exactly when we say that the higher depends on the lower or that it comes after. Not only so, the statement is likely to involve an error, a mistaken view. If one has to make a distinction between higher and lower, inner and outer, it will be nearer the truth and fact to say that the lower depends on the higher, it is the inner reality

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that upholds and inspires the outer form: without this inner cohesive deity all the external frame would fall to pieces. It is not the contingencies of time and circumstances, of day-to-day existence that determine the nature and form of power of the soul and spirit. It is the pressure of the Inner Being, antaryāmī, that brings about the pattern and organisation of the outer life. At the summit of being, at the absolute point of consciousness the two are identical, absolutely one and the same. In the lower ranges as manifestation and variation begin the two maintain their union and harmony and mutuality so long as the consciousness retains its purity and the being is not invaded. by Ignorance. Ignorance means the gradual predominance of the outer and the lower, till it reaches its last point in Inconscience where Matter is the only reality and everything is made to stand and depend on the grossest reality.

Even then, even from that nadir, let us consider things a little more closely. We have still consciousness left in us as human beings. Now, because 'man has a body and because he has to live and move in physical surroundings and circumstances, therefore body and physical conditions must necessarily come to his consciousness first in importance – this is not a valid argument nor a statement of fact. For man has and is something else besides: and this something else, in other words, the spiritual being, is quite a free and independent entity and can act as it wills ignoring and ignorant of the body and its circumstances. Whether one is poor or rich, successful or frustrated, happy or unhappy, one can always listen and follow the call of the Spirit.

It may be that for most men the physical life is of first and primary importance and they look upon the spiritual life, 'if ever they do, as a secondary pursuit; even as children consider food and play as the one thing needful, study or mental exercise quite a secondary or tertiary affair occupying a small side corner. This is because the taste for the higher life belongs to a more developed consciousness, not because it is something really dependent and derivative. Indeed, we do in fact see people – individually or collectively (like the early Christians, for example) – suddenly becoming conscious of the burning reality of the Spirit, in the midst of and in

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spite of the most adverse and all-engrossing outer physical conditions, and follow it caring nothing. So the Christ directs: Follow Me, let the dead bury their dead; and the Indian Shastra enjoins: Yadahareva virajet tadahareva pravrajet – the day you feel unattached, that very day go out of the world and away.

To the spiritual seeker the higher values are the first things that come first: to the ordinary man it is otherwise, lower values come first and claim topmost priority. To the experience of the spiritual seeker one should give greater value, for he has the experience of both the values, while the ordinary man knows only of one variety. Naturally, as we have said, there is synthesis, a fusion of the two values; but that is elsewhere for the present, not actually here and now.

2

It is again a point of view to say that things are fundamentally values only, as "philosophers of value" seem to declare today. It would be equally true to say that masses are fundamentally energies or that particles are merely waves. The truth of the matter, here as elsewhere, is global – ubhayameva, in the famous phrase of the great Rishi Yajnavalkya. In other words, values and things are aspects, polarisations of one single reality. Things have values; things are values: things are also things. .

Value refers to the particular poise or status, the mode of being or function of a thing. In its ultimate formulation we can say it is the rhythm or force of consciousness that vibrates in an object, it is the becoming of the being: but becoming does not cancel being, it only activises, energises, formulates. The debate brings us back to the ancient quarrel between the Buddhists and the Vedantists, the latter posits sat, being or existence, while the former considers sat as only an assemblage of asat. The object and its function, the thing-in-itself and its attribute (the fire and its burning power, as the Indian logicians used to cite familiarly as an example) are not to be separated – they are not separated in fact but given together as one unified entity; it is the logical mind that separates them artificially.

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3

That man is not the term of evolution, that intellect is not the supreme expression of human capacity, that this mortal being shall acquire new faculties and powers and become a higher species with a good deal of his present limitations removed are some of the views regarding human destiny held today. At one end are religious and devout people or those who follow a faith and spiritual discipline and at the other end are hard-headed scientific people who go by the evidence of downright facts and figures. There are a considerable number among both the groups and also among all the gradations lying in-between who subscribe, although in various ways, to this television we speak of. Catholics who believe in the coming of the Messiah and physicists who believe in re-creation of Matter and Energy, not merely its disintegration, have been equally enthusiastic in upholding this New Faith. There is Berdyaev who is a Christian, there is Gerald Heard who is called a Neo­Brahmin and there is Lecomte du Noüy, the eminent French biophysicist.

We see the movement accepted and advanced (if not even initiated) more in the West than in the East. That the world is a progressive and progressing phenomenon comes easily and naturally to the European mind. The East has been habituated to a static view of things: if there is dynamism, it is mostly considered as a movement in a circle. The spiritual East with its obsessing experience of the Infinite and Eternal and Permanent, the Transcendent, found it unnecessary to attach that importance to the impermanent and finite which would give it a meaning and purpose and direction. Therefore we see in India those who advocate this new view are considered Europeanised and not following the authentic spiritual tradition of India.

We, of course, are not of the opinion that all possible revelations in the spiritual sphere have been made and done with even in India or that there cannot be fresh valuations of the old revelations or their applications in a new way. We believe in the words of the ancient Rishis who declared that dawns come endlessly in succession, today's dawn follows the path trod by the ancient ones and is the first of the eternal series to

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come in the future. Each dawn brings in a new and fresh revelation, a hope and vision looking into the future although linked in with the experiences of the infinite past.

That is why, while we give our support to this new effort of Europe, we agree and even insist that the hoary spiritual tradition of India has still something to teach us moderns, some light to give us in our present predicament. For, although, the ideal is generally admitted in many places, the way to it is not clear. Since Nietzsche spoke of the surpassing of man, many are taken up with the ideal, but the means to effect it remains yet to be discovered: it is still under discussion, at least. As a matter of fact, the goal itself is none too clear and definite: sometimes we think of a saintly transformation of

human nature, sometimes the growing power of Intuition, very vaguely and variously defined, replacing or supplementing intellect and thus adding a new asset to man's life and consciousness.

The crucial problem however lies, in a sense, in the way that the goal is to be reached, in the modus operandi. How is the higher status, whatever it is, to be brought down, made effective, be established here on earth and in life. Ideals there have been always and many; evidently we do not know how to go about the business and actualise what is thought and dreamed. About the new ideal too, suggestions have been made with regard to the path to be followed to reach it and are being tried and tested. Some say a life of inner or ethical discipline, conscious effort on the part of each Individual for his own sake is needed: the higher reality must be reached first by a few individuals, it cannot be attained by 'mass action. Others declare that personal effort will not lead very far; if there is to be a great or fundamental change in human nature, it is the Divine Grace alone that can bring it about. The surpassing of man is a miracle and only the supreme magician as an Avatara can do it. Others, again, are not prone to believe in a physical Incarnation – somewhat difficult usually for a European mind – but would accept subtler forces or even superior beings, other than the human category, as aids and agents in the working out of the great future.

It 'is India's great achievement and speciality that she has found the way – the way to all truly high fulfilment. It is Yoga

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and the Yogic consciousness. Yoga is the science and art of discovering the higher truths, indeed, the highest reality and of living there, not a midway moral elevation only. In its integral view it combines all the three processes mentioned above. The Yogic consciousness seeks to lift the consciousness as high as possible, in fact, to the very highest – it literally means union or identity (with the highest Reality, Spirit or God). Thus it has the true perception or vision of the forces that act in and upon the world and the powers that decide and is in union with them. The Yogic consciousness and power is also embodied in the Divine Incarnation – for he is Yogeshwara: and in India it is accepted as a commonplace that God descends in a human shape, whenever there is a great crisis and man needs salvaging and salvation. God comes then with all his angels, with the divine host to battle for him and with him to establish the Dharma.

Sri Aurobindo's stand in this field is very definite and clear. The goal or end is clear, and with it the way too. What he envisages is the transformation of Matter and material life, that is to say, neither rejecting it as an impossible thing nor trying to gloss it over with a coat of mental luminosity, but delving into it and cleaning and purifying it, removing its mire and dross wholly and absolutely so that its true divine nature comes out and remains as Nature's highest and fullest expression on earth. That is the goal: the way_too is not less characteristic. The total spiritual transformation, the divinisation of Matter is possible, not only possible but inevitable, because it is :Matter that wants it, because Matter in its essence, in its true reality is spiritual energy, is the Spirit itself. That is the great secret Sri Aurobindo has brought to light. The ideals in the past for the reclamation of human nature and reformation of human society were tackled with mental and moral powers which were not adequate to the task. Even when the spiritual power was invoked, it was of the static category which is above, aloof, witness and can have at best a kindly look and influence. That the spirit dynamic is involved in Matter and as Matter is a truth that has to be discovered.

The supreme creative power of the Spirit – Truth-Consciousness – Sri Aurobindo calls the Superrnind. This power is not only up there above, but it is here below and within

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Matter. It is a power of Matter itself, its most secret power. Truth-Consciousness or Supermind congealed, solidified or crystallised under certain conditions becomes Matter: now to re-become its own true self and nature is the very drive of Matter, that is the true sense of evolution. The very nature of Matter makes its transformation absolutely inevitable. It obeys no alien force or rule, its achievement means self-fulfilment and therefore it is something destined and, when done, permanent and perfect.

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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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God's Labour

Bypaths of Soul's Journey

A POPULAR conundrum. Are the souls finite or infinite in number? Supposing they are finite, then a time is sure to come when there will be no more souls upon earth; for, as it is said, all souls are evolving and in the end will pass out of earthly life and get merged in their source, the Brahman, the absolute Reality. On the other hand, if they are infinite, then, since all of them cannot appear on earth at the same time, the number of human bodies that house the souls being limited (at the most, a few thousand millions, according to statisticians), what happens to those that are not embodied, where do they wait or what do they do in that period? Do all come down or embody in course of time? Will all have the chance, will it be needed for all to take a body and sojourn on earth? No doubt, there is a continual increase of population upon earth, does that mean that new souls are slowly coming away from the waiting list? Even then, the list cannot be exhausted, since it is infinite; so there is bound to be a very large number who would not get the chance of visiting the earth. For, however much the population increases, it cannot increase to infinity. It can do so only if the world continues to exist eternally and humanity too. But both science and religion say that the world will come to an end sometime. There is a pralaya – an extinction – although it may be followed by a new creation and a new cycle of growth and evolution, but of a different kind and constituting quite other elements.

I have put the popular case in figures of popular mentality; – almost foolish and childish on the face of it, as it would appear; but if one "tries to answer, one finds it is not easy, children's questions are always so. Let us then try to be wise and face the problem squarely. The whole difficulty comes from the popular,

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perhaps normal human conception of the soul; it is considered almost something like the physical body (even as Virochana of old did in the Upanishadic days), namely, it has a definite form and figure, even perhaps a definite mass: each is an isolated entity shut out from everyone else by a fixed contour within which each one is housed. In fact, however, it is not so. The soul is an individual, no doubt, it has even a kind of recognisable form, but nothing of the kind by which matter or a material body is characterised. It is an essential form, form of the form, swarūpa; it is a basic or typal individuality, the individual seated within the 'individual. The characteristic of material individuality is, as I have said, exclusiveness, where -as the soul individuality is characterised by a comprehensiveness which does not diminish but gives a special mode and movement to that individuality. In the growth of life-forms, we know how a single unit, a cell, divides and subdivides itself

and each division grows into a whole, a complete life-form. But the process is not reversible. Developed forms, coming out of a single parent cannot be resolved back into the original unit. Organisms do not combine to form a single unitary organism, although one or more may be taken up and assimilated into another: for this is not combination, but practically the annihilation of one into another. The second law of thermodynamics seems to hold good even in the biological field. On a still higher or deeper level, in the psychological and spiritual realm, such combinations or resolutions are however possible and form a characteristic movement of the occult world.

Let us repeat here what we have often said elsewhere. The creation and development of souls is a twofold process. First, there is the process of growth from below, and secondly there is the process of manifestation or expression from above, the movements of ascent and descent, as spoken of by Sri Aurobindo. The souls start on their evolutionary journey on the material plane as infinitesimal specks of consciousness imbedded in the vast expanse of the Inconscient; but they are parts and parcels of a homogeneous mass: in fact they are not distinguishable from each other at that level. There is as it were a secret vibration of consciousness with which the material infinity all around is shot through. With evolution, that is to

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say, with the growth and coming forward of the consciousness, there arise sparks, glowing centres here and there, forms shape and isolate themselves in the bosom of the original formless mass; they rise and they subside, others rise, coalesce, separate – some grow, others disappear. These sparks or centres, as they develop or evolve, slowly assume definiteness, – of form and function, – attain an individuality and finally a personality. Looked at from below there is no counting of these sparks or rudimentary souls; they are innumerable and infinitely variable. It is something like the nebula out of which the galaxies are supposed to be formed. The line of descent, however, presents a different aspect. Looked from above, at the summit there is the infinite supreme Being and Consciousness and Bliss (Sachchidananda) and in it too there cannot be a limit to the number of Jivatmas that are its formulations, like the waves in the bosom of the sea, according to the familiar figure. This is the counterpart of the infinity at the other end, where also the rudimentary souls or potential individualities are infinite. Moving down along the line of descent at a certain stage, under a certain modality of the creative process, certain types or fundamental formations are put forward that give the ground-plan, embody the matrix of the subsequent creation or manifestation. The Four Great Personalities (Chaturvyuha), the Seven Seers, the Fourteen Manus or Human Ancestors point to the truth of a fixed number of archetypes that are the source and origin of emanations forming in the end the texture of earthly lives and existences. The number and scheme depends upon a given purpose in view and is not an eternal constant. The types and archetypes with which we, human beings, are concerned in the present cycle of evolution belong to the supramental and overmental planes of consciousness; they are the beings known familiarly as gods and presiding deities. They too have emanations, each one of them, and these emanations multiply as they come down the scale of manifestation to lower and lower levels, the mental, the vital and the physical, for example. And they enter into human embodiments, the souls evolving and ascending from the lower end; they may even take upon themselves human character and shape.

There are thus chains linking the typal beings in the world

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above with their human embodiments in the physical world; an archetype in the series of emanations branches out, as it were, into its commensurables and cognates in human bodies. Hence it is quite natural that many persons, human embodi­ments, may have so to say one common ancestor in the typal being (that gives their spiritual gotra); they all belong to the same geneological tree. Souls aspiring and ascending to the higher and fuller consciousness, because of their affinity, because together they have to fulfil a special role, serve a particular purpose in the cosmic plan, because of their spiritual consanguinity, call on the same godhead as their Master-soul or Over-soul, the Soul of their souls. Their growth and develop­ment are along similar or parallel lines, they are moulded and shaped in the pattern set by the original being. This must not be understood to mean that a soul is bound exclusively to its own family and cannot step out of its geneological system. As I have said in the beginning, souls are not material particles hard and rigid and shut out from each other, they are not obliged to obey the law of impenetrability that two bodies cannot occupy the same place at the same time. They meet, touch, interchange, interpenetrate, even coalesce, although they may not belong to the same family but follow different lines of, evolution. Apart from the fact that in the ultimate reality each is in all and all is in each, not only so, each is all and all is each-thus beings on no account can be kept in water-tight compartments-apart from this spiritual truth, there is also a more normal and apparent give and take between souls. The phenomenon known as "possession", for example, is a case in point. "Possession", however, need not be always a ghostly possession in the modern sense of the possession by evil spirits, it may be also in a good sense, the sense that the word carried among mediaeval mystics, viz., spiritual.

We say commonly souls are immortal. But in an occult sense souls are or may be mortal too. When the Vedantin speaks of laya or the Buddhist of Śūnya, what else is it? It is nothing but the annihilation of the soul, even if it is in the Brahman or some Absolute. But we are not referring to that here. There is a merger of souls, and a dissolution of souls in a somewhat different manner, not on the highest metaphysical heights, but even here below among the growing developing

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souls embodied upon earth. That is to say, one soul may unite with another and both form one single entity and em­bodiment.

This perhaps is not the general rule, especially on the higher levels, where the beings possess well developed and well organised individual personalities. It is more common in the earlier stages when the souls are just developing and are pliant and supple and can easily intermingle. But even on the higher reaches a merger is possible and does happen, when some special work has to be done. A god sometimes literally descends into a man, takes up the human soul within himself and becomes the man, transformed and transfigured, even as an Asura also may do the same thing. And human beings too on high altitudes of spiritual growth, major souls, can combine and fuse together to form a single soul-such may be the demand of their individual lines of growth or the demand of a Higher Will and Purpose.

Reverting to the original question with which we started, we can say now that the birth of a soul is not like the birth of a living being or organism, that is to say, it does not happen at a given point of time. A soul is truly aja, unborn; it was always there imbedded as the element of secret consciousness in the bosom of the inconscient material Nature. Only it grew out, manifested itself, attaining gradually an individuality and an integrated personality. Neither can it be said that all souls originally, that is to say, at the very beginning of their evolutionary course, were of the same magnitude, equal in all respects. As we know the ultimate material particles – the atoms of the different elements or their constituents, protons, etc. - have not all the same mass or charge, even so the spiritual elements too have not the same potency or vibration: they are of varying sizes and strengths. The stress of the evolutionary urge in life expressed itself in multiple and varied figures and dispositions, variation being an inherent virtue of the stress. And the development too follows a chequered line: the direction, the tempo, the degree, the manner of the march all differ according to the case, each spark is or tends to be unique and sui generis-and even erratic perhaps – in its behaviour, like its physical counterpart, the indeterminate and indeterminable material particle. And yet all

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move towards a heightening, enlarging, deepening of the consciousness – rivers flowing and broadening out in their meandering course to the sea: what was unformed, rudimentary, scarcely distinguishable from out of a homogeneous mass, detaches itself gradually, shapes itself into an organised individual entity and finally the fully conscious personality. But, as I have said, the growth does not follow a single one-track straight line: there can be a fusion of souls, the descent and integration of a being or soul from another level of consciousness into a developing soul or psychic element from out of Nature. In this sense then there can be a birth of souls too. The astronomers speak of novae, new stars that suddenly flare out in the sky, as if from nowhere – even though they or their elements were existent before the phenomenon happened. Souls too can come to birth in an analogous way. That is to say, it is due to a special descent of a formed being or consciousness into the human vehicle. The conception of the "twice-born caste" may be remembered in this connection. There is a physical birth and there is a spiritual birth: the latter takes place when the being on the physical plane, yet wholly belonging to evolving Nature, suddenly (it usually happens suddenly) opens and receives into itself a higher principle and becomes a conscious personality.

The soul in Nature grows along a definite line and the descent also of higher principles overarching that soul happens also in the same line connecting it with its archetype in the supreme status. This we may call the major line of development through various avataras one after another: but apart from this there may also be subsidiary formations that are its emanations or are added to it from elsewhere either temporarily or even permanently. The soul can put out derivative or ancillary emanations, parts of its being and consciousness, a mental or vital or even a subtle physical movement or formation which can take a body creating a temporary, a transient personality or enter into another's body and another personality in order to go through a necessary experience and gather an element needed for the growth of its being and consciousness. One can recall here the famous story of Shankaracharya ! Who entered into the body of a king (just dead, made him alive and lead the life of the king) in order

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to experience love and enjoyment, things of which, being a Sannyasi, he was innocent. Similarly one can take into one-self such parts and elements from others which he wishes to utilise for his growth and evolution. It is said that a man with low carnal instincts and impulses becomes an animal of that type in his next life. But perhaps it is truer to say that a part only-the vital part of animal appetite-enters into or takes shape in an animal: the soul itself, the true or the whole being of the person, once become human, does not revert to animalhood. The animal portion in man that refuses to be taken up and integrated, sublimated into the higher human consciousness has to be satisfied and exhausted, as much as possible, in the animal way.

There is also the other question asked very often whether men and women always follow different lines of growth or whether there may be intermixture of the lines. Although the soul is sexless, still it may be said that on the whole there are these two lines, masculine and feminine; and generally a soul follows the same line in its incarnations. The soul difference is not in the sex as we know it; but there is a disposition and character that mark the difference and each type, masculine or feminine, is that because of some special role to fulfil, a particular kind of work to be done in a particular way. The difference is difficult to define exactly; but one may say, in the language of the mystics, that it "is the difference between the left hand and the right hand. The mystics refer to the two sides of consciousness, that of light and that of force (chit-tapas), that is to say, knowledge and power. It is not that the two are quite separate entities, they are together and grow together; but in actuality one aspect is more in front than the other. The masculine aspect is often termed as the right hand and the feminine as the left hand of the conscious being. And in a general way man represents the knowledge aspect – the conceptual dynamism – and woman represents the executive dynamism. This definition however should not be taken absolutely or rigidly. So it can be said that a woman generally remains a woman in all her births. and man like-wise remains a man. Here too, although there may not be a central metamorphosis, there may be a partial change: that is to say a part of a man – too womanish, so to say – may

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enter a woman and live and fulfil itself or exhaust there; and the masculine part of a woman also can identify itself with its type and pattern in a man. The difference, however, between Purusha and Prakriti, philosophically, seems to be very definite and clear; but in actuality, when they take form and embodiment, it is not easy to define the principles or qualities that mark out the two. At the source when the difference starts, it is a matter of stress and temper and not any so-called division of labour as human mind ordinarily understands it.

The soul in its inner consciousness knows all its evolutionary formations, remembers those of the past and foresees those of the future, when needed, and even determines them essentially. The mind ruling one incarnation cannot recall other incarnations, for it is a product of that incarnation and is meant to guide and control it; physical memory is a function of the brain in the particular body that the soul inhabits for the time. The soul carries a deeper reminiscence which is part and parcel of the self-consciousness inherent in its nature. The physical memory too can partake of this inner reminiscence if it is purified, illumined and organised around the soul as its instrument of expression. Indeed, although the journey of the soul essentially and originally is the flight of

the spirit to the Spirit, yet the final consummation is towards an increasing integration of all the external instruments from the highest to the lowest, from the subtlest to the grossest into a harmonised organised whole, reflecting and embodying the Spirit in its purity and totality. The mind, the life and the body too attain a perfectly unified individuality that is the expression of the soul's truth-consciousness and escaping disruption and dissolution partake ultimately of the inherent immortality of the spiritual being.

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The Immortal Person

THE whole purpose of man's life upon earth, it may be said, is to make an individuality of himself and to grow in that individuality and organise it perfectly.

An ordinary man is a most disorganised entity and possesses no individual character. His mind is a conglomeration of thoughts and ideas which do not particularly belong to him, but to everybody, being elements of the world-mind in general. His vital being too is a medley of desires, impulses, energies that are not personal in any sense, but pass through him or take a long or short-term asylum in him from the universal vital force. The body, being a definitely delimited object, is perhaps the only thing that appears to be personal – the chief, if not the only source and sign of personal identity; and with the loss of the body, the whole personality seems to crumble down and disappear in the world-existence – the body particles get mixed into the world of matter, the life elements disperse in the vital world, the mental components disintegrate into the world of mind. In fact, this is what happens to the human person after death or would happen normally.

Thus man, the ordinary or "natural" man, has no person­ality, no real individuality. It is just like a wave-formation out of universal nature, moving in and being moved by the total swell and heave, being formed and being destroyed every moment – as the poet says:

They take birth in you and they dissolve in you like

the waves in the sea.

And yet the building up of an abiding individual is the secret

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urge of Nature's evolution: it is the hidden spring of human aspiration and the purpose of God's creation. Not mere disparate particles – of substance or energy or consciousness – breaking up constantly and scattering and finally dissolving into the void (the great law of Running Down or as the Veda figures it, tucchyena abwapihitam absorbed by the infinitesimal) – but a gathering of elements, integrating them into organic wholes, moulding definite forces into definite forms – such is the secret plan behind. Indeed, ego is the first formation, the original instrument which Nature fashioned to carry out this object of hers. '

Ego means a hardened core that is not easily broken by the impact of forces. It delimits, ,cuts out, endeavours to maintain its formation by a strong violent self-assertion. Ego is a helper, but also it is a bar. It assists the first formation but delays and obstructs the true and final formation. For the ego is a formation, an individual formation, but on the level of universal Nature: it is of a piece with the normal cosmic movement, only bounded by a peripheral line. In the general expanse it puts up enclosures and preserves and fencings; the constituting elements remaining the same in substance and quality. Even the delimitation is illusory in reality, it is something like the membrane in the body separating the different functional organs, rigid yet allowing interaction and interpenetration. That is why, when death removes the outward fencing, the individuality also cannot long maintain itself and merges into the general. We may look upon egoism as a kind of artificial or experimental individuality, a laboratory formation, as it were, tried and developed under given conditions. In fact, however, egoism is a shadow or an echo upon this side of our nature of the true individuality which lies and comes from elsewhere.

And that is the soul of the man. We have spoken of the body, the life and the mind of the individual, but beside and beyond these elements which are only instruments there is this secret master and overlord. It is the particle of divinity in each, the developing consciousness – the spark of Fire, the ray of Light – “the immortal in the mortal no bigger than one's thumb." The soul is an individual, an individual formation of the divine reality: it is a godhead formulating an aspect or function of

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God. We may thus say that the whole purpose of earthly evolution is the evolution of this soul-formation, that is to say, its growing individualisation in light and power, in the expression of the godhead. This growth is first in itself and of itself, its inherent being and consciousness; then, the growth is that of its instrumentation, in other words, the development and organisation of the mind, the life and the body.

So the individualisation and growth of the soul means a growth and individualisation of the mental being, the vital being and also of the physical being. Normally the purpose of intellectual culture is the growth and individualisation of the mind, the purpose of moral culture is the growth and individualisation of the vital being and the true purpose of physical culture too should be a well-balanced and well-developed physical body, not only in a general sense, but' in a very individualised mode. But all these varieties and modes of culture can be truly individualised and not merely ordered or organised, more or less on the surface, only when they obey and subserve the culture of the soul. The mind, the vital and the physical each has to grow its individuality in the growing individuality of the soul. The soul, otherwise called the psychic being, is man's spiritual being: the growth of the spiritual being means the advent and establishment bf the true personality.

There is, of course, a spiritual path that turns the soul away from its instruments and demands that it should concentrate exclusively upon itself, upon its essential essence, upon its transcendent existence; but that is not our path and, according to us, that is only a temporary phase, an intermediate necessity for some persons and at certain stages.

The individualisation of the mind, its organisation as a special formation, as a vehicle of the true light, the light of the Psychic consciousness is comparatively easy for a man. Mind is the first member of the lower sphere that is taken up and dealt with by the soul; for it is the highest and the most characteristic element in man and less dense and less subject to the darkness inherent in human nature. The mental indi­vidual persists the longest after the dissolution of the body, it survives and may survive very long the disruption of the vital being. This vital being is next in the rung to be taken up, organised and individualised by and around the psychic being.

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The organisation of the vital. being in view of a particular object or aim in ordinary life is common enough: the purpose is limited, the scope restricted. Great men of action have done it and one has to do it more or less to be successful in life. This, however, may be called organisation; it is not individualisation in the true sense, much less personalisation. A limb is individualised, personalised only when it is an instrument and formation of the soul consciousness, the psychic being. And the vital is not easily amenable to such a role. For, it is the dynamic element, the effective power of life and it has acquired a strong nature and a definite function in its earthly relations. Naturally, there is a secret drive and an occult inspiration behind over-riding or guiding all immediate and apparent forces and happenings: in and through these the shape of things to come is being built up. In the meanwhile, however, actually the vital is an executive agent of the lower consciousness: it is an anonymous force of universal nature canalised into a temporary figure that is the normal individual man. The individualisation of the vital being would mean an immortal formulation of an immortal soul as energy consciousness with a specific role for the Divine to play. It maintains its identity, its personality independent of the vicissitudes of the physical body: it continues to function as a divine being, a godhead, to work for mankind and the world. The popular legend has imaged this phenomenon in the mystic figure of an immortal Aswatthama and Vibhishana still wandering in earth's atmosphere.

Finally, it is the turn of the body to become individualised, personalised, that is to say, when it takes up the disposition and configuration of the psychic person and individual. The first stage is that of a subtle body individualised, a radiant form of etherealised elements consisting of the concentrated light particles of the divine consciousness of the Psyche. This too is an immortalisation of the personal identity which can be achieved and is achieved by the gnostic man who is to come, who will wholly psychicise and divinise his personality. The second stage is the reorganisation and individualisation of the material sheath itself. The very cells of the body are impre­gnated with the radiant substance of the supreme spiritual consciousness; they live the life of the spiritual individual, the personal divine embodied in the individual. When the whole

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process is gone through and the work clone, the individual body, physically too, shares in and attains the immortality of the soul. The body is firm enough to maintain its physical identity and yet plastic enough to change in the manner and to the degree demanded of it at any time.

In the process of making the body personal and divine and immortal, death or what appears as such may be a needed operation. It is no longer an ineluctable destiny forced upon you, but an instrument which you use consciously for a definite purpose. It is a mystic or occult work (kriyā) which we can try to understand by an analogy. The evolution of the ideal or divine man, the assumption of the mortal by the immortal involves a twofold operation: rejection and integration. Rejection means throwing out the elements that belong exclusively to the lower grade and cannot be taken up and incorporated into the higher; while integration means taking up and absorbing utilisable elements of the lower into the higher. This double process goes on on all the levels, on the mental, on the vital, on the subtle physical and even on the physical level. At a certain stage or in a concentrated process of alchemy the process of rejection may demand a mode of reshuffling and redisposition which physically appears like death, but it is inevitably followed or accompanied by the process of integration or recreation.

Perhaps this supreme and dangerous gesture only the Master can make-as the pioneer and pathfinder-and he has made it.

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In Quest of Reality

THIS is, they say, the age of Positivism – no mystic obfuscation, but clear light in the open sun. Let us enquire a little into the nature of this modern illumination.

Positivists are those who swear by facts. Facts to them mean naturally facts attested in the end by sense-experience. To a positivist the only question that matters and that needs to be answered and can be answered is whether a thing is or is not physically: other questions are otiose, irrelevant, misleading. So problems of the Good, of the Beautiful, of God are meaningless. When one says this is good, that is bad, well, it is a proposition that cannot be related to any fact, it is a subjective personal valuation. In the objective world a thing simply is or is not, one cannot say it is good or it is bad. The thing called good by one is called bad by another, the same thing that is good to you now will appear bad at another time. This is a region absolutely of personal and variable idiosyncrasy. The same with regard to the concept of beauty. That a thing is beautiful or ugly is a subjective judgment; it is not and cannot be an objective statement. Beauty is a formula in your mind and imagination, it is a changing mode of your apprehension. The concept of God too fares no better. God exists: it is a judgment based upon no fact or facts of sense-experience. However we may analyse it, it is found to have no direct or even indirect but inevitable rapport with the field of actual reality. There is between the two an unbridgeable hiatus. This is a position restated in a modern style, familiar to the Kantian Critique of Pure Reason.

There are two ways off acing the problem. First, the Kantian way which cuts the Gordian knot. We say here that there are two realms in which man lives, but they are incommensurables:

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the truths and categories of one cannot be judged and tested by those of the other. Each is sui generis, each is valid in its own right, in its own dominion. God, Soul, Immortality these are realities belonging to one section of our nature, seizable by a faculty other than the Pure Reason, viz., the Practical Reason; while the realities given by the senses and the judgments of the logical mind are of another section. It may be said one is physical, the other metaphysical. The positivists limit their field of enquiry and knowledge to the physical: they seek to keep the other domain quite apart as something imaginary, illusory, often unnecessary and not unoften harmful to true human interest.

To a more detached and impartial view this may appear very much like the ostrich-policy. If a thing really exists, one cannot negate it by simply closing one's eyes. This involves a dichotomy which the logical mind may like to impose and live by, but man cannot be thus artificially segmented. And if both the worlds are found in him both have to be accepted and if they are found together, there must be some sort of commensurability between the two.

Indeed the second way of approach to the problem is the positivist's own way. That is to say, let us take our stand on the terra firma of the physical and probe into it and find out whether there are facts there which open the way or point to the other side of nature, whether there are signs, hints, intimations, factors involved there that lead to conclusions, if not inevitable, at least conformable to supraphysical truths. It is usually asserted, for example, that the scientist – the positivist par excellence – follows a rigid process of ratiocination, of observation, analysis and judgment. He collects facts and a sufficient number of them made to yield a general law – the probability of a generic fact – which is tested or exemplified by other correlate facts. This is however an ideal, a theoretical programme not borne out by actual practice, it is a rationalisation of a somewhat different actuality. The scientist, even the most hard-headed among them, the mathematician, finds his laws often and perhaps usually not by a long process of observation and induction or deduction, but all on a sudden, in a flash of illumination. The famous story of Newton .and the falling apple, Kepler's happy guess of the elliptical orbit of the

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planets – and a host of examples can be cited as rather the rule than the exception for the methodology of scientific discovery. Prof. Hadamard, the great French mathematician – the French are well-known for their intransigent, logical and rational attitude in Science, – has been compelled to admit the supreme role of an intuitive faculty in scientific enquiry. If it is argued that the so-called sudden intuition is nothing but the final outburst, the cumulative resultant of a long strenuous travail of thinking and reasoning and arguing, Prof. Hadamard says', in reply, that it does not often seem to be so, for the answer or solution that is suddenly found does not lie in the direction of or in conformity with the, conscious rational research but goes against it and its implications.

This faculty of direct knowledge, however, is not such a rare thing as it may appear to be. Indeed if we step outside the circumscribed limits of pure science instances crowd upon us, even in our normal life, which would compel one to conclude that the rational and sensory process is only a fringe and a very small part of a much greater and wider form of knowing. Poets and artists, we all know, are familiar only with that form: without intuition and inspiration they are nothing. Apart from that, modern inquiries and observations have established beyond doubt certain facts of extra-sensory, suprarational perception – of clairvoyance and clairaudience, of prophecy, of vision into the future as well as into the past. Not only these unorthodox faculties of knowledge, but dynamic powers that almost negate or flout the usual laws of science have been demonstrated to exist and can be and are used by man. The Indian yogic discipline speaks of the eight siddhis, super-natural powers attained by the Yogi when he learns to control nature by the force of his consciousness. Once upon a time these facts were challenged as facts in the scientific world, but it is too late now in the day to deny them their right of existence. Only Science, to maintain its scientific prestige, usually tries to explain such phenomena in the material way, but with no great success. In the end she seems to say these freaks do not come within her purview and she is not concerned with them. However, that is not for us also the subject for discussion for the moment.

The first point then we seek to make out is that even from a

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rigid positivist stand a form of knowledge that is not strictly positivist has to be accepted. Next, if we come to the content of the knowledge that is being gained, it is found one is being slowly and inevitably led into a world which is also hardly positivistic. We have in our study of the physical world come in close contact with two disconcerting facts or two ends of one fact-the infinitely small and the infinitely large. They have disturbed considerably the normal view of things, the view that dominated Science till yesterday. The laws that hold good for the ordinary sensible magnitudes fail totally, in the case of the infinite magnitudes (whether big or small). In the infinite we begin squaring the circle.

Take for instance, the romantic story of the mass of a body. Mass, at one time, was considered as one of the fundamental constants of nature: it meant a fixed quantity of substance inherent in a body, it was an absolute quality. Now we have discovered that this is not so; the mass of a body varies with its speed and an object with infinite speed has an infinite mass – theoretically at least it should be so. A particle of matter moving with the speed of light must be terribly massive. But – mirabile dictue! – a photon has no mass (practically none). In other words, a material particle when it is to be most material – exactly at the critical temperature, as it were – is dematerialised. How does the miracle happen?

In fact, we are forced to the conclusion that the picture of a solid massive material nature is only a mask of the reality; the reality is,that matter is a charge of electricity and the charge of electricity is potentially a mode of light. The ancient distinction between matter and energy is no longer valid. In fact energy is the sole reality, matter is only an appearance that

energy puts on under a certain condition. And this energy too' is not mechanical (and Newtonian) but radiant and ethereal. We can no longer regret with, the poet:

They have gone into the world of light

for, we all are come into a world of light and we ourselves, the' elements of our physical frame are made of the very texture of light.

So far so good. But it is evidently not far enough, for one

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can answer that all this falls within the dominion of Matter and the material. The conception of Matter has changed, to be sure: Matter and energy are identified, as we have said, and the energy in its essential and significant form is light (which, we may say, is electricity at its highest potential). But this does not make any fundamental change in the metaphysical view of the reality. We have to declare in the famous French phrase plus ça change, plus ça reste Ie même (the more it changes the more it remains the same). The reality remains material: for light, physical light is not something spiritual or even immaterial.

Well, let us proceed a little further. Admitted the universe

is a physical substance (although essentially of the nature of light – admitted light is a physical substance, obeying the law of gravitation, as Einstein has demonstrated). Does it then mean that the physical universe is after all a. dead inert insentient thing, that whatever the vagaries of the ultimate particles composing the universe, their structure, their disposition is more or less strictly geometrical (that is to say, mechanical) and their erratic movement is only the errantry of a throw of dice – a play of possibilities? There is nothing even remotely conscious or purposive in this field.

Let us leave the domain, the domain of inorganic matter for a while and turn to another set of facts, those of organic matter, of life and its manifestation. The biological domain is a freak in the midst of what apears to be a rigidly mechanistic material universe. The laws of life are not the laws of matter, very often one contravenes the other. The two converging lenses of the two eyes do not make the image twice brighter than the one produced by a single lens. What is this alchemy that forms the equation 1²=1 (we might as well put it as 1+1=1)? Again, a living whole – a cell – fissured and divided tends to live and grow wholly in each fragment. In life we have thus another strange equation: part=whole (although in the mathematics of infinity such an equation is a normal phenomenon). The body (of a warm-blooded animal) maintaining a constant temperature whether it is at the Pole or at the Equator is a standing miracle which baffles mere physics and chemistry. Thirdly, life is immortal – the law of entropy (of irrevocably diminishing energy) that governs the fate of matter does not

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seem to hold good here. The original life-cells are carried over physically from generation to generation and there is no end to the continuity of the series, if allowed to run its normal course. Material energy also, it is said, is indestructible; it is never destroyed, but changes form only. But the scientific conception of material energy puts a limit to its course, it

proceeds, if we are to believe thermodynamics, towards a dead equilibrium-there is no such thing as "perpetual movement" in the field of matter.

Again the very characteristic of life is its diversity, its infinite variety of norms and forms and movements. The content and movement of material nature is calculable to a great extent. A few mathematical equations or formulae can after all be made to cover all or most facts concerning it. But the laws of life refuse systematisation. A few laws purporting to govern the physical bases of life claim recognition, but they stand on precarious grounds. The laws of natural selection, of heredity or genetics are applicable within a very restricted frame of

facts. The variety of material substances revolves upon the gamut of 92 elements based upon 4 or 5 ultimate types of electric unit – and that is sufficient to make us wonder. But the variety in life-play is simply incalculable – from the amoeba or virus cell to man, what a bewildering kaleidoscope and each individual in each group is unique in its way! The few chromosomes that seem to be the basis of all diversity do not explain the mystery – the mystery becomes doubly mysterious: how does a tiny seed contain the thing that is to become a banyan tree, how does a speck of plasma bring forth from within an object of Hamletian dimensions! What then is this energy or substance of life welling out irrepressively into multitudinous forms and modes? The chemical elements composing an organic body do not wholly exhaust its composition; there is something else besides. At least in one field, the life element has received recognition and been given an independent name and existence. I am obviously referring to the life element in food-stuff which has been called vitamin.

Life looks out of matter as a green sprout in the midst of a desert expanse. But is matter really so very different and distinct from life? Does Matter mean no Life? Certain facts and experiments have thrown great doubt upon that assumption.

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An Indian, a scientist of the first order in the European and modern sense, has adduced proofs that obliterate the hard and fast line of demarcation between the living and the non-living. He has demonstrated -the parallelism, if not the identity, of the responses of those two domains: we use the term fatigue in respect of living organisms only, but Jagadish Chandra Bose says and shows, that matter too, a piece of metal for instance, undergoes fatigue. Not only so, the graph, the periodicity of the reactions as shown by a living body under a heightened or diminished stimulus or the influence of poison or drug is repeated very closely by the so-called dead matter under the same treatment.

It will not be far from the truth, if it is asserted that matter is instinct with a secret life. And because there was life secreted within matter, therefore life could come out of matter; there is here no spontaneous generation, no arbitrary fiat nor a fortui­tous chance. The whole creation is a mighty stir of life. That is how the ancient Rishi of the Upanishad puts it: Life stirred and all came out.

Now, let us advance another step forward. Beyond matter there lies life and beyond life-consciousness. Is consciousness too a mere epiphenomenon as life was once thought to be in the empire of matter? Or can it not be that consciousness is an extension - an evolute – of life, even as life is an extension, an evolute of matter? In other words consciousness is not a freak, even as life was not; it is inherent in life, life itself is a rudimentary movement of consciousness. The amoeba feeling or pre-sensing its way towards its food, the twig bending towards the direction in which it has the chance of getting more light, the sudden appearance of organs or elements in an organism that will be useful only in the future are indisputable examples of a purposiveness, a forward reference in the scheme of Nature. In the domain of life-play teleology is a fact which only the grossest brand of obfuscation can deny. And teleology means – does it not ?-the stress of an idea, the pattern of a consciousness.

Consciousness or thought in man, we know, is linked with the brain: and sentience which is the first step towards thought and consciousness is linked with the nervous system (of which the brain is an extension). Now the same Indian wizard who first, scientifically speaking, linked up the non-living with the

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living, has also demonstrated, if not absolutely, at least to a high degree of plausibility, that the plant also possesses a kind of rudimentary nervous system (although we accept more easily a respiratory system there). All this, however, one has to admit, is still a far cry from any intimation of consciousness in Matter. Yet if life is admitted to be involved in matter and consciousness is found to be involved in life, then the unavoidable conclusion is that Matter too must contain involved in it a form of consciousness. The real difficulty in the way of attributing consciousness to Matter is our. conception of consciousness which we usually identify with articulate thought, intelligence or reason. But these are various formations of consciousness, which in itself is something else and can exist in many other forms and formulations.

One remarkable thing in the material world that has always attracted and captivated man's attention, since almost the very dawn of his consciousness, is the existence of a pattern, of an artistic layout in the composition and movement of material things. When the Vedic Rishi sings out: "These countless stars that appear glistening night after night, where do they vanish during the day?" he is awed by the inviolable rhythm of the Universe, which other sages in other climes sang as the music of the spheres. The presence of Design in Nature has been in the eyes of Believers an incontrovertible proof of the existence of a Designer. What we want to say is not that a watch (if we regard the universe as a watch) presupposes the existence of a watch-maker: we say the pattern itself is the expression of an idea, it involves a conception not imposed or projected from outside but inherent in itself. The Greek view of the artist's mode of operation is very illuminating in this connection. The artist, according to this view, when he carves out a statue for example, does not impose upon the stone a figure that he has only in his mind, but that the stone itself contains the figure, the artist has the vision to see it, his chisel follows the lines he sees imbedded in the stone. It is why we say that the geometry in the structure of a crystal or an atom or an astronomical system, the balance and harmony, the symmetry and polarity that govern the composition of objects and their relations, the blend of colour schemes, the marshalling of lines and the building of volumes, in a word,

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the artistic make-up, perfect in detail and in the ensemble that characterise all nature's body and limbs and finally the mathematical laws that embrace and picture as it were Nature's movements, all point to the existence of a truth, a reality whose characteristic marks are or are very much like those of consciousness and Idea-Force. We fight shy of the word – consciousness – for it brings in a whole association of anthropomorphism and pathetic fallacy. But in our anxiety to avoid a ditch let us not fall over a precipice. If it is blindness to see nothing but the spirit, it is not vision to see nothing but Matter.

A hypothesis, however revolutionary or unorthodox it may seem for the moment, has to be tested by its effective application, in its successful working out. All scientific discoveries in the beginning appear as inconveniences that upset the known and accepted order. Copernicus, Newton, Galileo, Kepler, Maxwell or Einstein in our day enunciated principles that were not obvious sense-given axioms. These are at the outset more or less postulates that have to be judged by their applicability.

Creation as a movement or expression of consciousness need not be dubbed a metaphysical jargon; it can be assumed as a scientific working hypothesis and seen how it affects our view, meets our problems and difficulties, whether it can give a satisfactory clue to some of the riddles of physical and psychical phenomena. A scientific supposition (or intuition) is held to be true if it can be applied invariably to facts of life and experience and if it can open up to our vision and perception new facts. The trend of scientific discoveries today is towards the positing of a background reality in Nature of which energy (radiant and electrical) is the first and overt form. We discarded ether, only to replace it by field and disposition. We have arrived at a point where the question is whether we cannot take courage" in both hands and declare, as some have already done, that the substratum in Nature is consciousness-energy and on that hypothesis better explain certain movements of Matter and Life and Mind in a global unity. Orthodox and die-hard views will always protest and cry that it is a mésalliance, a misjoinder to couple together Matter and Consciousness or even Life and Consciousness. But since the light has touched the higher mind even among

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a few of the positivist type, the few may very well be the precursor of the order of the day.

After all, only one bold step is needed: to affirm unequi-vocally what is being suggested and implied and pointed to in a thousand indirect ways. And Science will be transformed. The scientist too, like the famous Saltimbanque (clown) of a French poet, may one day in turning a somersault, suddenly leap up and find himself rolling into the bosom of the stars.

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Physics or philosophy

WHAT is the world that we see really like? Is it mental, is it material? This is a question, we know, philosophers are familiar with, and they have answered and are still answering, each in his own way, taking up one side or other of the antinomy. There is nothing new or uncommon in that. The extraordinary novelty comes in when we see today even scientists forced to tackle the problem, give an answer to it, – scientists who used to smile at philosophers, because they seemed to assault seriously the windmills of abstract notions and airy concepts, instead of reposing on the terra firma of reality. The tables are turned now. The scientists have had to start the same business – the terra firma on which they stood as on the securest rock of ages is slipping away under their feet and fast vanishing into smoke and thin air. Not only that, it is discovered today that the scientist has always been a philosopher,' without his knowledge – a crypto-philosopher, – only he has become conscious of it at last. And further – mirabile dictu ! – many a scientist is busy demonstrating that the scientist is, in his essence, a philosopher of the Idealist school!

Physical Science in the nineteenth century did indeed develop or presuppose a philosophy of its own; it had, that is to say, a definite outlook on the fundamental quality of things and the nature of the universe. Those were days of its youthful self-confidence and unbending assurance. The view was, as is well-known, materialistic and deterministic. That is to say, all observation and experiment, according to it, demonstrated and posited:

First, that this universe is made up of particles that push and pull each other, the particles having certain constant values, such as in respect of mass and volume.

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secondly, that the laws governing the relations among the particles, in other words, their push and pull, are laws of simple mechanics; they are fixed and definite and give. us determinable and mensurable quantities called co-ordinates – by which one can ascertain the pattern or configuration of things at a given moment and deduce from that the pattern or configuration of things at any other moment: the chain that hangs things together is fixed and uniform and continuous and is not broken anywhere.

The scientific view of things thus discovered or affirmed certain universal and immutable facts – axiomatic truths – which were called constants of Nature. These were the very basic foundations upon which the whole edifice of scientific knowledge was erected. The chief among them were: (I) conservation of matter, (2) conservation of energy, (3) uni­formity of nature and (4) the chain of causality and continuity. Above all, there was the fundamental implication of an independent – an absolute – time and space in which all things. existed and moved and had their being.

The whole business of experimental science was just to find the absolutes of Nature, that is to say, facts and laws governing facts that do not depend for their existence upon anything but themselves. The purely objective world without any taint of an intruding subject was the field of its inquiry. In fact, the old-world or Mediaeval Science – there was a Science even then – could not develop properly, did not strike the right line of growth, precisely because it had a strong subjective bias: the human factor, the personal element of the observer or experimenter was unconsciously (at times even deliberately) introduced into the facts and explanations of Nature. The new departure of Modern Science consisted exactly in the elimination of this personal element and making observation and experiment absolutely impersonal and thoroughly objective.

Well, the old-world spirit has had its revenge complete and absolute in a strange manner. We are coming to that presently. Now, the constants or absolutes of which we spoke, which were the bed-rock of Modern Science, were gradually found to be rather shaky – very inconstant and relative. Take, for example, the principle of conservation of matter. The principle

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posited that in a given system the quantity of matter is constant in and through all transformations. Modern Science has found out that this law holds good only in respect of gross matter belonging to man-size Nature. But as soon as we enter into the domain 'of the ultimate constituents of matter, the units of electric charges, the infinitesimals, we find that matter is destroyed and is or can be recreated: material particles are dematerialised into light waves or quanta, and light quanta are precipitated back again into electric particles of matter. Similarly, the law of conservation of energy – that energy=½ mv² (m being mass, v velocity) – does not hold good in respect of particles that move with the speed of light: mass is not a constant as in Newtonian mechanics, but varies with velocity. Again, in classical mechanics, position and velocity are two absolute determinates for all scientific measurement, and Science after all is nothing if not a system of measurements. Now, in the normal size world, the two are easily determined; but in the sub-atomic world things are quite different; only one can be determined accurately; the more accurate the one, the less so the other; and if both are to be determined, it can be only approximatively, the closer the approximation, the hazier the measure, and the farther the approximation, the more definite the measure. That is to say, here we find not the exact measures of things, but only the probable measures. Indeed, not fixity and accuracy, but probability has become the central theme of modern physical calculation.

The principle of indeterminacy carries two revolutionary implications. First, that it is not possible to determine the movement of the ultimate particles of matter individually and severally, it is not possible even theoretically to follow up the chain of modulations of an electron from its birth to its dissolution (if such is the curve of its destiny), as Laplace considered it quite possible for his super-mathematician. One cannot trace the complete evolution of each and every or even one particular particle, not because of a limitation in the human capacity, but because of an inherent impossibility in the nature of things. In radioactive substances, for example, there is no ground or data from which one can determine which particle will go off or not, whether it will go off the

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next moment or wait for a million years. It is mere chance that seems to reign here. In radiation too, there is no formula, and no formula can be framed for determining the course of a photon in relation to a half-reflecting surface, whether it will pass through or be reflected. In this field of infinitesimals what we know is the total behaviour of an assemblage of particles, and the laws of nature are only laws of average computation. Statistics has ousted the more exact and rigid arithmetics. And statistics, we know, is a precarious science: the knowledge it gives is contingent, contingent upon the particular way of arranging and classifying the data. However, the certainty of classical mechanistic knowledge is gone, gone too the principle of uniformity of nature.

The second element brought in in the indeterminacy picture is the restoration of the "subject" to its honoured or even more than the honoured place it had in the Mediaeval Ages, and from which it was pulled down by young arrogant Science. A fundamental question is now raised in the very methodology of the scientific apparatus. For Science, needless to say, is first and foremost observation. Now it is observed that the very fact of observation affects and changes the observed fact. The path of an electron, for example, has to be observed; one has then to throw a ray of light – hurl a photon – upon it: the impact is sufficient to deflect the electron from the original path. If it is suggested that by correction and computation, by a backward calculation we can deduce the previous position, that too is not possible. For we cannot fix any position or point that is not vitiated by the observer's interference. How to feel or note the consistency of a thing, if the touch itself, the temperature of the finger, were sufficient to change the consistency? The trouble is, as the popular Indian saying goes, the very amulet that is to exorcise the ghost is possessed by the ghost itself.

So the scientists of today are waking up to this disconcerting fact. And some have put the question very boldly and frankly: do not all laws of Nature contain this original sin of the observer's interference, indeed may not the laws be nothing else but that? Thus Science has landed into the very heart – the bog and quagmire, if you like – of abstruse metaphysics. Eddington says, there is no other go for Science today but to

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admit and delcare that its scheme and pattern of things, as described by what is called laws of Nature, is only a mental construct of the Scientist. The "wonderful" discoveries are nothing but jugglery and legerdemain of the mind – what it puts out of itself unconsciously into the outside world, it recovers again and is astonished at the miracle. A scientific law is a pure deduction from the mind's own disposition. Eddington goes so far as to say that if a scientist is sufficiently introspective he can trace out from within his brain each and every law of Nature which he took so much pains to fish out from Nature by observation and experiment. Eddington gives an analogy to explain the nature of scientific law and scientific discovery. Suppose you have a fishing net of a particular size and with interstices of a particular dimension; you throw it into the sea and pull out with fishes in it. Now you count and assort the fishes, and according to the data thus obtained, you declare that the entire sea consists of so many varieties of fish and of such sizes. The only error is that you could not take into account the smaller fishes that escaped through the interstices and the bigger ones that did not at all fall into the net. Scientific statistics is something of this kind. Our mind is the net, and the pattern of Nature is determined by the mind's own pattern.

Eddington gives us absolutely no hope for any knowledge of an objective world apart from the objectification of mind's own constructs. This is a position which a scientist, qua scientist, finds it difficult to maintain. Remedies and loop-holes have been suggested with what result we shall presently see.

Einstein's was, perhaps, the most radical and revolutionary solution ever proposed. Indeed, it meant the reversal of the whole scientific outlook, but something of the kind was an imperative need in order to save Science from inconsistencies that seemed to be inherent in it. The scientific outlook was vitiated, Einstein said, because we started from wrong premises; two assumptions mainly were responsible for the bank-ruptcy which befell latter-day Science. First, it was assumed that a push and pull – a force (a gravitational or, more generally, a causal force) existed and that acted upon isolated and independent particles strewn about; and secondly, they were strewn about in an independently existing time and

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an independently existing space. Einstein has demonstrated, it seems, successfully that there is no Time and no Space actually, but times and spaces (this reminds one of a parallel conception in Sankhya and Patanjali) , that time is not independent of space (nor space of time) but that time is another co-ordinate or dimension necessary for all observation in addition to the three usual co-ordinates (or dimensions). This was the explanation he found of the famous Michelson-Morley experiment which failed to detect any difference in the velocity of light whether it moved with or against a moving object, which is an inconsistency according to the mechanistic view.! The absolute dependence of time and space upon each other was further demonstrated by the fact that it was absolutely impossible to synchronise two distant clocks (moving with different speeds and thus forming different systems) with perfect accuracy, or determine exactly whether two events happened simultaneously or not. In the final account of things, this relative element that varies according to varying particulars had to be eliminated, sublated. In order to make a law applicable to all fields – from the astronomical through the normal down to the microscopic or sub-atomic – in an equally valid manner, the law had to divest itself of all local colour. Thus, a scientific law became a sheer 'mathematical formula; it was no longer an objective law that governed the behaviour of things, but merely a mental rule or mnemonics to string together as many diverse things as possible in order to be able to memorise them easily.

Again, the generalised law of relativity (that is to say, laws governing all motions, even accelerated motion and hot merely uniform motion) that sought to replace the laws of gravitation did away also with the concepts of force and causality: it stated that things moved not because they were pulled or pushed but because they followed the natural curve of space (they describe geodesics, i.e., move in the line of least distance). Space is not a plain surface, smooth and uniform,

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¹ The constancy of the velocity of light, it must be noted, is not altogether an objective fact: it is a supposition by which Einstein tried to explain certain

anomalies in previous theories. It is really, as some have pointed out (e.g. Hans Reichenbach-Atom and Cosmos-po 136), a mental formula, part of a built-in structure, arbitrary to a certain extent which is so arranged that the speed be­comes constant and equal for systems in different states of motion.

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but full of dimples and hollows, these occurring in the vicinity of masses of matter, the sun, for instance, (although one does not see how or why a mass of matter should roll down the inclined plane of a curved surface without some kind of push and pull – the problem is not solved but merely shifted and put off). All this means to say that the pattern of the universe is absolutely geometrical and science in the end resolves itself into geometry: the laws of Nature are nothing but theorems or corollaries deduced and deducible from a few initial postulates. Once again, on this line, of enquiry also the universe is dissolved into abstract and psychological factors.

Apart from the standpoint of theoretical physics developed by Einstein, the more practical aspect as brought out in Wave Mechanics leads us into no less an abstract and theoretical domain. The Newtonian particle-picture, it is true, has been maintained in the first phase of modern physics which specialised in what is called Quantum Mechanics. But waves or particles – although the question as to their relative validity and verity still remains open – do not make much difference in the fundamental outlook. For in either view, the individual unit is beyond the ken of the scientist. A wave is not a wave but just the probability of a wave: it is not even a probable wave but a probability wave. Thus the pattern that Wave Mechanics weaves to show the texture of the ultimate reality is nothing more than a calculus of probabilities. By whichever way we proceed we seem to arrive always at the same inevitable conclusion.

So it is frankly admitted that what Science gives is not a faithful description of actuality, not a representation of material existence, but certain conventions or convenient signs to put together, to make a mental picture of our sensations and experiences. That does not give any clue to what the objective reality mayor may not be like. Scientific laws are mental rules imposed upon Nature. It may be asked why does Nature yield to such imposition? There must be then some sort of parallelism or commensurability between Nature and the observing Mind, between the pattern of Nature and the Mind's scheme or replica of it. If we successfully read into Nature things of the Mind, that means that there must be something very common between the two. Mind's readings are not

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mere figments, hanging in the air; for they are justified by their applicability, by their factual translation. This is arguing in a circle, a thorough-going mentalist like Eddington would say. What are facts? What is life? Anything more than what the senses and the mind have built up for us?

Jeans himself is on the horns of a dilemma.1 Being a scientist, and not primarily a mathematician like Eddington, he cannot very well acquiesce in the liquidation of the material world; nor can he refute successfully the facts and arguments that Science itself has brought forward in favour of mentalism. He wishes to keep the question open for further light and surer grounds. In the meanwhile, however, he is reconciled to a modified form of mentalism. The laws of Nature, he says, are surely subjective in the sense that astronomical or geographical concepts, for example, such as the system of latitudes, longitudes, equator and axis, ellipse and quadrant and sextant, are subjective. These lines and figures are' not drawn physically upon the earth or in space: they are mental constructs, they are pointers or notations, but they note and point to the existence and the manner of existence of real objects in a real world.

In other words, one tries to come back more or less to the common-sense view of things. One does not argue about what is naturally given as objective reality; whatever the mental gloss over it, it is there all the same. One accepts it, takes it on trust, if you like – one can admit even that it is an act of faith, as Russell and the Neo-Realists would maintain.

But Jeans' position is remarkable and very significant in one respect. When cornered in the process of argument, feeling that the world is inexorably dematerialised and mentalised, he suggests an issue which is natural to a philosopher, a mystic philosopher alone. Well, let him state his position in his own words, the passage, I repeat, is so remarkable and significant:

"When we view ourselves in space and time, our conscious­nesses are obviously the separate individuals of a particle-picture, but when we pass beyond space and time, they may perhaps form ingredients of a single continuous stream of life. As it is with light and electricity, so it may be with life; the phenomena may be individuals carrying on separate existence 1

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Physics and Philosophy)', by Sir James Jeans.

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in space and time, while in the deeper reality beyond space and time we may all be members of one body. In brief, modern physics is not altogether antagonistic to an objective idealism like that of Hegel." (p. 204)l

A la bonne leure! That runs close to Upanishadic knowledge.

It means that the world is objective – it is not the figment of an individual observer; but it is not material either, it is consciousness in vibration. (Note the word "consciousness" is Jeans' own, not mine).

Jeans is not alone to have such a revolutionary and unortho­dox view. He seems to take courage from Dirac also. Dirac too cannot admit an annihilation of the material world. His proposal to save and salvage it follows a parallel line. He says that the world presented or pictured by physical science may not be and is not the actual world, but it posits a substratum of reality to which it conforms: the pattern presented by subjective laws is so composed because of a pressure, an impact from an analogous substratum. There is no chain of causal relation in the pattern itself, the relation of causality is between the substratum reality and the pattern that it bodies forth. Here again we find ourselves at the end of physical inquiry driving straight into the tenuous spaces of spiritual metaphysics. We have one more example of how a modern physicist is metamorphosed into a mystic. What Dirac says is tantamount to the very well-known spiritual experience that the world as it appears to us is a vesture or symbol of an inner order of reality out of which it has been broadcast-sah paryagāt-and the true causes of things are not on the surface, the so-called antecedents, but behind in the subtler world called therefore the causal world, kārana jagat.

Even Eddington is not so absurd or impossible as it may seem to some. He says, as we have seen, that all so-called laws of Nature can be discovered from within the mind itself, can be deduced logically from psychologically given premises: no empiricial observation or objective experimentation is necessary to arrive at them: they are found a priori in the subject. Now, mystic experience always lays stress on extra-sensory knowledge: it declares that such a knowledge is not only possible, but that this alone is the right and correct knowledge. All

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things – matter and mind and life and all – being but vibrations of consciousness, even as the colours of a spectrum are vibrations, electro-magnetic waves of different frequency, mystic discipline enables one to enter into that condition in which one's consciousness mingles with all consciousness or with another particular consciousness (Patanjali's term is samyama), and one can have all knowledge that one wishes to have by this inner contact or concentration or identification, one discovers the knowledge within oneself, no external means of sense observation and experimental testing, no empirical inductive process is needed. We do not say that Eddington had in view anything of this kind, but that his attitude points in this direction.

That seems to be the burden, the underlying preoccupation of modern physical science: it has been forced to grope towards some kind of mystic perception; at least, it has been put into a frame of mind, due to the crumbling of the very fundamentals of the past structure, which is less obstructive to other sources and spheres and ways of knowledge. Certainly, we must admit that we have moved very far from Laplace when we hear today a hard-boiled rationalist like De Broglie declare:

The idealisations more or less schematic that our mind builds up are capable of representing certain facets of things, but they have inherent limitations and cannot contain within their frames all the richness of the reality.¹

The difficulty that modern Science encounters is not, how-ever, at all a difficulty: it may be so to the philosopher, but not to the mystic, the difficulty, that is to say, of positing a real objective world when all that we know or seize of it seems to be our own mental constructions that we impose upon it. Science has come to such a pass that it can do no more than take an objective world on trust.

Things need not, however, be so dismal looking. The difficulty arises because of a fundamental attitude-the attitude of a purely reasoning being. But Reason or Mind is only one layer or vein of the reality, and to see and understand and

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¹La Physique Nouvelle pt les Quanta, by Louis de Broglie, p. 12.

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explain that reality through one single track of approach will naturally bias the view, it will present only what is real or immediate to it, and all the rest will appear as secondary or a formation of it. That is, of course, a truth that has been clearly brought out by the anti-intellectualist. But the vitalist's view is also likewise vitiated by a similar bias, as he contacts reality only through this prism of vital force. It is the old story of the Upanishad in which the seeker takes the Body, the Life and the Mind one after another and declares each in its turn to be the only and ultimate reality, the Brahman.

The truth of the matter is that the integral reality is to be seized by an integral organon. To an integralised consciousness the integral reality is directly and immediately presented, each aspect is apprehended in and through its own truth and substance. The synthesis or integration is reached by a consciousness which is the basis and continent of all, collectively and severally, and of which all are various formations and expressions on various levels and degrees. This is the knowledge and experience given by the supreme spiritual consciousness.

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The Observer and the Observed

SCIENCE means objectivity, that is to say, elimination of the personal element-truth as pure fact without being distorted or coloured by the feelings and impressions and notions of the observer. It is the very opposite of the philosopher's standpoint who says that a thing exists because (and so long as) it is perceived. The scientist swears that a thing exists whether you perceive it or not, perception is possible because it exists, not the other way. And yet Descartes is considered not only as the father of modern philosophy, but also as the founder o( modern mathematical science. But more of that anon. The scientific observer observes as a witness impartial and aloof: he is nothing more than a recording machine, a sort of passive mirror reflecting accurately and faithfully what is presented to it. This is indeed the great revolution brought about by Science in the world of human inquiry and in human consciousness, viz., the isolation of the observer from the observed.

In the old world, before Science was born, sufficient distinction or discrimination was not made between the observer and the observed. The observer mixed himself up or identified himself with what he observed and the result was not a scientific statement but a poetic description. Personal feelings, ideas, judgments entered into the presentation of facts and the whole mass passed as truth, the process often being given the high-sounding name of Intuition, Vision or Revelation but whose real name is fancy. And if there happened to be truth off act somewhere, it was almost by chance. Once we thought of the eclipse being due to the greed of a demon, and pestilence due to the evil eye of a wicked goddess. The universe was born out of an egg, the cosmos consisted of concentric circles of worlds that were meant to reward the virtuous and punish the

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sinner in graded degrees. These are some of the very well-known instances of pathetic fallacy, that is to say, introducing the element of personal sentiment in our appreciation of events and objects. Even today Nazi race history and Soviet Genetics carry that unscientific prescientific tradition.

Science was born the day when the observer cut himself aloof from the observed. Not only so, not only he is to stand aside, outside the field of observation and be a bare recorder, but that he must let the observed record itself, that is, be its own observer. Modern Science means not so much the observer narrating the story of the observed but the observed telling its own story. The first step is well exemplified in the story of Galileo. When hot discussion was going on and people insisted on saying-as Aristotle decided and common sense declared – that heavier bodies most naturally fall quicker from a height, it was this prince of experimenters who straightaway took two differen.t weights, went up the tower of Pisa and let them drop and astounded the people by showing that both travel with equal speed and fall to the ground at the same time.

Science also declared that it is not the observation of one person, however qualified, that determines the truth or otherwise of a fact, but the observation of many persons and the possibility of observations of all persons converging, coinciding, corroborating. It is only when observation has thus been tested and checked that one can be sure that the personal element has been eliminated. Indeed the ideal condition would be if the observer, the scientist himself, could act as part of the machine for observation: at the mos he should be a mere assembler of the parts of the machine that would record itself, impersonatly, automatically. The rocket instruments that are sent high up in the sky to record the temperature, pressure or other weather condition in the stratosphere or the deep-sea recording machines are ingenious inventions in that line. The wizard Jagadish Chandra Bose showed his genius precisely in the way he made the plant itself declare its life-story: it is not what the scientist thinks or feels about the plant, but what the plant has to say of its own accord, as it were – its own tale of growth and decay, of suffering, spasm, swoon, suffocation or death under given conditions. This is the second step that Science took in the direction of impersonal and objective inquiry.

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It was thought for long a very easy matter – at least not extraordinarily difficult – to eliminate the observer and keep only to the observed. It was always known how the view of the observer that is to say, his observation changed in respect of the observed fact with his change of position. The sun rises and sets to the observer on earth: to an observer on Mars, for example, the sun would rise and set, no doubt, but earth too along with, in the same way as Mars and sun appear to us now, while to an observer on the sun, the sun would seem fixed while the planets would be seen moving round. Again, we all know the observer in a moving train sees things outside the train moving past and himself at stand-still; the same observer would see another train moving alongside in the same direction and with the same speed as stuck to it and at stand-still, but as moving with double the speed if going in a contrary direction: and so on.

The method proposed for eliminating the observer was observation, more and more observation, and experiment, testing the observation under given conditions. I observe and record a series of facts and when I have found a sufficient ,number of them I see I am able to put them all together under a general title, a law of the occurrence or pattern of the objects observed. Further it is not I alone who can do it in any peculiar way personal to me, but that, everybody else can do the same thing and arrive at the same series of facts leading to the same conclusion. I note, for example, the sun's path from day to day in the sky; soon we find that the curves described by the sun are shifted along the curve of an ellipse (that is to say, their locus is an ellipse). The ecliptic is thus found to be an ellipse which means that the earth moves round the sun in an ellipse.

But in the end a difficulty arose in the operation of observation. It proved to be not a simple process. The scientific observer requires for his observation the yard-stick and the time-piece. Now, we have been pushed to admit a queer phenomenon (partly by observation and partly by a compelling deduction) that these. two measuring units are not constant; they change with the change of system, that is to say, according to the velocity of the system. In other words, each observer has his own unit of space and time measure. So the elimination of

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the personal element of the observer has become a complicated mathematical problem, even if one is sure of it finally.

There is still something more. The matter of calculating and measuring objectively was comparatively easy when the object in view was of medium size, neither too big nor too small. But in the field of the infinite and the infinitesimal, when from the domain of mechanical forces we enter into the region of electric and radiant energy, we find our normal measuring apparatus almost breaks down. Here accurate observation cannot be made because of the very presence of the observer, because of the very fact of observation. The ultimates that are observed are trails of light particles: now when the observer directs his eye (or the beam oflight replacing the eye) upon the light particle, its direction and velocity are interfered with: the photon is such a tiny infinitesimal that a ray from the observer's eye is sufficient to deflect and modify its movement. And there is no way of determining or eliminating this element of deflection or interference. The old Science knew certainly that a thermometer dipped in the water whose temperature it is to measure itself changes the initial temperature. But that was something calculable and objective. Here the position of the observer is something like a "possession", imbedded, ingrained, involved in the observed itself.

The crux of the difficulty is this. We say the observing eye or whatever mechanism is made to function for it, disturbs the process of observation. Now to calculate that degree or measure of disturbance one has to fall back upon another observing eye, and this again has to depend upon yet another behind. Thus there is an infinite regress and no final solution. So, it has been declared, in the ultimate analysis, scientific calculation gives us only the average result, and it is only average calculations that are possible.

Now we come to the sanctum, the Shekinah, of the problem. For there is a still deeper mystery. And pre-eminently it is an Einsteinian discovery. It is not merely the measuring ray of light, not merely the beam in the eye of the observer that is the cause of interference: the very mind behind the eye is involved in a strange manner. The mind is not a tabula rasa, it comes into the field with certain presuppositions-axioms and postulates, as it calls them-due to its angle of vision and perhaps

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to the influence upon it of immediate sense perception. It takes for granted, for example, that light travels in a straight line, that parallels do not meet, indeed all the theorems and deductions of Euclidean geometry. There is a strong inclination in the mind to view things as arranged according to that pattern. Einstein has suggested that the spherical scheme can serve as well or even better our observations. Riemann's non-Euclidean geometry has assumed momentous importance in contemporary scientific enquiry. It is through that scheme that Einstein proposes to find the equation that will subsume the largest number of actual and possible or potential facts and bring about the reconciliation of such irrecon ilables as wave and particle, gravitation and electricity.

In any case, at the end of all our peregrinations we seem to circle back to our original Cartesian-cum-Berkeleyean position; we discover that it is not easy to extricate the observed from the observer: the observer is so deep set in the observed, part and parcel of it that there are scientists who consider their whole scientific scheme of the world as only a mental set-up, we may replace it very soon by another scheme equally cogent, subjective all the same. The subject has entered into all objects and any definition of the object must necessarily depend upon the particular poise of the subject. That is the cosmic immanence of the Purusha spoken of in the Upanishads – the one Purusha become many and installed in the heart of each and, every object. There is indeed a status of the Subject in which the subject and the object are gathered into or form one reality. The observer and the observed are the two ends, the polarisation of a single entity: and all are reals at that level. But the scientific observer is only the mental purusha and in his observation the absolute objectivisation is not possible. The Einsteinian equations that purport to rule out all local view-points can hardly be said to have transcended the co-ordinates of the subject. That is possible only to the consciousness of the cosmic Purusha.

2

Is it then to say that science is no longer science, it has now been converted into philosophy, even into idealistic philosophy?

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In spite of Russell and Eddington who may be considered in this respect as counsellors of despair, the objective reality of the scientific field stands, it is asserted, although somewhat changed.

Now, there are four positions possible with regard to the world and reality, depending on the relation between the observer and the observed, the subject and the object. They are: (I) subjective, (2) objective, (3) subjective objective and

(4) objective subjective. The first two are extreme positions, one holding the subject as the sole or absolute reality, the object being a pure fabrication of its will and idea, an illusion, and the other considering the object as the true reality, the subject being an outcome, an epiphenomenon of the object itself, an illusion after all. The first leads to radical or as it is called monistic spirituality the type of which is Mayavada: the second is the highway of materialism, the various avataras of which are Marxism, Pragmatism, Behaviourism etc. In between lie the other two intermediate positions according to the stress or value given to either of the two extremes. The first of the intermediates is the position held generally by the idealists, by many schools of spirituality: it is a major Vedantic position. It says that the outside world, the object, is not an illusion, a mere fabrication of the mind or consciousness of the subject, but that it exists and is as real as the subject: it is dovetailed into the subject which is a kind of linchpin, holding together and even energising the object. The object can further be considered as an expression or embodiment of the subject. Both the subject and the object are made of the same stuff of consciousness – the ultimate reality b ing consciousness. The subject is the consciousness turned on itself and the object is consciousness turned outside or going abroad. This is pre-eminently the Upanishadic position. In Europe, Kant holds a key position in this line: and on the whole, idealists from Plato to Bradley and Bosanquet can be said more or less to belong to this category. The second intermediate position views the subject as imbedded into the object, not the object into the subject as in the first one: the subject itself is part of the object something like its self-regarding or self-recording function. In Europe apart possibly from some of the early Greek thinkers (Anaxagoras or Democritus, for example), coming to more

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recent times, we can say that line runs fairly well-represented from Leibnitz to Bergson. In India the Sankhyas and the Vaisheshikas move towards and approach the position; the Tantriks make a still more near approach.

Once again, to repeat in other terms the distinction which may sometimes appear to carry no difference. First, the subjective objective in which the subject assumes the preponderant position, not denying or minimising the reality of the object. The external world, in this view, is a movement in and of the consciousness of a universal subject. It is subjective in the sense that it is essentially a function of the subject and does not exist apart from it or outside it; it is objective in the sense that it exists really and is not a figment or imaginative construction of any individual consciousness, although it exists in ahd through the individual consciousness in so far as that consciousness is universa,lised, is one with the universal consciousness (or the transcendental, the two can be taken together in the present connection). Instead of the Kantian transcendental idealism we can name it transcendental realism.

In the other case the world exists here below in its own reality, outside all apprehending subject; even the universal subject is in a sense part of it, immanent in it – it embraces the subject in its comprehending consciousness and posits it as part of itself or a function of its apprehension. The many Purushas (conscious beings or subjects) are imbedded in the universal Nature, say the Sankhyas. Kali, Divine Nature, is the manifest Omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent reality holding within her the transcendent divine Purusha who supports, sanctions and inspires secretly, yet is dependent on the Mahashakti and without her is nothing, śunyam. That is how the Tantriks put it. We may mention here, among European philosophers, the rather interesting conclusion of Leibnitz (to which Russell draws our attention): space is subjective to the view of each monad (subject unit) separately, it is objective when it consists of the assemblage of the view-points of all the monads.

The scientific outlook was a protest against the extreme subjective view: it started with the extreme objective standpoint and that remained the fundamental note till the other day, till the fissure of the nucleus opened new horizons to our

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somewhat bewildered mentality. We seem to have entered into a region where we still hold to the objective, no doubt, but not absolutely free from an insistent presence of the subjective. It is the second of the intermediate positions we have tried to describe. Science has yet to decide the implications of that position; whether it will try to entrench itself as much as possible on this side of the subjective or whether it can yield further and go over to or link itself with the deeper subjective position.

The distinction between the two may after all be found to be a matter of stress only, involving no fundamental difference, especially as there are sure to be g adations from the one to the other. The most important landmark, however, the most revolutionary step in modern science would be the discovery of the eternal observer or some sign or image of his seated within the observed phenomena of moving things – purusah prakritistho hi, as the Gita says.

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An Age of Revolution

THERE has been a revolutionary change in the scientific outlook in recent times. A very fundamental principle – the very postulate on which the whole edifice of physical Science has been built up – is now being called in question. We thought that the unity and uniformity of Nature is a cardinal fact and nothing can shake it. Well, it appears that solid basis too has proved to be no more than an eidolon.

The search for a universal principle of Nature is a meta-physical as well as a scientific preoccupation. In ancient days, fo example, we had the Water of Thales or the Fire of Heraclitus as the one original unifying principle of this kind. With the coming of the Renascence and the New Illumination we laughed them out and installed instead the mysterious Ether. For a long time this universal reigned supreme and now that too has gone the way of its predecessors. We thought for a time that we had found in Electric Energy the one sovereign principle in Nature. At a time when we had a few elements – discrete, different, fundamental units – that in their varying combinations built up the composite structure of Nature, apart from the fact that they reposed finally on the ultimate unifying principle of Ether, it was found also that they all behaved in a uniform and identical and therefore predictable manner. The time and the place (and the mass) being given, everything went according to a pattern and a formula, definite, fixed, mathematically rigid. Even the discovery of one element after another till the number Feached the famous figure 92 (itself following a line of mathematically precise and inevitable development) did not materially alter the situation and caused no tribulation. For on further scrutiny a closer unity revealed itself: the supposed disparity in the substance of the various

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elements was found to be an illusion, for they all appeared now as different organisations or dispositions of the same electric energy (although the identity of electric energy with radiant energy was not always very clear). Thus we could conclude that as the substance was the same, its mode of working also would be' uniform and patterned. In other words, the mechanistic conception still ruled our view' of Nature. That means, the ultimate units, the particles (of energy) that compose Nature are like sea-sands or water-drops, each one is fundamentally similar to any other and all behave similarly, reacting uniformly to the same forces that act upon them.

Well, it is now found that they do not do so. However same or similar constitutionally, each unit is sui generis and its movement cannot be predicted. That movement does not depend upon its mass or store of energy or its position in a pattern, as a wholly mechanistic conception would demand: it is something incalculable, one should say even, erratic. In a radioactive substance, the particle that is shot out, becomes active, cannot be predetermined by any calculation, even if that is due to a definitely and precisely arranged bombardment. So we have come to posit a principle of uncertainty, as a very fundamental law of Nature. It practically declares that the ultimate particle is an autonomou unit, it is an' individual, almost a personality, and seems to have a will of its own. A material unit acts very much like a biological unit: it does not obey mechanically, answer mechanically as an automaton, but seems to possess a capacity for choice, for assent or refusal, for a free determination. The mechanistic view presented is due to an average functioning. The phenomenon has been explained by a very apt image. It is like an army. A group of soldiers, when they are on parade, look all similar and geometrically patterned: each is just like another and all move and march in the same identical manner. But that' is when you look at the whole, the collectivity, but looked individually, each one regains his separate distinct personality, each having his own nature and character, his own unique history: there no two are alike, each is non pareil and behaves differently, incalculably.

That is how we have been led almost to the threshold of a will, of a life principle, of a consciousness, however rudimentary,

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imbedded in the heart of Matter. All the facts that are now cropping up, the new discoveries that are being made and which we have to take into cognisance lead inevitably towards such a conclusion. Without such a conclusion a rational co-ordination of all the data of experience is hardly possible. A physiCal scientist may not feel justified to go beyond the purely physical data, but the implications of even such data, the demand for a fair hypothesis that can harmonise and synthesise them are compelling even a physicist to become a psychologist and a metaphysician.

Looked at from below with the eye of reason and sense observation straining at it, the thing that appears only as a possibility-at best, as a probability – is revealed to the eyes of vision surveying from above as a self – evident reality, a reality before which the apparent realities posited by sense and reason become subsidiary and auxiliary, far-off echoes. The facts of sense-perception are indeed the branches spread out below while the root of the tree lies above: in other words, the root-reality is consciousness and all that exist are vibrations of that consciousness extended and concretised. This is the truth which modem science, in its farthest advances, would like to admit but dare not.

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The Changed Scientific Outlook

THERE is, of course, more than one line of scientific outlook at the present day. It is well known that continental scientists generally and Marxist scientists in particular belong to a different category from Jeans and Eddington. But the important point is this: a considerable body of scientists frankly hold the "idealist" view, and these come from the very front rank qua scientists. Discussion arises when it is seriously put forward that Eddington and Jeans are not authorities in science equalling any other great names; as if it is contended that because a scientist holds the idealist view, ergo, he is a pseudo-scientist, a third-degree luminary, a back-bencher, a mediaevalist. The Marxists also declare, we may recall in this connection, that the bourgeois cannot be a true poet, in order to be a poet one must be a proletarian.

There is a scientific obscurantism, which is not less obscure because it is scientific, and one must guard against it with double care and watchfulness. It is the mentality of the no-changer whose motto seems to be: plus ça change, plus ça reste le même.. Let me explain. The scientist who prefers still to be called a materialist must remember that the (material) ground under his feet has shifted considerably since the time he first propounded his materialistic position: he does not stand in the same place (or plane?) as he did even twenty years ago. The change has been basic and fundamental – fundamental, because the very definitions and postulates with which we once started have been called in question, thrown overboard or into the melting-pot.

Shall we elucidate a little? We were once upon a time materialists, that is to say, we had very definite and fixed notions about Matter: to Matter we gave certain invariable

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characteristics, inalienable properties. How many of them stand today unscathed on their legs? Take the very first, the crucial property ascribed to Matter: "Matter is that which has extension." Well, an electric charge, a unit energy of it, the ultimate constituent of Matter as discovered by Science today, can it be said to occupy space? In the early days of Science, one Boscovich advanced a theory according to which the ultimate material particle (a molecule, in his time) does not occupy space, it is a mere mathematical point toward or from which certain forces act. The theory, naturally, was laughed out of consideration; but today we have come perilously near it. Again, another postulate describing Matter's dharma was: "two material particles cannot occupy the same place at the same time". Now what do you say of the neutron and proton that coalesce and form the unit of a modern atomic nucleus? Once more, the notion of the indestructibility of Matter has been considerably modified in view of the phenomenon of an electric particle (electron) being wholly transmuted ("dematerialised" as the scientists themselves say) into a light particle (photon). Lastly, the idea of the constancy of mass – a bed-rock of old-world physics – is considered today to be a superstition, an illusion. If after all these changes in the idea of Matter, a man still maintains that he is a materialist, as of old, well, I can only exclaim in the Shakespearean phrase: "Bottom, thou art translated"! What I want to say is that the changes that modern physics proposes to execute in its body are not mere amendments and emendations, but they mean a radical transfiguration, a subversion and a mutation. And more than the actual changes effected, the possibilities, the tendencies that have opened out, the lines along which further developments are proceeding do point not merely to a reformation, but a revolution.

Does this mean that Science after all is veering to the Idealist position? Because we have modified the meaning and connotation of Matter does it 'follow that we have perforce arrived at spirituality? Not quite so. As Jeans says, the correct scientific position would be to withhold one's judgment about the ultimate nature of matter, whether it is material or mental (spiritual, we would prefer to say): it is an attitude of non possumus. But such neutrality, is it truly possible and is it so

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very correct? We do see scientists lean .on one side or the other, according to the vision or predisposition that one carries.

From our standpoint, as we view the modern scientific developments, what we see is not that Matter has been spiritualised, but that it has been considerably dematerialised, even immaterialised, that it is in the process of further dematerialisation or immaterialisation. That opens a long and large vista. We say Science by itself cannot arrive at the spiritual, for there is a frontier bar which has to be overleaped, negotiated by something like a somersault. For the scientific view is after all limited by one scope and range of the physical eye. Still, this eye has begun to see things and in a manner to which it was not normally accustomed; it has been trained and educated, made keen and supple so that it seems to be getting more and more attuned even to other vibrations of light beyond and outside the normal sevenfold spectrum.

Science has not spiritualised (or idealised or mentalised) the world; it has not spiritualised itself. Agreed. But what it has done is remarkable. First, with its new outlook it has cut away the ground from where it was wont to give battle to religion and spirituality, it has abjured its cast-iron strait-jacket mentality which considered that senses and syllogism encompass all knowledge and objects of knowledge. It has learnt humility and admits of the possibility of more things there being in heaven and earth which are not amenable to its fixed co-ordinates. Secondly, it has gone at times even beyond this attitude of benevolent neutrality. For certain of its conclusions, certain ways of formulation seem to echo other truths, other manners. That is to say, if Science by itself is unable to reach or envisage the spiritual outlook, yet the position it has reached, the vistas it envisages seem to be not perhaps exactly one with, but in line with what our vision (of the scientific world) would be like if once we possess the spiritual eye. Matter, Science says today, is energy and forms of matter, objects, are various vibrations of this one energy. What is this energy? According to science, it is electrical, radiant, ethereal (Einstein replaces "ether" by "field") – biological science would venture to call it life energy. You have only to move one step farther and arrive at the greater

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and deeper generalisation – Matter is a mode of the energy of consciousness, all forms of Matter are vibrations of consciousness.

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Knowledge by Identity

SRI AUROBINDO says, knowledge – true knowledge – comes always by identity, i.e., when you are identified with the object, when the knower and the known are one. He further adds that even ordinary knowledge, sense-perception, comes in fact by that way, although it may look otherwise, viz., as a process of logical induction or deduction or both. When I am angry, he illustrates, I know I am angry because I become anger or when I know I am existent, it is because I am one with my existence.

Prof. Das¹ seeks to controvert the position. He says, when there is complete identity there is no knowledge. If I am wholly one with the object, I get merged and lost in it. When I become a thing, I no longer know the thing. If I know a thing, it means the thing is separate from me, in front of me; the relation of subject-object is the very essence, the sine qua non of all knowledge. Taking up the illustration, Prof. Das says: if I know I am angry, it clearly shows that I and my anger are separate entities; similarly, I know I exist, it too shows that I am separate, partially at least, from my existence, that is to say, as knower transcendent to the object known. In knowing there cannot thus be complete identity.

Prof. Das evidently holds the orthodox, rather rigid, Sankhya position, viz., the Purusha or witness is always separate from Prakriti, its object. But after all this is only a standpoint, there are other standpoints equally valid and more comprehensive. Sri Aurobindo holds in this respect what may be generically called the Vedantic position where the basic epistemological principle is that the knower and the known (jñātā and jñeya) are fused together in knowledge (jñāna). One Vedantic line,

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¹ Calcutta Review, 1948 August-September.

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it is true however, seems to arrive at a different conclusion, for thus it is asserted, where there is absolute identity, who is it that sees or knows or what is it that is seen or known! But this is only one aspect of the phenomenon.

When the Upanishad says, one who knows Brahman be comes Brahman, does it not mean that the very condition of knowing Brahman is to become it? Indeed, there is no contradiction or incommensurability between knowing and becoming, between (what is termed by the mystic as) Knowledge and Realisation. Consciousness has a twofold power, Sri Aurobindo says: the power of apprehension and the power of comprehension – prajñāna and vijñāna. Prajnana, the apprehending consciousness, sets the object in front, away and separate from itself and contemplates it: Vijnana, the comprehending consciousness, on the other hand, comprehends, embraces the object within itself, as part of its own being. The two are not distinct or incompatible movements, they go together and form one single movement of consciousness. It is the mind, the reason that makes the separation; it is not possible for the mind to view two things simultaneously. It is because of this incapacity of the mind, married to its logic of the finite, that Sri Aurobindo points out the way of correcting it by a higher supramental power which operates in a global way.

Let us go back to our illustration. I am angry means both I am anger and I know I have anger. It is true in fact and experience. Similarly I am (existent) means both I am existence and I know I am existent. The transcendence of the subject (of which Prof. Das speaks) is nothing but the poise of the consciousness as the apprehending Purusha: it does not negate or exclude identification, which is another arm of a biune process. The two are complementary to each other. Also Purusha and Prakriti are nor contradictories, not mutually exclusive; they are dual aspects or dispositions of the same consciousness or self-conscious reality. Consciousness involved and lost to itself and in itself is Prakriti, consciousness evolved and looking out at itself is Purusha. I am aware of myself and I am myself are two ways of saying the same thing. We imagine Shakespeare expressed the experience graphically and poetically when he made his character say:

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Richard loves Richard, that is I am I.

In seeking to disvalue the principle of identity as a fundamental element in knowing, Prof. Das brings in to witness on his side the logical copula. Some logicians, of course, assert a parallelism if not identity between the laws of thought and the laws of language, language being conceived as the very image – a photograph – of thought, but the truth of the matter is that it is and it is not so, as in many other things. However, here when it is stated that the copula disjoining the subject and the predicate is the very pattern of all process of knowledge, one mistakes, we are afraid, a scheme or a formula, for the thing itself, a way of understanding a fact for the fact itself. Such a formula for understanding, however it may be valid for more or less analytical languages, those of later growth, need not and did not have the same propriety in respect of other older languages. We know the evolution of language has been in the direction of more and more disjunction of its component limbs even like the progression of the human mind and intellect. The modern analytical languages with their army of independent prepositions have taken the place of the classical languages which were predominantly inflexional. The Greek and Latin started the independent prepositional forms in the form of a fundamentally inflexional structure. Still further back, in Sanskrit for example, the inflexional form reigns supreme. Prefixes and affixes served the role of prepositions. And if we move further backward, the synthetic movement is so complete that the logical components (the subject, the copula, the predicate) are fused together into one symbol (the Chinese ideogram). We are here nearer to the original nature and pattern of knowledge – a single homogeneous movement of apperception. There is no sanctity or absoluteness in the logical disposition of thought structure; the Aristotelian makes it a triplicity, the Indian Nyaya would extend the dissection to five or seven limbs. But whatever the logical presentation, the original psychological movement is a single indivisible élan – and the Vedantic fusion of the knower, the knowledge and the known in identity remains the fundamental fact.

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The Place of Reason

ANOTHER point in Sri Aurobindo's view of consciousness which troubles Prof. Das is about the exact nature and function of Reason. For while on one side Sri Aurobindo never seems to be tired of pointing out the inherent incapacity of Reason – in the good company of the ancient Rishis – as an instrument for the discovery or realisation of the Absolute or the integral Reality, he asserts, on the other hand, almost in the same breath as it were, that mind can have some idea or conception of what is beyond it, which it so often vainly strives to seize or represent. Evidently, the rationalist logic fails to hold together the two ends, as it is further seen in Prof. Das's failure to perceive any distinction between types or gradations of "thinking".¹ He thinks that just as a philosopher thinks, or a cabman thinks or an animal thinks, all must think in the same way and through the same function of the same organ: either there is thinking (thinking proper, of one particular kind) or there is no thinking. That Nature consists of a graduated scale in every line of its movements, and that the gradations shade off into each other – not only so but that each scale or principle may contain within itself all the others ² - is a phenomenon which runs contrary to the "either this or that" or "no-overlapping" principle, like the colour-blind

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¹ Calcutta Review, January 1949.

² Thus, take the principles of matter, life and mind. They are separate and distinct from one point of view-the logical and practical. But life came out of matter, and then mind out of life--that is the evolutionary conception. In other words, matter shades off into life, there is a point where it is difficult to say whether it is matter or life; similarly there is a point where life shades off into mind, where mind and life are fused together. We can further say that in matter there is a life and there is a mind, and in life there is a matter and a mind and in mind too there is a matter and a life. But these facts of Nature are disconcerting to the one-track mind of the logical philosopher and make the confusion worse confounded for him.

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for whom things are either black or white. In the global outlook, however, we do not stand in the relation of division, separation, mutual exclusiveness. There is a consciousness in which all contraries find a harmonising truth and rhythm.

In Sri Aurobindo, Reason and Intuition possess a dual relation of mutual negation and mutual affirmation, of ex­clusiveness and inclusiveness, as indeed is the relation of Brahman and the World. One negates the other in the sphere of ignorance but in knowledge one affirms the other. That is to say, Reason or mental logic, so long as it is dominated by the senses, by the external impressions from things and by its analytic or exclusively separative method of procedure, is a denial of Intuition and a bar to spiritual experience. But Reason can be purified, relieved of its dross, illumined (sam-buddha) – sublimated and uplifted – then it comes to its own, becomes what it really is and should be – a frame to give body to what is beyond and unembodied, a mirror in conceptual terms to what is supra-conceptual. It loses its hard rigidity and becomes supple, loses its obscurity, density and becomes transparent: it attains a new rhythm and gait and capacity. Many of the Upanishadic mantras, a good part of the Gita, do that. And Sri Aurobindo's own exposition is a miracle in that style. "Reason was a helper, Reason is the bar" – and, we can add, Reason will again be an aid. The world, as it is, is anything but Divine; and yet it is nothing but the Divine essentially and fundamentally; it can and will attain the divine figure apparently and externally too. Even so with regard to man's mind and reason and all his other limbs.

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The Revealer and the Revelation

How the horizontal view limits and maims one's spiritual perception is further illustrated in the case of the famous Gloomy Dean. Dean Inge is a divine and as spiritual a person as one can hope to be in the modern world. He has, however, voluntarily clipped his wings and in the name of a surer rational knowledge and saner spirituality prefers a lower flight among known, familiar and nameable ranges to a transcendent soaring in mystic regions beyond. He has made a somewhat trenchant distinction between the Revelation and the Revealer. He says we can know God only by his qualities: what he is, if anything, besides his qualities none can define. In the words of the poet,

These are His works and His veils and His shadows;

But where is He then? by what name is He known?¹

According to the Dean the qualities themselves are God, the living God whom one can worship. The True, the Good and the Beautiful – the Hellenic trinity he adores more than the Holy Trinity. "The God of religion is rather the revelation than the revealer. The source of revelation cannot be revealed: the ground of knowledge cannot be known".² This, one might say, almost echoes the Upanishadic mantra, "How can one know the knower?" (Vijñātāram are kena vijānīyāt). The Upanishad says indeed that he who thinks he knows does not certainly know, but he who says he knows not is the one who knows; he knows who knows not, he knows not who knows. This simply means that God, the supreme Reality, is apprehended in and through other channels than mind and reason. It is a commonplace of

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1 Who-Sri Aurobindo

2 Mysticism in Religion, by Dean Inge, p. 155. 341

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spiritual experience that the Spirit is directly, immediately realisable, although its indirect approaches are walled in by a thousand appearances. A direct non-rational experience is not however something vague, nebulous, inarticulate; it is even more concrete, precise and tangible than a sense experience or a rational idea. Not only so, a suprarational knowledge can be grasped and presented by the intellect if it is purified _and illumined. A brain mind under the sway of the senses and the outgoing impulse is an obstacle: it disturbs and prevents the higher Light. But passive and transparent it can be a faithful mirror, a docile instrument and channel. That is why the Upanishad says in the first instance that the supreme Reality cannot be seized by the reason, but in another context, it declares that the mind, the intelligence too has to hold and realise the same. Normally intellect acts as a lid, but it can also be a reflector or projector.

One knows the Revealer for one becomes it. Knowledge by identity is the characteristic of spiritual knowledge. If one keeps oneself separate and seeks to apprehend the Divine as an object outside, the Divine escapes or is caught only by the trail it leaves, its echoes and shadows, its apparent qualities and attributes. But one with the Divine, the being realises and possesses it in full consciousness, the Revealer reveals himself as such (vrnute tanum swām) and not merely in or as his phenomenal formulations.

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Darshana and Philosophy

THERE is a mental approach to spiritual truths and there is a direct and immediate approach or rather contact. The mind sees as though through a mist, a darkling glass, a more or less opaque veil, and the thing envisaged presents a blurred and not unoften a deformed appearance. The mind has its own pre-dispositions – its own categories and terms, its own forms and figures-which it has to use when it seeks to express that which is beyond it. Naturally the object, the truth as it is, it cannot apprehend or represent; it gives as it were the reverse side of an embroidery work. It goes round about the thing, has to take recourse to all kinds of contortions and gymnastics and grimaces to ape the natural gesture of the truth. But mind acts in this way, as a veil rather than' a medium, when one is stationed in it or below it and strains to look at what is above and beyond. On the other hand, if the consciousness is stationed above the mind, that is to say, if it has direct access or contact with the truth, the spiritual reality, in that case, mind need not act as a veil, it too can be made transparent, and sufflused with the higher light, it too can translate faithfully, present and embody the reality beyond somewhat as it actually is, in its native rhythm and figure and not diffracted and diffused through a hazy atmosphere.

European thought, European philosophy particularly, moves under the aegis of the Mind. It takes its stand within the Mind and from there tries to reach out to truths and realities; and therefore, however far it goes, its highest flights of perception, its most intimate contacts with spirit-truths are 'sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought'. The Indian standpoint, on the contrary, is first to contact the truth by a direct realisation – through meditation, concentration, an uplifting and a deepening

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of the consciousness, through Yoga, spiritual discipline, and then endeavour to express the truth thus realised, directly intuited or revealed, through mental terms, to make it familiar and communicable to the normal intelligence. Mind, so subordinated and keyed to a new rhythm, becomes, as far as it is possible for it, a channel, a vehicle and not a veil. All the main systems of Indian philosophy have this characteristic as their background. Each stands on a definite experience, a spiritual realisation, a direct contact with an aspect of truth and in and -through that seeks to give a world-view, building "up an intellectual system, marshalling rational conclusions that are natural to it or derive inevitably from it. In the Upanishads, which preceded the Darshanas, the spiritual realisations were not yet mentally systematised or logically buttressed: truths were delivered there as self-evident statements, as certitudes luminous in their own authenticity. We accept them without question and take them into our consciousness as forming its fundamental norms, structuring its most intimate inscape. This is darśana, seeing, as philosophy is named in India. One sees the truth or reality and describes it as it is seen, its limbs and gestures, its constituents and functions. Philosophy here is fundamentally a recording of one's vision and a translation or presentation of it in mental terms.

The procedure of European philosophy is different. There the reason or the mental light is the starting-point. That light is cast about: one collects facts, one observes things and happenings and then proceeds to find out a general truth – a law, a hypothesis – justified by such observations. But as a matter of fact this is the ostensible method: it is only a make-believe. For mind and reason are not normally so neutral and impersonal, a tabula rasa. The observer already comes into the field with a definite observational angle and a settled viewpoint. The precise sciences of today have almost foundered on this question of the observer entering inextricably into his observations and vitiating them. So in philosophy too as it is practised in Europe, on a closer observation, if the observer is carefully observed, one finds not unoften a core of suppositions, major premises taken for granted hidden behind the logical apparatus. In other words, even a hardened philosopher cherishes at the back of his mind a priori judgments and his whole

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philosophy is only a rationalisation of an inner prejudgment, almost a window-dressing of a perception that came to him direct and in other secret ways. That was what Kant meant when he made the famous distinction between the Pure and the Practical Reason and their categories. Only the direct perceptions, the spiritual realisations are so much imbedded behind, covered so much with the mist of mind's struggle and tension and imaginative construction that it is not always easy to disengage the pure metal from the ore.

We shall take the case of one such philosopher and try to illustrate our point. We are thinking of Whitehead. The character of European philosophical mind is well exemplified in this remarkable modern philosopher. The anxiety to put the inferences into a strict logical frame makes a naturally abstruse and abstract procedure more abstruse and abstract. The effort to present suprarational truths in terms of reason and syllogism clouds the issues more than it clarifies them. The fundamental perception, the living intuition that is behind his entire philosophy and world outlook is that of an Immanent God, a dynamic evolving Power working out the growth and redemption of mankind and the world {the apotheosis of the World, as he puts it). It is the theme which comes last in the development of his system, as the culminating conclusion of his philosophy, but it is the basic presupposition, the first principle that inspires his whole outlook, all the rest is woven and extended around this central nucleus. The other perception intimate to this basic -original perception and inseparable from it is a synthetic view in which things that are usually supposed to be contraries find their harmony and union, viz., God and the World, Permanence and Flux, Unity and Multiplicity, the Universal and the Individual. The equal reality of the two poles of an integral truth is characteristic of many of the modern philosophical systems. In this respect Whitehead echoes a fundamental conclusion of Sri Aurobindo.

There is another concept in Whitehead which seems to be moulded after a parallel concept in Sri Aurobindo: it is with regard to the working out of the process of creation, the mechanism of its dynamism. It is almost a glimpse into the occult functioning of the world forces. Whitehead speaks of

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two principles that guide the world process, first, the principle of limitation, and second, the principle of ingress. The first one Sri Aurobindo calls the principle of concentration (and of exclusive concentration) by which the infinite and the eternal limits himself, makes himself finite and temporal and infinitesimal, the universal transforms itself into the individual and the particular. The second is the principle of descent, which is almost the corner-stone in Sri Aurobindo's system. There are layers of reality: the higher forces and formulations enter into the lower, work upon it and bring about a change and transformation, purification and redemption. All progress and evolution is due to this influx of the higher, the deeper into , the lower and superficial plane of existence.

There is one concept in Whitehead which seems rather strange to us; it is surely a product of the brain-mind. God, according to him, is not the creator: he is only the Redeemer, he is a shaper but not the source and origin of things. That is because he thinks that if God is made the creator of the world, he would be held responsible for the evil there. This difficulty comes when one thinks of God too much in the popular anthropomorphic way, like someone seated above the world and passing judgment upon a world which is not his doing. God is perhaps a lover of the world, but not its Master – a certain Christian outlook says. According to Sri Aurobindo, God is a triple reality in his transcendental, cosmic and individual aspect. In creating the world, God creates, that is to say, manifests himself. And Evil is an evolute in the process of God's self-creation through self-limitation: it proceeds to self-annihilation and even self-transmutation in a farther process of God's self-unfoldment in world and Nature.

To return to our main theme, we should point out, however, that in Europe too at one time (during the whole Middle Age, the Age of Scholasticism) philosophy was considered only as a handmaid of Religion, it had to echo and amplify and reason out the dogmas (which were sometimes real spiritual experiences or revelations); but the New Illumination came and philosophy declared her autonomy, only that autonomy did not last long. For today in Europe, Philosophy has become the handmaid of Science. It was natural, since

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Reason is not a self-sufficient faculty, it is mediatory and must be ancillary either to something above it 'or something below it – either to Revelation or to sense-perception.

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The Sanctity of the Individual

THE sanctity of the individual, the value of the human person is one of the cardinal articles of faith of the modern consciousness. Only it has very many avatars. One such has been the characteristic mark of the group of philosophers (and mystics) who are nowadays making a great noise under the name of Existentialists. The individual personality exists, they say, and its nature is freedom. In other words, it chooses, as it likes, its course of life, at every step, and Creates its destiny. This freedom, however, may. lead man and will inevitably lead him, according to one section of the group, to the perception and realisation of God, an infinite in which the individual finite lives and moves and has his being; according to others, the same may lead to a very different consummation, to Nothingness, the Great Void, Nihil. All existence is bounded by something unknown and intangible which differs according to your luck or taste, – one would almost say to your line of approach, put philosophically, according either to the positive pole or the negative, God or Non-existence. The second alternative seems to be an inevitable corollary of the particular conception of the individual that is entertained by some, viz., the individual existing only in relation to individuals. Indeed the leader of the French school, Jean-Paul Sartre – not a negligible playwright and novelist – seems to conceive the individual as nothing more than the image formed in other individuals with whom he comes in contact. Existence literally means standing out or outside (ex+sistet), coming out of one-self and living in other's consciousness – as one sees one's exact image in another's eye. It is not however the old-world mystic experience of finding one's self in other selves. For here we have an exclusively level or horizontal view of the human personality.

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The personality is not seen in depth or height, but in line with the normal phenomenal formation. It looks as though, to save personality from the impersonal dissolution to which all monistic idealism leads, the present conception seeks to hinge all personalities upon each other so that they may stand by and confirm each other. But the actual result seems to have been not less calamitous. When we form and fashion each other, we are not building with anything more substantial than sand. Personalities are thus mere eddies in the swirl of cosmic life, they rise up and die down, separate and melt into each other and have no consistency and no reality in the end. The freedom too which is ascribed to such individuals, even when they feel it so, is only a sham and a make-believe. Within Nature nothing is free, all is mechanical law – Karma is supreme. The Sankhya posits indeed many Purushas, free, lodged in the midst of Prakriti, but there the Purusha is hardly an active agent, it is only an inactive, passive, almost impotent, witness. The Existentialist, on the contrary, seeks to make of the individual an active agent; he is not merely being, imbedded or merged in the original Dasein, mere existence, but becoming, the entity that has come out, stood out in its will and consciousness, articulated itself in name and form and act. But the person that stands out as part and parcel of Prakriti, the cosmic movement, is, as we have said, only an instrument, a mode of that universal Nature. The true person that informs that apparent formulation is something else. .

To be a person, it is said, one must be apart from the crowd. A person is the "single one", one who has attained his singularity, his individual wholeness. And the life's work for each individual person is to make the crowd no longer a crowd, but an association of single ones. But how can this be done? It is not simply by separating oneself from the crowd, by dwelling upon oneself that one can develop into one's true person. The individuals, even when perfect single ones, do not exist by themselves or in and through one another. The mystic or spiritual perception posits the Spirit or God, the All-self as the background and substance of all the selves. Indeed, it is only when one finds and is identified with the Divine in oneself that one is in a position to attain one's true selfhood and find oneself in other selves. And the re-creation of a crowd into such

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divine individuals is a cosmic work in which the individual is at best a collaborator, not the master and dispenser. Anyway, one has to come out of the human relationship, rise above the give-and-take of human individuals – however completely individual each one may be – and establish oneself in the Divine's consciousness which is the golden thread upon which is strung all the assembly of individuals. It is only in and through the Divine, the Spiritual Reality and Person, that one enters into true relation and dynamic harmony with others.

The truth of the personality is not to be found in its horizontal, but vertical dimension. The Existentialist speaks of the existence (standing out) of the human person as a transcendence. But real transcendence is not so much in coming out as in going up and beyond. To be outside oneself is not always to transcend oneself: to be above oneself is the real transcendence. Man is a true and free person only when he is lord of Prakriti, dominating and commanding Nature, when he is identified with Ishwara, the supreme Person, the Master, and becomes an incarnate will and consciousness of His. The soul in ignorance and in ignorant relation with others must rise and envisage its archetype in the Supreme Divine, as a free formulation of an Idea-Force of the Infinite.

If we do not keep in view this vertical transcendence and confuse it with immanence, we are likely to arrive at queer conclusions, as for example, one Existentialist says: polarity being an essential truth of the reality, the law of day and night is an eternal and immutable law and therefore, God cannot subsist as pure love; there must be also anger in him. In fact, God too is a becoming God as the human being. The limitation of such a view, characteristically Germanic and intellectual, is evident.

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Sartrian Freedom

THE poise of the ego, the consciousness of the psycho-vital Purusha as envisaged and experienced by Sartre leads to many other not less catastrophic conclusions. Here is something more on Freedom which seems to be almost the corner-stone of his system:

"Freedom is not a being: it is the being of man, that is to say, his not-being". A very cryptic mantra. Let us try to unveil the Shekinah. "Being" means "be-ing" i.e. existing, something persisting, continuing in the same condition, something fixed, a status. Freedom is not a thing of that kind, it is movement: even so, it is not a continuous movement. According to Bergson, the true, the ultimate reality is a continuity of urge (élan vital); according to Sartre, however, in line with the trend of modern scientific knowledge, the reality is an assemblage of discrete units of energy, packets or quanta. So freedom is an urge, a spurt (jaillissement): it acts in a disconnected fashion and it is absolute and unconditional. It is veritably the wind that bloweth where it listeth. It has no purpose, no direction, no relation: for all those attributes or definitions would annul its absoluteness. It does not stop or halt or dwell upon, it bursts forth and passes. It does not exist, that is stay: therefore it is non-being. Man's being then consist of a conglomeration (ensemble) of such freedoms. And that is the whole reality of

I man, his very essence. We have said that a heavy sense of responsibility hangs upon the .free Purusha: but it appears the Sartrian Purusha is a divided personality. In spite of the sense of responsibility (or because of it?) he acts irresponsibly; for, acting otherwise would not be freedom. So then this essence, the self-consciousness, self-existence, presence in oneself is not a status, a fixed standing entity: it is not a point, even if geometrical;

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it is, Sartre describes, the jet from one point to another, for, real point there is none: so it is the emptiness behind all concrete realities that is the true reality, asat brahman, śunyam – to Sartre that is freedom, freedom absolute and ultimate.

Practically this conception of freedom brings into high relief, makes almost all in all, only one aspect, one character or attribute of freedom: the abolition of all ties and obligations and relations beyond oneself involving a hollow self-sufficiency. Naturally such an outlook requires against it a complementary one, even if it is not to correct and complete, at least to support and implement it. Sartre too cannot ignore the fact that the free being is not an isolated phenomenon in the world; it exists along with and in the company of others of the same nature and quality. Indeed human society is that in essence, an association of freedoms, although these movements of freedom are camouflaged in appearance and are not recognised by the free persons themselves. The interaction between the free persons, the reflection of oneself in others and the mutual dependence of egos is a constant theme in the novels and plays of Sartre.

'Freedom cannot be real freedom unless it is licence : yet society means a curtailment or inhibition or modification of this absolute liberty. This, conflict has never been resolved in Sartre and is fundamental to his ideology, 'the source of his tragic nihilism. That is because the consciousness here lives horizontally, level with the normal, what we described as psycho-vital consciousness. The way out lies in transcendence, in a vertical uplifting of the consciousness and the being.

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A Modernist Mentality

ANDRE Gide, a very well-known name in French letter for the last half a century, is quoted, very appreciatively, in the editorial of the World Review (July 1950), as saying:

"The world can only be saved, if it can be, by the rebels. Without them there would be an end to our civilisation, our culture, all that we love and that gave to our presence on earth a secret justification. They are, these rebels, the salt of the earth and the men sent from God. For I am convinced that God does not exist, and that we have to create him."

The truth expressed in these well-chiselled lines ("purple patches", I was going to say perhaps somewhat uncharitably) is, as always happens when we are for a rounded phrase and a neat thought, only half-truth or even quarter-truth. It all depends on the meaning we attach to the words, the shade trailing behind the thought. For, first of all, it is true, it is even a truism that the rebel is a necessary agent in the economy of human evolution; but if by rebel we mean the sheer iconoclast, the mere or in the main destroyer – and the word, especially since it is given preference, does carry that connotation – then the sentence loses most of its truth or value and becomes only a shibboleth or slogan.

The old, fossilised or rotten past has to be destroyed and ruthlessly eradicated, no doubt: -but, how is it to be done and who will do it? By a simple process of sledge-hammering – breaking, burning? By anybody who cares to do it? It does not require much sense or intelligence to see that that is not the ideal nor even the most effective way of doing the thing. The best way to destroy, the wise say, is to construct. Look at Nature, how she is going about the thing. Something is crumbling, precisely because something is growing within or behind.

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It is the drive of a living growth in secret that pushes a limb no longer necessary or useful to decay and death. Man too in his work of reformation or regeneration should learn that lesson, whether in respect of his individual or of his 'collective growth and evolution. Discover the truth that is to replace the 'old, live it intensely and wholly – the old past will automatically slip down like old clothes or drop like yellow sapless leaves.

Further Monsieur Gide says, God is nowhere, he has to be created. If he means that God is not anywhere in the manifest physical world, especially, the physical world of today, it is true, though here too partially true. God is never truly absent; even in and through this dismal and distressed age of ours he is ever present, a living power of abounding Grace – even if behind the veil, even if not patent to the sense-bound observer. Still God has to be made patent, established concretely in the physical world also, in the everyday normal human affairs. But, again, how to do it? And who is to do it? You or I in our complete, at best half-lit hazy ignorance? By running blindly full tilt against any and all atheism and denial and egoism and arrogance, shouting at them, pointing the finger of scorn at them or being physically violent upon them? It were best if we moved with as much vigour against our own selves, against the ungodly within us. If one begins seriously at home, in dealing with oneself one will be best equipped to deal with the others and the world, in the process of new-creating in oneself one will be in a position to find out exactly what lies in the way of a new creation outside.

A deeper sense of truth and rectitude says: you have no right to break unless you have the power to make. Even an illusion you cannot and should not break if you do not know how and what to replace; you will only replace it by a greater and more disastrous illusion, you must yourself have the full vision of the truth, you must yourself realise and establish it in yourself, in your inner being as well as your outer personality. Then only you will have secured full authority (Ramakrishna's chaprash, badge) to make and unmake. If you have not the needed authority, then you must obey implicitly one who possesses the authority.

This is a counsel of perfection, one might say, and human

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things are not usually done in this way. But precisely because things are not done in this way that human affairs are always in a muddle and continue to be more or less the same eternal merry-go-round. It is only when things are done in the ideal way that the ideal can be established fully, the perfect remedy obtained.

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Evolution or Special Creation

THE point is still being debated and, it seems, is still debatable whether evolution is truly the fact behind the origin of species. or is it special creation. The latter, we know, was the old- world pre-Copernican theory advocated by theologians and religious minds. It was thoroughly discredited and demolished by the new illumination that Science brought in with the nineteenth century. Till lately it was considered as a pure superstition and to be its advocate would be nothing but blind bigotry. But evidently things in Nature are not so simple; what at one time is brushed aside as a meaningless futility comes back later with a meaning and suggestiveness and truth of reality. We were once laughing at the corpuscular theory of light advocated by the great Newton and putting on a patronising air at the frailty of an otherwise mighty intelligence.  But the tables are now turned and we accept it as an undoubted fact when Planck says today that a light ray consists also of particles {quanta) of light. Similarly if in some scientific quarter a doubt has arisen as to the absolute and exclusive truth of the principle of evolution and if the old conception of special creation is exhumed for fresh consideration,  well, one should not be astonished at the turn over.

The most serious lacuna in the concept of evolution, at least in the Darwinian form of it, is, as is well known, the missing link. The transition stage between one form of life and another, between one species and its higher evolute is always absent, has left no trace of any kind and it is a matter of any man's guess. So the theory of mutation, saltum, sudden change, has been advanced. But that only restates the fact, clinches the matter, but does not explain it. If a sudden and thorough change is possible, if one object can be transformed

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into something quite different and unpredictable, one can as well call it special creation. That would, some might say, be facing the fact squarely.

According to the Yogic or occult view of things, however, the two conceptions that human mind sets against each other need not be and are not contradictory. Indeed both are true and both are factors working out the progress of life. Evolution is a movement upward, the urge of consciousness to grow and expand and rise to a higher and greater articulation: the change follows a scale of degrees. But there comes a point in the progressive march when a change of degree means a change of kind and the phenomenon presents itself as a sudden, unforeseen mutation. This is due to the fact that there happens at the moment, in answer to a last call as it were from below, a descent of consciousness from the higher into the lower. All the grades of being or consciousness are always there in the cosmic infinity, only it is a matter of gradual manifestation in the physical world. The higher scales are kept in the background,  the march of life starts from the lowest, the material rung. One by one they manifest or descend, formulate themselves  in the lower as these grow and rise and get ready to receive the descent. The gap or missing link means the irruption  of a new principle or mode of consciousness, the bursting of the cocoon, as it were, at the end of the period of gestation in the previous mode. Thus we can say that in the beginning there was only Matter and Matter was being churned until a point of tension or saturation was reached when Life precipitated  and became embodied and evident in Matter. In the same way, out of a concentrated incubation that Life underwent,  it brought down Mind from the hidden mind-plane and the vegetable kingdom gave birth to the animal. Latterly when Intelligence and self-consciousness descended, it was Man that appeared on earth.

Looked at from below, as the lower marches forward and upward, the scene presents itself as Evolution, growth, Nature's gradual unfolding of herself: looked at from above, as the higher seems poised and descends when the time and occasion are ready, creation appears as a series of special intervention. Both movements are facts of Nature and implement each other.

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Man to be Surpassed

"MAN is a thing that shall be surpassed". This burning phrase of Nietzsche has unsealed many eyes: it has also scalded and frightened others. It has been hailed by many as the motto, the mantra of the age to come; it has been denounced equally as a false light, a lead of arrogance and egoism.

Erich Kahler (a Czech now become an American citizen) in his book Man the Measure seeks to strike a balance, but as the title indicates, evidently leans more to the second, the reactionary, than to the original ideal. He posits that man's humanity is to be preserved and fostered, that is to say, his true humanity, that which distinguishes him from mere animality. The Greek ideal, according to Kahler, was an advance upon the animal man; it brought in the ideal of the rational man. And yet the Greek ideal, in spite of its acceptance of the whole man – mens sana in corpore sano – embracing as it did his physical, ethical and æsthetic development, laid on the whole a greater emphasis upon reason, upon ration-alising, that is, ordering life according to a rational pattern. And then the Greek ideal was more for the individual; it was for the culture and growth of the individuality in man. Society was considered as composed of such individualised units. The degree of personal choice, of individual liberty, of free understanding that a Greek citizen enjoyed marked the evolution secured by man out of the primitive society. Still the integral man is not the rationalistic man, even as he is not the mere biological man: and he is not predominantly individualistic either.

Yes, man's true humanity, says Kahler, almost echoing Nietzcshe, consists precisely in his capacity to surpass himself. The animal is wholly engrossed in its natural nature and

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activities; but man is capable of standing back, can separate from his biological self, observe, control and direct. For him "existence" truly means (as the Existentialist declares today) ex+sistere or ex+stare, to stay or stand outside. That is the surpassing enjoyed by him and demanded of him – going beyond one's natural or normal self. But there is a danger here. For there can be a too much surpassing, a going away altogether, as religion or spirituality usually enjoins. Christianity, for example, which is in many senses a movement contrary to the Greek spirit, taught a transcendence that was for luring or driving the human soul away from the world and men towards an extra-terrestrial summum bonum.

That is a false light, a wrong lead. Surpassing should not mean going beyond-up and away: it means rather coming out of one's self and going abroad, finding one's kinship and unity with others, with the world around. The individualisation of the self – given by the Greek culture – was the first step; the next step in evolution is the "collectivisation" of the self. It is not in the Nazi or Bolshevic sense that we have to understand the word: it does not equate with totalitarianism. The peril is there, no doubt.

But there was danger in individualism too: and the Greek polity suffered from it. For individualism meant clash of personalities: indeed rivalry, ambition, intolerance, arrogance, all the violent or vulgar movements of egoism occupy a good part of the life story of the old-world peoples trained in the classical culture. On the other hand, modern collectivism tends towards a uniform levelling down of all individual eccentricity. But dangers apart, the truth of either conception, ingrained in human nature, has to be recognised and accepted. A humanity, composed of developed and formed individuals living in broad commonalty – that is the highest achievement the present author holds before mankind.

Mr. Kahler does not define very clearly the nature and function of this commonalty: but it almost borders on what I may call human humanism, something in the manner of the other modern humanist Albert Schweitzer. Two types of humanism have been distinguished: man-centred humanism and God-centred humanism. Kahler's (and even Schweitzer's) humanism belongs, very much to the first category. He does

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not seem to believe in any transcendent Spirit or God apart from the universal totality of existence, the unitary life of all, somewhat akin to the Vie Unanime of Jules Romains.

The limitation of such a human ideal is for us evident. We demand a total surpassing of man, although that does not mean a rejection of man. Unless human life is built upon foundations quite other than what they are now, we say there can be no permanent or radical remedy to the ills it suffers from. Hence we are for utter transcendence; for, the highest height it is possible for the consciousness to reach and the being to dwell in, even the experience of Brahman or un-mitigated Absolute of the Mayavadin or the Zero, Shunyam of the Buddhist not excluded. Since it is there that the true foundations of creation lie hidden and it is from there that a new world has to be recreated, a new humanity reshaped. The very stuff of human nature has to be changed, not only what is considered as bad in it but what is valued as good also. For beyond good and evil is Nature Divine. Man has to find out this divine nature and dissolve his human nature into that, remould it, reshape it in that pattern. So long as human consciousness remains too human, it will be always branded with the bar sinister of all earthly things. Man has to grow into the immortal seated within mortality, into the light that shines inviolate on the other side of the darkness we live in. That immortality, that light one has to bring down here on earth and in ourselves, and out of it build a new earth and a new human self and life.

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Lone to the Lone

THE quintessence of spirituality is said to consist in, as has been described in the famous phrase of the Alexandrine mystic philosopher Plotinus, the flight of the lone to the lone. God is a solitary and the other solitary is the soul: so when one solitary mingles with the supreme solitary, the result is utter solitariness, which is spirituality at its apex, its highest height. The world, in this view, is an excrescence, an epiphenomenon – Illusion, Maya. God is the transcendent Reality, above and beyond all manifestation, negating all multiplicities and relativities of creation: He is indivisible, single, absolute unity – ekamevādvitīyam, kevalam – neha nānāsti kincana. The human being too is not in reality the individual person bounded within a body, life and mind formation, standing in reciprocal relations with such other formations; his inner core of truth and substance is a unitary centre of consciousness – angusthamiātra purusah, - which is aloof and apart from his apparent and assumed personality and has no dealings with such personalities. God has no upādhi, phenomenal qualification, neither has the soul of man. Therefore in his spiritual aspiration, man has to divest himself of all the outer growths that cover and bury his soul: with the clear unmixed vision of his pure soul he has to look straight into the face of the Divine Transcendent, shredded too of its cosmic vesture, and rise from the station of ignorance, this level ground. of clay to which it is pinned, and soar and fly and merge into the pure reality of the pure Spirit. Therefore it is said, naked we come into the vale of tears and naked we have to go back to our home. Or in terms of another imagery, it is the pure pouring into the pure, the full mixing"into the full.

Some mystics and philosophers recently come into vogue

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(inspired or encouraged by the Christian or the Buddhist way of Realisation) have emphasised this outlook. But it has also been counterbalanced by another way of spiritual growth and fulfilment: we may call it the modern way, for it has been a pronounced characteristic of the modern consciousness. We referred in our previous essay to the Existentialist who has attracted so much attention in these days, the linchpin of whose philosophy is the value of the individual person, especially the individual personal in relation to each other. Kierkegaard, the Danish mystic, from whom this school is supposed to originate, speaks of the Absolute as the Single One that excludes and annuls all "others", the crowd. He lays especial emphasis upon complete solitariness and total renunciation as the very condition, sine qua non, of the soul's spiritual journey and yet characterises the singleness of the one in terms that make of it an essential whole, an integer. Man must isolate himself from his phenomenal being, certainly – as the neti neti formula enjoins – but also he must first find or become his real self, realise his true individuality before he can reach God, the Divine Self, identify himself with the Transcendent. It is only a freely and truly formed individual being that can give itself to the Divine or become one with it. This true individuality is indeed a solitary being away and apart from the crowd of personalities that surround it – it has been called by the Indian mystics, the Purusha in the heart, no bigger than the thumb, the Dwarf Godhead (Vāmana).

When one is a member of the crowd, he has no personality or individuality, he is an amorphous mass, moving helplessly in the current of life, driven by Nature-force as it pleases her: spiritual life begins by withdrawing oneself from this flow of Ignorance and building up or taking cognisance of one's true person and being. When one possesses oneself integrally, is settled in the armature of one's spirit self, he has most naturally turned away from the inferior personalities of his own being and the comradeship also of people in bondage and ignorance. But then one need not stop at this purely negative poise: one can move up and arrive at a positive status, a new revaluation and reaffirmation. For when the divine selfhood is attained, one is no longer sole or solitary. Indeed, the solitariness or loneliness that is attributed to the spiritual status is a human

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way of viewing the experience: that is the impression left on the normal mind consciousness when the Purusha soars out of it, upwards from the life of the world to the life of the Spirit. But the soul, the true spiritual being in the individual, is not and cannot be an isolated entity; the nature of the spiritual consciousness is first transcendence, no doubt, transcendence of the merely temporal and ephemeral, but it is also universalisation, that is to say, the cosmic realisation that has its classic expression in the famous mantra of the Gita, he who sees himself in other selves and other selves in his own self. In that status "own" and "other" are not distinct or contrary things, but aspects of the one and the same reality, different stresses in one rhythm.

The flight then represents the freedom, the movement in height of the soul; but there is also the other, the horizontal movement leading to expansiveness and comprehension. One is transcendental, the other global or cosmic. First we have to reject, reject the false formations one by one (sheath by sheath, as it is described in the Upanishads) and arrive at the purest core of truth and reality; but again we have to come back, take up a new, the true formation. What was renounced has to be reintegrated in the divine becoming. While we are in Ignorance, our relations with men and the world are false and, ignorant, but once we attain our true self, we find the same self in men and things and we have no more revulsion for them – tato na vijigupsate.

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The Urge for Progression

IN the process of the expression and embodiment of this innermost truth, the first necessary condition is, as we have said, sincerity, that is to say, a constant reference to the demand of that truth, putting everything and judging everything in the light of that truth, a vigilant wakefulness to it. The second condition is progression. It is the law of the Truth that it is expressing itself, seeking to express itself continually and continuously in the march of life; it is always unfolding new norms and forms of its light and power, ever new degrees of realisation. The individual human consciousness has to recognise that progressive flux and march along with it. Human consciousness, the complex of external mind and life and body consciousness, has the habit of halting, clinging to the forms, experiences and gains of the past, storing them in memory, agreeing to a minimum change only just to be able to pour the new into the old. But this conservatism, which is another name for tamas is fatal to the living truth within. Even like the élan vital so gloriously hymned by Bergson, the inmost consciousness, the central truth of being, the soul élan has always a forward-looking reference. And it is precisely because the normal instru­ment of the body and life and mind has always a backward reference, because it slings ,back and cannot keep pace with the march of the soul-consciousness that these members stagnate, wear away, decay and death ends it all. The past has its utility: it marks the stages of progress. It means assimilation, but must not mean stagnation. It may supply the present basis but must always open out to what is coming or may come. If one arrives at a striking realisation, a light is revealed, a Voice, a mantra heard, a norm disclosed, it is simply to be noted, taken in the stuff of the being, made part and parcel of the consciousness;

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you leave it at that and pass and press on. You must not linger at wayside illuminations however beautiful or even useful some may be. The ideal of the paryataka – the wanderer – may be taken as a concrete symbol of this principle. The Brahmanas described it graphically in the famous phrase, caraivete, "move on". The Vedic Rishi sang of it in the memor­able hymn to Dawn, the goddess who comes today the last of a succession of countless dawns in the immemorial past and the first of a never-ending series of the future. The soul is strung with a golden chain to the Great Fulfilment that moves ahead: even when fulfilled the soul does not rest or come to the end of its mission, it continues to be an ever new expression or instrumentation of the Infinite.

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Being or Becoming and Having

AGAIN, in this ceaseless continuity of progression it is indeed not necessary at all to stop a while or somewhere and become something for one's perfection or fulfilment. The normal ideal that is placed before man or which he himself seeks is that he should become something, a definite pattern of some particular achievement, and possess something in the sense of an acquisition. An ordinary man must have an occupation and even an extraordinary man, the saint or the sage, must embody, that is to say, enchain himself in the name and form of a particular realisation – a siddhānta or a siddhi. A man has to be -a soldier, a merchant, a politician or a poet, a philosopher: even so he has to be a bhakta or a jnāni, a mauni or a vāksiddha. Each human being should have a ticket and a roll number, an identity card. Now, for the soul of man none of these or other adjuncts are necessary: its progress and its growth are independent of such auxiliaries or correlates. A soul can be and even express itself perfectly at the highest point of its being without formulating itself, binding itself in a scheme of some external achievement or functioning. The soul need not possess any of the glories – aiśwaryas – to realise itself, in order to be the abode of the Divine. Its very existence is full to the brim of the substance of the truth and its simple living marks the law or rhythm of that Truth.

A soulful man, whatever he says, thinks, feels or acts, always embodies wholly the Divine. Not that because he says, acts, thinks or feels in a certain manner that he has attained perfection or is in dynamic union with the summit a d integral consciousness. As the Mother brings out the distinction, although in a somewhat different context, the perfect soul-existence .cannot be judged by the forms it takes, the forms themselves have to be judged by the soul-existence.

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Success and its Conditions

SUCCESS in any undertaking can come only by the application of a quiet force. A force that is restless, shaky, nervous always misses the mark. A steady, controlled, almost rigid hand alone can shoot the missile that hits the bull's-eye. The Upanishad speaks of being one and indivisible with one's aim, even like an arrow-head fixed into the target. An undivided concentration naturally means an absolute unruffled tranquillity.

How is this tranquil energism to be secured? What are the conditions that produce and maintain and foster it? The first condition is self-confidence. One must have trust in oneself, a full faith that one is able to do the thing. A pessimist, a half-hearted doubter, a defeatist can never achieve anything in the world. All successful men, whatever share they agreed to give to chance, had always immense hope and faith. Against failures, against tremendous odds they have always persisted, always believed in their star. Like Caesar they said not only to themselves but also to others: "Thou carriest with thee the fate of Caesar." Only, of course, the self-confidence sometimes overrides itself, becomes conceit and arrogance. Then you go beyond your depth, tempt the fates beyond your control and open the door to failure. So along with self-confidence, there must be an element of sobriety; we will call it modesty – true modesty that can perceive the extreme limit at least of the possible and the impossible. Such modesty itself is a source of serenity and calmness in the mind and nerves. Imagine a lion couchant, aiming at its prey. The prey remains spellbound, unable to run away. The lion's gaze is fixed upon its victim; its hypnotism consists in a calm and absolute self-confidence, an unshakable assurance that its will shall prevail.

Man's self-confidence is, as I have said, apt to overleap

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itself; it turns into self-conceit and blind and obstinate complacence. An animal by instinct knows how to remain within its limits and continue to be unfailing in its judgment: it is domestic animals that begin to get muddled in their instinctive movements. With the growth of the mental self-consciousness man loses the sense of his limits and always seeks to exceed himself. And therefore failure and fall have become almost his constant companions. His efforts are not commensurate with his powers. Hence in his case modesty is a great asset and a desideratum. Modesty, we said, is the consciousness of one's limitation – not over-estimating oneself, nor for that matter under-estimating oneself: it is judging exactly what one is.

That, however, is the case with the normal man with the normal nature. But precisely because of the growth of self-consciousness, man has developed the power to increase his powers: he can extend the boundaries of his capacities and possibilities. He need not confine himself within the dimensions that he naturally possesses or acquires in the normal course of his growth. He can follow an abnormal or extraordinary course of growth, break through his limits and establish contact with the vast and the illimitable and the incalculable, even the very fount and origin- of all power. That is the gift of Yoga, spiritual discipline.

Yoga brings in a different line and scheme of life. For it is built upon soul-consciousness, upon Divine Nature which means another history of individual destiny. Even then tranquillity and self-confidence are at the basis of a Yogic life also and a new degree of modesty and humility.

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The Base of Sincerity

THE great, perhaps, the greatest secret of life – uttamam rahasyam, to quote the familiar phrase of the Gita-consists in finding, in coming in contact with and remaining in permanent contact with this centre of our being, the nucleus of our living. And curiously, if we are alert and observant enough, we discover that this mysterious thing is not very far to seek. There is hardly any developed human being who has not had, some time or other in the course of his life, a feeling or perception that he is free, he is happy in a miraculous way, as if he is above or away from the vicissitudes of external life, nothing touches him and he is unique and self-fulfilled, he is on the summit of his being, in the topmost form of his nature. However fugitive that experience may be, it is the kernel of his being that reveals itself for a moment, the central consciousness that moves, guides, inspires and supports his whole life-and all his other lives too-although till now from behind the veil. That is what we call the Divine in the individual, the Inner Controller, antaryāmin, the conscious being ever seated within the heart, purusa sadā hŗdi sannivista.

Once this centre has been aspected – in whatever manner, to whatever degree, even faintly and feebly-one has always to come back to it, as the mariner to the pole-star, try to connect all external happenings as well as one's inner movements with this fountain-head. That is to say, one must think, feel or do nothing that is contrary to the truth it is, that is not in accord with its rhythm and law: indeed one must always endeavour to think only that thought, feel only that feeling, do only that act which is the spontaneous and inevitable outcome and expression of that innermost and topmost reality.

That is the definition of sincerity: to be transparent and

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single-pointed to your soul-consciousness, to your deity. And that also is the only way by which there can be realised in you, the highest and largest, the most intimate and absolute harmony you are capable of and that is demanded of you. The perfect organisation of the individual life can be obtained in and through the harmony inherent in the central reality, in the natural order of its activities. In the scheme or pattern laid out in the inmost consciousness, each element has its own orbit and its own quantum of energy, each force its. allotted function: the will in each is exactly commensurable with what should be the expression in it of the total reality, each is the whole and rounded articulation of an aspect or figure put forth by the central truth in its self-display. As in a musical theme, each note has a definite pitch, amplitude, tone which give it its perfect form in order to constitute a common pattern – the highest pitch, the largest amplitude or the most vibrant tone is not needed, not only not needed, would be a bar on the contrary – even so, the individual man when he attains perfection realises in himself a harmony which gives the true expression of all his limbs, the fullest and fairest expression of each and every one as demanded by the divine role destined for him.

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Process of Purification

THERE are three well-marked stages in the process of the purification of nature and surrender to the Divine. When one has made up one's mind finally to take to the path of spiritual life and to turn one's back on the life of ignorant nature, one enters at the outset into a phase of divided consciousness and life. It is the stage when one cries, "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak." One feels an inner aspiration and devotion and even freedom and purity and wider consciousness, but actually in the practical world, he follows the old nature, acts under the pressure of Ignorance and the Ripus. You are a mundane man with profane habits – and yet within, when aloof, you are in contact with the deeper and larger breath of the Spirit. The next stage is one of external control and of modification of behaviour. You have the inner consciousness of the spirit grown strong in you and you are no longer a helpless prey to the physical outbursts of inferior nature: a kind of brake has been put upon the outgoing passions. Still at this stage the surges of passion are there within, inside the wall of control, as it were. The pressure and demand of the Spirit has brought about a deadlock in the ignorant movements of the outer nature, although the physico-vital and vital support behind has not been wholly purified and continues in its old way, expressing itself in veiled and sublimated acts and in dreams and imaginations. The vital support even when it does not express itself in grosser physical movements, even when it is self-contained, yet maintains its old taste for them. Finally, when this taste even goes away (that is the suggestion in the beautiful and luminous phrase of the Gita, rasavaljam), then only one rises into the integral and unadulterated life of the Spirit. Till that final consummation happens, the period of interregnum is a great

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occasion for training and experience. It is of considerable interest also from the standpoint of occult knowledge.

There are two types – which mean two stages – of control. You can control your nature by the force of your will, as one does a wicked horse by means of the toothed bit. But this control is precarious and the clearing or purification effected is only skin-deep. At the slightest weakening of the will or a momentary lack of vigilance, you may find yourself in the very midst of a volcanic eruption of passions. Even otherwise, even if there happens no external outburst, the burden or pressure of t4e ignorant nature is always there and the struggle or tension, although thrown into the background, obstructs the nature, does not give it the free and spontaneous higher poise of the spirit. The other control comes from the inmost being, from the spiritual self itself: it is automatic and it is occult in its action and therefore naturally effective. When the Spirit, the Inner Control (Antaryāmi) works, it happens that even if the desires are there, the occasions for their satisfaction are withdrawn from you. As the Mother says, some people who are destined for the spiritual life lose all earthly props whenever they wish to lean upon them, they lose their endeared objects whenever they are eager to cherish them. At a certain stage of

the growth of the inner consciousness, the demand of the soul makes it impossible for the vital (or physico-vital), so far as it is unpurified and unprepared, to secure its objects: even if the lips yearn, the cup is taken away. The circumstances themselves yield to the pressure of the inner being and conspire, as it were, to withhold and remove all dangerous contacts. The being has not to say, "Lead me not into temptation", for the temptations by themselves slip away. That is the earlier poise of the interregnum we are describing; the next poise comes when the wish-impulses, the subjective vibrations also melt and disappear. Then there appear no such things as temptations. Objects, events, circumstances that might have acted in that role come and go, but the being remains indifferent and unruffled, because suffused with the delight of another contact. The detachment from the worldly is secure and absolute because the being has found its attachment to the Divine. That is the beginning of the integral spiritualisation of the nature.

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Sweet Adversity

"So long we lived in anxiety, now at last we are going to live in hope." So said the delicious French playwright Tristan Bernard when the Germans came in, occupied Paris, arrested and imprisoned him (in the World War No. I). A noble truth nobly said by a noble soul thrown into the very midst of danger and calamity. Indeed, a danger is a danger so long as it is away and has not reached us. It is the menace, the imminence that causes more fright and upsetting than the thing itself. For it is imagination that enlarges and intensifies the object and makes of us craven cowards. The uncertainty hangs like a pall and casts a disabling influence upon the mind and nerves: one does not know what exactly to do, since the full situation is not presented or grasped and a fearful speculation becomes the only occupation.

But once the danger is right upon us and we are inside the jaws of death, there is an end to all speculation and anxiety; there are then two issues possible. One is that of absolute helplessness and hopelessness, of an unquestioning resignation, a quiet bowing down to the inevitable and implacable destiny. Many a victim on the gallows felt like that: an incredible quietness seized them in their last moments. Very often it is the quietness of the shadow of Death – a supreme inertness, tamas, coming over and possessing. But there is another issue, a more luminous egress. When all uncertainty is set at rest as to the in vitability of the calamity, when circumstances have really besieged us in their unshakable steel-frame and we are doomed obviously, it is then that comes the chance for the hero-soul to stand out and declare its freedom and immortality – deny and strive to reverse the obvious.

Man has something in him which is irrepressible in the worst

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of circumstances, which can and does live outside and beyond their attacks and menaces. Adverse circumstances-the more adverse the better-are God-sent in that sense, because they tend to throw us back upon ourselves, upon our inner truth and reality, which otherwise we would not have known or recognised. And it is the nature of that truth and reality to be free and happy and hopeful absolutely. And the consciousness which possesses that temper and vibration is master of an energy, a force of execution-a will and power to do the miracle.

To live in hope, to work in hope is not merely to live in illusion and to work for a chimera. On one consideration, to live otherwise, in hopelessness, cannot cure matters, even if the matter is truly and really as dark as it looks. To view a matter of fact solely and wholly in the matter of fact way does not give the right perspective of things, a proper appreciation of appearance and reality. It is well known that often we project our imagination and apprehension upon the external world and bring about or help to bring about results that were only a possibility. Our fear calls for the object feared and makes it a reality. Apart from that, however, and on a deeper consideration, to live in hope is to react against the danger apprehended, to call in a help and power that is or can be always at our disposal, which can not only console but save. Even if death be the end and there is no escape, yet we would be freed from the wounds and scars that it inflicts upon our being with its ignorance and unconsciousness, we would learn to pass over luminously and in the full freedom of the spirit.

Hope is the image of the soul's prophetic vision. It is not just a way of escape from present sorrows, but a bridge-head leading to victory and fulfilment.

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The Soul in Anguish

IT is very interesting to observe how in the modern epoch depths of consciousness. are being dug up and laid bare to the common gaze, even like the archaeological finds of great antiquity and of immense value that are springing surprise after surprise upon our present-day civilisation. In our inner explorations too we have often come to strike psychological veins of unusual importance and significance. It is natural to the Yogin to do so; for it is the business of his life. But even thinkers and philosophers who do not ostensibly lead the mystic life are arriving at judgments and conclusions that are not normally warranted or covered by the unaided activities of the human reason. That proves once more that man is not reason alone, that he has other faculties to go by even in the field of ordinary knowledge.

A range of mystics and philosophers or philosopher-mystics from Kierkegaard to Sartre have made much of the sentiment of "anguish". Naturally, it is not the usual feeling of grief or sorrow due to disappointment or frustration that they refer to, nor is it the "repentance" which is a cardinal virtue in the Christian spiritual discipline. Repentance or grief is for something amiss, for some wrong done, for some good not done. It has a definite cause that gives rise to it and determinate conditions that maintain and foster it: and therefore it has also an end, at least the possibility of an ending. It is not eternal and can be mastered and got over: it is of the category of the Sankhyan or Buddhistic dukhatrayabhighata – for that matter even the lacrimae rerum (tears inherent in things) of Virgil* are not eternal.

But the new Anguish spoken of is a strange phenomenon: it is causeless and it is eternal. It has sprung unbidden with no
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*Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt [Aeneid, 1. 462]

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antecedent cause or condition: it is woven into the stuff of the being, part and parcel of the consciousness itself. Indeed it seems to be the veritable original sin, pertaining to the very nature. Kierkegaard makes of it an absolute necessity in the spiritual constituent and growth of the human soul – something akin to, but deeper, because ineradicable, than the Socratic "divine discontent". Sartre puts it in more philosophical and rational terms, in a secular atmosphere as a kind of inevitable accompaniment to the sense of freedom and responsibility and loneliness that besets the individual being and consciousness at its inmost core, its deepest depth.

I was speaking of the depth, of the sounding of consciousness in present-day inquiries into human nature. Sartre's investigation links itself up with the eternal inquiry graphically and beautifully described in the famous parable of the Taittiriya Upanishad (III).

In his quest for Brahman, Bhrigu came in contact first of all with the material existence and so took Matter to be the ultimate Reality. He was asked to move on and at the next step he met Life and considered that as Brahman. He was asked to move farther on and at the third stage he found Mind which then appeared to him as the Reality. He had to proceed farther and enter and pass through other higher formulations till finally he entered the highest expanse (parame vyoman). Now applying the parable to the situation today and the modern quest we can say that Science like Bhrigu is at the first step – and, for some, stuck there contented like the Asura Virochana of another Upanishadic parable, although it has become fidgety and somewhat uncertain in recent times: some others – the "vitalist" scientists and philosophers – are in the second stage. And yet there is a third category, the idealist philosophers generally, who are emerging from the second into the third.

It seems that the School of Anguish is on the borderland between the second and the third stage, that is to say, the vital rising into the mental or the mental still carrying an impress of the vital consciousness. It is the emergence of the Purusha consciousness, the individual being in its heart of hearts, in its pure status: for it is that that truly evolves, progresses from level to level, deploying and marshalling according to its stress and scheme the play of its outward nature. Now the Purusha

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consciousness, as separate from the outward nature, has certain marked characteristics which have been fairly observed and comprehended by the exponents of the school we are dealing with. Sartre, for example, characterises this being – être en soi, as distinguished from être pour soi which is something like dynamic purusha or purusha identified or associated with prakrti – as composed of the sense of absolute freedom, of full responsibility, of unhindered choice and initiation. Indeed, Purusha is freedom, for in its own status it means liberation from all obligations to Prakriti. But such freedom brings in its train, not necessarily always but under certain conditions, a terrible sense of being all alone, of infinite loneliness. One is oneself, naked and face to face with one's singleness and unbreakable, unsharable individual unity. The others come as a product or corollary to this original sui generis entity. Along with the sense of freedom and choice or responsibility and loneness, there is added and gets ingrained into it the sense of fear and anxiety – the anguish (Angst). The burden that freedom and loneliness brings seems to be too great. The Purusha that has risen completely into the mental zone becomes wholly a witness, as the Sankhyans discovered, and all the movements of his nature appear outside, as if foreign: an absolute calm and unperturbed tranquillity or indifference is his character. But it is not so with regard to the being that has still one foot imbedded in the lower region of the vital consciousness; for that indeed is the proper region of anguish, of fear and apprehension, and it is there that the soul becoming conscious of itself and separate from others feels lone, lonely, companionless, without support, as it were. The mentalised vital Purusha suffers from this peculiar night of the soul. Sartre's outlook is shot through with very many experiences of this intermediary zone of consciousness.

The being immersed in Prakriti, as normally it is, in relation and communion with others, may entertain as a pleasure and luxury, the illusion of its separateness and freedom: it can do so at ease, because it feels it has the secret support of its environment, it is courageous because it feels itself in good company. But once it rises out of the environmental level and stands truly apart and outside it – it is the mental being which can do so more or less successfully – the first feeling is that of freedom, no

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doubt, but along with it there is also the uncanny sense of isolation, of heavy responsibility, also a certain impotence, a loss of bearings. The normal Cartesian Co-ordinates, as it were, are gone and the being does not know where to look for the higher multi-dimensional co-ordinates. That is the real meaning of the Anguish which suddenly invades a being at a certain stage of his ascending consciousness.

The solution, the issue out is, of course, to go ahead. Instead of making the intermediary poise, however necessary it may be, a permanent character of the being and its destiny, as these philosophers tend to do, one should take another bold step, a jump upward. For the next stage, the stage when the true equilibrium, the inherent reconciliation is realised between oneself and others, between the inner soul and its outer nature is what the Upanishad describes as Vijnana, the Vast Knowledge.

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The Nature of Perfection

PERFECTION is often understood to mean the highest or the utmost possible development, even if it be in one particular line or direction. That, however, can better be called success or achievement. True perfection is not an extreme growth, however great or commendable it may be: it is the harmony of an all-round growth, the expression of the unified total being. And yet this does not involve a stultification of any limb or a forced diminution of any capacity. Perfection does not consist either in the harmonisation of the utmost possible development of each and every capacity, attribute or power of being. First of all, it is not a possible ideal, given the conditions of existence and manifestation. Secondly, it is not necessary: perfection can be realised even otherwise.

How is the harmony to be brought about in the human system composed of so many different and discordant factors, forms and forces of consciousness? It is not possible if one tries to make them accommodate each other, tone down the individual acuities and angularities, blunt or cut out the extreme expressions and effect some sort of a compromise or a pact of goodwill. It is. not. the Greek ideal of the golden mean nor is it akin to the modern democratic ideal which lays down that each element is free – to grow and possess – to the extent that it allows the same freedom to every other element. No, for true harmony one has to go behind and beyond the apparent divergences to a secret being or status of consciousness, the bed-rock of existence where all divergences are resolved and find their inherent and inalienable unity, their single origin and basis. If one gets there and takes one's stand upon that absolute oneness, then and then only the perfect harmony of all the diversities that naturally rise

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out of it as its self-expression becomes possible, not only possible but inevitable.

That bed-rock is one's inmost spiritual being, the divine consciousness which is at once an individual centre, a cosmic or universal field of existence and a transcendent truth and reality. With that as the nucleus and around it the whole system has to be arranged and organised: according to the demand of the will and vision composing that consciousness, life has to manifest itself and play out its appointed role. Its configuration or disposition will be wholly determined by the Divine Purpose working in and through it; its fullness will be the fullness of the Divine Presence and intention. The mind will be wholly illumined, the vital with it will become the pure energy of Consciousness and the physical body will be made out of the substance of the divine being: our humanity will be the home and sanctuary of the Divine.

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God Protects

THE protection that man naturally needs and asks for is that of life and property. It is, in the ordinary course of things, the duty of the State and society to give this protection. But sometimes the State or society is unable to do its duty as it should. 'In revolutionary epochs, when storm and turmoil are almost a natural occurrence, the individual has to turn upon himself, and it is then that many turn to God – they have been called ārtabhakta, those who become devotees through affliction. Now the first question that comes up is why on earth should God care for the life and property of any individual. Life and death, loss and gain are dualities that form the warp and woof of human existence: God is not more partial to one limb of the pair than to the other. From God's standpoint, so also from the standpoint of a God-lover, the soul is immortal, as indeed the Gita says, and even if the body dies, the soul remains for ever, the body can be killed but not the soul – na hanyate hanyamāne Sarire. And as regards property, it is the ignorant who are attached to it; the man of God has no need of it, not only so, it is an obstacle in his way to meet God. Did not the Christ declare that a camel could pass through the eye of a needle, never a rich man enter the kingdom of Heaven. And Nachiketas too, a heroic boy that he was, flung back into the face of Yama himself all the riches offered to him by the Lord of Death.

Have life and property then no value in the eye of God? To the divine consciousness are these things mere māyā, transient objects of ignorance, ties that bind the soul to earth and have to be cut away and thrown behind? We at least do not hold that opinion. We hold that life and property are valuable, they are significant: they become so in reference to

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the individual who has them. The life that is dedicated to the Divine, the life that is in some way connected with the higher consciousness, through which something of the world of light and delight comes down into our mortality acquires a special worth and naturally calls for divine protection. Likewise the property placed at the service of the Divine, which is used as an instrument for the Divine's own work upon earth, the Divine will surely protect, for it is then part of his grandeur and glory, aiśwarya. Life and property become indeed sacred and inviolable when they are put at the disposal of the Divine for his use in the fulfilment of the cosmic design. As we know, life and property under present conditions upon earth are possessions of the undivine forces, they are weapons through which God's enemies hold sway over earth. Therefore life and property that seek to be on God's side run a great risk, they are in the domain of the hostiles and therefore need special protection. The Divine extends that protection, but under conditions – for his rule in the material field is not yet absolute. The Asura too extends his protection to his agents, and his protection appears sometimes, if not often, more effective; for the present world is under his domination and all forces and beings obey him; God and the godly have to admit his terms and work out their design on that basis.

The conditions under which the Divine's protection can come are simple enough, but difficult to fulfil completely and thoroughly. The ideal conditions that ensure absolute safety are an absolute trust and reliance on the Divine Force, a tranquillity and fearlessness that nothing shakes, .whatever the appearances at the moment, the spirit and attitude of an unreserved self-giving that whatever one is and one has is God's. Between that perfect state at the peak of consciousness and the doubting and hesitant and timid mind at the lower end-that of St. Peter, for example, at his weakest moment – there are various gradations of the conditions fulfilled and the protection given is variable accordingly. Not that the Divine Grace acts or has to act according to any such hard and fast rule of mechanics, there is no such mathematical Law of Protection in the scheme of Providence. And yet on the whole and generally speaking Providence, Divine Intervention, acts

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more or less successfully according to the degree of the soul's wakefulness on the plane that needs and possesses the protection.

And yet there is another aspect of the thing that is to be taken into consideration. For in the supreme and ultimate view the world or creation is not divided between God and Asura : the Asura cannot be outside God's infinity, he is there because permitted by him, indeed forms part of him and serves the divine purpose. Asura represents the hard dark passage through which the ignorant human soul cuts out its forward march: it is the crucible in which the growing consciousness is purified of its dross in order to regain the fullness of its divine quality and nature.

Finally, it must also be understood that because the divine protection is there upon whosoever belongs to the Divine, this protection should not be taken to mean exclusively the preservation of the individual's physical life and its accessories. Divine protection, in its true and real sense, means the soul's welfare so that nothing can bring harm to it or be an obstacle to its happy growth and divine fulfilment. Protection gives the maximum of this welfare, the soul's. self-increase and passage into perfect union with the Divine. And if death and privation – the giving up of a particular body and deprivation of life's possession – are necessary sometime or other for that growth and well-being – the contingency is not ruled out – well, that destiny too has to be accepted as part of the divine purpose, as protection itself. For after all life and life's powers have no intrinsic' or absolute value of their own, their value depends upon the soul's need of them for its divine well-being.

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Vengeance is Mine

ONE who seeks to live in God's consciousness cannot take the law into his own hands; he must leave it all to God. When he takes up the self-appointed task of remedying the situation, "resisting evil" as Christ termed it, he invites resistance from the other side which takes up its own counter-measures. The principle of revanche or vendetta, practised by nations and families, has not been a success, as history has amply proved. It is a seesaw movement, a vicious circle without issue. Not only so, the movement gathers momentum and increases in violence and confusion the farther it proceeds on its career. That is why Christ uttered his warning: and Buddha too declared that enmity cannot be appeased by enmity, it can be appeased only by the want of enmity. The truth is true not only in respect of two enemy forces of the same quality and on the same plane, but also with regard to the antagonism between higher and lower forces, between Good and Evil.

Do we then propose taking it all lying down, it may be asked? Is martyrdom then our ideal? Not so, for we do not believe that evil forces can be appeased or conquered or transformed by yielding to them, letting them free to have their own way. Otherwise Krishna would not have enjoined. and inspired (almost incited) Arjuna to enter on a bloody battle. Still forces, whether good or bad, are conquered or quelled or transformed truly and permanently by forces that belong not to the same level of being or consciousness, but to a higher one. Instead of working in a parallelogram of forces, we must take recourse, as it were, to a pyramid of forces. We know of the ideal of soul-force standing against and seeking to persuade or peacefully subdue brute force. It is not an

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impossibility; only we must be able really to get to the true soul and not a semblance or substitute of it. The true soul is .man's spiritual or divine being – the consciousness in which man is one in substance and nature with God. It is not a mere thought formation, a mental and moral ideal. The only force that can succeed against a lower or undivine force is God's own force – and the success can be complete and absolute by the calling in or intervention of God's force in its highest status. Anything less than that will be no more than a temporary lull or adjustment.

The world is not changed in spite of many efforts, because man is always taking to human means, he is not allowing God to do God's work, but putting his own individual initiative in God's place, taking perhaps God's name on the lips with a secret, unconscious feeling that unless he himself does something nothing will be done – kartāhamiti manyate. Human means may achieve at its best a compromise, but no permanent solution: it is often the beginning of a worse situation, a greater disharmony and conflict – peace, it has been said, is only a preparation for war. That vicious circle can be and has to be cut by the razor-blade consciousness of the aspirant to life divine who by the clear and tranquil energy of his tapas can call down a divine interference in mortal affairs.

The right attitude, then, for a sadhak who has to live dangerously in the world of today is to rise above the turmoils that surge around, to lift the consciousness to a serener height and aspire wholly towards the help and guidance from above, not to be moved by the blast that passes but hold himself firmly anchored upon the rock of ages, the Divine Grace. It is only then that the question can come of actually taking part in the battle of life – for it is then that you can act as God's agent or instrument. If you have to take to the field of actual battle you must first receive God's commission (chaprash – as Ramakrishna called it), even as Arjuna did.

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There's a Divinity

There's a Divinity that shapes our ends,

Rough-hew them how we will. *

That is what man can do at his best, and even at his worst, rough-hew. Ignorant as he is, crude as his instruments are, he can do no better (and happily, no worse either). The ideals he has do not go very far, not much beyond his nose – they are limited by his senses, by his notions, by his immediate reactions to the circumstances of the moment. Even when the ends are commendable, the purposes decent, even when he is happily inspired, the materials and means at his disposal are crude and he uses them in a rough and ready manner. What he can achieve in this direction is not even a near but a very far approximate. And w hen he is otherwise inspired, when suggestions and impulsions come to him from the Hostiles, well, he hews his way, as Hitler did – and some others are doing now – to wrong ends; even there he does not succeed wholly, realises his design very partially, grosso modo. The stone club in the hand of the palaeolithic man and the atom bomb in the hand of the modern are equally rough instruments, and the ends which they serve, whether for good or for evil, are also gross, neither far-visioned nor deep inspired, but superficial, strait and narrow, blindly immediate. In either case, however, the Divine remains unaffected, firmly seated behind and in and through both, in and through their ignorant and perverse wills, it is His Will that works itself out and finds fulfilment in the end. Whether one is for or against the Divine, whether one is a God or an Asura, each in his own way contributes to the progressive realisation of

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* Hamlet, Act v, Sc. ii

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the Cosmic Purpose. From a certain point of view even it may seem as though nothing helps or hinders, all are like a straw in a rushing current.

In our human reckoning, we seem to help the evolutionary course sometimes and sometimes hamper it with our efforts in so far as they are well directed or ill directed. In the practice of spiritual life too, one may be tempted to find a measurable proportion between the personal endeavour and the attainment. However that may be, at the end of all human efforts, the finishing touch always comes from the Divine Grace. Whether we succeed or fail, whatever be the human judgment of the situation, the Grace is sure to intervene in the final stage: to success it will bring more success giving it the peak of fulfilment, and failure too it will transmute into a glorious triumph.

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Divine Intervention

WHAT we have named Intervention is also known popularly as Providence. It is the element of the incalculable and the unforeseen in Nature. Nature, in one respect, seems to be a closed circle: it is a rigid mechanism and its movements are very definite and absolutely fixed admitting of no change or variation whatsoever. That was the idea which governed our earlier scientists when they spoke or the Law of Nature. Law of Nature was to them, in the great Sophoclean phrase, something indelible and inviolable, immemorially the same which no man or god dare alter or disobey. Laplace, one of the pioneers of the scientific outlook, said, in fact, that he could very well imagine a mathematician recording and calculating all the forces that act and react in the world and from the present position of things foretell the time and place of each and every event in the cosmic field. The idea of Karma, or Kismet, is a parallel conception in the domain of human nature and character. The chain reaction of cause and effect" is rigorous and absolute, follows a single line of movement and possesses a rigidly predetermined disposition. The principle is equally applicable either to a phenomenon of the physical world or to that of man's inner consciousness.

But we have arrived today at a stage when this old-world view has perforce to be discarded. We can no longer take Laplace seriously: for scientists themselves have established as a fact in physical Nature the indeterminacy of her movements, the impossibility of foretelling a la Laplace, not because of any deficiency in the human instrument but because of the very nature of things. Science is of course at a loss to explain the why or even the how of this indeterminacy. We say, however, that it is nothing but the intrusion of another,

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a different kind of force in the field of the forces actually at play. That force comes from a higher, a subtler level. Things and forces move in their ordinary round, according to the normal laws, bound ,within their present frame: but always there drops in from elsewhere an unknown element, a force or energy or impulse of another quality, which causes a shift of emphasis in the actual, brings about a change unaccountable and unforeseen. This is what is called miracle: the imposition of a higher law, a generic law governing subtler forms and forces upon an inferior and grosser sphere. And the higher or subtler the plane from which the new force descends – the plane can be anything between the one nearest to the material, the subtle physical or ethereal, and the one nearest to the other extreme, the spiritual – the greater will be the change in nature, quality and extent in the lower order. Such miracles, interventions, providential happenings are not rare. They are always occurring, only they do not attract attention. For it is these phenomena that are the real causes of all progress – cosmic as well as individual. Evolution is based upon this truth of Nature.

Man is not bound to the present pattern or complex of his nature and character: he is not irrevocably fixed to the frame – a Procrustean bed – given by the parallelogram of actual forces in or around him. Always he can call down forces or forces can descend into him from otherwhere and bring about a change, even a revolution in the mode and make-up of his character and nature and life. What we call "opening" in our. Sadhana refers to this factor in our consciousness. It means the possibility of the descent of a higher force in our normal nature. Nature is not such a solid stream-lined structure as not to admit of any interstices in it. We know of the comparatively vast spaces that separate atom from atom, the immense emptiness across which even the ultimate nuclear particles have to act upon each other. These are the loop-holes in the great net and it is precisely through them that other forces percolate.

Man or Nature does not mark time; they are always on the march. The march would have been a thrice vicious circle, a mere issueless repetition of the old and the agelong but for this stress of a higher destiny behind. Great souls,

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Vibhutis, Avatars themselves are incarnations of such descents of higher and other forces from toprung sources.

The higher the source the greater, more substantial and permanent is the miracle. The miracle of miracles awaits the destiny of man on earth when the supreme consciousness of the Divine will descend here into Matter and mould all mortality into immortality.

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Yoga as Pragmatic Power

PEOPLE ask about the practical value of Yoga, but do not always wait for an answer. For, according to some, Yoga means "introversion", escapism – illusion, delusion, hallucination. And yet the truth of the matter is that Yoga is nothing but a downright practical affair, that its proof is in the very eating of it. To judge a Yogin you are to ask, as did Arjuna, a very prince of pragmatic men, how he sits, how he walks about – kim āsīta vrajeta kim. Indeed the very definition of Yoga is that it is skill in works. To do works and not to run away from them has always been the true and natural ideal even (and particularly, as we shall see), for the spiritual man: the ideal is as old as the Upanishadic injunction, "Doing verily works in this world one should wish to live a hundred years." The Yogi as a world-shunner was not always the only ideal or the highest ideal. To do works, yes; but, with skill, it is pointed out, that is to say, in the way in which they can be most effectively done. Sri Krishna teaches Arjuna the skill and shows how to apply it in the crudest and the most terrible action, viz ., a bloody battle. But the skill that he demands, that is demanded of a Yogi, is not mere cleverness, craftiness or business policy including deceit, duplicity, sharpness; it means quite another spirit and faculty.

The ordinary man does works, achieves the object he aims at, through processes and means which, however powerful and effective, can be only moderately and approximately so. The amount of time and energy wasted is not proportionate to the result obtained. Man knows to utilise only a fraction of the energy collected in a system: the best of dispositions and organisation can harness just a modicum of the total stock, the rest is frittered away or locked up, whether it is vital energy or

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mental energy or even physical energy. That is because the central power that drives, the consciousness that controls the whole mechanism is of an inferior quality, of a lower potential. The Yogi views all energy as various forms and gradations of consciousness. So what he proposes, as a good scientist, is to lift up the consciousness and thus raise its potential and effectivity and minimise the waste. The higher the consciousness, the greater the effectivity, that is to say, the pragmatic value. As we rise in the scale there is less and less waste and greater and greater utilisation until we reach a climax, a critical degree, where there is absolutely no waste and where there is the utmost, the total utilisation of the whole energy. This supreme peak of consciousness that is absolute energy Sri Aurobindo names the Supermind. But on lesser levels too the spiritual consciousness is dynamic and effective – pragmatic in a way that the ordinary, limited, externally pragmatic consciousness cannot hope to be.

Sometimes it is urged that in the worldly affairs we should move according to the worldly procedure, otherwise to import into mundane things spiritual values would merely confuse issues and end in failure in both the fields – “fallen from hence, lost from thence". Of course there are spiritual points of view that go ill with the mundane, as indeed there are mundane considerations that do not match with the spiritual. The two categories of view-point have been succinctly and luminously named by Sri Aurobindo as the Materialist Denial and the Ascetic Refusal.* But there are other points of view, .other lines of approach which seek a harmony and union between Spirit and Matter, that envisage the marriage of Heaven and Earth.

The fundamental truth to be noted is that the Spirit is power, not merely consciousness: indeed the very definition of the spirit is that it is consciousness-energy. And it is this consciousness-energy that is at the source of all cosmic activities. Man's action too springs from this original source, although apparently it seems to be caused by other secondary and derivative energies. As a matter of fact what these energies that seem to be actually in play do is not the origination but rather

the deviation and diversion, a diminution and adulteration of the supreme energy, a lowering of the quality, the tone and .

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* The Life Divine, by Sri Aurobindo

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temper of the dynamism. In other words, as we have already said, a thought force, a vital force, a nervous or physical force, all these are only lower, even minima values, more or less distant and deformed echoes of a true and absolute Power behind and above them all. These forces become powerful in proportion as they are instruments and functions of that one mother energy. The truth is most beautifully illustrated in the story of Brahma a and the gods in the Kena Upanishad. The gods conquered and were proud of their conquest; each thought that it was due to his own personal prowess that he conquered. But they were utterly discomfited and shamed when the Divine Powter appeared and proved to them that but for this Power they would not be able even to tackle a blade of grass-Fire would not burn it, Water would not drench it, Wind would not move it.

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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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Light, More Light

LIGHT is its own authenticity. Modern knowledge has reduced the material universe to light particles: that is the ultimate reality which is cognisable to the human sense, beyond which there is no means to go. All other objects are reflections, measures or derivations of this single primordial substance-at least all have to reach our perception through this intermediary. And its movement, its velocity too is the standard of measure for all movements: the velocity is constant and nothing can exceed it (that is Einstein).

There is an inner light too. The virtues of the outer light only translate something of the nature of the inner light. You cannot prove the existence of light, inner or outer; it exists in its own light and itself serves to prove things that exist. Not only that. Light is not only a power of knowledge, it is also a power of action: it not only illumines, but also purifies. It clears up and as well cleans up.

But where is to be found this inner light? How is it to be recognised? 'Does it truly require no introduction like the outer light? What are its characters and attributes, its signs and signals? The light is in one's own consciousness, one has simply to become aware of it. It is mixed p with darkness, imbedded in obscurity, as diamond or gold lies concealed in its ore. But, as I have said, light carries its own authenticity. One cannot fail to recognise it, provided – and that is the sole arid sufficient provision – one is genuinely willing to recognise. A sincere good-will is all that is required in this apparently arduous labour.

Here is a significant mystery and of capital importance. We refer to an activity of the consciousness which is not completely .hidden or behind the veil: it appears covered, because we do not care to look at it, because it is likely to be of an uncomfortable

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kind and that because we feel safe and cosy at the lowest level of our consciousness and to mount and rise or to be vigilant and straight means effort and trouble.

Let us explain. Man is not as ignorant and helpless as he seems to be, as he would himself consider to be. There is in him always a spark, under the ashes, as it were, a perfect freedom behind the façade of a network of bondages, not dead or dormant but biding the time, to come out and be active on the surface. The spark is the light that directs to the right and warns against the wrong; the freedom is the choice to do th e right and avoid the wrong. It is just a point of perception, just a flash of awareness, but net and clear: it is there, you have only to notice it. It does not give the why or the whither of the rightness: it is a simple declaration presented to you, for you to do what you like with it: to ignore or to profit by. Usually we do not pay attention to it: our attention is diverted towards another direction and other things. Our environment, our education, our domestic and social influences, even a good part of our own nature demand of us other ways of living and inhibit the spontaneous inherent light of the consciousness. Even so, if we care to look at it, if we sincerely turn round and ask for it, we will find it still there – the flame behind the smoke, the queen in the harem, the deity in the sanctum. What is required is just a straight look and not the crooked wink we are accustomed to. The first attempts will necessarily mean a little fumbling, but if you mean what you do, you will find your vision getting clearer. It is our own disinclination that weaves the cobweb of ignorance around the trutl1. Otherwise, an unsophisticated consciousness, a consciousness which is not vitiated – more often by nurture than by nature – can always feel the presence of the truth and is directly aware of it.

A blinded misdirected mind, if it wakes up at any time and looks about for the truth sincerely – we insist upon the condition – can recognise it, learn to trace it by certain indications it always leaves behind in the consciousness. A touch of the truth, a step towards it will be always accompanied by a sense of relief, of peace, of a serene happiness and unconditional freedom. These things are felt not as something gross and superficial affecting your outer life and situation, but pertaining to the depth of your being, concerning your inmost fibre – it

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is nothing else but just the sense of light, as if you are at last out of the dark. A right movement brings you that feeling; and whenever you have that feeling you know that there has been the right movement. On the contrary, with a wrong movement you are ill at ease. You may say that a hardened criminal is never ill at ease; perhaps, but only after a great deal of hardening. The criminal was not always a criminal – I am speaking of a human being, not a born hostile – he must have started some-where the downward incline. The distinction of the right and the wrong must have been presented to his consciousness and the choice was freely his. Afterwards one gets bound to one's Karma and its chain.

Anyway, we are concerned particularly with one who asks for the truth and reality, the aspirant who is ready for the discipline. To the aspiring soul, to one who sincerely wishes to see the truth, it has been said, the truth unveils its body. The unveiling is gradual: the perception of the reality grows, the sensibility becomes refined, the vision clearer and clearer. The first step, as in all things, is the most decisive. For once all on a sudden, probably when you are off your guard, you know, in a flash, as it were, here is the right thing to do or the right thing you have done or even the wrong you have not done. You have thus secured the clue: and it is up to you now to pursue the clue.

The question of false light or of wrong perception need not trouble you too much. If you are sincere, if you have the correct attitude, things will come always right to you. The trouble is for him who is not himself true or does not propose to be true.

This spontaneous recognition of the light in you is also called, in the Yogic language, openness. It means you are ready, at least, something in you is ready, to accept and admit the light when it presents itself before you. If you have any hesitation to receive it for its own sake, if you wish to corroborate your initial perception you can look for its sign manual: the peace, the freedom, the elevation, the quiet certitude, the exquisite sweetness or gladness it brings, its own luminosity which is found neither here nor elsewhere but in its own body of self.

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Index

A. E. (George Russell), 45, 152,195,275

Adwaita, 139

Aesop, 97

Africa, 56, 101

Agastya, 281

Agni, 9, 247

Ajanta, 136, 179

Akbar, 93, 394

Alexander, 208, 394

Allies, the, 75, 88, 89

America, 56, 72, 81, 87, 89, 91, 103-4, 111, 119, 209

Amitabha, 273

Anarchism, 112

Anaxagoras, 326

Angst, 377

Anselm, 150

Apollo, 177,220

Aquinas, Thomas, 150

Aristotle, 128, 182,219,322

Arjuna, 60, 188-9,384-5, 391

Arminius, 88

Arnold, Matthew, 68, 192, 240, 272

Artemis, 195

Asia, 16, 48, 70, 101, 148, 152-3, 240, 245

Asoka,93,195

Asura, 18, 69-74, 186, 201, 234, 267,

272, 291, 376, 382-3, 386 Aswatthama, 298

Aswins, 9

Athena, 222

Atlantic, 210

Atlantis, 223

Augustan Age, 205, 212

Augustine, St., 150

Augustus, 207

Australia, 106

Avatara(s), 49, 55, 69, 161, 205, 261, 277, 286, 390

BAAL,220

Babylon, 223

Bacon, 16

Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, 114, 197

Bartho1omews, St., 52

Baudelaire, 48

Beethoven, 88

Behaviourism, 326

Benda, Julien, 119

- La Trahison des Clercs, 119

Bentham, 50, 140

Berdyaev, 260

Bergson, 16-20, 255, 327, 351, 364

Bernard, Tristan, 373

Bernhardi, 24

Bethlehem, 215

Beveridge Plan, the, 129

Bharata, 93, 161

Bhasa, 96

Bhisma, 80

Bhrigu, 376

Bible, the, 70, 248, 267

Blake, 164

Boehme, 150

Bosanquet, 326

Boscovich, 333

BoseiJagadish Chandra, 306, 322

Bottrall, Ronald, 193-4

-The Thyrsus Retipped, 193n

Brahmanas, the, 222, 365

Bradley, 326

Britain, 89, 104-5, 128

British Isles, the, 100

Buddha, 8, 50, 54-5, 166, 195, 208, 215-6, 222, 243, 280, 384 Buddhism, 54, 110, 166, 280

Byron, 194

CAESAR, jULIUS, 206, 208, 239, 367,394

Calcutta Review, the, 336n., 339n Camoens, 197

Canada, 106

Cato, 239

Chaitanya,216

Chaldea, 219, 223

Chamberlaine, Neville, 100

Chandragupta, 93, 394

Chaucer, 194

China, 119, 238-40, 242

Christ, 6, 50, 14511., 151, 154, 164, 195, 208,213-14,259,273-4,381,384

Christianity, 23, 58, 151, 168, 213, 280,282,359

Churchill, Winston, 91, Ill, 128

Coleridge, 194

Commonwealth, 91, 106, 236

Communism, 25, 27-8, 125-6 Confucius, 222

Copernicus, 308

Cordelia, 185n

Corneille, 197

Crete, 214

Cyrus, 240

Czechoslovakia, 100

DANTE, 39, 79, 197

. - Divina Commedia, 39

Darshallas, the, 344

Das, Prof. A. C., 336-9

Dasarathi, 91

De Broglie, Louis, 319

-La Physique Nouvelle et les Quanta, 319n Democritus, 326

Descartes, 321

Dirac, 318

Drona, 80

Du Noiiy, Lecomte, 260

Duryadhona, 80

EDDINGTON, 313-14, 317-19, 326, 332

Egypt, 106, 119, 127, 177n., 219, 223, 236, 238-41

Einstein, 139, 304, 308, 314-16, 325, 334, 401

Eliot, T. S., 115, 192-3, 195

-The Waste Land, 193n Encyclopaedists, the, 16

Engels, 128

England, 145,210,245

Equator, the, 304

Euclid, 81

Europe, 16,52,59,69-70,88, Ill, 117, 148, 150-2, 154-6, 158-9, 167, 178, 180, 211-12, 216-17, 225, 239, 243-6, 261, 326, 346

Existentialists, the, 348-50, 359, 362

FIRDAUSI, 197

Flanders, 74

France, 16, 69, 89-90, 101, 128, 145, 159, 197, 241, 244-6

France, Anatole, 145

French Revolution, 32, 52, 59, 101, 105,. 126, 149, 155, 207-8 Francis I, 90, 120

GALILEO, 308, 322

Germany, 32, 70, 72, 87-9

Gibbon, 238

-The Decline & Fall of the Roman EmPire, 238

Gide, Andre, 353-4

Gita, the, 27, 57,68, 83, 161, 163,188-9, 276, 280, 328, 340, 363, 369, 371, 381, 394

Goethe, 88, 197

Goncourts, 145

Gondwanaland, 223

Govind Singh, 396

Gray, Thomas, 115n

Greece, 16, 25, 119, 159, 205-6, 211,2H, 238-41, 244-6

HADAMARD, PROF., 302

Haeckel, 140

Hamlet, 186-90

Harappa,238,243

Heard, Gerald, 260

Hegel, 318

Heine, 88

Henry, the Great, 90

Hera, 220

Heraclitus, 150,211,329

Hennes, 220

Hibbert Journal, the, 251

Himalayas, the, 54, 100

Hinduism, 54, 110, 166

Hider. 70, 87-8, 106, 386

-Mein Kampf, 70

Homer, 136, 197,206,219

Hugo, Victor, 197,275

-A Villequier, 275n

Huma m, 16, 129-30, 163, 166, 168

Huxley, T. H., 140, 192

Hellas, 219

IDA, 219

Impressionists, 145

India, 25, 52-9, 74-5,. 90-2, 94, 98, 103-7, 119, 127, 153-7, 159-63, 168, 205, 207, 215, 217, 221-3, 229, 235, 238-43, 245, 260-2, 327

Indra, 9, 222

Industrial Revolution, 101 Industrial League, 102 Inge, Dean, 341 -Mysticism in Religion, 341n

Iraq, 106

Ireland 106, 127, 151

Irish Renaissance, 152

Ishwara, 4

Inquisition, the, 123

Isis, 220

Islam, 55-6, 110

Israel, 219

Italy, 89, 244

JANAKA,396

Japan, 70, 160,209

Jayachand,9O

Jeanne d'Arc, 90

Jeans, Sir James, 317-18, 332-3

-Physics & Philosophy, 317n Jehovah, 220

Johnson, Samuel, 212

Junkerism, 88, 89

Juno, 220

KABALA, 151, 214 Kahler,

Erich, 358-9

-Man the Measure, 358

Kali, 327

Kalidasa, 8, 55, 136, 197

Kant, 326, 345

Kanwa, 247

Keats, 120, 194

Kepler, 301, 308

Khilafat, 51

Kierkegaard, 362, 375-6

Koran, the, 70

Korea, 209

Kosala,91

Kurukshetra, 80,81

LAERTES, 188

Lamarck, 254

Lao-tse, 242

Laplace, 225, 312, 319, 388

League of Nations, 78, 80, 85

Leibnitz, 327

Lenin, 125

Leo X, 207

Leonardo da Vinci, 120

Lewis, Cecil Day, 195

Louis XIV, 207

Lucifer, 267

MACBETH, 186

Madhusudan Dutt, 120, 197

Mahabharata, the, 188,217,222

Mahalakshmi, 275

Mahasaraswati,271

Mahashakti, 327

Maheshwari, 275

Maitreyi, 160

Manchester Guardian, the, 163n Mao-tse-Tung,242

Mara,280

Mars, 323

Maruts, 222

Marx, 128

-Dos Kapital, 118

Marxism, 326

Mathura, 91

Maupassant, 145

Maxwell, 308

Maya, 50, 55, 67, 280, 284, 361, 381

Mayavada,326

Mazzini, 59, 91

Mephistopheles, 83 Michelson-Morley experiment, 315

Middle Age(s), 69, 145, 150, 152, 155, 213, 221, 346

Mill, 140

Milton, 194, 251

Minerva, 222

Mitra, 9

Modem Age, 145, 152

Moghuls, 58, 239

Mohammed, 208,215

Mohenjo-daro, 238, 243

Moliere, 197

Moloch, 220

Montesquieu,212

Morris, 151

Mother, The, 366, 372

Mysteries,

-Christian, 153

-Druidic, 151, 153

-Eleusinian, 150, 151, 153

-Kabalistic, 153

-Platonic, 153

Mythic Age, 221

NACHIKETAS, 381

Napoleon, 7, 8.. 90, 1l5, 195,208,394

Nazism, 127

Nyaya,338

Neo-Realists,317

New Testament, the, 214, 244

Newton, 301, 308, 356

Nietzsche, 16, 18-19,21-24, 130,261, 272, 358

Nineveh, 91

ODIN, 201

Old Testament, the, 214, 244

Olympus, 201, 234

Osiris, 220

PACIFIC, the, 209

Paracelsus, 150

Paris, 373

Parthenon, 136

Patanjali, 315, 319

Pericles, 206-7, 239

Periclean Age, 206

Persia, 240

Pharaohs, the, 239

Phidias, 220

Phoenicia, 219

Pisa, 322

Pisacha, 201, 234

Planck, Max, 356

Plato, 1l7, 150, 211, 219, 326

Plotinus, 150, 361

Poland, 72, 127

Pole, the, 304

Polonius, 187

Pope, 212

Pound, Ezra, 192

Pragmatism, 326

Prithwiraj, 90

Prometheus, 234

Proteus, 274

Prussia, 88

Puranas, the, 71

Pythagoras, 150,211,219

QUANTUM MECHANICS, 316

RACINE, 197 Raghus, the, 55

Ramayana, the, 217

Ramdas, 396

Raphael, 176-8

Red Cross, 104

Reichenbach, Hans, 315

-Atom .& Cosmos, 315n

Relativity, 141

Renaissance, 21, 52, 130, 145, 149, 152, 163, 206-8, 211, 329 Renan, Emest, 91, 94

-Qp'est-ce qu'une nation?, 94n Ribhus; 271

Richelieu, 90

Riemann, 325

Romains, Jules, 69, 360

-Vie Unanime, 360

Romanticism, 212

Romantic Revival, the, 207, 212

Rome, 16, 25, 72, 119, 206, 238-9, 245

Rossetti, 151

Rousseau, 113, 145

Roy, D. L., 192

Rumi 280

Russell, Bertrand, 140, 317, 326-7

Russia... 81, 91, 104, 106, 125, 207

Russian Revolution, 101, 207

SANKHYA(S), 139, 222, 315, 327, 349

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 348, 351-2, 375-7

Satan, 267, 280

Sati, 268

Schweitzer, Albert, 359

Sedan, 106

Shakespeare, , 120, 160, 182, 194, 197, 251, 337

-Hamlet, 185, 188n., 386n

-King Lear, 185

-Mm;beth, 185

Shankaracharya, 8, 215-16, 229, 276

Shaw, Bernard, 140, 145, 254

-Back to Methuselah, 140

Shelley, 194

Shiva, 268

Shivaji,93, 394, 396

Shylock, 100

Sisupala, 80

Socrates, 16, 150,219-20,222,229,273

Solon, 219

Spain, 72

Sparta, 25

Spengler, Oswald, 238

Sri Aurobindo, 96, 222, 239, 250, 262, 270n., 277-8, 280-1, 283, 288, 336-7, 339-40, 345-6, 392

-A God's Labour, 278

-Savitri, 270n

-The Life Divine, 392n

-Who, 341n

Sri Krishna, 80, 83, 243, 384, 391

Sri Ramakrishna, 57, 161, 239, 385, 395

St. Augustine, 150

St. Bartholomews, 52

St. Bernard, 150

St. Francis, 150, 164

St. Peter, 382

St. Teresa, 150

St.. Thomas Aquinas, 150

Stalin, 106, 125

Sumeria, 223

Sun-yat-Sen, 242

TACITUS, 87

Tagore, Rabindranath, 195, 197-8, 200-1

Tantras, the, 63, 216, 248

Thales, 329

Thebes, 91

Thor, 201

Tibet, 177n

Times Literary Supplement, the, 254

Toynbee, Arnold, 238, 242n

Trethowan, Rev. 252

Treitschke, 24

UNRRA,1O4

Ukraine, 74

Upanishads, the, 55, 200, 214-15, 217, 255, 306, 320, 325, 337, 340-2, 344, 363, 367-8

Upanishadic Age, 222

-Kena, 393

- TaittiriYa, 376

V AISHESHIKAS, 327

Vansittart, Lord, 88

Varona, 9, 270

Varus, 88

Vedas, the, 5, 54, 63,70, 162,217-18, 221 2, 242, 247, 249, 272, 276, 281, 296

Vedic Age, 241

. Venizelos,239

Venus, 177

Versailles Treaty, 106

Vibhisana, 298

Vibhutis, 390

Virgil, 197,211,375

-Ae1Ulid, 375n

Virochana, 288, 376

Vishnu, 133, 277

Vwekananda, 56, 59, 154, 161, 165,396

Voltaire, 16, 50, 212 .

WAGNER, sa

Watson-Watt, Sir Robert, 251-2

Wave mechanics, 316

Wells, H. G., 140

Whitehead, A. N., 345-6

Wordsworth, 183, 194

World Review, the, 353

World War I, 101, 373

YADUPATI,91

Yajnavalkya, 160, 167,200,259

Yama, 381

Yeats, 152, 195

Yudhisthira, 93

ZEUS, 24, 123,220,222 Zola, 145