Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 2

The Approach to Mysticism

MYSTICISM is not only a science but also, and in a greater degree, an art. To approach it merely as a science, as the modern mind attempts to do, is to move towards futility, if not to land in positive disaster. Sufficient stress is not laid on this aspect of the matter, although the very crux of the situation lies here. The mystic domain has to be apprehended not merely by the true mind and understanding but by the right temperament and character. Mysticism is not merely an object of knowledge, a problem for inquiry and solution, it is an end, an ideal that has to be achieved, a life that has to be lived. The mystics themselves have declared long ago with no uncertain or faltering voice: this cannot be attained by intelligence or much learning, it can be seized only by a purified and clear temperament.

The warning seems to have fallen, in the modern age, on unheeding ears. For the modern mind, being pre-eminently and uncompromisingly scientific, can entertain no doubt as to the perfect competency of science and the scientific method to seize and unveil any secret of Nature. If, it is argued, mysticism is a secret, if there is at all a truth and reality in it, then it is and must be amenable to the rules and regulations of science; for science is the revealer of Nature's secrecies.

But what is not recognised in this view of things is that there are secrecies and secrecies. The material secrecies of Nature are of one category, the mystic secrecies are of another. The two are not only disparate but incommensurable. Any man with a mind and understanding of average culture can see and handle the 'scientific' forces, but not the mystic forces.

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A scientist once thought that he had clinched the issue and cut the Gordian knot when he declared triumphantly with reference to spirit séances: "Very significant is the fact that spirits appear only in closed chambers, in half obscurity, to somnolent minds; they are nowhere in the open air, in broad daylight to the wide awake and vigilant intellect!" Well, if the fact is as it is stated, what does it prove? Night alone reveals the stars, during the day they vanish, but that is no proof that stars are not existent. Rather the true scientific spirit should seek to know why (or how) it is so, if it is so, and such a fact would exactly serve as a pointer, a significant starting ground. The attitude of the jesting Pilate is not helpful even to scientific inquiry. This matter of the Spirits we have taken only as an illustration and it must not be understood that this is a domain of high mysticism; rather the contrary. The spiritualists' approach to Mysticism is not the right one and is fraught with not only errors but dangers. For the spiritualists approach their subject with the entire scientific apparatus – the only difference being that the scientist does not believe while the spiritualist believes.

Mystic realities cannot be reached by the scientific consciousness, because they are far more subtle than the subtlest object that science can contemplate. The neutrons and positrons are for science today the finest and profoundest object-forces; they belong, it is said, almost to a borderland where physics ends. Nor for that reason is a mystic reality something like a mathematical abstraction, √√ n for example. The mystic reality is subtler than the subtlest of physical things and yet, paradoxical to say, more concrete than the most concrete thing that the senses apprehend.

Furthermore, being so, the mystic domain is of infinitely greater potency than the domain of intra-atomic forces. If one comes, all on a sudden, into contact with a force here without the necessary preparation to hold and handle it, he may get seriously bruised, morally and physically. The adventure into the mystic domain has its own toll of casualties – one can lose the mind, one can lose one's body even and it is a very common experience among those who have tried the path. It is not in vain and merely as a poetic metaphor that the ancient seers have said

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Kşurasya dhārā niśitā duratyayā¹

nāyamātmā balahinena labhyah²

or

The mystic forces are not only of immense potency but of a definite moral disposition and character, that is to say, they are of immense potency either for good or for evil. They are not mechanical and amoral forces like those that physical sciences deal with; they are forces of consciousness and they are conscious forces, they act with an aim and a purpose. The mystic forces are forces either of light or of darkness, either Divine or Titanic. And it is most often the powers of darkness that the naturally ignorant consciousness of man contacts when it seeks to cross the borderline without training or guidance, by the sheer arrogant self-sufficiency of mental scientific reason.

Ignorance, certainly, is not man's ideal condition – it leads to death and dissolution. But knowledge also can be equally disastrous if it is not of the right kind. The knowledge that is born of spiritual disobedience, inspired by the Dark ones, leads to the soul's fall and its calvary through pain and suffering on earth. The seeker of true enlightenment has got to make a distinction, learn to separate the true and the right from the false and the wrong, unmask the luring Māra, say clearly and unfalteringly to the dark light of Lucifer – apage Satana, if he is to come out into the true light and command the right forces. The search for knowledge alone, knowledge for the sake of knowledge, the path of pure scientific inquiry and inquisitiveness, in relation to the mystic world, is a dangerous thing. For such a spirit serves only to encourage and enhance man's arrogance and in the end not only limits but warps and falsifies the knowledge itself. A knowledge based on and secured exclusively through the reason and mental light can go only so far as that faculty can be reasonably stretched and not infinitely – to stretch it to infinity means to snap it. This is the warning that Yajnavalkya gave to Gargi when the latter started renewing her question ad infinitum. Yajnavalkya said, "If you do not stop, your head will fall off."

¹"Sharp as a razor's edge, difficult of going, hard to traverse is that path!"

²"This spirit is a thing no weakling can gain."

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The mystic truth has to be approached through the heart. "In the heart is established the Truth," says the Upanishad: it is there that is seated eternally the soul, the real being, who appears no bigger than the thumb. Even if the mind is utilised as an instrument of knowledge, the heart must be there behind as the guide and inspiration. It is precisely because, as I have just mentioned, Gargi sought to shoot up – like "vaulting ambition that o'erleaps itself" of which Shakespeare speaks-through the mind alone to the highest truth that Yajnavalkya had to pull her up and give the warning that she risked losing her head if she persisted in her questioning endlessly.

For true knowledge comes of, and means, identity of being. All other knowledge may be an apprehension of things but not comprehension. In the former, the knower stands apart from the object and so can envisage only the outskirts, the contour, the surface nature; the mind is capable of this alone. But comprehension means an embracing and penetration which is possible when the knower identifies himself with the object. And when we are so identified we not merely know the object, but becoming it in our consciousness, we love it and live it.

The mystic's knowledge is a part and a formation of his life. That is why it is a knowledge not abstract and remote but living and intimate and concrete. It is a knowledge that pulsates with delight: indeed it is the radiance that is shed by the purest and intensest joy. For this reason it may be that in approaching through the heart there is a chance of one's getting arrested there and not caring for the still higher, the solar lights; but this need not be so. In the heart there is a golden door leading to the deepest delights, but there is also a diamond door opening up into the skies of the brightest luminosities.

For it must be understood that the heart, the mystic heart, is not the external thing which is the seat of emotion or passion; it is the secret heart that is behind, the inner heart - antarhrdaya of the Upanishad – which is the centre of the individual consciousness, where all the divergent lines of that consciousness meet and from where they take their rise. That is what the Upanishad means when it says that the heart has a hundred channels which feed the human vehicle. That is the source, the

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fount and origin, the very substance of the true personality. Mystic knowledge-the true mystic knowledge which saves and fulfils-begins with the awakening or the entrance into this real being. This being is pure and luminous and blissful and sovereignly real, because it is a portion, a spark of the Divine Consciousness and Nature: a contact and communion with it brings automatically into play the light and the truth that are its substance. At the same time it is an uprising flame that reaches out naturally to higher domains of consciousness and manifests them through its translucid dynamism.

The knowledge that is obtained without the heart's instrumentation or co-operation is liable to be what the Gita describes as Asuric. First of all, from the point of view of knowledge itself, it would be, as I have already said, egocentric, a product and agent of one's limited and isolated self, easily put at the service of desire and passion. This knowledge, whether rationalistic or occult, is, as it were, hard and dry in its constitution, and oftener than not, negative and destructive – withering and blasting in its career like the desert simoom.

There are modes of knowledge that are occult – and to that extent mystic-and can be mastered by practices in which the heart has no share. But they have not the saving grace that comes by the touch of the Divine. They are not truly mystic – the truly mystic belongs to the ultimate realities, the deepest and the highest, – they, on the other hand, are transverse and tangential movements belonging to an intermediate region where light and obscurity are mixed up and even for the greater part the light is swallowed up in the obscurity or utilised by it.

The mystic's knowledge and experience is not only true and real: it is delightful and blissful. It has a supremely healing virtue. It brings a sovereign freedom and ease and peace to the mystic himself, but also to those around him, who come in contact with him. For truth and reality are made up of love and harmony, because truth is, in its essence, unity.

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Mystic symbolism

THE Mystics all over the world and in all ages have clothed their sayings in proverbs and parables, in figures and symbols. To speak in symbols seems to be in their very nature; it is their characteristic manner, their inevitable style. Let us see what is the reason behind it. But first who are the Mystics? They are those who are in touch with supra-sensual things, whose experiences are of a world different from the common physical world, the world of the mind and the senses.

These other worlds are constituted in other ways than ours. Their contents are different and the laws that obtain there are also different. It would be a gross blunder to attempt a chart of

any of these other systems, to use an Einsteinian term, with the measures and conventions of the system to which our external waking consciousness belongs. For, there "the sun shines not, nor the moon, nor the stars, neither these lightnings nor this fire." The difficulty is further enhanced by the fact that there are very many unseen worlds and they all differ from the seen and from one another in manner and degree. Thus, for example, the Upanishads speak of the swapna, the susupta, and the turīya, domains beyond the jāgrat which is that where the rational being with its mind and senses lives and moves. And there are other systems and other ways in which systems exist, and they are practically innumerable.

If, however, we have to speak of these other worlds, then, since we can speak only in the terms of this world, we have to use them in a different sense from those they usually bear; we must employ them as figures and symbols. Even then they may prove inadequate and misleading; so there are Mystics who are averse to all speech and expression – they are mauni; in silence they experience the inexpressible and in silence they communicate

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it to the few who have the capacity to receive in silence.

But those who do speak, how do they choose their figures and symbols? What is their methodology? For it might be said, since the unseen and the seen differ out and out, it does not matter what forms or signs are taken from the latter; for any meaning and significance could be put into anything. But in reality, it does not so happen. For, although there is a great divergence between figures and symbols on the one hand and the things figured and symbolised on the other, still there is also some link, some common measure. And that is why we see not unoften the same or similar figures and symbols representing an identical experience in ages and countries far apart from each other.

We can make a distinction here between two types of expression which we have put together indiscriminately, figures and symbols. Figures, we may say, are those that are constructed by the rational mind, the intellect; they are mere metaphors and similes and are not organically related to the thing experienced, but put round it as a robe that can be dropped or changed without affecting the experience itself. Thus, for example, when the Upanishad says, ātmānam rathinam viddhi (Know that the soul is the master of the chariot who sits within it) or indriyāni hayānāhu (The senses, they say, are the horses), we have here only a comparison or analogy that is common and natural to the poetic manner. The particular figure or simile used is not inevitable to the idea or experience that it seeks to express, its part and parcel. On the other hand, take this Upanishadic perception: hiranyamayena patrena satyasyāphitam mukham (The face of the Truth lies hidden under the golden orb). Here the symbol is not mere analogy or comparison, a figure; it is one with the very substance of the experience-the two cannot be separated. Or when the Vedas speak of the kindling of the Fire, the rushing of the waters or the rise of the Dawn, the images though taken from the material world, are not used for the sake of mere comparison, but they are the embodiments, the living forms of truths experienced in another world.

When a Mystic refers to the Solar Light or to the Fire-the light, for example, that struck down Saul and transformed him into Saint Paul or the burning bush that visited Moses, it is

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not the physical or material object that he means and yet it is that in a way. It is the materialization of something that is fundamentally not material: some movement in an inner consciousness precipitates itself into the region of the senses and takes from out of the material the form commensurable with its nature that it finds there.

And there is such a commensurability or parallelism between the various levels of consciousness, in and through all the differences that separate them from one another. Thus an object or a movement apprehended on the physical plane has a sort of line of re-echoing images extended in a series along the whole gradation of the inner planes; otherwise viewed, an object or movement in the innermost consciousness translates itself in varying modes from plane to plane down to the most material, where it appears in its grossest form as a concrete three-dimensional object or a mechanical movement. This parallelism or commensurability by virtue of which the different and divergent states of consciousness can portray or represent each other is the source of all symbolism.

A symbol symbolizes something for this reason that both possess in common a certain identical, at least similar, quality or rhythm or vibration, the symbol possessing it in a grosser or more apparent or sensuous form than the thing symbolized does. Sometimes it may happen that it is more than a certain quality or rhythm or vibration that is common between the two: the symbol in its entirety is the thing symbolized but thrown

down on another plane, it is the embodiment of the latter in a more concrete world. The light and the fire that Saint Paul and Moses saw appear to be of this kind.

Thus there is a great diversity of symbols. At the one end is the mere metaphor or simile or allegory ('figure,' as we have called it) and at the other end is the symbol identical with the thing symbolized. And upon this inner character of the symbol depends also to a large extent its range and scope. There are symbols which are universal and intimately ingrained in the human consciousness itself. Mankind has used them in all ages and climes almost in the same sense and significance. There are others that are limited to peoples and ages. They are made out of forms that are of local and temporal interest and importance. Their significances vary according to time

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and place. Finally, there are symbols which are true of the individual consciousness only; they depend on personal peculiarities and idiosyncrasies, on one's environment and upbringing and education.

Man being an embodied soul, his external consciousness (what the Upanishad calls jāgrat) is the milieu in which his soul-experiences naturally manifest and find their play. It is the forms and movements of that consciousness which clothe and give a concrete habitation and name to perceptions on the subtler ranges of the inner existence. If the experiences on these planes are to be presented to the conscious memory and to the brain-mind and made communicable to others through speech, this is the inevitable and natural process. Symbols are a translation in mental and sensual (and vocal) terms of experiences that are beyond the mind and the sense and the speech and yet throw a kind of echoing vibrations upon these lesser levels.

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Upanishadic Symbolism

A certain rationalistic critic divides the Upanishadic symbols into three categories – those that are rational and can be easily understood by the mind; those that are not understood by the mind and yet do not go against reason, having nothing inherently irrational in them and may be simply called non-rational; those that seem to be quite irrational, for they go frankly against all canons of logic and common sense. As an example of the last, the irrational type, the critic cites a story from the Chhnādogya, which may be rendered thus:

There was an aspirant, a student who was seeking after knowledge. One day there appeared to him a white dog. Soon, other dogs followed and addressed their predecessor: "0 Lord, sing to our Food, for we desire to eat." The white dog answered, "Come to me at dawn here in this very place." The aspirant waited. The dogs, like singer-priests, circled round in a ring. Then they sat and cried aloud; they cried out, "Om We eat and Om we drink, may the gods bring here our food."

Now, before any explanation is attempted it is important to bear in mind that the Upanishads speak of things experienced – not merely thought, reasoned or argued and that these experiences belong to a world and consciousness other than that of the mind and the senses. One should naturally expect here a different language and mode of expression than that which is appropriate to mental and physical things. For example, the world of dreams was once supposed to be a sheer chaos, a mass of meaningless confusion; but now it is held to be quite otherwise. Psychological scientists have discovered a method – even a very well-defined and strict method – in the madness of that domain. It is an ordered, organised, significant world; but its terminology has to be understood, its code deciphered.

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It is not a jargon, but a foreign language that must be learnt and mastered.

In the same way, the world of spiritual experiences is also something methodical, well-organized, significant. It may not be and is not the rational world of the mind and the sense; but it need not, for that reason, be devoid of meaning, mere fancifulness or a child's imagination running riot. Here also the right key has to be found, the grammar and vocabulary of that language mastered. And as the best way to have complete mastery of a language is to live among the people who speak it, so, in the matter of spiritual language, the best and the only way to learn it is to go and live in its native country.

Now, as regards the interpretation of the story cited, should not a suspicion arise naturally at the very outset that the dog of the story is not a dog but represents something else? First, a significant epithet is given to it – white; secondly, although it asks for food, it says that Om is its food and Om is its drink. In the Vedas we have some references to dogs. Yama has twin dogs that "guard the path and have powerful vision." They are his messengers, "they move widely and delight in power and possess the vast strength." The Vedic Rishis pray to them for Power and Bliss and for the vision of the Sun.¹ There is also the Hound of Heaven, Sarama, who comes down and discovers the luminous cows stolen and hidden by the Panis in their dark caves; she is the path-finder for Indra, the deliverer.

My suggestion is that the dog is a symbol of the keen sight of Intuition, the unfailing perception of direct knowledge. With this clue the Upanishadic story becomes quite sensible and clear and not mere abracadabra. To the aspirant for Knowledge came first a purified power of direct understanding, an Intuition of fundamental value, and this brought others of the same species in its train. They were all linked together organically – that is the significance of the circle, and formed a rhythmic utterance and expression of the supreme truth (Om). It is also to be noted that they came and met at dawn to chant, the Truth. Dawn is the opening and awakening of the consciousness to truths that come from above and beyond.

It may be asked why the dog has been chosen as the symbol

¹Rig Veda, X. 14-11, 12.

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of Intuition. In the Vedas, the cow and the horse also play a large part; even the donkey and the frog have their own assigned roles. These objects are taken from the environment of ordinary life, and are those that are most familiar to the external consciousness, through which the inner experiences have to express themselves, if they are to be expressed at all. These material objects represent various kinds of forces and movements and subtle and occult and spiritual dynamisms. Strictly speaking, however, symbols are not chosen in a subtle or spiritual experience, that is to say, they are not arbitrarily selected and constructed by the conscious intelligence. They form part of a dramatization (to use a term of the Freudian psychology of dreams), a psychological alchemy, whose method and process and rationale are very obscure, which can be penetrated only by the vision of a third eye.

I. THE SEVERAL LIGHTS

The Brihadaranyaka speaks of several lights that man possesses, one in the absence of another, for his illumination and guidance.

First of all, he has the Sun; it is the primary light by which he lives and moves. When the Sun sets, the Moon rises to replace it. When both the Sun and the Moon set, he has recourse to the Fire. And when the Fire, too, is extinguished, there comes the Word. In the end, when the Fire is quieted and the Word silenced, man is lighted by the Light of the Atman. This Atman is All-Knowledge; it is secreted within the life, within the heart: it is self-luminous Vijñānamayah prāņeşu hrdyantar jyotih.

The progression indicated by the order of succession points to a gradual withdrawal from the outer to the inner light, from the surface to the deep, from the obvious to the secret, from the actual and derivative to the real and original. We begin by the senses and move towards the Spirit.

The Sun is the first and the most immediate source of light that man has and needs. He is the presiding deity of our waking consciousness and has his seat in the eye – cakşusah ādityah, ādityah caksuh bhūtvā aksinī prāviśat. The eye is the representative

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of the senses; it is the sense par excellence. In truth, sense-perception is the initial light with which we have to guide us, it is the light with which we start on the way. A developed stage comes when the Sun sets for us, that is to say, when we retire from the senses and rise into the mind, whose divinity is the Moon. It is the mental knowledge, the light of reason and intelligence, of reflection and imagination that govern our consciousness. We have to proceed farther and get beyond the mind, exceed the derivative light of the Moon. So when the Moon sets, the Fire is kindled. It is the light of the ardent and aspiring heart, the glow of an inner urge, the instincts and inspirations of our secret life-will. Here we come into touch with a source of knowledge and realization, a guidance more direct than the mind and much deeper than the sense-perception. Still this light partakes more of heat than of pure luminosity; it is, one may say, incandescent feeling, but not vision. We must probe deeper, mount higher – reach heights and profundities that are serene and transparent. The Fire is to be quieted and silenced, says the Upanishad. Then we come nearer, to the immediate vicinity of the Truth: an inner hearing opens, the direct voice of Truth – the Word – reaches us to lead and guide. Even so, however, we have not come to the end of our journey; the Word of revelation is not the ultimate Light. The Word too is clothing, though a luminous clothing – hiranmayam pātram When this last veil dissolves and disappears, when utter silence, absolute calm and quietude reign in the entire consciousness, when no other lights trouble or distract our attention, there appears the Atman in its own body; we stand face to face with the source of all lights, the self of the Light, the light of the Self. We are that Light and we become that Light.

II. THE FOUR OBLATIONS

The Word has four breasts. The Gods feed on two, SWAHAKAR and VASHATKAR, men upon the third, HANTAKAR, and the Ancestor upon the fourth, SWADHA¹ –

Ritualistically these four terms are the formulae for oblation

¹Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, V. 8.і.

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to four Deities, Powers or Presences, whom the sacrificer wishes to please and propitiate in order to have their help and blessing and in order thereby to discharge his dharma or duty of life. Svāhā is the offering especially dedicated to Agni, the foremost of the Gods, for he is the divine messenger who carries men's offering to the Gods and brings their blessing to men. Vasatkār is the offering to the Gods generally. Hantakār is the offering to mankind, to our kin, an especial form of it being the worship of the guests, sarvadevamay'tithi. Svadhā is the offering to the departed Fathers (Pitris).

The duty of life consists, it is said, in the repaying of three debts which every man contracts as soon as he takes birth upon earth – the debt to the Gods, to Men and to the Ancestors. This threefold debt or duty has, in other terms, reference to the three fields or domains wherein an embodied being lives and moves and to which he must adjust and react rightly -if he is to secure for his life an integral fulfilment. These are the family, society and the world and beyond-world. The Gods are the Powers that rule the world and beyond, they are the forms and forces of the One Spirit underlying the universe, the varied expressions of divine Truth and Reality: To worship the Gods, to do one's duty by them, means to come into contact and to be united-in being, consciousness and activity-with the universal and spiritual existence, which is the supreme end and purpose of human life. The second – a more circumscribed field – is the society to which one belongs, the particular group of humanity in which he functions as a limb. The service to society or good citizenship entails the worship of humanity, of Man as a god. Lastly, man belongs to the family, which is the unit of society; and the backbone of the family is the continuous line of ancestors, who are its presiding deity and represent the norm of a living dharma, the ethic of an ideal life.

From the psychological standpoint, the four oblations are movements or reactions of consciousness in its urge towards the utterance and expression of Divine Truth. Like some other elements in the cosmic play, these also form a quartet – caturvyūha – and work together for a common purpose in view of a perfect and all-round result.

Svāhā is the offering and invocation. One must dedicate everything to the Divine, cast all one has or does into the Fire of

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Aspiration that blazes up towards the Most High, and through the tongue of that one-pointed flame call on the Divinity.

In doing so, in invoking the Truth and consecrating oneself to it, one begins to ascend to it step by step; and each step means a tearing of another veil and a further opening of the I passage. This graded mounting is vasatkāra.

Hantakār is the appearance, the manifestation of the Divinity – that which makes the worshipper cry in delight, "Hail!" It is the coming of the Dawn – ahanā – when the night has been traversed and the lid rent open, the appearance of the Divine to a human vision for the human consciousness to seize, almost in a human form.

Finally, once the Truth is reached, it is to be held fast, firmly established, embodied and fixed in its inherent nature here in life and the waking consciousness. This is Svadhā.

The Gods feed upon Svādhā and Vasat, as these represent the ascending movement of human consciousness: it is man's self-giving and aspiration and the upward urge of his heart and soul that reach to the Gods, and it is that which the immortals take into themselves and are, as it were, nourished by, since it is something that appertains to their own nature.

And in response they descend and approach and enter into the aspiring human soul – this descent and revelation and near and concrete presence of Divinity, this Hanta is man's food, for by it his consciousness is nourished.

This interchange, or mutual giving, the High Covenant between the Gods and Men, to which the Gita too refers

With this sacrifice nourish the Gods, that the Gods may nourish you; thus mutually nourishing ye shall obtain the highest felicity¹

is the very secret of the cosmic play, the basis of the spiritual evolution in the universal existence.

The Gods are the formations or particularisations of the Truth-consciousness, the multiple individualisations of the One spirit. The Pitris are the Divine Fathers, that is to say, souls that once laboured and realised here below, and now have passed beyond. They dwell in another world, not too far removed from the earth, and from there, with the force of their

¹The Gita, III-II.

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Realisation, lend a more concrete help and guidance to the destiny that is being worked out upon earth. They are forces and formations of consciousness in an intermediate region between Here and There (antariksa), and serve to bring men and gods nearer to each other, inasmuch as they belong to both the categories, being a divinised humanity or a humanised divinity. Each fixation of the Truth-consciousness in an earthly mould is a thing of joy to the Pitris; it is the Svadhā or food by which they live and grow, for it is the consolidation and also the resultant of their own realisation. The achievements of the sons are more easily and securely reared and grounded upon those of the forefathers, whose formative powers we have to invoke, so that we may pass on to the realisation, the firm embodiment of higher and greater destinies.

III. THE PATH OF THE FATHERS AND THE PATH OF THE GODS

One is an ideal in and of the world, the other is an ideal transcending the world. The Path of the Fathers (Pitryāna) enjoins the right accomplishing of the dharma of Life – it is the path of works, of Karma; it is the line of progressive evolution that, man follows through the experience of life after life on earth. The Path of the Gods (Devayāna) runs above life's evolutionary course; it lifts man out of the terrestrial cycle and places him in a superior consciousness it is the path of knowledge, of Vidya.¹ The Path of the Fathers is the soul's southern or inferior orbit (daksinayana, aparārdha); the Path of the Gods is the northern or superior orbit (uttarāyana, parārdha) . The former is also called the Lunar Path and the latter the Solar Path.² For the moon represents the mind,³ and is therefore, an emblem that befits man so long as he is a mental being and pursues a dharma that is limited by the mind; the sun, on the other hand, is the knowledge and consciousness that is beyond the mind – it is the eye of the Gods.4

Man has two aspects or natures; he dwells in two worlds. The first is the manifest world-the world of the body, the life

¹ Karmaņā pitŗloka vidyayā devolokah (jayyāh) – Brihadaranyaka, 1.5.16.

² Devalokādādityam... pitrlokāccandram 0 Ibid., VI. 2.15.16.

³Cāndram mano bhūtvā – Aitareya, 1.2.4; Manasascandramāh – Ibid., 1.1.4.

4Divīva caksurātatam – Rig Veda

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and the mind. The body has flowered into the mind through the life. The body gives the basis or the material, the life gives power and energy and the mind the directing knowledge. This triune world forms the humanity of man. But there is another aspect hidden behind this apparent nature, there is another world where man dwells in his submerged, larger and higher consciousness. To that his soul – the Purusha in his heart only has access. It is the world where man's nature is transmuted into another triune reality – Sat, Chit and Ananda.

The one, however, is not completely divorced from the other. The apparent, the inferior nature is only a preparation for the real, the superior nature. The Path of the Fathers concerns itself with man as a mental being and seeks so to ordain and accomplish its duties and ideals as to lead him on to the Path of the Gods; the mind, the life, and the body consciousness should be so disciplined, educated, purified, they should develop along such a line and gradually rise to such a stage as to make them fit to receive the light which belongs to the higher level, so allowing the human soul imbedded in them to extricate itself and pass on to the Immortal Life.

And they who are thus lifted up into the Higher Orbit are freed from the bondage to the cycle of rebirth. They enjoy the supreme Liberation that is of the Spirit; and even when they descend into the Inferior Path, it is to work out as free agents, as vehicles of the Divine, a special purpose, to bring down something of the substance and nature of the Solar reality into the lower world, enlighten and elevate the lower, as far as it is allowed, into the higher.

IV. THE TRIPLE AGNI

Agni is the divine spark in man, the flaming consciousness in the mortal which purifies and uplifts (pāvaka) mortality into immortality. It is the god "seated in the secret heart, who is the possession of infinity and the foundation of existence," as Yama says to Nachiketas.¹

Indeed, it was to this godhead that Nachiketas turned and he wanted to know of it and find it, when faith seized on his

¹ Katha, I.1.14.

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pure heart and he aspired for the higher spiritual life. The very opening hymn of the Rig Veda, too, is addressed to Agni, who is invoked as the vicar seated in the front of the sacrifice, the giver of the supreme gifts.

King Yama initiated Nachiketas into the mystery of Fire Worship and spoke of three fires that have to be kindled if one aspires to enter the heaven of immortality.

The three fires are named elsewhere Garhapatya, Dakshina, and Ahavaniya.¹ They are the three tongues of the one central Agni, that dwells secreted in the hearth of the soul. They manifest as aspirations that flame up from the three fundamental levels of our being, the body, the life and the mind. For although the spiritual consciousness is the natural element of the soul and is gained in and through the soul, yet, in order that man may take possession of it and dwell in it consciously, in order that the soul's empire may be established, the external being too must respond to the soul's impact and yearn for its truth in the Spirit. The mind, the life and the body which are usually obstructions in the path, must discover the secret flame that is in them too – each has his own portion of the Soul's Fire – and mount on its ardent tongue towards the heights of the Spirit.

Garhapatya is the Fire in the body-consciousness, the fire of Earth, as it is sometimes called; Dakshina is the Fire of the moon or mind, and Ahavaniya that of life.² The earthly fire is also the fire of the sun; the sun is the source of all earth's heat and symbolises at the same time the spiritual light manifested in the physical consciousness. The lunar fire is also the fire of the stars, the stars, mythologically, being the consorts or powers of the moon and they symbolise, in Yogic experience, the intuitive thoughts. The fire of the life-force has its symbol in lightning, electric energy being its vehicle.

Agni in the physical consciousness is called grhapati, for the body is the house in which the soul is lodged and he is its keeper, guardian and lord. The fire in the mental consciousness is called daksinā; for it is that which gives discernment, the power to discriminate between the truth and the falsehood, it is that which by the pressure of its heat and light

¹ Chhandyogya, IV, 11. 12, 13; V, 18.2.

² Chhandyogya, IV, 11. 12. 13; V, 18,2.

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cleaves the wrong away from the right. And the fire in the life-force is called āhavanīya; for prāna is not only the plane of hunger and desire, but also of power and dynamism, it is that which calls forth forces, brings them into' play and it is that which is to be invoked for the progression of the Sacrifice, for an onward march on the spiritual path.

Of the three fires one is the upholder – he who gives the firm foundation, the stable house where the Sacrifice is performed and Truth realised; the second is the Knower, often called in the Veda jātavedā, who guides and directs; and the third the Doer, the effective Power, the driving Energy – vaiśvānara.

V. THE FIVE GREAT ELEMENTS

The five elements of the ancients – earth, water, fire, air and ether or space – are symbols taken from the physical world to represent other worlds that are in it and behind it. Each one is a principle that constitutes the fundamental nature of a particular plane of existence.

Earth represents the material world itself, Matter or existence in its most concrete, its grossest form. It is the basis of existence, the world that supports other worlds (dharā, dharitrī), the first or the lowest of the several ranges of creation. In man it is his body. The principle here is that of stability, substantiality, firmness, consistency.

Water represents the next rung – the vital world, the world life-force (prāna). Physiologically also we know that water is the element forming three-fourths of the constituents of a living body and that dead and dry are synonymous terms; it is the medium in which the living cells dwell and through which they draw their sustenance. Water is the veritable sap of life – it is the emblem of life itself. The principle it represents is that of movement, continuity, perpetuity.

Fire represents the Heart. It is that which gives the inner motive to the forces of life, it is the secret inspiration and aspiration that drive the movements of life. It is the heat of consciousness, the ardour of our central being that lives in the Truth and accepts nothing, nothing but the Truth. It is the

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pure and primal energy of our divine essence, driving ever upward and onward life's course of evolution.

Air is Mind, the world of thought, of conscious formation; it is where life-movements are taken up and given a shape or articulate formula for an organised expression. The forms here have not, however, the concrete rigidity of Matter, but are pliant and variable and fluid – in fact, they are more in the nature of possibilities, rather than actualities. The Vedic Maruts are thought-gods, and lndra (the Luminous Mind), their king, is called the Fashioner of perfect forms.

Ether or Space is the infinitude of the Spirit, the limitless Presence that dwells in and yet transcends the body, the life the heart and the mind.

VI. THE SCIENCE OF THE FIVE FIRES

The Science of the Five Agnis (Fires), as propounded by Pravahan, explains and illustrates the process of the birth of the body, the passage of the soul into earth existence. It describes the advent of the child, the building of the physical form of the human being. The process is conceived of as a sacrifice, the usual symbol with the Vedic Rishis for the expression of their vision and perception of universal processes of Nature, physical and psychological. Here, the child IS said to be the final fruit of the sacrifice, the different stages in the process being: (i) Soma, (ii) Rain, (iii) Food, (iv) Semen, (v) Child. Soma means Rasa – physically the principle of water, psychologically the 'principle of delight – and symbolises and constitutes the very soul and substance of life. Now it is said that these five principles – the fundamental and constituent elements – are born out of the sacrifice, through the oblation or offering to the five Agnis. The first Agni is Heaven or the Sky-God, and by offering to it one's faith and one's ardent desire, one calls into manifestation Soma or Rasa or Water, the basic principle of life. This water is next offered to the second Agni, the Rain-God, who sends down Rain. Rain, again, is offered to the third Agni, the Earth, who brings forth Food. Food is, in its turn, offered to the fourth Agni, the Father or Male, who elaborates in himself the generating fluid.

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Finally, this fluid is offered to the fifth Agni, the Mother or the Female, who delivers the Child.

The biological process, described in what may seem to be crude and mediaeval terms, really reflects or echoes a more subtle and psychological process. The images used form perhaps part of the current popular notion about the matter, but the esoteric sense goes beyond the outer symbols. The sky seems to be the far and tenuous region where the soul rests and awaits its next birth – it is the region of Soma, the own Home of Bliss and Immortality. Now when the time or call comes, the soul stirs and journeys down – that is the Rain. Next, it enters the earth atmosphere and clothes itself with the earth consciousness. Then it waits and calls for the formation of the material body, first by the contribution of the father and then by that of the mother; when these two unite and the material body is formed, the soul incarnates.

Apart from the question whether the biological phenomenon described is really a symbol and a cloak for another order of reality, and even taking it at its face value, what is to be noted here is the idea of a cosmic cycle, and a cosmic cycle that proceeds through the principle of sacrifice. If it is asked what there is wonderful or particularly spiritual in this rather naïf description of a very commonplace happening that gives it an honoured place in the Upanishads, the answer is that it is wonderful to see how the Upanishadic Rishi takes from an event its local, temporal and personal colour and incorporates it in a global movement, a cosmic cycle, as a limb of the Universal Brahman. The Upanishads contain passages which a puritanical mentality may perhaps describe as 'pornographic'; these have in fact been put by some on the Index expurgatorius. But the ancients saw these matters with other eyes and through another consciousness.

We have, in modern times, a movement towards a more conscious and courageous, knowledge of things that were taboo to puritan ages. Not to shut one's eyes to the lower, darker and hidden strands of our nature, but to bring them out into the light of day and to face them is the best way of dealing with such elements, which otherwise, if they are repressed, exert an unhealthy influence on the mind and nature. The Upanishadic view runs on the same lines, but, with the

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unveiling and the natural – and not merely naturalistic – delineation of these under-worlds (concerning sex and food), it endows them with a perspective sub specie aeternitatis. The sexual function, for example, is easily equated to the double movement of ascent and descent that is secreted in nature, or to the combined action of Purusha and Prakriti in the cosmic Play, or again to the hidden fount of Delight that holds and moves the universe. In this view there is nothing merely secular and profane, but all is woven into the cosmic spiritual whole; and man is taught to consider and to mould all his movements-of soul and mind and body-in the light and rhythm of that integral Reality.¹

The central secret of the transfigured consciousness lies, as we have already indicated, in the mystic rite or law of Sacrifice. It is the one basic, fundamental, universal Law that upholds and explains the cosmic movement, conformity to which brings to the thrice-bound human being release and freedom. Sacrifice consists essentially of two elements or processes: (i) The offering or self giving of the lower reality to the higher, and, as a consequence, an answering movement of (ii) the descent of the higher into the lower. The lower offered to the higher means the lower sublimated and integrated into the higher; and the descent of the higher into the lower means the incarnation of the former and the fulfilment of the latter. The Gita elaborates the same idea when it says that by Sacrifice men increase the gods and the gods increase men and by so increasing each other they attain the supreme Good. Nothing is, nothing is done, for its own sake, for an egocentric satisfaction; all, even movements relating to food and to sex should be dedicated to the Cosmic Being – Visva Purusha – and that alone received which comes from Him.

¹ The secularisation of man's vital functions in modem ages has not been a success. It has made him more egocentric and blatantly hedonistic. From an occult point of view he has in this way subjected himself to the influences of dark and undesirable world-forces, has made an opening, to use an Indian symbolism, for Kali (the Spirit of the Iron Age) to enter into him. The sex-force is an extremely potent agent, but it is extremely fluid and elusive and uncontrollable. It was for this reason that the ancients always sought to give it a proper mould, a right continent, a fixed and definite channel; the moderns, on the other hand, allow it to run free and play with it recklessly. The result has been, in the life of those born under such circumstances, a growing lack of poise and balance and a corresponding incidence of neurasthenia, hysteria and all abnormal pathological conditions.

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VII. THE COSMIC AND THE TRANSCENDENTAL

The Supreme Reality which is always called Brahman in the Upanishads, has to be known and experienced in two ways; for it has two fundamental aspects or modes of being. The Brahman is universal and it is transcendental. The Truth, satyam, the Upanishad says in its symbolic etymology, is 'This' (or, He) and 'That' (syat + tyat i.e. sat + tat). 'This' means the Universal Brahman: it is what is referred to when the Upanishad says:

Iśāvāsyamidam sarvam : All this is for habitation by the Lord;

or, Sarvam khalvidam brahma: All this is indeed the Brahman;

or, Sa evedam sarvam: He is indeed all this;

or, Ahamevedam sarvam: I am indeed all this;

or, Atmaivedam sarvam: The Self indeed is all this; or again, Sarvamasmi: I am all.

The Chhandyogya¹ gives a whole typal scheme of this universal reality and explains how to realise it and what are the results of the experience. The Universal Brahman means the cosmic movement, the cyclic march of things and events taken in its global aspect. The typical movement that symbolises and epitomises the phenomenon, embodies the truth, is that of the sun. The movement consists of five stages which are called the fivefold sāma. Sāma means the equal Brahman that is ever present in all, the Upanishad itself says deriving the word from sama. It is Sāma also because it is a rhythmic movement, a cadence – a music of the spheres. And a rhythmic movement, in virtue of its being a wave, consists of these five stages: (i) the start, (ii) the rise, (iii) the peak, (iv) the decline and (v) the fall. Now the sun follows this curve and marks out the familiar divisions of the day: dawn, forenoon, noon, afternoon and sunset. Sometimes two other stages are added, one at each end, one of preparation and another of final lapse – the twilights with regard to the sun – and then we have seven instead of five sāmas.. Like the Sun, the Fire – that is to say, the sacrificial Fire – can also be seen in its fivefold cyclic movement: (i) the lighting, (ii) the smoke, (iii) the flame, (iv) smouldering

* Chhandyogya, II, III.

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and finally (v) extinction – the fuel as it is rubbed to produce the fire and the ashes may be added as the two supernumerary stages. Or again, we may take the cycle of five seasons or of the five worlds or of the deities that control these worlds. The living wealth of this earth is also symbolised in a quintet – goat and sheep and cattle and horse and finally man. Coming to the microcosm, we have in man the cycle of his five senses, basis of all knowledge and activity. For the macrocosm, to I bring out its vast extra-human complexity, the Upanishad refers to a quintet, each term of which is again a trinity: (i) the threefold Veda, the Divine Word that is the origin of creation, (ii) the three worlds or fields – earth, air-belt or atmosphere and space, (iii) the three principles or deities ruling respectively these worlds – Fire, Air and Sun, (iv) their expressions, emanations or embodiments – stars and birds and light-rays, and finally, (v) the original inhabitants of these worlds – to earth belong the reptiles, to the mid-region the Gandharvas and to heaven the ancient Fathers.

Now, this is the All, the Universal. One has to realise it and possess in one's consciousness. And that can be done only in one way: one has to identify oneself with it, be one with it, become it. Thus by losing one's individuality one lives the life universal; the small lean separate life is enlarged and moulded in the rhythm of the Rich and the Vast. It is thus that man shares in the consciousness and energy that inspire and move and sustain the cosmos. The Upanishad most emphatically enjoins that one must not decry this cosmic godhead or deny any of its elements, not even such as are a taboo to the puritan mind. It is in and through an unimpaired global consciousness that one attains the All-Life and lives uninterruptedly and perennially: Sarvamanveti jyok jīvati.

Still the Upanishad says this is not the final end. There is yet a higher status of reality and consciousness to which one has to rise. For beyond the Cosmos lies the Transcendent. The Upanishad expresses this truth and experience in various symbols. The cosmic reality, we have seen, is often conceived as a septenary, a unity of seven elements, principles and worlds. Further to give it its full complex value, it is considered not as a simple septet, but a threefold heptad – the whole gamut, as it were, consisting of 21 notes or syllables.

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The Upanishad says, this number does not exhaust the entire range; I for there is yet a 22nd place. This is the world beyond the Sun, griefless and deathless, the supreme Selfhood. The Veda I also sometimes speaks of the integral reality as being represented by the number 100 which is 99 + I; in other words, 99 represents the cosmic or universal, the unity being the reality beyond, the Transcendent.

Elsewhere the Upanishad describes more graphically this truth and the experience of it. It is said there that the sun has five-we note the familiar five-movements of rising and setting: (i) from East to West, (ii) from South to North, (iii) from West to East, (iv) from North to South and (v) from above-from the Zenith-downward. These are the five normal and apparent movements. But there is a sixth one; rather it is not a movement, but a status, where the sun neither rises nor sets, but is always visible fixed in the same position.

Some Western and Westernised scholars have tried to show that the phenomenon described here is an exclusively natural phenomenon, actually visible in the polar region where the sun never sets for six months and moves in a circle whose plane is parallel to the plane of the horizon on the summer solstice and is gradually inclined as the sun regresses towards the equinox (on which day just half the solar disc is visible above the horizon). The sun may be said there to move in the direction East-South-West-North and again East. Indeed the Upanishad mentions the positions of the sun in that order and gives a character to each successive station. The Ray from the East is red, symbolising the Rik, the Southern Ray is white, symbolising the Yajur, the Western Ray is black symbolising the Atharva. The natural phenomenon, however, might have been or might not have been before the mind's eye of the Rishi, but the symbolism, the esotericism of it is clear enough in the way the Rishi speaks of it. Also, apart from the first four movements (which it is already sufficiently difficult to identify completely with what is visible), .the fifth movement, as a separate descending movement from above appears to be a foreign element in the context. And although, with regard to the sixth movement or status, the sun is visible as such exactly from the point of the North Pole for a while, the ring of the Rishi's utterance is unmistakably spiritual, it cannot but

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refer to a fact of inner consciousness-that is at least what the physical fact conveys to the Rishi and what he seeks to convey and express primarily.

Now this is what is sought to be conveyed and expressed. The five movements of the sun here also are nothing but the five sāmas and they refer to the cycle of the Cosmic or Universal Brahman. The sixth status where all movements cease, where there is no rising and setting, no ebb and flow, no waxing and waning, where there is the immutable, the ever-same unity, is very evidently the Transcendental Brahman. It is That to which the Vedic Rishi refers when he prays for a constant and fixed vision of the eternal Sun – jyok ca sūryam driśe.

It would be interesting to know what the five ranges or levels or movements of consciousness exactly are that make up the Universal Brahman described in this passage. It is the mystic knowledge, the Upanishad says, of the secret delight in things – madhuvidyā. The five ranges are the five fundamental principles of delight – immortalities, the Veda would say – that form the inner core of the pyramid of creation. They form a rising tier and are ruled respectively by the gods Agni, Indra, Varuna, Soma and Brahma-with their emanations and instrumental personalities-the Vasus, the Rudras, the Adityas, the Maruts and the Sadhyas. We suggest that these refer to the five well-known levels of being, the modes or nodi of consciousness or something very much like them. The Upanishad speaks elswhere of the five sheaths. The six Chakras of Tantric system lie in the same line. The first and the basic mode is the physical and the ascent from the physical: Agni and the Vasus are always intimately connected with the earth and -the earth-principles (it can be compared with the Muladhara of the Tantras). Next, second in the line of ascent is the Vital, the centre of power and dynamism of which the Rudras are the deities and Indra the presiding God (cf. Swadhishthana of the Tantras-the navel centre). lndra, in the Vedas, has two aspects, one of knowledge and vision and the other of dynamic force and drive. In the first aspect he is more often considered as the Lord of the Mind, of the Luminous Mind. In the present passage, Indra is taken in his second aspect and instead of the Maruts with whom he is usually invoked has the Rudras as his agents and associates.

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The third in the line of ascension is the region of Varuna and the Adityas, that is to say, of the large Mind and its lights -perhaps it can be connected with Tantric Ajnachakra. The fourth is the domain of Soma and the Maruts-this seems to be the inner heart, the fount of delight and keen and sweeping aspirations-the Anahata of the Tantras. The fifth is the region of the crown of the head, the domain of Brahma and the Sadhyas: it is the Overmind status from where comes the descending inflatus, the creative Maya of Brahma. And when you go beyond, you pass into the ultimate status of the Sun, the reality absolute, the Transcendent which is indescribable, unseizable, indeterminate, indeterminable, incommensurable; and once there, one never returns, never – na ca punarāvartate na ca punarāvartate.

VIII. HOW MANY GODS?

"How many Gods are there?" Yajnavalkya was once asked.1 The Rishi answered, they say there are three thousand and three of them, or three hundred and three, or again, thirty-three; it may be said too there are six or three or two or one and a half or one finally. Indeed as the Upanishad says elsewhere, it is the One Unique who wished to be many: and all the gods are the various glories (mahimā) or emanations of the One Divine. The ancient of ancient Rishis had declared long long ago, in the earliest Veda, that there is one indivisible Reality, the seers name it in various ways.

In Yajnavalkya's enumeration, however, it is to be noted, first of all, that he stresses on the number three. The principle of triplicity is of very wide application: it permeates all fields of consciousness and is evidently based upon a fundamental fact of reality. It seems to embody a truth of synthesis and comprehension, points to the order and harmony that reigns in the cosmos, the spheric music. The metaphysical, that is to say, the original principles that constitute existence are the well-known triplets: (i) the superior: Sat, Chit, Ananda; and (ii) the inferior: Body, Life and Mind-this being a reflection or translation or concretisation of the former. We can see also

¹Brihadaranyaka III.9.

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here how the dual principle comes in, the twin godhead or the two gods to which Yajnavalkya refers. The same principle is found in the conception of Ardhanarishwara, Male and Female, Purusha-Prakriti. The Upanishad says¹ yet again that the One original Purusha was not pleased at being alone, so for a companion he created out of himself the original Female. The dual principle signifies creation, the manifesting activity of the Reality. But what is this one and a half to which Yajnavalkya refers? It simply means that the other created out of the one is not a wholly separate, independent entity: it is not an integer by itself, as in the Manichean system, but that it is a portion, a fraction of the One. And in the end, in the ultimate analysis, or rather synthesis, there is but one single undivided and indivisible unity. The thousands and hundreds, very often mentioned also in the Rig Veda, are not simply multiplications of the One, a graphic description of its many-sidedness; it indicates also the absolute fullness, the complete completeness (pūrņasya pūrņam) of the Reality. It includes and comprehends all and is a rounded totality, a full circle. The hundred-gated and the thousand-pillared cities of which the ancient Rishis chanted are formations and embodiments of consciousness human and divine, are realities whole and entire englobing all the layers and grades of consciousness.

Besides this metaphysics there is also an occult aspect in numerology of which Pythagoras was a well-known adept and in which the Vedic Rishis too seem to take special delight. The multiplication of numbers represents in a general way the principle of emanation. The One has divided and subdivided itself, but not in a haphazard way: it is not like the chaotic pulverisation of a piece of stone by hammer-blows. The process of division and subdivision follows a pattern almost as neat and methodical as a genealogical tree. That is to say, the emanations form a hierarchy. At the top, the apex of the pyramid, stands the one supreme Godhead. That Godhead is bi-une in respect of manifestation-the Divine and his creative Power. This two-in-one reality may be considered, according to one view of creation, as dividing into three forms or aspects -the well-known Brahma, Vishnu and Rudra of Hindu mythology. These may be termed the first or primary emanations.

¹ Brihadaranyaka 1.4.

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Now, each one of them in its turn has its own emanations – the eleven Rudriyas are familiar. These are secondary and there are tertiary and other graded emanations – the last ones touch the earth and embody physico-vital forces. The lowest formations or beings can trace their origin to one or other of the primaries and their nature and function partake of or are an echo of their first ancestor.

Man, however, is an epitome of creation. He embraces and incarnates the entire gamut of consciousness and comprises in him all beings from the highest Divinity to the lowest jinn or elf. And yet each human being in his true personality is a lineal descendant of one or other typal aspect or original Personality of the one supreme Reality; and his individual character is all the more pronounced and well-defined the more organised and developed is the being. The psychic being in man is thus a direct descent, an immediate emanation along a definite line of devolution of the supreme consciousness. We may now understand and explain easily why one chooses a particular Ishta, an ideal god, what is the drive that pushes one to become a worshipper of Siva or Vishnu or any other deity. It is not any rational understanding, a weighing of pros and cons and then a resultant conclusion that leads one to choose a path of religion or spirituality. It is the soul's natural call to the God, the type of being and consciousness of which it is a spark, from which it has descended, it is the secret affinity – the spiritual blood-relation as it were – that determines the choice and adherence. And it is this that we name Faith. And the exclusiveness and violence and bitterness which attend such adherence and which go "by the "name of partisanship, sectarianism, fanaticism etc., a;e a deformation in the ignorance on the physico-vital plane of the secret loyalty to one's source and origin. Of course, the pattern or law is not so simple and rigid, but it gives a token or typal pattern. For it must not be forgotten that the supreme source or the original is one and indivisible and in the highest integration consciousness is global and not exclusive. And the human being that attains such a status is not bound or wholly limited to one particular formation: its personality is based on the truth of impersonality. And yet the two can go together: an individual

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can be impersonal in consciousness and yet personal in becoming and true to type.

The number of gods depends on the level of consciousness on which we stand. On this material plane there are as many gods as there are bodies or individual forms (adhar). And on the supreme height there is only one God without a second. In between there are gradations of types and sub-types whose number and function vary according to the aspect of consciousness that reveals itself.

IX. NACHIKETAS' THREE BOONS

The three boons asked for by Nachiketas from Yama, Lord of Death, and granted to him have been interpreted in different ways. Here is one more attempt in the direction.

Nachiketas is the young aspiring human being still in the Ignorance-naciketa, meaning one without consciousness or knowledge. The three boons he asks for are in reference to the three fundamental modes of being and consciousness that are at the very basis, forming, as it were, the ground-plan of the integral reality. They are (i) the individual, (ii) the universal or cosmic and (iii) the transcendental.

The first boon regards the individual, that is to say, the individual identity and integrity. It asks for the maintenance of that individuality so that it may be saved from the dissolution that Death brings about. Death, of course, means the dissolution of the body, but it represents also dissolution pure and simple. Indeed death is a process which does not stop with the physical phenomenon, but continues even after; for with the body gone, the other elements of the individual organism, the vital and the mental too gradually fall off, fade and dissolve. Nachiketas wishes to secure from Death the safety and preservation of the earthly personality, the particular organisation of mind and vital based upon a recognisable physical frame. That is the first necessity for the aspiring mortal-for, it is said, the body is the first instrument for the working out of one's life ideal. But man's true personality, the real individuality lies beyond, beyond the body, beyond the life, beyond the mind, beyond the triple region that Death lords it over. That is the divine world,

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the Heaven of the immortals, beyond death and beyond sorrow and grief. It is the hearth secreted in the inner heart where burns the Divine Fire, the God of Life Everlasting. And this is the nodus that binds together the threefold status of the manifested existence, the body, the life and the mind. This triplicity is the structure of name and form built out of the bricks of experience, the kiln, as it were, within which burns the Divine Agni, man's true soul. This soul can be reached only when one exceeds the bounds and limitations of the triple cord and experiences one's communion and identity with all souls and all existence. Agni is the secret divinity within, within the individual and within the world; he is the Immanent Divine, the cosmic godhead that holds together and marshals all the elements and components, all the principles that make up the manifest universe. He it is that has entered into the world and created facets of his own reality in multiple forms: and it is he that lies secret in the human being as the immortal soul through all its adventure of life and death in the series of incarnations in terrestrial evolution. The adoration and realisation of this Immanent Divinity, the worship of Agni taught by Yama in the second boon, consists in the triple sacrifice, the triple work, the triple union in the triple status of the physical, the vital and the mental consciousness, the mastery of which leads one to the other shore, the abode of perennial existence where the human soul enjoys its eternity and unending continuity in cosmic life. Therefore, Agni, the master of the psychic being, is called jātavedās, he who knows the births, all the transmigrations from life to life.

The third boon is the secret of secrets, for it is the knowledge and realisation of Transcendence that is sought here. Beyond the individual lies the universal; is there anything beyond the universal? The release of the individual into the cosmic existence gives him the griefless life eternal: can the cosmos be rolled up and flung into something beyond? What would be the nature of that thing? What is there outside creation, outside manifestation, outside Maya, to use a latter day term? Is there existence or non-existence (utter dissolution or extinction -Death in his supreme and absolute status)? King Yama did not choose to answer immediately and even endeavoured to dissuade Nachiketas from pursuing the question over which

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people were confounded, as he said. Evidently it was a much discussed problem in those days. Buddha was asked the same question and he evaded it, saying that the pragmatic man should attend to practical and immediate realities and not,waste time and energy in discussing things ultimate and beyond that have hardly any relation to the present and the actual.

But Yama did answer and unveil the mystery and impart the supreme secret knowledge-the knowledge of the Transcendent Brahman: it is out of the transcendent reality that the immanent deity takes his birth. Hence the Divine Fire, the Lord of creation and the Inner Master – sarvabhūltāntarātmā, antaryāmī – is called brahmajam, born of the Brahman. Yama teaches the process of transcendence. Apart from the knowledge and experience first of the individual and then of the cosmic Brahman, there is a definite line along which the human consciousness (or unconsciousness, as it is at present) is to ascend and evolve. The first step is to learn to distinguish between the Good and the Pleasurable (śreya and preya). The line of pleasure leads to the external, the superficial, the false: while the other path leads towards the inner and the higher truth. So the second step is the gradual withdrawal of the consciousness from the physical and the sensual and even the mental preoccupation and focussing it upon what is certain and permanent. In the midst of the death-ridden consciousness – in the heart of all that is unstable and fleeting – one has to look for Agni, the eternal godhead, the Immortal in mortality, the Timeless in time through whom lies the passage to Immortality beyond Time.

Man has two souls corresponding to his double status. In the inferior, the soul looks downward and is involved in the current of Impermanence and Ignorance, it tastes of grief and sorrow and suffers death and dissolution: in the higher it looks upward and communes and joins with the Eternal (the cosmic) and then with the Absolute (the transcendent). The lower is a reflection of the higher, the higher comes down in a diminished and hence tarnished light. The message is that of deliverance, the deliverance and reintegration of the lower soul out of its bondage of worldly ignorant life into the freedom and immortality first of its higher and then of its highest

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status. It is true, however, that the Upanishad does not make a trenchant distinction between the cosmic and the transcendent and often it speaks of both in the same breath, as it were. For in fact they are realities involved in each other and interwoven. Indeed the triple status, including the Individual, forms one single totality and the three do not exclude or cancel each other; on the contrary, they combine and may be said to enhance each other's reality. The Transcendence expresses or deploys itself in the cosmos-he goes abroad, sa paryagāt: and the cosmic individualises, concretises itself in the particular and the personal. The one single spiritual reality holds itself, aspects itself in a threefold manner.

The teaching of Yama in brief may be said to be the gospel of immortality and it consists of the knowledge of triple immortality. And who else can be the best teacher of immortality than Death himself, as Nachiketas pointedly said? The first immortality is that of the physical existence and consciousness, the preservation of the personal identity, the individual name and form – this being in itself as expression and embodiment and instrument of the Inner Reality. This inner reality enshrines the second immortality – the eternity and continuity of the soul's life through its incarnations in time, the divine Agni lit for ever and ever growing in flaming consciousness. And the third and final immortality is in the being and consciousness beyond time, beyond all relativities, the absolute and self-existent delight.

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The Beautiful in the Upanishads

A Vedic Conception of the Poet

'Kavi' is an invariable epithet of the gods. The Vedas mean by this attribute to bring out a most fundamental character, an inalienable dharma of the heavenly host. All the gods are poets; and a human being can become a poet only in so far as he attains to the nature and status of a god. Who is then a kavi? The Poet is he who by his poetic power raises forms of beauty in heaven – kavih kavitvā divi rūpam āsajat.¹ Thus the essence of poetic power is to fashion divine Beauty, to reveal heavenly forms. What is this Heaven whose forms the Poet discovers and embodies? Heaven – Dyaus – has a very definite connotation in the Veda. It means the luminous or divine Mind² – the mind purified of its obscurity and limitations, due to subjection to the external senses, thus opening to the higher Light, receiving and recording faithfully the deeper and vaster movements and vibrations of the Truth, giving them a form, a perfect body of the right thought and the right word. Indra is the lord of this world and he can be approached only with an enkindled intelligence, didhayā manīsā,³ a faultless understanding, sumedhā.³ He is the supreme Artisan of the poetic power, Tashtā,³ the maker of perfect forms, surūpa krtnum.⁴ All the gods turn towards Indra and become gods and poets, attain their Great Names of Supreme Beauty.⁵ Indra is also the master of the senses, indriyas, who are his hosts. It is through this mind and the senses that the poetic creation has to be manifested. The mind spreads out wide the Poet's weaving;⁶

¹ Rig Veda, X. 124. 7.

² The Secret of the Veda, by Sri Aurobindo.

³ Rig Veda, III. 38. 1.

4 Ibid., I. 4.1.

5 Ibid., III. 54. 17.

6 Ibid., X. 5. 3.

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the poet is the priest who calls down and works out the right thinking in the sacrificial labour of creation.¹ But that creation is made in and through the inner mind and the inner senses that are alive to the subtle formation of a vaster knowledge.² The poet envisages the golden forms fashioned out of the very profundity of the consciousness.³ For the substance, the material on which the Poet works, is Truth. The seat of the Truth the poets guard, they uphold the supreme secret Names.⁴ The poet has the expressive utterance, the creative word; the poet is a poet by his poetic creation-the shape faultlessly wrought out that unveils and holds the Truth.⁵ The form of beauty is the body of the Truth.

The poet is a trinity in himself. A triune consciousness forms his personality. First of all, he is the Knower-the Seer of the Truth, kavayah satyadrastārah . He has the direct vision, the luminous intelligence, the immediate perception.⁶ A subtle and profound and penetrating consciousness is his, nirgam, pracetas; his is the eye of the Sun, sūrya caksuh.⁷ He secures an increased being through his effulgent understanding.⁸ In the second place, the Poet is not only Seer but Doer; he is knower as well as creator. He has a dynamic knowledge and his vision itself is power, nrcakaāh;⁹ he is the Seer-Will, kavikratuh. ^l0 He has the blazing radiance of the Sun and is supremely potent in his self-Iuminousness.^l1 The Sun is the light and the energy of the Truth. Even like the Sun the Poet gives birth to the Truth, sūrya satyasava, satyāya satyaprasavāya. But the Poet as Power is not only the revealer or creator, savitā, he is also the builder or fashioner, tastā, and he is the organiser, vedhāh , of the Truth.¹² As Savita he manifests the Truth, as Tashta he gives a perfected body and form to the Truth, and as Vedha he maintains the Truth in its dynamic working. The

1 Ibid., I. 151. 7. a Ibid., IV. 16. 3.

8 Ibid., VIII. 8. 2.

4 Ibid., X. 5. 2.

8 Ibid., IX. 96. 17;

6 Ibid., I. 71. 10; kavim ketum-VII. 6. 2. 7 Ibid., IX. 10. 8-9.

6 Rig., Veda, VIII. 44.12.

9 Ibid., III. 54. 6.

10 Ibid., I. 1. 5.

11 Ibid., VII. 59. 11.

12 Ibid., V. 52. 13.

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effective marshalling and organisation of the Truth is what is called Ritam, the Right; it is also called Dharma,¹ the Law or the Rhythm, the ordered movement and invincible execution of the Truth. The Poet pursues the Path of the Right;² it is he who lays out the Path for the march of the Truth, the progress of the Sacrifice.³ He is like a fast steed well-yoked, pressing forward;⁴ he is the charger that moves straight and unswerving and carries us beyond ⁵ – into the world of felicity.

Indeed delight is the third and the supremely intimate element of the poetic personality. Dear and delightful is the poet, dear and delightful his works, priya, priyāni. His hand is dripping with sweetness, kavir hi madhuhastya.⁶ The Poet-God shines in his pristine beauty and is showering delight.⁷ He is filled with utter ecstasy so that he may rise to the very source of the luminous Energy.⁸? Pure is the Divine Joy and it enters and purifies all forms as it moves to the seat of the Immortals.⁹ Indeed this sparkling Delight is the Poet-Seer and it is that that brings forth the creative word, the utterance of Indra.¹⁰

The solar vision of the Poet encompasses in its might the wide Earth and Heaven, fuses them in supreme Delight in the womb of the Truth.¹¹ The Earth is lifted up and given in marriage to Heaven in the home of Truth, for the creation and expression of the Truth in its varied beauty, cāru citram.

The Poet creates forms of beauty in Heaven; but these forms are not made out of the void. It is the Earth that is raised to Heaven and transmuted into divine truth forms. The union of Earth and Heaven is the source of the Joy, the Ananda, that the Poet unseals and distributes. Heaven and Earth join and meet in the world of Delight; between them they press out Soma, the drink of the gods.

The Mind and the Body are held together by means of the Life, the mid-world. The Divine Mind by raising the body-

1 Ibid., III. 38. 2.

2 Ibid., VIII. 8. 23.

3 Taittiriya Samhita, III. 55.

4. . Rig Veda, III. 38. 1.

s Ibid., IV. 16. 11.

6 Ibid., V. 5. 2.

7 Ibid., IX. 25. 2.

8 Ibid., IX. 25. 6.

9 Ibid., IX. 25. 4.

10 Ibid., IX. 25. 5.

11 Ibid., III. 54.6.

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consciousness into itself gathers up too, by that act, the delight of life and releases the fountain of immortal Bliss. That is the work and achievement of the gods as poets.

Where then is the birth of the Poets? Ask it of the Masters. The Poets have seized and mastered the Mind, they have the perfect working and they fashion the Heaven.

On this Earth they hold everywhere in themselves all the secrets. They make Earth and Heaven move together, so that they may realise their heroic strength. They measure them with their rhythmic measurings, they hold in their controlled grasp the vast and great twins, and unite them and establish between them the mid-world of Delight for the perfect poise.¹

All the gods are poets-their forms are perfect, surūpa, sudrśa, their Names full of beauty, cāru devasya nāma.² This means also that the gods embody the different powers that constitute the poetic consciousness. Agni is the Seer-Will, the creative vision of the Poet – the luminous energy born of an experience by identity with the Truth. Indra is the Idea-Form, the architectonic conception of the work or achievement. Mitra and Varuna are the large harmony, the vast cadence and sweep of movement. The Aswins, the Divine Riders, represent the intense zest of well-yoked Life-Energy. Soma is Rasa, Ananda, the Supreme Bliss and Delight.

The Vedic Poet is doubtless the poet of Life, the architect of Divinity in man, of Heaven upon earth. But what is true of Life is fundamentally true of Art too-at least true of the Art as it was conceived by the ancient seers and as it found expression at their hands.³

¹ Rig Veda, 111. 38. 2. 3.

² Ibid., 1. 24. 1.

³ The Vedic term Kavi means literally 'a seer', 'one who has the vision', as the word 'poet' means etymologically 'a doer', 'a creator'. I have combined the two senses to equate the terms and bring out the meaning involved in their more current acceptation.

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POETS AND MYSTICS

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Sri Aurobindo : The Age of Sri Aurobindo

SOMEONE has written to this effect: "This is not the age of Sri Aurobindo. His ideal of a divine life upon earth mayor may not be true; at any rate it is not of today or even of tomorrow. Humanity will take some time before it reaches that stage or its possibility. What we are concerned with here and now is something perhaps less great, less spiritual, but more urgent and more practical. The problem is not to run away with one's soul, but to maintain its earthly tenement, to keep body and soul together: one has to live first, .live materially before one can hope to live spiritually."

Well, the view expressed in these words is not a new revelation. It has been the cry of suffering humanity through the ages. Man has borne his cross since the beginning of his creation through want and privation, through disease and bereavement, through all manner of turmoil and tribulation, and yet – mirabile dictu – at the same time, in the very midst of those conditions, he has been aspiring and yearning for something else, ignoring the present, looking into the beyond. It is not the prosperous and the more happily placed in life who find it more easy to turn to the higher life, it is not the wealthiest who has the greatest opportunity to pursue a spiritual idea. On the contrary, spiritual leaders have thought and experienced otherwise.

Apart from the well-recognised fact that only in distress does the normal man think of God and non-worldly things, the real matter, however, is that the inner life is a thing apart and follows its own line of movement, does not depend upon, is not subservient to, the kind of outer life that one may happen

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to live under. The Bible says indeed, "Blessed are the poor, blessed are they that mourn"... But the Upanishad declares, on the other hand, that even as one lies happily on a royal couch, bathes and anoints himself with all the perfumes of the world, has attendants all around and always to serve him, even so, one can be full of the divine consciousness from the crown of the head to the tip of his toe-nail. In fact, a poor or a prosperous life is in no direct or even indirect ratio to a spiritual life. All the miseries and immediate needs of a physical life do not and cannot detain or delay one from following the path of the ideal; nor can all your riches be a burden to your soul and overwhelm it, if it chooses to walk on-it can not only walk, but soar and fly with all that knapsack on its back.

If one were to be busy about reforming the world and when that was done then alone to turn to other-worldly things, in that case, one would never take the turn, for the world will never be reformed totally or even considerably in that way. It is not that reformers have for the first time appeared on the earth in the present age. Men have attempted social, political, economic and moral reforms from times immemorial. But that has not barred the spiritual attempt or minimised its importance. To say that because an ideal is apparently too high or too great for the present age, it must be kept in cold storage is to set a premium on the present nature of humanity arid eternise it: that would bind the world to its old moorings and never give it the opportunity to be free and go out into the high seas of larger and greater realisations.

The ideal or perhaps one should say the policy of Real-politik is the thing needed in this world. To achieve something actually in the physical and material field, even a lesser something, is worth much more than speculating on high flaunting chimeras and indulging in day-dreams. Yes, but what is this something that has to be achieved in the material world? It is always an ideal. Even procuring food for each and every person, clothing and housing all is not less an ideal for all its concern about actuality. Only there are ideals and ideals; some are nearer to the earth, some seem to be in the background. But the mystery is that it is not always the ideal nearest to the earth which is the. easiest to achieve or the first thing to be done first. Do we not see before our very eyes

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how some very simple innocent social and economic changes are difficult to carry out – they bring in their train quite disproportionately gestures and movements of violence and revolution? That is because we seek to cure the symptoms and not touch the root of the disease. For even the most innocent-looking social, economic or political abuse has at its base far-reaching attitudes and life-urges – even a spiritual outlook – that have to be sought out and tackled first, if the attempt at reform is to be permanently and wholly successful. Even in mundane matters we do not dig deep enough, or rise high enough.

Indeed, looking from a standpoint that views the working of the forces that act and achieve – and not the external facts and events and arrangements alone – one finds that things that are achieved on the material plane are first developed and matured and made ready behind the veil and at a given moment burst out and manifest themselves often unexpectedly and suddenly like a chick out of the shell or the young butterfly out of the cocoon. The Gita points to that truth of Nature when it says: "These beings have already been killed by Me." It is not that a long or strenuous physical planning and preparation alone or in the largest measure brings about a physical realisation. The deeper we go within, the farther we are away from the surface, the nearer we come to the roots and sources of things even most superficial. The spiritual view sees and declares that it is the Brahmic consciousness that holds, inspires, builds up Matter, the physical body and form of Brahman.

The highest ideal, the very highest which God and Nature and Man have in view, is not and cannot be kept in cold storage: it is being worked out even here and now, and it has to be worked out here and now. The ideal of the Life Divine embodies a central truth of existence, and however difficult or chimerical it may appear to be to the normal mind, it is the preoccupation of the inner being of man – all other ways or attempts of curing human ills are faint echoes, masks, diversions of this secret urge at the source and heart of things. That ideal is a norm and a force that is ever dynamic and has become doubly so since it has entered the earth atmosphere and the waking human consciousness and is labouring there. It is always safer and wiser to recognise that fact, to help in the realisation of that truth and be profited by it.

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Sri Aurobindo: “Ahana and Other Poems”

Mystic Poetry

I WOULD like to make a distinction between mystic poetry and spiritual poetry. To equate mysticism and spirituality is not always happy or even correct. Thus, when Tagore sings:

Who comes along singing and steering his boat?

It seems a face familiar.

He goes in full sail, turns nor right nor left;

The waves break helplessly at the sides!

His face looks familiar... ¹

it is mysticism, mysticism in excelsis. Even A.E.'s

I turn

To Thee, invisible, unrumoured, still:

White for Thy whiteness all desires burn.

Ah, with what longing once again I turn!²

is just on the borderland: it has succeeded in leaving behind the mystic domain, but has not yet entered the city of the Spirit – at the most, it has turned the corner and approached the gate. Listen now,

My soul unhorizoned widens to measureless sight,

My body is God's happy living tool,

My spirit a vast sun of deathless light.³

or the more occult yet luminously vibrant lines:

¹ "The Golden Boat."

² S A.E.: "Desire."

³ Sri Aurobindo: "Transformation."

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He stood upon a threshold serpent-watched,

And peered into gleaming endless corridors,

Silent and listening in the silent heart

For the coming of the new and the unknown.

He gazed across the empty stillness

And heard the footsteps of the undreamed Idea

In the far avenues of the Beyond.

He heard the secret Voice, the Word that knows,

And saw the secret face that is our own.¹...

Is there not a fundamental difference, difference not merely with regard to the poetic personality, but with regard to the very stuff of consciousness? There is direct vision here, the fullness of light, the native rhythm and substance of revelation, as if

In the dead wall closing from a wider self,

Parting a door to things unseized by earth-sense,

It lifted the heavy curtain of the flesh.². . .

When the Spirit speaks its own language in its own name, we have spiritual poetry. If, however, the Spirit speaks – from choice or necessity-an alien language and manner, e.g., that of a profane consciousness, or of the consciousness of another domain, idealistic or philosophical or even occult, puts on or imitates spirit's language and manner, we have what we propose to call mystic poetry proper. When Samain sings of the body of the dancer:

Et Pannyre devient fleur, flamme, papillon! ...

Comme au travers d'une eau soyeuse et continue;

Dans un divin éclair, montre Pannyre nue.³

¹ Sri Aurobindo: Savitri, Book I, Canto III.

² Ibid.

Later version:

In the dead wall closing us from wider self,

Into a secrecy of apparent sleep,

The mystic tract beyond our waking thoughts,

A door parted, built in by Matter's force,

Releasing things unseized by earthly sense:

³ Albert Samain: "Pannyre awe talons d'or"-Aux Flancs du Vase.

And Pannyre became flower, flame, butterfly.. . .

As though through a silky continuity of water

In a divine flash showed Pannyre naked.

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or when Mallarmé describes the laurel flower:

Vermeil comme Ie pur orteil du séraphin

Que rougit la pudeur des aurores foulées, ¹

both so idealise, etherealize, almost spiritualise the earth and the flesh that they seem ostensibly only a vesture of something e1se behind, something mysterious and other-worldly, something other than, even just opposite to what they actually are or appear to be. That is the mystique of the senses which is a very characteristic feature of some of the best poetic inspirations of France. Baudelaire too, the Satanic poet, by the sheer intensity of sympathy and sincerity, pierces as it were into the soul of things and makes the ugly, the unclean, the diseased, the sordid throb and glow with an almost celestial light. Here is the Baudelairean manner:

Tout cassés

Qu'ils sont, its ant desyeux perçants comme une vrille,

Luisant comme ces trous où I' eau dart dans la nuit;

lis ant les yeux divins de la petite fille. ². . .

It is not merely by addressing the be1oved as your goddess that you can attain this mysticism; the Elizabethan did that in merry abundance, ad nauseam. A finer temper, a more delicate touch, a more subtle sensitiveness and a kind of artistic wizardry are necessary to tune the body into a rhythm of the spirit. The other line of mysticism is common enough, viz., to express the spirit in terms and rhythms of the flesh. Tagore did that liberally, the Vaishnava poets did nothing but that, the Song of Solomon is an exquisite example of that procedure. There is here, however, a difference in degrees which is an interesting feature worth noting. Thus in Tagore the reference to the spirit is evident, that is the major or central chord; the earthly and the sensuous are meant as the name

¹¹ Mallarme: "Les Fleurs".

"Vermilion like the pure toe of the seraph

Reddened by the blush of dawns it trampled through."

²"Quite broken they are, yet they have eyes that pierce like a drill, shine like those holes in which the water sleeps at night: they have the divine eyes of a little girl."-Baude1aire, "Les petites vieilles"

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and form, as the body to render concrete, living and vibrant, near and intimate what otherwise would perhaps be vague and abstract, afar, aloof. But this mundane or human appearance has a value in so far as it is a support, a pointer or symbol of the spiritual import. And the mysticism lies precisely in the play of the two, a hide-and-seek between them. On the other hand, as I said, the greater portion of Vaishnava poetry, like a precious and beautiful casket, no doubt, hides the spiritual import: not the pure significance but the sign and symbol are luxuriously elaborated, they are placed in the foreground in all magnificence: as if it was their very purpose to conceal the real meaning. When the Vaishnava poet says,

O love, what more shall I, shall Radha speak,

Since mortal words are weak?

In life, in death,

In being and in breath

No other lord but thee can Radha seek.!

there is nothing in the matter or manner which can indicate, to the uninitiated, any reference to the Spirit or the Divine. Or this again,

I have gazed upon beauty from my very birth

and yet my eyes

are not satiated; I have rested bosom upon bosom

for thousands

of aeons and yet my heart is not soothed.. . .

they all give a very beautiful, a very poignant experience of love, but one does not know if it is love human or divine, if it is soul's love or mere bodily love.

The famous Song of Solomon too is not on a different footing, when the poet cries:

Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse;

thou hast

ravished my heart with one of thine eyes, with

one chain of thy neck.. . .

Sri Aurobindo: "Radha's Appeal" in Songs to Myrtilla.

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one can explain that it is the Christ calling the Church or God appealing to the human soul or one can simply find in it nothing more than a man pining for his woman. Anyhow I would not call it spiritual poetry or even mystic poetry. For in itself it does not carry any double or oblique meaning, there is no suggestion that it is applicable to other fields or domains of consciousness: it is, as it were, monovalent. An allegory is never mysticism. There is more mysticism in Wordsworth, even in Shelley and Keats, than in Spenser, for example, who stands in this respect on the same ground as Bunyan in his The Pilgrim's Progress. Take Wordsworth as a Nature-worshipper,

Breaking the silence of the seas

Among the farthest Hebrides.¹

or Wordsworth the Pagan,

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. 2

I do not know if this is not mysticism, what else is. Neither is religious poetry true mysticism (or true spirituality). I find more mysticism in

Come, let us run

And give the world a girdle with the sun!³

than in this pious morning hymn,

Heaven is, dear Lord! where'er Thou art,

O never then from me depart !4

I am anticipating however, I shall come to the point presently again. I was speaking of spiritual poetry. Listen once more to these simple, transparent, yet vibrant lines:

But how shall body not seem a hollow space

When the soul bears eternity's embrace?⁵

¹ "The Solitary Reaper".

² "The World is too much with us"...

³ John Hall: "To his Tutor".

4Ken: "A Morning Hymn".

5 K. D. Sethna: "Deluge" in The Secret Splendour.

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or these again equally fraught with an intense experience a quiet in – gathered luminous consciousness:

I held my breath and from a world of din

Solitarily I sat apart

And felt the being vistaed into fire

Of truth which did acquire

Rhythm in the heart,

When lo, I knew the worlds without as worlds within.¹

But first let us go to the fans et origo, be acquainted with the very genuine article in its purity and perfection, in its essential simplicity. I do not know of any other ideal exemplar than the Upanishad. Thus,

There the sun shines not and the moon has no

splendour and the stars are blind; there these

lightnings flash not, nor any earthly fire. For all

that is bright is but the shadow of His brightness

and by His shining all this shineth.²

Or this one equally deep, luminous and revealing:

Even as one Fire hath entered into the world but

it shapeth itself to the form it meeteth, so there

is one Spirit within all creatures but it shapeth

itself to form and form; it is likewise outside these.³

This is spiritual matter and spiritual manner that can never be improved upon. This is spiritual poetry in its quintessence. I am referring naturally here to the original and not to the translation which can never do full justice, even at its very best, to the poetic value in question. For apart from the individual genius of the poet, the greatness of the language, the instrument used by the poet, is also involved. It may well be what is comparatively easy and natural in the language of the

¹ Harindranath Chattopadhyaya: "Blue Profound" in Strange Journey.

² Katha Upanishad.

³ Ibid.

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gods (devabhasha) wouJd mean a tour de force, if not altogether an impossibility, in a human language. The Sanskrit language was moulded and fashioned in the hands of the Rishis, that is to say, those who lived and moved and had their being in the spiritual consciousness. The Hebrew or even the Zend does not seem to have reached that peak, that absoluteness of the spiritual tone which seems inherent in the Indian tongue, although those too breathed and grew in a spiritual atmosphere. The later languages, however, Greek or Latin or their modern descendants, have gone still farther from the source, they are much nearer to the earth and are suffused with the smell and effluvia of this vale of tears.

Among the ancients, strictly speaking, the later classical Lucretius was a remarkable phenomenon. By nature he was a poet, but his mental interest lay in metaphysical speculation, in philosophy, and unpoetical business. He turned away from arms and heroes, wrath and love and, like Seneca and Aurelius, gave himself up to moralising and philosophising, delving 'into the mystery, the why and the how and the whither of it all. He chose a dangerous subject for his poetic inspiration and yet it cannot be said that his attempt was a failure. Lucretius was not a religious or spiritual poet; he was rather Marxian, – atheistic, materialistic. The dialectical materialism of today could find in him a lot of nourishment and support. But whatever the content, the manner has made a whole difference. There was an idealism, a clarity of vision and an intensity of perception, which however scientific apparently, gave his creation a note, an accent, an atmosphere high, tense, aloof, ascetic, at times bordering on the suprasensual. It was a high light, a force of consciousness that at its highest pitch had the ring and vibration of something almost spiritual. For the basic principle of Lucretius' inspiration is a large thought-force, a tense perception, a taut nervous reaction– it is not, of course, the identity in being with the inner realities which is the hallmark of a spiritual consciousness, yet it is something on the way towards that.

There have been other philosophical poets, a good number of them since then – not merely rationally philosophical, as was the vogue in the eighteenth century, but metaphysically philosophical, that is to say, inquiring not merely into the

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phenomenal but also into the labyrinths of the noumenal, investigating not only what meets the senses, but also things that are behind or beyond. Amidst the earlier efflorescence of this movement the most outstanding philosopher poet is of

course Dante, the Dante of Paradiso, a philosopher in the mediaeval manner and to the extent a lesser poet, according to some. Goethe is another, almost in the grand modern manner. Wordsworth is full of metaphysics from the crown of his head to the tip of his toe although his poetry, perhaps the major portion of it, had to undergo some kind of martyrdom because of it. And Shelley, the supremely lyric singer, has had a very rich undertone of thought-content genuinely metaphysical. And Browning and Arnold and Hardy-indeed, if we come to the more moderns, we have to cite the whole host of them, none can be excepted.

We left out the Metaphysicals, for they can be grouped as a set apart. They are not so much metaphysical as theological, religious. They have a brain-content stirring with theological problems and. speculations, replete with scintillating conceits and intricate fancies. Perhaps it is because of this philosophical burden, this intellectual bias that the Metaphysicals went into obscurity for about two centuries and it is precisely because of that that they are slowly coming out to the forefront and assuming a special value with the moderns. For the modern mind is characteristically thoughtful, introspective – “introvert” – and philosophical; even the exact physical sciences of today are rounded off in the end with metaphysics.

The growth of a philosophical thought-content in poetry has been inevitable. For man's consciousness in its evolutionary march is driving towards a consummation which includes and presupposes a development along that line. The mot d'ordre in old-world poetry was "fancy", imagination-remember the famous lines of Shakespeare characterising a poet; in modern times it is Thought, even or perhaps particularly abstract metaphysical thought. Perceptions, experiences, realisations-of whatever order or world they may be-expressed in sensitive and aesthetic terms and figures, that is poetry known and appreciated familiarly. But a new turn has been coming on with an increasing insistence-a definite time has been given to that, since the Renaissance, it is said: it is

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the growing importance of Thought or brain-power as a medium or atmosphere in which poetic experiences find a sober and clear articulation, a definite and strong formulation. Rationalisation of all experiences and realisations is the keynote of the modern mentality. Even when it is said that reason and rationality are not ultimate or final or significant realities, that the irrational or the submental plays a greater role in our consciousness and that art and poetry likewise should be the expression of such a mentality, even then, all this is said and done in and through a strong rational and intellectual stress and frame the like of which cannot be found in the old-world frankly non-intellectual creations.

The religious, the mystic or the spiritual man was, in the past, more or Jess methodically and absolutely non-intellectual and anti-intellectual: but the modern age, the age of scientific culture, is tending to make him as strongly intellectual: he has to explain, not only present the object but show up its mechanism also-explain to himself so that he may have a total understanding and a firmer grasp of the thing which he presents and explains to others as well who demand a similar approach. He feels the necessity of explaining, giving the rationality – the rationale – the science, of his art; for without that, it appears to him, a solid ground is not given to the structure of his experience: analytic power, preoccupation with methodology seems inherent in the modern creative consciousness.

The philosophical trend in poetry has an interesting history with a significant role: it has acted as a force of purification, of sublimation, of katharsis. As man has risen from his exclusively or predominantly vital nature into :;tn increasing mental poise, in the same way his creative activities too have taken this new turn and status. In the earlier stages of evolution the mental life is secondary, subordinate to the physico-vital life; it is only subsequently that the mental finds an independent and self-sufficient reality. A similar movement is reflected in poetic and artistic creation too: the thinker, the philosopher remains in the background at the outset, he looks out; peers through chinks and holes from time to time; later he comes to the forefront, assumes a major role in man's creative activity.

Man's consciousness is further to rise from the mental to

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over-mental regions. Accordingly, his life and activities and along with that his artistic creations too will take on a new tone and rhythm, a new mould and constitution even. For this transition, the higher mental-which is normally the field of philosophical and idealistic activities-serves as the Paraclete, the Intercessor; it takes up the lower functionings of the consciousness, which are intense in their own way, but narrow and turbid, and gives, by purifying and enlarging, a wider frame, a more luminous pattern, a more subtly articulated , form for the higher, vaster and deeper realities, truths and harmonies to express and manifest. In the old-world spiritual and mystic poets, this intervening medium was overlooked for evident reasons, for human reason or even intelligence is a double-edged instrument, it can make as well as mar, it has a light that most often and naturally shuts off other higher lights beyond it. So it was bypassed, some kind of direct and immediate contact was sought to be established between the normal and the transcendental. The result was, as I have pointed out, a pure spiritual poetry, on the one hand, as in the Upanishads, or, on the other, religious poetry of various grades and denominations that spoke of the spiritual but in the terms and in the manner of the mundane, at least very much coloured and dominated by the latter. Vyasa was the great legendary figure in India who, as is shown in his Mahabharata, seems to have been one of the pioneers, if not the pioneer, to forge and build the missing link of Thought Power. The exemplar of the manner is the Gita. Valmiki's represented a more ancient and primary inspiration, of a vast vital sensibility, something of the kind that was at the basis of Homer's genius. In Greece it was Socrates who initiated the movement of speculative philosophy and the emphasis of intellectual power slowly began to find expression in the later poets, Sophocles and Euripides. But all these were very simple beginnings. The moderns go in for something more radical and totalitarian. The rationalising element instead of being an additional or subordinate or contributing factor, must itself give its norm and form, its own substance and manner to the creative activity. Such is the present-day demand.

The earliest preoccupation of man was religious; even when he concerned himself with the world and worldly things, he

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referred all that to the other world, thought of gods and goddesses, of after-death and otherwhere. That also will be his last and ultimate preoccupation though in a somewhat different way, when he has passed through a process of purification and growth, a "sea-change". For although religion is an aspiration towards the truth and reality beyond or behind the world, it is married too much to man's actual worldly nature and carries always with it the shadow of profanity.

The religious poet seeks to tone down or cover up the mundane taint, since he does not know how to transcend it totally, in two ways: (1) by a strong thought-element, the metaphysical way, as it may be called and (2) by a strong symbolism, the occult way. Donne takes to the first course, Blake the second. And it is the alchemy brought to bear in either of these processes that transforms the merely religious into the mystic poet. The truly spiritual, as I have said, is still a higher grade of consciousness: what I call Spirit's own poetry has its own matter and manner – swabhava and swadharma. A nearest approach to it is echoed in those famous lines of Blake:

To see a World in a grain of Sand,

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,

And Eternity in an hour.¹

And a considerable impact of it is vibrant and aglow in these lines of a contemporary Indian poet:

Sky-lucent Bliss untouched by earthiness!

. . . . . . . . . . . .lean down from above,

Temper-the unborn light no thought can trace,

Suffuse my mood with a familiar glow.

For 'tis with mouth of clay I supplicate:

Speak to me heart to heart words intimate,

And all Thy formless glory turn to love

And mould Thy love into a human face.²

¹ "Auguries of Innocence".

² K. D. Sethna: "This Errant Life" in The Secret Splentiour.

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Something of the fullness of spiritual matter and manner overflows in these epic lines:

His spirit mingles with eternity's heart

And bears the silence of the Infinite.

In a divine retreat from mortal thought,

In a prodigious gesture of soul-sight,

His being towered into pathless heights,

Naked of its vesture of humanity.¹

or this simple single line pregnant no less with the self-same fullness:

An eye awake in voiceless heights of trance,²

This, I say, is something different from the religious and even from the mystic. It is away from the merely religious, because it is naked of the vesture of humanity (in spite of a human face that masks it at times) ; it is something more than the merely mystic, for it does not stop being a signpost or an indication to the Beyond, but is itself the presence and embodiment of the Beyond. The mystic gives us, we can say, the magic of the Infinite; what I term the spiritual, the spiritual proper, gives in addition the logic of the Infinite. At least this is what distinguishes modern spiritual consciousness from the ancient, that is, Upanishadic spiritual consciousness. The Upanishad gives expression to the spiritual consciousness in its original and pristine purity and perfection, in its essential simplicity. It did not buttress itself with any logic. It is the record of fundamental experiences and there was no question of any logical exposition. But, as I have said, the modern mind requires and demands a logical element in its perceptions and presentations. Also it must needs be a different kind of logic that can satisfy and satisfy wholly the deeper and subtler movements of a modern consciousness. For the philosophical poet of an earlier age, when he had recourse to logic, it was the logic of the finite that always gave him the frame, unless

¹ Sri Aurobindo: Savitri, Book I, Canto V.

² Ibid., Book I, Canto III.

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he threw the whole thing overboard and leaped straight into the occult, the illogical and the a logical, like Blake, for instance. Let me illustrate and compare a little. When the older poet explains indriyani hayan ahuh, it is an allegory he resorts to, it is the logic of the finite he marshals to point to the infinite and the beyond. The stress of reason is apparent and effective too, but the pattern is what we are normally familiar with – the movement, we can say, is almost Aristotelian in its rigour. Now let us turn to the following:

Our life is a holocaust of the Supreme.

The great World-Mother by her sacrifice

Has made her soul the body of our state;

Accepting sorrow and unconsciousness

Divinity's lapse from its own splendours wove

The many-patterned ground of all we are.

An idol of self is our mortality.¹

or this chiselled bit of diamond,

An inconscient Power groped towards consciousness,

Matter smitten by Matter glimmered to sense, ²

Here we have a pattern of thought-movement that does not seem to follow the lineaments of the normal brain-mind consciousness, although it too has a basis there: our customary line of reasoning receives a sudden shock, as it were, and then is shaken, moved, lifted up, transported – gradually or suddenly, according to the temperament of the listener. Besides, we have here the peculiar modern tone, which, for want of a better term, may be described as scientific. The impress – imprimatur – of Science is its rational coherence, justifying or justified by sense data, by physical experience, which gives us the pattern or model of an inexorable natural law. Here too we feel we are in the domain of such natural law but lifted on to a higher level.

This is what I was trying to make out as the distinguishing trait of the real spiritual consciousness that seems to be developing

¹ Sri Aurobindo: Savitri, Book II, Canto I.

² Ibid., Book II, Canto IV.

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in the poetic creation of tomorrow, e.g., it has the same rationality, clarity, concreteness of perception as the scientific spirit has in its own domain and still it is rounded off with a halo of magic and miracle. That is the nature of the logic of the infinite proper to the spiritual consciousness. We can have a Science of the Spirit as well as a Science of Matter. This is the Thought element or what corresponds to it, of which I was speaking, the philosophical factor, that which gives form to the formless or definition to that which is vague, a nearness and familiarity to that which is far and alien. The fullness of the spiritual consciousness means such a thing, the presentation of a divine name and form. And this distinguishes it from the mystic consciousness which is not the supreme solar consciousness but the nearest approach to it. Or, perhaps, the mystic dwells in the domain of the Divine, he may even be suffused with a sense of unity but would not like to acquire the Divine's nature and function. Normally and generally he embodies all the aspiration and yearning moved by intimations and suggestions belonging to the human mentality, the divine urge retaining still the human flavour. We can say also, using a Vedantic terminology, that the mystic consciousness gives us the tatastha lakshana, the nearest approximative attribute of the attributeless; or otherwise, it is the hiranyagarbha consciousness which englobes the multiple play, the coruscated possibilities of the Reality: while the spiritual proper may be considered as prajñāghana, the solid mass, the essential lineaments of revelatory knowledge, the typal "wave-particles" of the Reality. In the former there is a play of imagination, even of fancy, a decorative aesthesis, while in the latter it is vision pure and simple. If the spiritual poetry is solar in its nature, we can say, by extending the analogy, that mystic poetry is characteristically lunar-Moon representing the delight and the magic that Mind and mental imagination, suffused, no doubt, with a light or a reflection of some light from beyond, is capable of (the Upanishad speaks of the Moon being born of the Mind).

To sum up and recapitulate. The evolution of the poetic expression in man has ever been an attempt at a return and a progressive approach to the spiritual source of poetic inspiration, which was also the original, though somewhat veiled, source from the very beginning. The movement has followed

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devious ways – strongly negative at times – even like man's life and consciousness in general of which it is an organic member; but the ultimate end and drift seems to have been always that ideal and principle even when fallen on evil days and evil tongues. The poet's ideal in the dawn of the world was, as the Vedic Rishi sang, to raise things of beauty in heaven by his poetic power, kavih kavitvā divi rūpam āsajat. Even a Satanic poet, the inaugurator, in a way, of modernism and modernistic consciousness, Charles Baudelaire, thus admonishes his spirit:

"Flyaway, far from these morbid miasmas, go and purify yourself in the higher air and drink, like a pure and divine liquor, the clear fire that fills the limpid spaces."¹

That angelic poets should be inspired by the same ideal is, of course, quite natural: for they sing:

Not a senseless, trancèd thing,

But divine melodious truth;

Philosophic numbers smooth;

since they

Have ye souls in heaven too,

Double-lived in regions new?²

Poetry, actually however, has been, by and large, a profane and mundane affair: for it expresses the normal man's perceptions and feelings and experiences, human loves and hates and desires and ambitions. True. And yet there has also always been an attempt, a tendency to deal with them in such a way as can bring calm and purity – katharsis – not trouble and confusion. That has been the purpose of all Art from the ancient

¹ Envole-toi bien loin de ces miasmes morbides;

Va te purifier dans l'air supérieur,

Et bois, comme tine pure et divine liqueur,

Le feu clair qui remplit les espaces Iimpides.

"Elévation" pleen et Idéal.

² Keats: "Ode on the Poets".

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days. Besides, there has been a growth and development in the historic process of this katharsis. As by the sublimation of his bodily and vital instincts and impulses.., man is gradually growing into the mental, moral and finally spiritual consciousness, even so the artistic expression of his creative activity has followed a similar line of transformation. The first and original transformation happened with religious poetry. The religious, one may say, is the profane inside out; that is to say, the religious man has almost the same tone and temper, the same urges and passions, only turned Godward. Religious poetry too marks a new turn and development of human speech, in taking the name of God human tongue acquires a new plasticity and flavour that transform or give a new modulation even to things profane and mundane it speaks of. Religious means at bottom the colouring of mental and moral idealism. A parallel process of katharsis is found in another class of poetic creation, viz., the allegory. Allegory or parable is the stage when the higher and inner realities are expressed wholly in the modes and manner, in the form and character of the normal and external, when moral, religious or spiritual truths are expressed in the terms and figures of the profane life. The higher or the inner ideal is like a loose clothing upon the ordinary consciousness, it does not fit closely or fuse. In the religious, however, the first step is taken for a mingling and fusion. The mystic is the beginning of a real fusion and a considerable ascension of the lower into the higher. The philosopher poet follows another line for the same katharsis – instead of uplifting emotions and sensibility, he proceeds by thought-power, by the ideas and principles that lie behind all movements and give a pattern to all things existing. The mystic can be of either type, the religious mystic or the philosopher mystic, although often the two are welded together and cannot be very well separated. Let us illustrate a little:

The spacious firmament on high,

With all the blue ethereal sky,

And spangled heavens, a shining frame,

Their great Original proclaim.¹

This is religious poetry, pure and simple, expressing man's

¹ Addison: "Hymn":

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earliest and most elementary feeling, marked by a broad candour, a rather shallow monotone. But that feeling is raised to a pitch of fervour and scintillating sensibility in Vaughan's

They are all gone into the world of light

And I alone sit lingering here, . . .

O Father of eternal life, and all

Created glories under Thee,

Resume Thy spirit from this world of thrall

Into true liberty.¹

The same religious spirit seems to climb a little higher still. stretching towards the mystic vein in Donne,

My heart is by dejection, clay,

And by self-murder, red.

From this red earth, 0 Father, purge away

All vicious tinctures, that new fashioned

I may rise up from death, before ram dead.²

The allegorical element too finds here cleverly woven into the mystically religious texture. Here is another example of the mystically religious temper from Donne:

For though through many streights, and lands I roame,

I launch at paradise, and saile towards home,³

The same poet is at once religious and mystic f1.nd philosophical in these lines, for example:

That All, which always is All every where,

Which cannot sinne, and yet all sinnes must beare,

Which cannot die, yet cannot chuse but die,

Loe, faithfull Virgin,.. . .

Whom thou conceiv'st, conceiv'd; yea thou art now

Thy Maker's maker, and thy Father's mother;

¹ "They Are All Gone".

²"The Litanie"-Divine Poems.

³ The Progress of the Soule, VI.

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Thou 'hast light in darke; and shutst in little roome,

Immensity cloystered in thy deare wombe.¹

Blake's powerfully pregnant lines are mystically philosophic:

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour.²

Blake had this wonderful gift of transmuting the baser metal of mundane experience into the gold of a deep mystic and spiritual experience:

Bring me my bow of burning gold!

Bring me my arrows of desire!

Bring me my spear! 0 clouds, unfold!

Bring me my chariot of fire!³

An allegorical structure has been transfused into a living and burning symbolism of an inner world.

But all that is left far behind, when we hear a new voice announcing an altogether new manner, revelatory of the truly and supremely spiritual consciousness, not simply mystic or religious but magically occult and carved out of the highest if recondite philosophia:

A finite movement of the Infinite

Came winging its way through a wide air of Time;

A march of Knowledge moved in Nescience

And guarded in the form a separate soul. ⁴

¹ "Annvnciation"-Divine Poems.

² "Auguries of Innocence".

³ "Jerusalem".

4Sri Aurobindo: Sauitri, Book II, Canto IV.

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The Poetry in the Making

Is the artist – the supreme artist, when he is a genius, that is to say – conscious in his creation or is he unconscious? Two quite opposite views have been taken of the problem by the best of intelligences. On the one hand, it is said that genius is genius precisely because it acts unconsciously, and on the other it is asserted with equal emphasis that genius is the capacity of taking infinite pains, which means it is absolutely a self. conscious activity.

We take a third view of the matter and say that genius is neither unconscious or conscious but superconscious. And when one is superconscious, one can be in appearance either conscious or unconscious. Let us at the outset try to explain a little this psychological riddle.

When we say one is conscious, we usually mean that one is conscious with the mental consciousness, with the rational intelligence, with the light of the brain. But this need not be always so. For one can be conscious with other forms of consciousness or in other planes of consciousness. In the average or normal man the consciousness is linked to or identified with the brain function, the rational intelligence and so we conclude that without this wakeful brain activity there can be no consciousness. But the fact is otherwise. The experiences of the mystic prove the point. The mystic is conscious on a level which we describe as higher than the mind and reason, he has what may be called the overhead consciousness. (Apart from the normal consciousness, which is named jagrat, waking, the Upanishad speaks of three other increasingly subtler states of consciousness, swapna, sushupti and turiya.) And then one can be quite unconscious, as in samadhi – that can be sushupti or turiya – or partially conscious – in swapna, for example,

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the external behaviour may be like that of a child or a lunatic or even a goblin. One can also remain normally conscious and still be in the superconscience. Not only so, the mystic – the Yogi – can be conscious on infraconscious levels also; that is to say, he can enter into and identify with the consciousness involved in life and even in Matter; he can feel and realise his oneness with the animal world, the plant world and finally the world of dead earth, of "stocks and stones" too. For all these strands of existence have each its own type of consciousness and all different from the mode of mind which is normally known as consciousness. When St. Francis addresses himself to the brother Sun or the sister Moon, or when the Upanishad speaks of the tree silhouetted against the sky, as if stilled in trance, we feel there is something of this fusion and identification of consciousness with an infra-conscient existence.

I said that the supreme artist is superconscious: his consciousness withdraws from the normal mental consciousness and becomes awake and alive in another order of consciousness. To that superior consciousness the artist's mentality – his ideas and dispositions, his judgments and valuations and acquisitions, in other words, his normal psychological make-up – serves as a channel, an instrument, a medium for transcription. Now, there are two stages, or rather two lines of activity in the processus, for they may be overlapping and practically simultaneous. First, there is the withdrawal and the in-gathering of consciousness and then its reappearance into expression. The consciousness retires into a secret or subtle world – Words-worth's "recollected in tranquillity" -and comes back with the riches gathered or transmuted there. But the purity of the gold thus garnered and stalled in the artistry of words and sounds or lines and colours depends altogether upon the purity of the channel through which it has to pass. The mental vehicle receives and records and it can do so to perfection if it is perfectly in tune with what it has to receive and record; otherwise the transcription becomes mixed and blurred, a faint or confused echo, a poor show. The supreme creators are precisely those in whom the receptacle, the instrumental faculties offer the least resistance and record with absolute fidelity the experiences of the over or inner consciousness. In Shakespeare, in Homer, in Valmiki the inflatus of the secret

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consciousness, the inspiration, as it is usually termed, bears down, sweeps away all obscurity or contrariety in the recording mentality, suffuses it with its own glow and puissance, indeed resolves it into its own substance, as it were. And the difference between the two, the secret norm and the recording form, determines the scale of the artist's creative value. It happens often that the obstruction of a too critically observant and self-conscious brain-mind successfully blocks up the flow of something supremely beautiful that wanted to come down and waited for an opportunity.

Artists themselves, almost invariably, speak of their inspiration: they look upon themselves more or less as mere instruments of something or some Power that is beyond them, beyond their normal consciousness attached to the brain-mind, that controls them and which they cannot control. This perception has been given shape in myths and legends. Goddess Saraswati or the Muses are, however, for them not a mere metaphor but concrete realities. To what extent a poet may feel himself to be a mere passive, almost inanimate, instrument – nothing more than a mirror or a sensitive photographic plate-is illustrated in the famous case of Coleridge. His Kubla Khan, as is well known, he heard in sleep and it was a long poem very distinctly recited to him, but when he woke up and wanted to write it down he could remember only the opening lines, the rest having gone completely out of his memory; in other words, the poem was ready-composed somewhere else, but the transmitting or recording instrument was faulty and failed him. Indeed, it is a common experience to hear in sleep verses or musical tunes and what seem then to be very beautiful things, but which leave no trace on the brain and are not recalled in memory.

Still, it must be noted that Coleridge is a rare example, for the recording apparatus is not usually so faithful but puts up its own formations that disturb and alter the perfection of the original. The passivity or neutrality of the intermediary is relative, and there are infinite grades of it. Even when the larger waves that play in it in the normal waking state are quieted down, smaller ripples of unconscious or half-conscious habitual formations are thrown up and they are sufficient to cause the scattering and dispersal of the pure light from above.

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The absolute passivity is attainable, perhaps, only by the Yogi. And in this sense the supreme poet is a Yogi, for in his consciousness the higher, deeper, subtler or other modes of experiences pass through and are recorded with the minimum aberration or diffraction.

But the Yogi is a wholly conscious being; a perfect Yogi is he who possesses a conscious and willed control over his instruments, he silences them, as and when he likes, and makes them convey and express with as little deviation as possible truths and realities from the Beyond. Now the question is, is it possible for the poet also to do something like that, to consciously create and not to be a mere unconscious or helpless channel? Conscious artistry, as we have said, means to be conscious on two levels of consciousness at the same time, to be at home in both equally and simultaneously. The general experience, however, is that of "one at a time": if the artist dwells more in the one, the other retires into the background to the same measure. If he is in the over-consciousness, he is only half-conscious in his brain consciousness, or even not conscious at all – he does not know how he has created, the sources or process of his creative activity, he is quite oblivious of them" gone through them all as if per saltum. Such seems to have been the case with the primitives, as they are called, the elemental poets – Shakespeare and Homer and Valmiki. In some others, who come very near to them in poetic genius, yet not quite on a par, the instrumental intelligence is strong and active, it helps in its own way but in helping circumscribes and limits the original impulsion. The art here becomes consciously artistic, but loses something of the initial freshness and spontaneity: it gains in correctness, polish and elegance and has now a style in lieu of Nature's own naturalness. I am thinking of Virgil and Milton and Kalidasa. Dante's place is perhaps somewhere in between. Lower in the rung where the mental medium occupies a still more preponderant place we have intellectual poetry, poetry of the later classical age whose representatives are Pope and Dryden. We can go farther down and land in the domain of versification – although here, too, there can be a good amount of beauty in shape of ingenuity, cleverness and conceit: Voltaire and Delille are of this order in French poetry.

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The three or four major orders I speak of in reference to conscious artistry are exampled characteristically in the history of the evolution of Greek poetry. It must be remembered, however, at the very outset that the Greeks as a race were nothing if not rational and intellectual. It was an element of strong self-consciousness that they brought into human culture – that was their special gift. Leaving out of account Homer who was, as I said, a primitive, their classical age began with Aeschylus who was the first and the most spontaneous and intuitive of the Great Three. Sophocles, who comes next, is more balanced and self-controlled and pregnant with a reasoned thought-content clothed in polished phrasing. We feel here that the artist knew what he was about and was exercising a conscious control over his instruments and materials, unlike his predecessor who seemed to be completely carried away by the onrush of the poetic enthousiasmos. Sophocles, in spite of his artistic perfection or perhaps because of it, appears to be just a little, one remove, away from the purity of the central inspiration – there is a veil, although a thin transparent veil, yet a veil between which intervenes. With the third of the Brotherhood, Euripides, we slide lower down – we arrive at a predominantly mental transcription of an experience or inner conception; but something of the major breath continues, an aura, a rhythm that maintains the inner contact and thus saves the poetry. In a subsequent age, in Theocritus, for example, poetry became truly very much 'sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought', so much of virtuosity and precocity entered into it; in other words, the poet then was an excessively self-conscious artist. That seems to be the general trend of all literature.

But should there be an inherent incompatibility between spontaneous creation and self-consciousness? As we have seen, a harmony and fusion can and do happen of the superconscious and the normally conscious in the Yogi. Likewise, an artist also can be wakeful and transparent enough so that he is conscious on both the levels simultaneously – above, he is conscious of the source and origin of his inspiration, and on the level plain he is conscious of the working of the instrument, how the vehicle transcribes and embodies what comes from elsewhere. The poet's consciousness becomes then divalent as

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it were – there is a sense of absolute passivity in respect of the receiving apparatus and coupled and immisced with it there is also the sense of dynamism, of conscious. agency as in his secret being he is the master of his apparatus and one with the Inspirer – in other words, the poet is both a seer (kavih) and a creator or doer (poiētēs).

Not only so, the future development of the poetic consciousness seems inevitably to lead to such a consummation in which the creative and the critical faculties will not be separate but form part of one and indivisible movement. Historically, human consciousness has grown from unconsciousness to con­sciousness and from consciousness to self-consciousness; man's creative and artistic genius too has moved pari passu in the same direction. The earliest and primitive poets were mostly unconscious, that is to say, they wrote or said things as they came to them spontaneously, without effort, without reflection, they do not seem to know the whence and wherefore and whither of it all, they know only that the wind bloweth as it listeth. That was when man had not yet eaten the fruit of knowledge, was still in the innocence of childhood. But as he grew up and progressed, he became more and more conscious, capable of exerting and exercising a deliberate will and initiating a purposive action, not only in the external practical field but also in the psychological domain. If the earlier group is called "primitives", the later one, that of conscious artists, usually goes by the name of "classicists." Modern creators have gone one step farther in the direction of self-consciousness, a return upon oneself, an inlook of full awareness and a free and alert activity of the critical faculties. An unconscious artist in the sense of the "primitives" is almost an impossible phenomenon in the modern world. All are scientists: an artist cannot but be consciously critical, deliberate, purposive in what he creates and how he creates. Evidently, this has cost something of the old-world spontaneity and supremacy of utterance; but it cannot be helped, we cannot command the tide to roll back, Canute-like. The feature has to be accepted and a remedy and new orientation discovered.

The modern critical self-consciousness in the artist originated with the Romantics. The very essence of Romanticism is curiosity – the scientist's pleasure in analysing, observing, experimenting,

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changing the conditions of our reactions, mental or sentimental or even nervous and physical by way of discovery of new and unforeseen or unexpected modes of "psychoses" or psychological states. Goethe, Wordsworth, Stendhal represented a mentality and initiated a movement which led logically to the age of Hardy, Housman and Bridges and in the end to that of Lawrence and Joyce, Ezra Pound and Eliot and Auden. On the Continent we can consider Flaubert as the last of the classicists married to the very quintessence of Romanticism. A hard, self-regarding, self-critical mentality, a cold scalpel-like gaze that penetrates and upturns the reverse side of things is intimately associated with the poetic genius of Mallarmé and constitutes almost the whole of Valéry's. The impassioned lines of a very modern poet like Aragon are also characterised by a consummate virtuosity in chiselled artistry, conscious and deliberate and willed at every step and turn.

The consciously purposive activity of the poetic consciousness – in fact, of all artistic consciousness – has shown itself with a clear and unambiguous emphasis in two directions. First of all with regard to the subject-matter: the old-world poets took things as they were, as they were obvious to the eye, things of human nature and things of physical Nature, and without questioning dealt with them in the beauty of their normal form and function. The modern mentality has turned away from the normal and the obvious: it does not accept and admit the "given" as the final and definitive norm of things. It wishes to discover and establish other norms, it strives to bring about changes in the nature and condition of things, envisage the shape of things to come, work for a brave new world. The poet of today, in spite of all his effort to remain a pure poet, in spite of Housman's advocacy of nonsense and not-sense being the essence of true Art, is almost invariably at heart an incorrigible prophet. In revolt against the old and established order of truths and customs, against all that is normally considered as beautiful, – ideals and emotions and activities of man or aspects and scenes and movements of Nature – against God or spiritual life, the modern poet turns deliberately to the ugly and the macabre, the meaningless, the insignificant and the trifling – tins and teas, bone and dust and dustbin, hammer and sickle – he is still a prophet, a violent

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one, an iconoclast, but one who has his own icon, a terribly jealous being, that seeks to pull down the past, erase it, to break and batter and knead the elements in order to fashion out of them something conforming to his heart's desire. There is also the class who have the vision and found the truth and its solace, who are prophets, angelic and divine, messengers and harbingers of a new beauty that is to dawn upon earth. And yet there are others in whom the two strains mingle or approach in a strange way. All this means that the artist is far from being a mere receiver, a mechanical executor, a passive unconscious instrument, but that he is supremely' conscious and master of his faculties and implements. This fact is doubly reinforced when we find how much he is preoccupied with the technical aspect of his craft. The richness and variety of patterns that can be given to the poetic form know no bounds today. A few major rhythms were sufficient for the ancients to give full expression to their poetic inflatus. For they cared more for some major virtues, the basic and fundamental qualities – such as truth, sublimity, nobility, forcefulness, purity, simplicity, clarity, straightforwardness; they were more preoccupied with what they had to say and they wanted, no doubt, to say it beautifully and powerfully; but the modus operandi was not such a passion or obsession with them, it had not attained that almost absolute value for itself which modern craftsmanship gives it. As technology in practical life has become a thing of overwhelming importance to man today, become, in the Shakespearean phrase, his "be-all and end-all", even so the same spirit has invaded and pervaded his aesthetics too. The subtleties, variations and refinements, the revolutions, reversals and inventions which the modern poet has ushered and takes delight in, for their own sake, I repeat, for their intrinsic interest, not for the sake of the subject which they have to embody and clothe, have never been dream by Aristotle, the supreme legislator among the ancients, nor by Horace, the almost incomparable craftsman among the ancients in the domain of poetry. Man has become, to be sure, a self-conscious creator to the pith of his bone.

Such a stage in human evolution, the advent of Homo Faber, has been a necessity; it has to serve a purpose and it has done admirably its work. Only we have to put it in its proper place.

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The salvation of an extremely self-conscious age lies in an exceeding and not in a further enhancement or an exclusive concentration of the self-consciousness, nor, of course, in a falling back into the original unconsciousness. It is this shift in the poise of consciousness that has been presaged and prepared by the conscious, the scientific artists of today. Their task is to forge an instrument for a type of poetic or artistic creation completely new, unfamiliar, almost revolutionary which the older mould would find it impossible to render adequately. The yearning of the human consciousness was not to rest satisfied with the familiar and the ordinary, the pressure was for the discovery of other strands, secret stores of truth and reality and beauty. The first discovery was that of the great Unconscious, the dark and mysterious and all-powerful subconscient. Many of our poets and artists have been influenced by this power, some even sought to enter into that region and become its denizens. But artistic inspiration is an emanation of Light; whatever may be the field of its play, it can have its origin only in the higher spheres, if it is to be truly beautiful and not merely curious and scientific.

That is what is wanted at present in the artistic world-the true inspiration, the breath from higher altitudes. And here comes the role of the mystic, the Yogi. The sense of evolution, the march of human consciousness demands and prophesies that the future poet has to be a mystic-in him will be fulfilled the travail of man's conscious working. The self-conscious craftsman, the tireless experimenter with his adventurous analytic mind has sharpened his instrument, made it supple and elastic, tempered, refined and enriched it; that is comparable to what we call the aspiration or call from below. Now the Grace must descend and fulfil. And when one rises into this higher consciousness beyond the brain and mind, when one lives there habitually, one knows the why and the how of things, one becomes a perfectly conscious operator and still retains all spontaneity and freshness and wonder and magic that are usually associated with inconscience and irreflection. As there is a spontaneity of instinct, there is likewise also a spontaneity of vision: a child is spontaneous in its movements, even so a seer. Not only so, the higher spontaneity is more spontaneous, for the higher consciousness means not only

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awareness but the free and untrammeled activity and expression of the truth and reality it is.

Genius had to be generally more or less unconscious in the past, because the instrument was not ready, was clogged as it were with its own lower grade movements; the higher inspiration had very often to bypass it, or rob it of its serviceable materials without its knowledge, in an almost clandestine way. Wherever it was awake and vigilant, we have seen it causing a diminution in the poetic potential. And yet even so, it was being prepared for a greater role, a higher destiny it is to fulfil in the future. A conscious and full participation of a refined and transparent and enriched instrument in the delivery of superconscious truth and beauty will surely mean not only a new but the very acme of aesthetic creation. We thus foresee the age of spiritual art in which the sense of creative beauty in man will find its culmination. Such an art was only an exception, something secondary or even tertiary, kept in the background, suggested here and there as a novel strain, called "mystic" to express its unfamiliar nature-unless, of course, it was openly and obviously scriptural and religious.

I have spoken of the source of inspiration as essentially and originally being a super-consciousness or over-consciousness. But to be more precise and accurate I should add another source, an inner consciousness. As the super-consciousness is imaged as lying above the normal consciousness, so the inner consciousness may be described as lying behind or within it. The movement of the inner consciousness has found expression more often and more largely than that of over-consciousness in the artistic creation of the past : and that was in keeping with the nature of the old-world inspiration, for the inspiration that comes from the inner consciousness, which can be considered as the lyrical inspiration, tends to be naturally more "spontaneous", less conscious, since it does not at all go by the path of the head, it evades that as much as possible and goes by the path of the heart.

But the evolutionary urge, as I have said, has always been to bring down or instil more and more light and self-consciousness into the depths of the heart too: and the first result has been an intellectualisation, a rationalisation of the consciousness, a movement of scientific observation and criticism

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which very naturally leads to a desiccation of the poetic enthusiasm and fervour. But a period of transcendence is in gestation. All efforts of modern poets and craftsmen, even those that seem apparently queer, bizarre and futile, are at bottom a travail for this transcendence, including those that seem contradictory to it.

Whether the original and true source of the poet's inspiration lies deep within or high above, all depends upon the mediating instrument-the mind (in its most general sense) and speech-for a successful transcription. Man's ever-growing consciousness demanded also a conscious development and remoulding of these two factors. A growth, a heightening and deepening of the consciousness meant inevitably a movement towards the spiritual element in things. And that means, we have said, a twofold change in the future poet's make-up. First as regards the substance. The revolutionary shift that we notice in modern poets towards a completely new domain of subject-matter is a signpost that more is meant than what is expressed. The superficialities and futilities that are dealt with do not in their outward form give the real trend of things. In and through all these major and constant preoccupation of our poets is "the pain of the present and the passion for the future": they are, as already stated, more prophets than poets, but prophets for the moment crying in the wilderness although some have chosen the path of denial and revolt. They are all looking ahead or beyond or deep down, always yearning for another truth and reality which will explain, justify and transmute the present calvary of human living. Such an acute tension of consciousness has necessitated an overhauling of the vehicle of expression too, the creation of a mode of expressing the inexpressible. For that is indeed what human consciousness and craft are aiming at in the present stage of man's evolution. For everything, almost everything that can be normally expressed has been expressed and in a variety of ways as much as is possible: that is the history of man's aesthetic creativity. Now the eye probes into the unexpressed world; for the artist too the Upanishadic problem has cropped up:

By whom impelled does the mind fall to its target, what is the agent that is behind the eye and sees through the eyes,

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what is the hearing and what the speech that their respective sense organs do not and cannot convey and record adequately or at all?

Like the modern scientist the artist or craftsman too of today has become a philosopher, even a mystic philosopher. The subtler and higher ranges of consciousness are now the object of inquiry and investigation and expression and revelation for the scientist as well as for the artist. The external

sense-objects, the phenomenal movements are symbols and signposts, graphs and pointer-readings of facts and realities that lie hidden, behind or beyond. The artist and the scientist are occult alchemists. What to make of this, for example:

Beyond the shapes of empire, the capes of Carbonek, over the topless waves of trenched Broceliande, drenched by the everlasting spray of existence, with no mind's sail

reefed or set, no slaves at the motived oars, drove into and clove the wind from unseen shores. Swept from all altars, swallowed in a path of power by the wrath

that wrecks the pirates in the Narrow Seas,.. . . multiple without dimension, indivisible without uniformity, the ship of Solomon (blessed be he) drove on.¹

Well, it is sheer incantation. It is word-weaving, rhythm plaiting, thought-wringing in order to pass beyond these frail materials, to get into contact with, to give some sense of the mystery of existence that passeth understanding. We are very far indeed from the "natural" poets, Homer or Shakespeare, Milton, or Virgil. And this is from a profane, a mundane poet, not an ostensibly religious or spiritual poet. The level of the poetic inspiration, at least of the poetic view and aspiration has evidently shifted to a higher, a deeper degree. We may be speaking of tins and tinsel, bones and dust, filth and misery, of the underworld of ignorance and ugliness,

All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old,

¹ "The Last Voyage" by Charles Williams-A Little Book of Modern Verse, (Faber and Faber).

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and the imaginative idealist, the romantically spiritual poet says that these or

The cry of a child by the roadway, the creak of a lumbering cart,

The heavy steps of the ploughman, splashing the wintry mould,

all, all the dark spots and blotches on the fair face of earth and humanity

Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.

and he cries out:

The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be told;

and declares the ardent aspiration of his heart and soul:

I hunger to build them anew, and sit on a green knoll apart,

With the earth and the sky and the water, re-made, like a casket of gold

For my dreams of your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.¹

But the more truly modern mind looks at the thing in a slightly different way. The good and the evil are not, to it, contrary to each other: one does not deny or negate the other. They are intermixed, fused in a mysterious identity. The best and the worst are but two conditions, two potentials of the same entity. Baudelaire, who can be considered as the first of the real moderns in many ways, saw and experienced this intimate polarity or identity of opposites in human nature and consciousness. What is Evil, who is the Evil One:

¹ W. B. Yeats: "The Lover tells of the Rose in his Heart"-The Wind among the Reeds.

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Une Idée, une Forme, Un Être

Parti de l' azur et tombé

Dans un Sryx bourbeux et plombé

Où nul æil du Ciel ne pénètre;¹

(L'Irremediable)

I And therefore it is not so irremediable as it appears to be. For the miracle happens and is an inevitable natural phenomenon, and that is why

Par l'opération d'un mystère vengeur

Dans la brute assoupie un ange se réveille. ²

(L' Aube spirituelle)

Heaven and Earth are not incommensurables, divinity and humanity function as one reality, towards one purpose and end: cruel heaven, miserable humanity? Well, this is how they appear to the poet's eye:

Le Ciel! couvercle noir de la grande marmite

Où bout l'imperceptible et vaste Humanité³

(Le Couvercle)

In other words, the tension in the human consciousness has been raised to the nth power, the heat of a brooding consciousness is about to lead it to an outburst of new creation sah tapastaptva. Human self-consciousness, the turning of oneself upon oneself, the probing and projecting of oneself into oneself – self-consciousness raised so often to the degree of self-torture, marks the acute travail of the spirit. The thousand "isms" and "logies" that pullulate in all fields of life, from the political to the artistic or even the religious and the spiritual indicate how the human laboratory is working at white heat. They are breaches in the circuit of the consciousness, volcanic eruptions from below or cosmic-ray irruptions from above,

¹ An Idea, a Form, a Being left the azure and fell into the mud and grey of a Styx where no eye from Heaven can penetrate.

² An avenging Mystery operating, out of the drowsy animal awakes an angel.

³ Heaven! it is the dark lid upon the huge cauldron in which the imperceptible and vast humanity is boiling.

– Les Fleurs du Mal.

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tearing open the normal limit and boundary – Baudelaire's couvercle or the "golden lid" of the Upanishads-disclosing and bringing into the light of common day realities beyond and unseen till now.

If so long the poet was more or less a passive, a half-conscious or unconscious intermediary between the higher and the lower lights and delights, his role in the future will be better fulfilled when he becomes fully aware of it and consciously moulds and directs his creative energies. The poet is and has to be the harbinger and minstrel of unheard-of melodies: he is the fashioner of the creative word that brings down and embodies the deepest aspirations and experiences of the human consciousness. The poet is a missionary: he is missioned by Divine Beauty to radiate upon earth something of her charm and wizardry. The ful1ness of his role he can only play up when he is fully conscious – for it is under that condition that all obstructing and obscuring elements lying across the path of inspiration can be completely and wholly eradicated: the instrument purified and tempered and transmuted can hold and express golden truths and beauties and puissances that otherwise escape the too human mould.

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Vivekananda

A PERSONAL reminiscence. A young man in prison, accused of conspiracy and waging war against the British Empire. If convicted he might have to suffer the extreme penalty, at least, transportation to the Andamans. The case is dragging on for long months. And the young man is in a solitary cell. He cannot always keep up his spirits high. Moments of sadness and gloom and despair come and almost overwhelm him. Who was there to console and cheer him up? Vivekananda. Vivekananda's speeches, From Colombo to Almora, came, as a godsend, into the hands of the young man. Invariably, when the period of despondency came he used to open the book, read a few pages, read them over again, and the cloud was there no longer. Instead there was hope and courage and faith and future and light and air.

Such is Vivekananda, the embodiment of Fearlessness – abhīh , the Upanishadic word, the mantra, he was so fond of. The life and vision of Vivekananda can be indeed summed up in the mighty phrase of the Upanishads, nāyam ātmā balahīnena labhyah . 'This soul no weakling can attain.' Strength! More strength! Strength evermore! One remembers the motto of Danton, the famous leader in the French Revolution: De l'audance, encore de l'audace, toujours de l'audace!

The gospel of strength that Vivekananda spread was very characteristic of the man. For it is not mere physical or nervous bravery, although that too is indispensable, and it is something more than moral courage. In the speeches referred to, the subject-matter (as well as the manner to a large extent) is philosophical, metaphysical, even abstract in outlook and treatment: they are not a call to arms, like the French National Anthem, for example; they are not merely an ethical exhortation,

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a moral lesson either. They speak of the inner spirit, the divine in man, the supreme realities that lie beyond. And yet the words are permeated through and through with a vibration life-giving and heroic-not so much in the explicit and apparent meaning as in the style and manner and atmosphere: it is catching, even or precisely when he refers, for example, to these passages in the Vedas and the Upanishads, magnificent in their poetic beauty, sublime in their spiritual truth, nec plus ultra, one can say, in the grand style supreme:

Yasyaite himavanto mahitvā

He whose greatness these snowy ranges declare

or,

Na tatra sūryo bhāti na eandratārakām...

There the' sun shines not, nor the moon nor the stars

or agam,

Nāsad āsīt na sad āsīt tadānīm

nāsīt raja no vyoma para yat...

Then existence was not nor non-existence, the mid

world was not nor the Ether nor what is beyond.

The consciousness that breathed out these mighty words, these heavenly sounds was in itself mighty and heavenly and it is that that touches you, penetrates you, vibrates in you a kindred chord, "awakening in you someone dead" till then – mrtam kāñcana bodhayantī. More than the matter, the thing that was said, was the personality, the being who embodied the truth expressed, the living consciousness behind the words and the speech that set fire to your soul. Indeed it was the soul that Vivekananda could awaken and stir in you. Any orator, any speaker with some kind of belief, even if it is for the moment, in what he says, by the sheer force of assertion, can convince your mind and draw your acquiescence and adhesion. A leader of men, self-confident and bold and fiery,

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can carry you off your feet and make you do brave things. But that is a lower degree of character and nature, ephemeral and superficial, that is touched in you thereby. The spiritual leader, the Guide, goes straight to the spirit in you – it is the call of the deep unto the deep. That was what Vivekananda meant when he said that Brahman is asleep in you, awaken it, you are the Brahman, awaken it, you are free and almighty. It is the spirit consciousness – Sachchidananda – that is the real man in you and that is supremely mighty and invincible and free absolutely. The courage and fearlessness that Vivekananda gave you was the natural attribute of the lordship of your spiritual reality. Vivekananda spoke and roused the Atman in man.

Vivekananda spoke to the Atman in man, he spoke to the Atman of the world, and he spoke specially to the Atman of

India. India had a large place in Vivekananda's consciousness: for the future of humanity and the world is wedded to India's future. India has a great mission, it has a spiritual, rather the spiritual work to do. Here is India's work as Vivekananda conceived it in a nutshell:

"Shall India die? Then from the world all spirituality will be extinct." And wherefore is this call for the life spiritual? Thus the aspiring soul would answer:

"If I do not find bliss in the life of the spirit, shall I seek satisfaction in the life of the senses? If I cannot get nectar, shall I fall back upon ditch water?"

The answer is as old as that of Nachiketas: "These horses and these songs and dances of yours, let them remain yours, man is not appeased with riches"; or that of Maitreyi, "What am I to do with that which will not bring me immortality?" This is then man's mission upon earth:

"Man is higher than all animals, than all angels: none is greater than man. Even the Devas will have to come down again and attain to salvation though a human body. Man alone attains to perfection, not even the Devas." Indeed, men are gods upon earth, come down here below to perfect themselves and perfect the world – only, they have to be conscious of themselves. They do not know what they are, they have to be actually and sovereignly what they are really and potentially. This then is the life-work of everyone:

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"First, let us be Gods, and then help others to be Gods. 'Be and make', let this be our motto."

That is indeed the only way of securing a harmonious and perfected humanity:

"Manifest the divinity within you, and everything will be harmoniously arranged around it."

The path to this higher harmonious divine life is that of hard labour, of scrupulously untiring, conscientious work:

"It is struggle against nature and not conformity to nature that makes man what he is."

Work and not abstention from work is the way, but not work for ignorant enjoyment:

"The dwelling-place of the Jivatman, this body, is a veritable means of work, and he who converts this into an infernal den is guilty, and he who neglects it is also to blame."

"No work is petty ... He who can properly prepare a chilam (pipe of tobacco) can also properly meditate."

These are luminous life-giving mantras and the world and humanity of today, sore distressed and utterly confounded, have great need of them to live them by and be saved.

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Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

"THE zeal for the Lord hath eaten me up." Such has indeed been the case with Pascal, almost literally. The fire that burned in him was too ardent and vehement for the vehicle, the material instrument, which was very soon used up and reduced to ashes. At twenty-four he was already a broken man, being struck with paralysis and neurasthenia; he died at the comparatively early age of 39, emulating, as it were, the life career of his Lord the Christ who died at 33. The Fire martyrised the body, but kindled and brought forth experiences and realisations that save and truths that abide. It was the Divine Fire whose vision and experience he had on the famous night of 23 November 1654 which brought about his final and definitive conversion. It was the same fire that had blazed up in his brain, while yet a boy, and made him a precocious genius, a marvel of intellectual power in the exact sciences. At 12 this prodigy discovered by himself the 32nd proposition of Euclid, Book I. At sixteen he wrote a treatise on conic sections. At nineteen he invented a calculating machine which, without the help of any mathematical rule or process, gave absolutely accurate results. At twenty-three he published his experiments with vacuum. At twenty-five he conducted the well-known experiment from the tower of St. Jacques, proving the existence of atmospheric pressure. His studies in infinitesimal calculus were remarkably creative and original. And it might be said he was a pioneer in quite a new branch of mathematics, viz., the mathematical theory of probability. We shall see presently how his preoccupation with the mathematics of chance and probability coloured and reinforced his metaphysics and theology.

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But the pressure upon his dynamic and heated brain – the fiery zeal in his mind – was already proving too much and he was advised medically to take complete rest. Thereupon followed what was known as Pascal's mundane life – a period of distraction and dissipation; but this did not last long nor was it of a serious nature. The inner fire could brook no delay, it was eager and impatient to englobe other fields and domains. Indeed, it turned to its own field – the heart. Pascal became initiated into the mystery of Faith and Grace. Still he had to pass through a terrible period of dejection and despair: the life of the world had given him no rest or relaxation, it served only to fill his cup of misery to the brim. But the hour of final relief was not long postponed: the Grace came to him, even as it came to Moses or St. Paul as a sudden flare of fire which burnt up the Dark Night and opened out the portals of Morning Glory.

Pascal's place in the evolution of European culture and consciousness is of considerable significance and importance. He came at a critical time, on the mounting tide of rationalism and scepticism, in an age when the tone and temper of human mentality were influenced and fashioned by Montaigne and Rochefoucauld, by Bacon and Hobbes. Pascal himself, born in such an atmosphere of doubt and disbelief and disillusionment, had sucked in a full dose of that poison; yet he survived and found the Rock of Ages, became the clarion of Faith against Denial. What a spectacle it was! This is what one wrote just a quarter of a century after the death of Pascal:

"They can no longer tell us that it is only small minds that have piety. They are shown how it has grown best in one of the the greatest geometricians, one of the subtlest metaphysicians, one of the most penetrating minds that ever existed on earth. The piety of such a philosopher should make the unbeliever and the libertine declare what a certain Diocles said one day on seeing Epicurus in a temple: 'What a feast, what a spectacle for me to see Epicurus in a temple! All my doubts vainsh, piety takes its place again. I never saw Jupiter's greatness so well as now when I behold Epicurus kneeling down!"¹

¹ "Ils ne peuvent plus nous dire qu'il n'y a que de petits esprits qui aient de la piété: car on leur en fait voir de la mieux poussé dans run des plus grands géo-mètres, l'un des plus subtils métaphysiciens, et des plus pénétrants esprits que aient jamais été au monde. La piété d'un tel philosophe devrait faire dire aux indévots et awe libertins ce que dit un jour un certain Dioclés, en voyant Epicure dans un temple: 'Quelle fête,' s'écriait-il, 'quelle spectacle pour moi, de voir Epicure dans un temple! Tous mes soupçons s'évanouissent: la piété reprend sa place; et je ne vis jamais mieux la grandeur de Jupiter que depuis que je vois Epicure à genoux!' " a – Bayle: Nouvelle de la République des Lettres.

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What characterises Pascal is the way in which he has bent his brain – not rejected it – but truly bent and forced even the dry "geometrical brain" to the service of Faith.

In his inquiry into truth and certitude Pascal takes his stand upon what he calls the geometrical method, the only valid method, according to him, in the sphere of reason. The characteristic of this method is that it takes for granted certain fundamental principles and realities – called axioms and postulates or definitions – and proceeds to other truths that are infallibly and inevitably deduced from them, that are inherent and implied in them. There is no use or necessity in trying to demonstrate these fundamentals also; that will only land us into confusion and muddle. They have to be simply accepted, they do not require demonstration, it is they that demonstrate others. Such, for instance, are space, time, number, the reality of which it is foolishness and pedantry to I seek to prove. There is then an order of truths that do not i require to be proved. We are referring only to the order of I physical truths. But there is another order, Pascal says, equally I valid and veritable, the order of the Spirit. Here we have i another set of fundamentals that have to be accepted and taken for granted, matrix of other truths and realities. It can also be called the order of the Heart. Reason posits physical fundamentals; it does not know of the fundamentals of the Heart which are beyond its reach; such are God, Soul, Immortality which are evident only to Faith.

But Faith and Reason, according to Pascal, are not contraries nor irreconcilables. Because the things of faith are beyond reason, it is not that they are irrational. Here is what Pascal says about the function and limitation of reason:

"The last movement of reason is to know that there is an infinity of things that are beyond it. It must be a very weak reason if it does not arrive there."¹

¹ "La dernière démarche de la raison, c'est de connaître qu'il y a une infinité de chases qui la surpassent. Elle est bien faible si elle ne va jusque-là

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"One must know where one should doubt, where one should submit."¹

"Two excesses are equally dangerous: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason."²

He goes farther and adopting a positive attitude says:

"We know truth not by reason alone, but by the heart also: it is in the latter way that we know the first principles, and in vain does reasoning, that has no part in it, attempt to combat them... The heart feels... and the reason demon strates afterwards... Principles are felt, propositions are deduced. . . . "³

About doubt, Pascal says that the perfect doubter, the Pyrrhonian as he is called, is a fiction. Pascal asks:

"What will men do in such a state? Will he doubt everything?... Will he doubt whether he doubts ? Will he doubt whether he exists?. . . In fact there has never been a perfectly effective Pyrrhonian."4

The process of conversion of the doubting mind, of the dry intellectual reason as propounded and perhaps practised by Pascal is also a characteristic mark of his nature and genius. It is explained in his famous letter on "bet" or "game of chance" (Le Pari). Here is how he puts the issue to the doubting mind (I am giving the substance, not his words): let us say then that in the world we are playing a game of chance. How do the chances stand? What are the gains and losses if God does not exist? What 'are the gains and losses if God does exist? If God exists, by accepting and reaching him what do we gain? All that man cares for – happiness, felicity. And what do we lose? We lose the world of misery. If, on the other 'hand, God does not exist, by believing him to exist, we lose nothing, we are not more miserable than what we are. If, however, God exists and we do not believe him, we gain this

¹ "Il faut savoir douter où il faut, se soumettre où il faut."

² "Ce sont deux exès également dangereux, d'exclure la raison, de n'admettre que la raison."

³ "Nous connaissons la vérité, non seulement par la raison, mais encore par Ie cæur; c'est de cette dernière sorte que nous connaissons les premiers principes, et c'est en vain que Ie raisonnement qui n'y a point de part, essaye de leg combattre... Le cœur sent et la raison démontre ensuite Les principes se sentent, leg propositions se concluent."

4"Que Cera done l'homme en cet état? Doutera-t-il de tout? . . . doutera-t-il s'il doute? doutera-t-il s'il est?. .En fait qu'il n'y ajamais eu de pyrrhonien effectif parfait."

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world of misery but we lose all that is worth having. Thus Pascal concludes that even from the standpoint of mere gain and loss, belief in God is more advantageous than unbelief. This is how he applied to metaphysics the mathematics of probability.

One is not sure if such reasoning is convincing to the intellect; but perhaps it is a necessary stage in conversion. At least we can conclude that Pascal had to pass through such a stage; and it indicates the difficulty his brain had to undergo, the tension or even the torture he made it pass through. It is true, from Reason Pascal went over to Faith, even while giving Reason its due. Still it seems the two were not perfectly synthetised or fused in him. There was a gap between that was not thoroughly bridged. Pascal did not possess the higher, intuitive, luminous mind that mediates successfully between the physical discursive ratiocinative brain-mind and the vision of faith: it is because deep in his consciousness there lay this chasm. Indeed, Pascal's abyss (l' abîme de Pascal) is a well-known legend. Pascal, it appears, used to have very often the vision of an abyss about to open before him and he shuddered at the prospect of falling into it. It seems to us to be an experience of the Infinity – the Infinity to which he was so much attracted and of which he wrote so beautifully (L'infiniment grand et l'infiniment petit) – but into which he could not evidently jump overboard unreservedly. This produced a dichotomy, a lack of integration of personality, Jung would say. Pascal's brain was cold, firm, almost rigid; his heart was volcanic, the faith he had was a fire: it lacked something of the pure light and burned with a lurid glare.

And the reason is his metaphysics. It is the Jansenist conception of God and human nature that inspired and coloured all his experience and consciousness. According to it, as according to the Calvinist conception, man is a corrupt being, corroded to the core, original sin has branded his very soul. Only Grace saves him and releases him. The order of sin and the order of Grace are distinct and disparate worlds and yet they complement each other and need each other. Greatness and misery are intertwined, united, unified with each other in him. Here is an echo of the Manichean position which also involves an abyss. But even then God's grace is not a free

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agent, as Jesuits declare; there is a predestination that guides and controls it. This was one of the main subjects he treated in his famous open letters (Les Provinciales) that brought him renown almost overnight. Eternal hell is a possible prospect that faces the Jansenist. That was why a Night always over-shadowed the Day in Pascal's soul.

Man then, according to Pascal, is by nature a sinful thing. He can lay no claim to noble virtue as his own: all in him is vile, he is a lump of dirt and filth. Even the greatest has his full share of this taint. The greatest, the saintliest, and the meanest, the most sinful, all meet, all are equal on this common platform; all have the same feet of clay. Man is as miserable a creature as a beast, as much a part and product of Nature as a plant. Only there is this difference that an animal or a tree is unconscious, while man knows that he is miserable. This knowledge or perception makes him more miserable, but that is his real and only greatness – there is no other. His thought, his self-consciousness, and his sorrow and repentance and contrition for what he is – that is the only good part – Mary's part – that has been given to him. Here are Pascal's own words on the subject:

"The greatness of man is great in this that he knows he is miserable. A tree does not know that it is miserable.

It is misery indeed to know oneself miserable. But one is great when one knows thus that he is miserable.

Thought is man's greatness.

Man is a mere reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed."¹

Pascal's faith had not the calm, tranquil, serene, luminous and happy self-possession of an Indian Rishi. It was ardent and impatient, fiery and vehement. It had to be so perhaps, since it was to stand against his steely brain (and a gloomy vital or life force) as a counterpoise, even as an antidote. This tension and schism brought about, at least contributed to his neurasthenia and physical infirmity. But whatever the effect

¹"La grandeur de l'homme est grande en se qu'il se connaît misérable. Un arbre ne se connaît pas miserable.

C'est done être misérable que de se connaître miserable. Mais c'est être grand que de connaître qu'on est misérable.

Pensée fait la grandeur de l'homme.

L'homme n'est qu'un roseau, Ie plus faible de la nature, mais e'est un roseau pensant."

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upon his inner consciousness and spiritual achievement, his power of expression, his literary style acquired by that a special quality which is his great gift to the French language. If one speaks of Pascal, one has to speak of his language also; for he was one of the great masters who created the French prose. His prose was a wonderful blend of clarity, precision, serried logic and warmth, colour, life, movement, plasticity.

A translation cannot give any idea of the Pascalian style; but an inner echo of the same can perhaps be caught from the thought movement of these characteristic sayings of his with which we conclude:

"Contradiction is not a mark of falsehood, nor is uncontradiction a mark of truth."¹

"The infinite distance of the body from the mind images the distance infinitely more infinite of the mind from Charity (Divine Grace, Faith)."²

"The heart has its reasons which Reason knows not... I say, the heart loves the universal being naturally, and itself also naturally, according to whichsoever it gives itself. And it hardens itself against the one or the other according to its choice. You have rejected one and preserved the other. Is it by the reason that you love ?"³

"Know then, a you proud one, what a paradox you are to yourself. Humble yourself, impotent Reason. Learn, man surpasses man infinitely. Hear from your Master your true state which you do not know. Listen to God."⁴

¹ "Ni la contradiction n'est marque de fausseté, ni l'incontradiction n'est marque de vérité."

² "La distance infinite des corps aux esprits figure la distance infiniment plus infinie des esprits à la charité."

³ "Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point; ... Je dis que Ie cœur aime l'être universel naturellement, et soi-même naturellement, selon qu'il s'y donne; et il se durcit contre l'un ou l'autre, à son choix. Vous avez rejeté l'un et conservé l'autre. Est-ce par raison que vous aimez?"

4"Connaissez done, superbe, quel paradoxe vous êtes à vous-même. Humiliezvous, raison impuissante: apprenez que l'homme passe infiniment l'homme, et entendez de votre maître votre condition véritable que vous ignorez. Écoutez Dieu.'.

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Walter Hilton: “The Scale of Perfection"

FROM the twentieth century back to the fourteenth is a far cry: a far cry indeed from the modern scientific illumination to mediaeval superstition, from logical positivists and mathematical rationalists to visionary mystics, from Russell and Huxley to Ruysbroeck and Hilton. The mystic lore, the Holy Writ, the mediaeval sage says, echoing almost the very words of the Eastern Masters, "may not be got by study nor through man's travail only, but principally by the grace of the Holy Ghost." As for the men living and moving in the worldly way, there are "so mickle din and crying in their heart and vain thoughts and fleshly desires" that it is impossible for them to listen or understand the still small voice. It is the pure soul touched by the Grace that alone "seeth soothfastness of Holy Writ wonderly shewed and opened, above study and travail and reason of man's kindly (i.e. natural) wit."

What is day to us is night to the mystics and what is day to the mystics is night for us. The first thing the mystic asks is to close precisely those doors and windows which we, on the contrary, feel obliged to keep always open in order to know and to live and move. The Gita says: "The sage is wakeful when it is night for all creatures and when all creatures are wakeful, that is night for the sage." Even so this sage from the West says: "The more I sleep from outward things, the more wakeful am I in knowing of Jhesu and of inward things. I may not wake to Jhesu, but if I sleep to the world."

Close the senses. Turn within. And then go forward, that is to say, more and more inward. In that direction lies your itinerary, the journey of your consciousness. The sense-ridden

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secular man, who goes by his physical eye, has marked in his own way the steps of his forward march and progress. His knowledge and his power grew as he proceeded in his survey from larger masses of physical objects to their component molecules and from molecules to their component atoms and from atoms once more into electrons and protons or energy-points pure and simple, or otherwise as, in another direction, he extended his gaze from earth to the solar system, from the solar system to other starry systems, to far-off galaxies and I from galaxies to spaces beyond. The record of this double-track march to infinity – as perceived or conceived by the physical senses – is marvellous, no doubt. The mystic offers the spectacle of a still more marvellous march to another kind of infinity.

Here is the Augustinian mantra taken as the motto of The Scale of Perfection: We ascend the ascending grades in our heart and we sing the song of ascension.! The journey's end is heavenly Jerusalem, the House of the Lord. The steps of this inner ascension are easily visible, not surely to the outer eye of

the sense-burdened man, but to the "ghostly seeing" of the aspirant which is hazy in the beginning but slowly clears as he advances. The -first step is the withdrawal from the outer senses and looking and seeing within. "Turn home again in thyself, and hold thee within and beg no more without." The immediate result is a darkness and a restless darkness – it is a painful night. The outer objects of attraction and interest have been discarded, but the inner attachments and passions surge there still. If, however, one continues and persists, refuses to be drawn out, the turmoil settles down and the darkness begins to thin and wear away. One must not lose heart, one must have patience and perseverance. So when the outward world is no more-there and its call also no longer awakes any echo in us, then comes the stage of "restful darkness" or "light-some darkness". But it is still the dark Night of the soul. The outer light is gone and the inner light is not yet visible: the night, the desert, the great Nought, stretches between these two lights. But the true seeker goes through and comes out of the tunnel. And there is happiness at the end. "The seeking is

1 "Ascendimus ascensiones in corde et cantamus canticum graduum." Confessions of St. Augustine XIII. 9.

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travaillous, but the finding is blissful." When one steps out of the Night, enters into the deepest layer of the being, one stands face to face to one's soul, the very image of God, the perfect God-man, the Christ within. That is the third degree of our inner ascension, the entry into the deepest, purest and happiest state – in which one becomes what he truly is; one finds the Christ there and dwells in love and union with him. But there is still a further step to take, and that is real ascension. For till now it has been a going within, from the outward to the inner and the inmost; now one has to go upward, transcend. Within the body, in life, however deep you may go, even if you find your soul and your union with Jesus whose tabernacle is your soul, still there is bound to remain a shadow of the sinful prison-house; the perfect bliss and purity without any earthly taint, the completeness and the crowning of the purgation and transfiguration can come only when you go beyond, leaving altogether the earthly form and worldly vesture and soar into Heaven itself and be in the company of the Trinity. "Into myself, and after... above myself by overpassing only into Him." At the same time it is pointed out, this mediaeval mystic has the common sense to see that the going in and going above of which one speaks must not be understood in a literal way, it is a figure of speech. The movement of the mystic is psychological – "ghostly", it is said – not physical or carnal.

This spiritual march or progress can also be described as a growing into the likeness of the Lord. His true self, his own image is implanted within us; he is there in the profoundest depth of our being as Jesus, our beloved and our soul rests in him in utmost bliss. We are aware neither of Jesus nor of his spouse, our soul, because of the obsession of the flesh, the turmoil raised by the senses, the blindness of pride and egoism. All that constitutes the first or old Adam, the image of Nought, the body of death which means at bottom the "false misruled love in to thyself." This self-love is the mother of sin, is sin itself. What it has to be replaced by is charity – that is the true meaning of Christian charity, forgetfulness of self. "What is sin but a wanting and a forbearing of God." And the whole task, the discipline consists in "the shaping of Christ in you, the casting of sin through Christ." Who then is Christ, what is he?

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This knowledge you get as you advance from your sense-bound perception towards the inner and inmost seeing. As your outer nature gets purified, you approach gradually your soul, the scales fall off from your eyes too and you have the knowledge and "ghostly vision." Here too there are three degrees; first, you start with faith – the senses can do nothing better than have faith; next, you rise to imagination which gives a sort of indirect touch or inkling of the truth; finally, you have the "understanding", the direct vision. "If he first trow it, he shall afterwards through grace feel it, and finally understand it."

It is never possible for man, weak and bound as he is, to reject the thraldom of his flesh, he can never purify himself wholly by his own unaided strength. God in his infinite mercy sent his own son, an emanation created out of his substance – his embodied love – as a human being to suffer along with men and take upon himself the burden of their sins. God the Son lived upon earth as man and died as man. Sin therefore has no longer its final or definitive hold upon mankind. Man has been made potentially free, pure and worthy of salvation. This is the mystery of Christ, of God the Son. But there is a further mystery. Christ not only lived for all men for all time, whether they know him, recognise him or not; but he still lives, he still chooses his beloved and his beloved chooses him, there is a conscious acceptance on either side. This is the function of the Holy Ghost, the redeeming power of Love active in him who accepts it and who is accepted by it, the dynamic Christ-Consciousness in the true Christian.

Indeed, the kernel of the mystic discipline – and its whole bearing – consists in one and only one principle: to love Jhesu. All roads lead to Rome: all preparations, all trials lead to one realisation, love of God, God as a living person close to us, our friend and lover and master. The Christian mystic speaks almost in the terms of the Gita: Rise above your senses, give up your egohood, be meek and humble, it is Jesus within you, who embraces your soul: it is he who does everything for you and in you, give yourself up wholly into his hands. He will deliver you.

The characteristic then of the path is a one-pointed concentration. Great stress is laid upon "oneliness", "onedness":

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that is to say, a perfect and complete withdrawal from the outside and the world; an unmixed solitude is required for the true experience and realisation to come. "A full forsaking in will of the soul for the love of Him, and a living of the heart to Him. This asks He, for this gave He." The rigorous exclusion, the uncompromising asceticism, the voluntary self-torture, the cruel dark night and the arid desert are necessary conditions that lead to the "onlyness of soul", what another prophet (Isaiah, XXIV, 16) describes as "My privity to me". In that secreted solitude, the "onlistead" – the graphic language of the author calls it – is found "that dignity and that ghostly fairness which a soul had by kind and shall have by grace." The utter beauty of the soul and its absolute love for her deity within her (which has the fair name of Jhesu), the exclusive concentration of the whole of the being upon one point, the divine core, the manifest Grace of God, justifies the annihilation of the world and life's manifold existence. Indeed, the image of the Beloved is always within, from the beginning to the end. It is that that keeps one up in the terrible struggle with one's nature and the world. The image depends upon the consciousness which we have at the moment, that is to say, upon the stage or the degree we have ascended to. At the outset, when we can only look through the senses, when the flesh is our master, we give the image a crude form and character; but even that helps. Gradually, as we rise, with the clearing of our nature, the image too slowly regains its original and true shape. Finally, in the inmost soul we find Jesus as he truly is: "an unchangeable being, a sovereign might, a sovereign soothfastness, sovereign goodness, a blessed life and endless bliss." Does not the Gita too say: "As one approaches Me, so do I appear to him." Ye yathā mām prapadyante.

Indeed, it would be interesting to compare and contrast the Eastern and Western approach to Divine Love, the Christian and the Vaishnava, for example. Indian spirituality, whatever its outer form or credal formulation, has always a background of utter unity. This unity, again, is threefold or triune and is expressed in those great Upanishadic phrases, mahāvākyas, – (1) the transcendental unity: the One alone exists, there is nothing else than the One – ekamevādvitfyam; (2) the cosmic unity: all existence is one, whatever exists is that One, there

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are no separate existences: sarvam khalvidam brahma neha nānāsti kincaña; (3) That One is I, you too are that One: so' ham, tattvamasi; this may be called the individual unity. As I have said, all spiritual experiences in India, of whatever school or line, take for granted or are fundamentally based upon this sense of absolute unity or identity. Schools of dualism or pluralism, who do not apparently admit in their tenets this extreme monism, are still permeated in many ways with that sense and in some form or other take cognizance of the truth of it. The Christian doctrine too says indeed, 'I and my Father in Heaven are one', but this is not identity, but union; besides, the human soul is not admitted into this identity, nor the world soul. The world, we have seen, according to the Chris6an discipline has to be altogether abandoned, negatived, as we go inward and upward towards our spiritual status reflecting the divine image in the divine company. It is a complete rejection, a cutting off and casting away of world and life. One extreme Vedantic path seems to follow a similar line, but there it is not really rejection, but a resolution, not the rejection of what is totally foreign and extraneous, but a resolution of the external into its inner and inmost substance, of the effect into its original cause. Brahman is in the world, Brahman is the world: the world has unrolled itself out of the Brahman – srsti, pravrtti – it has to be rolled back into its, cause and substance if it is to regain its pure nature (that is the process of nivrtti). Likewise, the individual being in the world, "I", is the transcendent being itself and when it withdraws, it withdraws itself and the whole world with it and merges into the Absolute. Even the Maya of the Mayavadin, although it is viewed as something not inherent in Brahman but superimposed upon Brahman, still, has been accepted as a peculiar power of Brahman itself. The Christian doctrine keeps the individual being separate practically, as an associate or at the most as an image of God. The love for one's neighbour, charity, which the Christian discipline enjoins is one's love for one's kind, because of affinity of nature and quality: it does not dissolve the two into an integral unity and absolute identity, where we love because we are one, because we are the One. The highest culmination of love, the very basis of love, according to the Indian conception, is a transcendence of love, love trans-

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muted into Bliss. The Upanishad says, where one has become the utter unity, who loves whom? To explain further our point, we take two examples referred to in the book we are considering. The true Christian, it is said, loves the sinner too, he is permitted to dislike sin, for he has to reject it, but he must separate from sin the sinner and love him. Why? Because the sinner too can change and become his brother in spirit, one loves the sinner because there is the possibility of his changing and becoming a true Christian. It is why the orthodox Christian, even such an enlightened and holy person as this mediaeval Canon, considers the non-Christian, the non-baptised as impure and potentially and fundamentally sinners. That is also why the Church, the physical organisation, is worshipped as Christ's very body and outside the Church lies the pagan world which has neither religion nor true spirituality nor salvation. Of course, all this may be symbolic and it is symbolic in a sense. If Christianity is taken to mean true spirituality, and the Church is equated with the collective embodiment of that spirituality, all that is claimed on their behalf stands justified. But that is an ideal, a hypothetical standpoint and can hardly be borne out by facts. However, to come back to our subject, let us ow take the second example. Of Christ himself, it is said, he not only did not dislike or had any aversion for Judas, but that he positively loved the traitor with a true and sincere love. He knew that the man would betray him and even when he was betraying and had betrayed, the Son of Man continued to love him. It was no make-believe or sham or pretence. It was genuine, as genuine as anything can be. Now, why did he love his enemy? Because, it is said, the enemy is suffered by God to do the misdeed: he has been allowed to test the faith of the faithful, he too has his utility, he too is God's servant. And who knows even a Judas would not change in the end? Many who come to scoff do remain to pray. But it can be asked, 'Does God love Satan too in the same way?' The Indian conception which is basically Vedantic is different. There is only one reality, one truth which is viewed differently. Whether a thing is considered good or evil or neutral, essentially and truly, it is that One and nothing else. God's own self is everywhere and the sage makes no difference between the Brahmin and the cow and

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the elephant. It is his own self he finds in every person and every object – sarvabhūtāsthitam yo mām bhajati ekatvamāsthitah – "he has taken his stand upon oneness and loves Me in all beings."¹

This will elucidate another point of difference between the Christian's and the Vaishnava's love of God, for both are characterised by an extreme intensity and sweetness and exquisiteness of that divine feeling. This Christian's, however, is the union of the soul in its absolute purity and simplicity and "privacy" with her lord and master; the soul is shred here of all earthly vesture and goes innocent and naked into the embrace of her Beloved. The Vaishnava feeling is richer and seems to possess more amplitude; it is more concrete and less ethereal. The Vaishnava in his passionate yearning seeks to carry as it were the whole world with him to his Lord: for he sees and feels Him not only in the inmost chamber of his soul, but meets Him also in and I through his senses and in and through the world and its objects around. In psychological terms one can say that the Christian realisation, at its very source, is that of the inmost soul, what we call the "psychic being" pure and simple, referred to in the book we are considering; as: "His sweet privy voice... stirreth thine heart full stilly." Whereas the Vaishnava reaches out to his Lord with his outer heart too aflame with passion; not only his inmost being but his vital being also seeks the Divine. This bears upon the occult story of man's spiritual evolution upon earth. The Divine Grace descends from the highest into the deepest and from the deepest to the outer ranges of human nature, so that the whole of it may be illumined and transformed and one day man can embody in his earthly life the integral manifestation of God, the perfect Epiphany. Each religion, each line of spiritual discipline takes up one limb of man-one level or mode of his being and consciousness-purifies it and suffuses it with the spiritual and divine consciousness, so that in the end the whole of man, in his integral living, is recast and remoulded: each discipline is in charge of one thread as it were, all together weave the warp and woof in the evolution of the perfect pattern of a spiritualised and divinised humanity. The conception of original sin is a cardinal factor in Christian

¹ The Gita, VI. 31

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discipline. The conception, of sinfulness is the very motive-power that drives the aspirant. "Seek tensely," it is said, "sorrow and sigh deep, mourn still, and stoop low till thine eye water for anguish and for pain." Remorse and grief are necessary attendants; the way of the cross is naturally the calvary strewn with pain and sorrow. It is the very opposite of what is termed the "sunlit path" in spiritual ascension. Christian mystics have made a glorious spectacle of the process of "dying to the world." Evidently, all do not go the whole length. There are less gloomy and happier temperaments, like the present one, for example, who show an unusual balance, a sturdy common sense even in the midst of their darkest nights, who have chalked out as much of the sunlit path as is possible in this line. Thus this old-world mystic says: it is true one must see and admit one's sinfulness, the grosser and apparent and more violent ones as well as all the subtle varieties of it that are in you or rise up in you or come from the Enemy. They pursue you till the very end of your journey. Still you need not feel overwhelmed or completely desperate. Once you recognise the sin in you, even the bare fact of recognition means for you half the victory. The mystic says, "It is no sin as thou feelest them." The day Jesus gave himself away on the Cross, since that very day you are free, potentially free from the bondage of sin. Once you give your adherence to Him, the Enemies are rendered powerless. "They tease the soul, but they harm not the soul". Or again, as the mystic graphically phrases it: "This soul is not borne in this image of sin as a sick man, though he feel it; but he beareth it." The best way of dealing with one's enemies is not to struggle and "strive with them." The aspirant, the lover of Jesus, must remember: "He is through grace reformed to the likeness of God ('in the privy substance of his soul within') though he neither feel it nor see it."

If you are told you are still full of sins and you are not worthy to follow the path, that you must go and work out your sins first, here is your answer: "Go shrive thee better: trow not this saying, for it is false, for thou art shriven. Trust securely that thou art on the way, and thee needeth no ransacking of shrift for that that is passed, hold forth thy way and think on Jerusalem." That is to say, do not be too busy with

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the difficulties of the moment, but look ahead, as far as possible, fix your attention upon the goal, the intermediate steps will become easy. Jerusalem is another name of the Love of Jesus or the Bliss in Heaven. Grow in this love, your sins will fade away of themselves. "Though thou be thrust in an house with thy body, nevertheless in thine heart, where the stead of love is, thou shouldst be able to have part of that love... " What exquisite utterance, what a deep truth!

Indeed, there are one or two points, notes for the guidance of the aspirant, which I would like to mention here for their striking appositeness and simple "soothfastness." First of all with regard to the restless enthusiasm and eagerness of a novice, here is the advice given: "The fervour is so mickle in outward showing, is not only for mickleness of love that they have; but it is for littleness and weakness of their souls, that they may not bear a little touching of God.. . . afterward when love hath boiled out all the uncleanliness, then is the love clear and standeth still, and then is both the body and the soul mickle more in peace, and yet hath the self soul mickle more love than it had before, though it shew less outward." And again: "without any fervour outward shewed, and the less it thinketh that it loveth or seeth God, the nearer it nigheth" ('it' naturally refers to the soul). The statement is beautifully self-luminous, no explanation is required. Another hurdle that an aspirant has to face often in the passage through the Dark Night is that you are left all alone, that you are deserted by your God, that the Grace no longer favours you. Here is however the truth of the matter; "when I fall down to my frailty, then Grace withdraweth: for my falling is cause there-of, and not his fleeing." In fact, the Grace never withdraws, it is we who withdraw and think otherwise. One more difficulty that troubles the beginner especially is with regard to the false light. The being of darkness comes in the form of the angel of light, imitates the tone of the still small voice; how to recognise, how to distinguish the two? The false light, the "feigned sun" is always found "atwixt two black rainy clouds" : they are "highing" of oneself and "lowing" of others. When you feel flattered and elated, beware it is the siren voice tempting you. The true light brings you soothing peace and meekness: the other light brings always a trail of darkness –

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if you are soothfast and sincere you will discover it if not near you, somewhere at a distance lurking.

The ultimate truth is that God is the sole doer and the best we can do is to let him do freely without let or hindrance. "He that through Grace may see Jhesu, how that He doth all and himself doth right nought but suffereth Jhesu work in him what him liketh, he is meek." And yet one does not arrive at that condition from the beginning or all at once. "The work is not of the hour nor of a day, but of many days and years." And for a long time one has to take up one's burden and work, co-operate with the Divine working. In the process there is this double movement necessary for the full achievement. "Neither Grace only without full working of a soul that in it is nor working done without grace bringeth a soul to reforming. . . . but that one joined to that other." Mysticism is not all eccentricity and irrationality: on the contrary, sanity seems to be the very character of the higher mysticism. And it is this sanity, and even a happy sense of humour accompanying it, that makes the genuine mystic teacher say: "It is no mastery to me for to say it, but for to do it there is mastery." Amen.

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William Blake: “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”

THE ideal was Blake's. It will not sound so revolting if we understand what the poet meant by Hell. Hell, he explains, is simply the body, the Energy of Life – hell, because body and life on earth were so considered by the orthodox Christianity. The Christian ideal demands an absolute denial and rejection of life. Fulfilment is elsewhere, in heaven alone. That is, as we know, the ideal of the ascetic. The life of the spirit (in. heaven) is a thing away from and stands against the life of the flesh (on earth). In the face of this discipline, countering it, Blake posited a union, a marriage of the two, considered incompatibles and incommensurables. Enfant terrible that he was, he took an infinite delight in a spirit of contradiction and went on expatiating on the glory of the mésalliance. He declared a new apocalypse and said that Lucifer, the one called Satan, was the real God, the so-called Messiah the fake one: the apparent Milton spoke in praise of God and in dispraise of Satan, but the real, the esoteric Milton glorified Satan, who is the true God and minimised or caricatured the counterfeit or shadow God. Here is Blakean Bible in a nutshell:

But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged.. . . If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

The eyes of fire, the nostrils of air, the mouth of water, the beard of earth.

Such is to be the ideal, the perfect, the spiritual man. Have we

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here the progenitor of the Nietzschean Superman? Both smell almost the same sulphurous atmosphere. But that also seems to lie in the direction to which the whole world is galloping in its evolutionary course. Humanity in its agelong travail has passed through the agony, one might say, of two extreme and opposite experiences, which are epitomised in the classic phrasing of Sri Aurobindo as: (1) the Denial of the Materialist and (2) the Refusal of the Ascetic.¹ Neither, however, the Spirit alone nor the body alone is man's reality; neither only the earth here nor only the heaven there embodies man's destiny. Both have to be claimed, both have to be lived – ubhayameva samrāt, as the old sage, Yajnavalkya, declared.

The earliest dream of humanity is also the last fulfilment. The Vedic Rishis sang of the marriage of heaven and earth – Heaven is my father and this Earth my mother. And Blake and Nietzsche are fiery apostles of that dream and ideal in an age crippled with doubt, falsehood, smallness, crookedness, impotence, colossal ignorance.

We welcome voices that speak of this ancient tradition, this occult Knowledge of a high Future. Recently we have come across one aspirant in the line, and being a contemporary, his views and reviews in the matter will be all the more interesting to us.² He is Gustave Thibon, a Frenchman-not a priest or even a religious man in the orthodox sense in any way, but a country farmer, a wholly self-educated laïque. Of late he has attracted a good deal of attention from intellectuals as well as religious people, especially the Catholics, because of his remarkable conceptions which are so often unorthodox and yet so often ringing true with an old-world authenticity.

Touching the very core of the malady of our age he says that our modern enlightenment seeks to cancel altogether the higher values and install instead the lower alone as true. Thus, for example, Marx and Freud, its twin arch priests, are brothers. Both declare that it is the lower, the under layer alone that matters: to one "the masses", to the other "the instincts". Their wild imperative roars: "Sweep away this pseudo-higher; let the instincts rule, let the pro-letariat dictate!" But more characteristic, Monsieur Thibon has made another discovery which gives the whole value and

¹ The Life Divine

² The Times Literary Supplement, January 15, 1949

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speciality to his outlook. He says the moderns stress the lower, no doubt; but the old world stressed only the higher and neglected the lower. Therefore the revolt and wrath of the lower, the rage of Revanche in the heart of the dispossessed in the modern world. Enlightenment meant till now the cultivation and embellishment of the Mind, the conscious Mind, the rational and nobler faculties, the height and the depth: and mankind meant the princes and the great ones. In the individual, in the scheme of his culture and education, the senses were neglected, left to go their own way as they pleased; and in the collective field, the toiling masses in the same way lived and moved as best as they could under the economics of laissez-faire. So Monsieur Thibon concludes: "Salvation has never come from below. To look for it from above only is equally vain. No doubt salvation must come from the higher, but on condition that the higher completely adopts and protects the lower." Here is a vision luminous and revealing, full of great import, if we follow the right track, prophetic of man's true destiny. It is through this infiltration of the higher into the lower and the integration of the lower into the higher that mankind will reach the goal of its evolution, both individually and collectively.

But the process, Monsieur Thibon rightly asserts, must begin with the individual and within the individual. Man must "turn within, feel alive within himself", re-establish his living contact with God, the source and origin from which he has cut himself off. Man must learn to subordinate having to being. Each individual must be himself, a free and spontaneous expression. Upon such individual , upon individuals grouped naturally in smaller collectivities and not upon unformed or ill-formed wholesale masses can a perfect human society be raised and will be raised. Monsieur Thibon insists – and very rightly – upon the variety and diversity of individual and local growths in a unified humanity and not a dead uniformity of regimented oneness. He declares, as the reviewer of the London Times succinctly puts it: "Let us abolish our insensate worship of number. Let us repeal the law of majorities. Let us work for the unity that draws together instead of idolizing the multiplicity that disintegrates. Let us understand that it is not enough for each to have a place; what matters is that each

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should be in his right place. For the atomized society let us substitute an organic society, one in which every man will be free to do what he alone is qualified and able to do."

So far so good. For it is not far enough. The being or becoming that is demanded in fulfilment of the divine advent in humanity must go to the very roots of life and nature, must seize God in his highest and sovereign status. No prejudice of the past, no notion of our mental habits must seek to impose its law. Thus, for example, in the matter of redeeming the senses by the influx of the higher light, our author seems to consider that the senses will remain more or less as they are, only they will be controlled, guided, used by the higher light. And he seems to think that even the sex relation (even the institution of marriage) may continue to remain, but sublimated, submitted to the laws of the Higher Order. This, according to us, is a dangerous compromise and is simply the imposition of the lower law upon the higher. Our view of the total transformation and divinisation of the Lower is altogether different. The Highest must come down wholly and inhabit in the Lowest, the Lowest must give up altogether its own norms and lift itself into the substance and form too of the Highest.

Viewed in this light, Blake's memorable mantra attains a deeper and more momentous significance. For it is not merely Earth-the senses and life and Matter that are to be uplifted and affianced to Heaven, but all that remains hidden within the bowels of the Earth, the subterranean regions of man's consciousness, the slimy viscous undergrowths, the darkest horrors and monstrosities that man and nature hide in their subconscient and inconscient dungeons of material existence, all these have to be laid bare to the solar gaze of Heaven, burnt or transmuted as demanded by the law of that Supreme Will. That is the Hell that has to be recognised, not rejected and thrown away, but taken up purified and transubstantiated into the body of Heaven itself. The hand of the Highest Heaven must extend and touch the Lowest of the lowest elements, transmute it and set it in its rightful place of honour. A mortal body reconstituted into an immemorial fossil, a lump of coal revivified into a flashing carat of diamond-that shows something of the process underlying the nuptials of which we are speaking.

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Nicholas Berdyaev : God Made Human

NICHOLAS Berdyaev is an ardent worker, as a Russian is naturally expected to be, in the cause of the spiritual rehabilitation of mankind. He is a Christian, a neo-Christian: some of his conclusions are old-world truths and bear repetition and insistence; others are of a more limited, conditional and even doubtful nature. His conception of the value of human person, the dignity and the high reality he gives to it, can never be too welcome in a world where the individual seems to have gone the way of vanished empires and kings and princes. But even more important and interesting is the view he underlines that the true person is a spiritual being, that is to say, it is quite other than the empirical ego that man normally is-"not this that one worships" as the Upanishads too declare. Further, in his spiritual being man, the individual, is not simply a portion or a fraction; he is, on the contrary, an integer, a complete whole, a creative focus; the true individual is a microcosm yet holding in it and imaging the macrocosm. Only perhaps greater stress is laid upon the aspect of creativity or activism. An Eastern sage, a Vedantin, would look for the true spiritual reality behind the flux of forces: Prakriti or Energy is only the executive will of the Purusha, the Conscious .Being. The personality in Nature is a formulation and emanation of the transcendent impersonality.

There is another aspect of personality as viewed by Berdyaev which involves a bias of the more orthodox Christian faith: the Christ is inseparable from the Cross. So he says: "There is no such thing as personality if there is no capacity for suffering. Suffering is inherent in God too, if he is a personality, and not

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merely an abstract idea. God shares in the sufferings of men. He yearns for responsive love. There are divine as well as human passions and therefore divine or creative personality must always suffer to the end of time. A condition of anguish and distress is inherent in it." The view is logically enforced upon the Christian, it is said, if he is to accept incarnation, God becoming flesh. Flesh cannot but be weak. This very weakness, so human, is and must be specially characteristic of God also, if he is one with man and his lover and saviour.

Eastern spirituality does not view sorrow and suffering – evil – as an integral part of the Divine Consciousness. It is born out of the Divine, no doubt, as nothing can be outside the Divine, but it is a local and temporal formation; it is a disposition consequent upon certain conditions and with the absence or elimination of those conditions, this disposition too disappears. God and the Divine Consciousness can only be purity, light, immortality and delight. The compassion that a Buddha feels for the suffering humanity is not at all a feeling of suffering; pain or any such normal human reaction does not enter into its composition; it is the movement of a transcendent consciousness which is beyond and purified of the normal reactions, yet overarching them and entering into them as a soothing and illumining and vivifying presence. The healer knows and understands the pain and suffering of his patient but is not touched by them; he need not contract the illness of his patient in order to be in sympathy with him. The Divine -the Soul-can be in flesh and yet not smirched with its mire; the flesh is not essentially or irrevocably the ooze it is under certain given conditions. The divine physical body is composed of radiant matter and one can speak of it even as of the soul that weapons cannot pierce it nor can fire burn it.

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Aldous Huxley: "The Perennial Philosophy"

THIS latest work of Aldous Huxley is a collection of sayings of sages and saints and philosophers from all over the world and of all times. The sayings are arranged under several heads such as "That art Thou", "The Nature of the Ground", "Divine Incarnation", "Self-Knowledge", "Silence", "Faith" etc., which clearly give an idea of the contents and also of the "Neo-Brahmin's" own personal preoccupation. There is also a running commentary, rather a note on each saying, meant to elucidate and explain, naturally from the compiler's standpoint, what is obviously addressed to the initiate.

A similar compilation was published in the Arya, called The Eternal Wisdom (Les Paroles Éternelles, in French) a portion of which appeared later on in book-form: that was more elaborate, the contents were arranged in such a way that no comments were needed, they were self-explanatory, divided as they were in chapters and sections and subsections with proper headings, the whole thing put in a logical and organised sequence. Huxley's compilation begins under the title of the Upanishadic text "That art Thou" with this saying of Eckhart: "The more God is in all things, the more He is outside them. The more He is within, the more without". It will be interesting to note that the Arya compilation too starts with the same idea under the title "The God of All; the God who is in All", the first quotation being from Philolaus, "The Universe is a Unity". The Eternal Wisdom has an introduction called "The Song of Wisdom" which begins with this saying from the Book of Wisdom: "We fight to win sublime Wisdom; therefore men call us warriors".

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Huxley gives only one quotation from Sri Aurobindo under the heading "God in the World". Here it is:

"The touch of Earth is always reinvigorating to the son of Earth, even when he seeks a supraphysical Knowledge. It may even be said that the supraphysical can only be really mastered in its fullness – to its heights we can always reach – when we keep our feet firmly on the physical. 'Earth is His footing' says the Upanishad, whenever it images the Self that manifests in the universe." Huxley's commentary is as follows:

" 'To its heights we can always come.' For those of us who are still splashing about in the lower ooze, the phrase has a rather ironical ring. Nevertheless, in the light of even the most distant acquaintance with the heights and the fullness, it is possible to understand what its author means. To discover the Kingdom of God exclusively within oneself is easier than to discover it, not only there, but also in the outer worlds of minds and things and living creatures. It is easier because the heights within reveal themselves to those who are ready to exclude from their purview all that lies without. And though this exclusion may be a painful and mortificatory process, the fact remains that it is less arduous than the process of inclusion, by which we come to know the fullness as well as the heights of spiritual life. Where there is exclusive concentration on the heights within, temptations and distractions are avoided and there is a general denial and suppression. But when the hope is to know God inclusively – to realise the divine Ground in the world as well as in the soul, temptations and distractions must not be avoided, but submitted to and used as opportunities for advance; there must be no suppression of outward-turning activities, but a transformation of them so that they become sacramental."

The neatness of the commentary cannot be improved upon. Only with regard to the "ironical ring" of which Huxley speaks, it has just to be pointed out, as he himself seems to understand, that the "we" referred to in the phrase does not mean humanity in general that 'splashes about in the lower ooze' but those who have a sufficiently developed inner spiritual life.

There is a quotation from Lao Tzu put under the heading "Grace and Free Will": "It was when the Great Way declined that human kindness and morality arose".

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We fear Mr. Huxley has completely missed the point of the cryptic sentence. He seems to take it as meaning that human kindness and morality are a means to the recovery of the Lost Way-although codes of ethics and deliberate choices are not sufficient in themselves, they are only a second best, yet they mark the rise of self-consciousness and have to be utilised to pass on into the unitive knowledge that is Tao. This explanation or amplification seems to us somewhat confused and irrelevant to the idea expressed in the apophthegm. What is stated here is much simpler and transparent. It is this that when the Divine is absent and the divine Knowledge, then comes in man with his human mental knowledge: it is man's humanity that clouds the Divine and to reach the' Divine one must reject the human values, all the moralities, salva dharmān, seek only the Divine. The lesser way lies through the dualities, good and evil, the Great Way is beyond them and cannot be limited or measured by the relative standards. Especially in the modern age we see the decline and almost the disappearance of the Greater Light and instead a thousand smaller lights are lighted which vainly strive to dispel the gathering darkness. These do not help, they are false lights and men are apt to cling to them, shutting their eyes to the true one which is not that that one worships here and now, nedam yadidam upāsate.

There is a beautiful quotation from the Chinese sage, Wu Ch'êng-ên, regarding the doubtful utility of written Scriptures:

"'Listen to this!' shouted Monkey. 'After all the trouble we had getting here from China, and after you specially ordered that we were to be given the scriptures, Ananda and Kasyapa made a fraudulent delivery of goods. They gave us blank copies to take away; I ask you, what is the good of that to us?' 'You needn't shout,' said the Buddha, smiling. 'As a matter of fact, it is such blank scrolls as these that are the true scriptures. But I quite see that the people of China are too foolish and ignorant to believe this, so there is nothing for it but to give them copies with some writing on.' "

A sage can smile and smile delightfully! The parable illustrates the well-known Biblical phrase, 'the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life'. The monkey is symbolical of the ignorant, arrogant, fussy human mind. There is another Buddhistic

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story about the monkey quoted in the book and it is as delightful; but being somewhat long, we cannot reproduce it here. It tells how the mind-monkey is terribly agile, quick, clever, competent, moving lightning-fast, imagining that it can easily go to the end of the world, to Paradise itself, to Brahmic status. But alas! when he thought he was speeding straight like a rocket or an arrow and arrive right at the target, he found that he was spinning like a top at the same spot, and what he very likely took to be the very fragrance of the topmost supreme heaven was nothing but the aroma of his own urine.

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Goethe

A perfect face amid -barbarian faces,

A perfect voice of sweet and serious rhyme,

Traveller with calm, inimitable paces,

Critic with judgment absolute to all time,

A complete strength when men were maimed and weak,

German obscured the spirit of a Greek.

SRI AUROBINDO

THE year 1949 has just celebrated the 200th anniversary of the birth of the great force of light that was Goethe. We too remember him on the occasion, and will try to present in a few words, as we see it, the fundamental experience, the major Intuition that stirred this human soul, the lesson he brought to mankind. Goethe was a great poet. He showed how a language, perhaps least poetical by nature, can be moulded to embody the great beauty of great poetry. He made the German language sing, even as the sun's ray made the stone of Memnon sing when falling upon it. Goethe was a man of consummate culture. Truly and almost literally it could be said of him that nothing human he considered foreign to his inquiring mind. And Goethe was a man of great wisdom. His observation and judgment on things-no matter to whatever realm they belong-have an arresting appropriateness, a happy and revealing insight. But above all, he was an aspiring soul-aspiring to know and be in touch with the hidden Divinity in man and the world.

GOETHE AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

No problem is so vital to the human consciousness as the problem

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of Evil – its why and wherefore It is verily the Sphinx Riddle. In all ages and in all climes man has tried to answer; the answers are of an immense variety, but none seems to be sure and certain. Goethe's was an ardent soul seeking to embrace the living truth whole and entire; the problem was not merely of philosophical interest to him, but a burning question of life and death – life and death of the body and even of the soul.

One view considers Evil as coeval with Good: the Prince of Evil is God's peer, equal to him in all ways, absolutely separate, independent and self-existent. Light and Darkness are eternal principles living side by side, possessing equal reality. For, although it is permissible to the individual to pass out of the Darkness and enter into Light, the Darkness itself does not disappear: it remains and maintains its domain, and even it is said that some human beings are meant eternally for this domain. That is the Manichean principle and that also is fundamentally the dualistic conception of chit-achit in some Indian systems (although the principle of chit or light is usually given a higher position and priority of excellence).

The Christian too accepts the dual principle, but does not give equal status to the two. Satan is there, an eternal reality: it is anti-God, it seeks to oppose God, frustrate his work. It is the great tempter whose task it is to persuade, to inspire man to remain always an earthly creature and never turn to know or live in God. Now the crucial question that arises is, what is the necessity of this Antagonist in God's scheme of creation? What is the meaning of this struggle and battle? God could have created, if he had chosen, a world without Evil. The orthodox Christi an answer is that in that case one could not have fully appreciated the true value and glory of God's presence. It is to manifest and proclaim the great victory that the strife and combat has been arranged in which Man triumphs in the end and God's work stands vindicated. The place of Satan is always Hell, but he cannot drag down a soul into his pit to hold it there eternally (although according to one doctrine there are or may be certain eternally damned souls).

Goethe carries the process of convergence and even harmony of the two powers a little further and shows that although they are contrary apparently, they are not contradictory

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principles in essence. For, Satan is, after all, God's servant, even a very obedient servant; he is an instrument in the hand of the Almighty to work out His purpose. The purpose is to help and lead man, although in a devious way, towards a greater understanding, a nearer approach to Himself.

THE CHALLENGE AND THE PACT

There is on the earthly stage the play of a challenge, a twofold challenge, one between God and Satan and another, as a consequence, between Man and Satan.

Satan is jealous of man who is God's favourite. He tells God that his partiality to man is misplaced. God has put into man a little of his light (reason and intelligence and something more perhaps), but to what purpose? Man tries to soar, he thinks he flies high and wide, but in fact he is and will be an insect that "lies always in the grass and sings its old song in the grass." God answers that whatever the perplexity in which man now is, in the end he will come out and reach the Light with a greater and richer experience of it. Satan smiles in return and says he will prove otherwise. Given a free hand, he can do whatever he likes with man: "Dust shall he eat and with a relish." God willingly agrees to the challenge: there is no harm in Satan's trying his hand. Indeed, Satan will prove to be a good companion to man; for man is normally prone to inertia and sinks into repose and rest and stagnation. Satan will be the goad, the force that drives towards ceaseless activity. For activity is life, and without activity no progress.

Thus, as sanctioned by God, there is a competition, a wager between man and Satan. The pact between the parties is this that, on the one hand, Satan will serve man here in life upon earth, and on the other hand, in return, man will have to serve Satan there, on the other side of life. That is to say, Satan will give the whole world to man to enjoy, man will have to give Satan only his soul. Man in his ignorance says he does not care for his soul, does not know of a there or elsewhere: he will be satisfied if he gets what he wants upon earth. That, evidently, is the demand of what is familiarly known as life-force (élan vital): the utmost fulfilment of the life-force is what man stands for, although the full significance of the movement

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may not be clear to him or even to Satan at the moment. For life-force does not necessarily drag man down, as its grand finale as it were, into hell – however much Satan might wish it to be so. In what way, we shall see presently. Now Satan promises man all that he would desire and even more: he would give him his fill so' that he will ask for no more. Man takes up the challenge and declares that his hunger is insatiable, whatever Satan can bring to it, it will take in and press on: satisfaction and satiety will never come in his way. Satan thinks he knows better, for he is armed with a master weapon to lay man low and make him cry halt!

LOVE HUMAN AND LOVE DIVINE

Satan proposes to lead man down into hell through a sure means, nothing more sure, according to him, viz., love for a woman and a woman's love in return. Nothing like that to make man earth-bound or hell-bound and force out of him the nostalgic cry, "Time must have a stop." A most simple, primal and primeval ]yric love wil1 most suit Satan's purpose. Hence the Margaret episode. Love=Passion=Lust=Hell; that is the inevitable equation sequence, and through which runs the magic thread of infatuation. And that charm is invincible. Satan did succeed and was within an ace, as they say, of the final and definitive triumph: but that was not to be, for he left out of account an incalculable element. Love, even human love has, at least can have, a wonderful power, the potency of reversing the natural decree and bring about a supernatural intervention. Human love can at a crucial moment – in extremis – call down the Divine Grace, which means God's love for man. And the soul meant for perdition

and about to be seized and carried away by Satan finds itself suddenly free and lifted up and borne by Heaven's messengers. Human Jove is divine love itself in earthly form and figure and whatever its apparent aberrations it is in soul and substance that thing. Satan is hoisted with his own petard. That is God's irony.

But Goethe's Satan seems to know or feel something of his fate. He knows his function and the limit too of his function. He speaks of the doomsday for people, but it is his doomsday also, he says in mystic terms. Yes, it is his doomsday, for it is

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the day of man's 1iberation. Satan has to release man from the pact that stands cancelled. The soul of man cannot be sold, even if he wanted it.

THE COSMIC RHYTHM

The angels weave the symphony that is creation. They represent the various notes and rhythms – in their higher and purer degrees – that make up the grand harmony of the spheres. It is magnificent, this music that moves the cosmos, and wonderful the glory of God manifest therein. But is it absolutely perfect? Is there nowhere any flaw in it? There is a doubting voice that enters a dissenting note. That is Satan, the Antagonist, the Evil One. Man is the weakest link in the chain of the apparently all-perfect harmony. And Satan boldly proposes to snap it if God only let him do so. He can prove to God that the true nature of his creation is not cosmos but chaos not a harmony in peace and light, but a confusion, a Walpurgis Night. God acquiesces in the play of this apparent breach and proves in the end that it is part of a wider scheme, a vaster harmony. Evil is rounded off by Grace.

The total eradication of Evil from the world and human nature and the remoulding of a terrestrial life in the substance and pattern of the Highest Good that is beyond all dualities is a conception which it was not for Goethe to envisage. In the order of reality or existence, first there is the consciousness of division, of trenchant separation in which Good is equated with not-evil and evil with not-good. This is the outlook of

individualised consciousness. Next, as the consciousness grows and envelops the whole existence, good and evil are both embraced and are found to form a secret and magic harmony. That is the universal or cosmic consciousness. And Goethe's genius seems to be an outflowering of something of this status of consciousness. But there is still a higher status, the status of transcendence in which evil is not simply embraced but dissolved and even transmuted into a supreme reality of which it is an aberration, a reflection or projection, a lower formulation. That is the mystery of a spiritual realisation to which Goethe aspired perhaps, but had not the necessary initiation to enter into.

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T. S. Eliot: “Four Quartets"

IN these latest poems of his, Eliot has become outright a poet of the Dark Night of the Soul. The beginnings of the new avatar were already there certainly at the very beginning. The Waste Land is a good preparation and passage into the Night. Only, the negative element in it was stronger – the cynicism, the bleakness, the sereness of it all was almost overwhelming. The next stage was "The Hollow Men": it took us right up to the threshold, into the very entrance. It was gloomy and fore-boding enough, grim and serious – no glint or hint of the silver lining yet within reach. Now as we find ourselves into the very heart of the Night, things appear somewhat changed: we look at the past indeed, but can often turn to the future, feel the pressure of the Night yet sense the Light beyond overarching and embracing us. This is how the poet begins:

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you

Which shall be the darkness of God.¹

and continues

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

but what he adds is characteristic of the new outlook

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

¹ "East Coker"

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But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

Yes, by the force of this secret knowledge he has discovered, this supreme skill i:r:t action, as it is termed in the Eastern lore, I that the poet at last comes out into the open, into the light and happiness of the Dawn and the Day:

Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.

The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,

The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy

Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony

Of death and birth.

It is the song of redemption, of salvation achieved, of Paradise regained. The full story of the purgatory, of man's calvary is beautifully hymned in these exquisite lines of a haunting poetic beauty married to a real mystic sense:

The dove descending breaks the air

With flame of incandescent terror

Of which the tongues declare

The one discharge from sin and error.

The only hope, or else despair

Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre –

To be redeemed from fire by fire.¹

The Divine Love is a greater fire than the low smouldering fire that our secular unregenerate life is. One has to choose and declare his adhesion. Indeed, the stage of conversion, the crucial turn from the ordinary life to the spiritual life Eliot has characterised in a very striking manner. We usually say, sometimes in an outburst of grief, sometimes in a spirit of sudden disgust and renunciation that the world is dark and dismal and lonesome, the only thing to do here is to be done

¹"Little Gidding"

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with it. The true renunciation, that which is deep and abiding, is not, however, so simple a thing, such a short cut. So our poet says, but the world is not dark enough, it is not lonesome enough: the world lives and moves in a superficial half-light, it is neither real death nor real life, it is death in life. It is this miserable mediocrity, the shallow uncertainty of consciousness that spells danger and ruin for the soul. Hence the poet exclaims:

. . . .Not here

Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

Descend lower, descend only

Into the world of perpetual solitude,. . . .

Internal darkness, deprivation

And destitution of all property,

Desiccation of the world of sense,

Evacuation of the world of fancy,

Inoperancy of the world of spirit;¹

Yes, that is the condition demanded, an entire vacuity in which nothing moves. That is the real Dark Night of the Soul. It is then only that the Grace leans down and descends, then only beams in the sweet Light of lights. Eliot has expressed the experience in these lines of rare beauty and sincerity :

Time and the bell have buried the day,

The black cloud carries the sun away.

Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis

Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray Clutch and cling?

Chill

Fingers of yew be curled

Down on us? After the kingfisher's wing

Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still

At the still point of the turning world.²

¹ "Burnt Norton"

² Ibid.

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Eliot's is a very Christian soul, but we must remember at the same time that he is nothing if not modern. And this modernism gives all the warp and woof woven upon that inner core. How is it characterised? First of all, an intellectualism that requires a reasoned and rational synthesis of all experiences. Another poet, a great poet of the soul's Dark Night was, as we all know, Francis Thompson: it was in his case not merely the soul's night, darkness extended even to life, he lived the Dark Night actually and physically. His haunting, weird lines, seize within their grip our brain and mind and very flesh –

My days have crackled and gone up in smoke,¹

or,

Suffered the trampling hoof of every hour

The night's slow-wheel'd car.. . .

But Thompson was not an intellectual, his doubts and despondencies were not of the mental order, he was a boiling, swelling life-surge, a geyser, a volcano. He, too, crossed the Night and saw the light of Day, but in a different way. Well, I he did not march into the day, it was the Day that marched I into him! Yes, the Divine Grace came and seized him from behind with violence. A modern, a modernist consciousness cannot expect that indulgence. God meets him only halfway, he has to work up himself the other half. He has laid so many demands and conditions: the knots in his case are not cut asunder but slowly disengaged.

The modern temper is especially partial to harmony: it cannot assert and reject unilaterally and categorically, it wishes to go round an object and view all its sides; it asks for a synthesis and reconciliation of differences and contraries. Two major chords of life-experience that demand accord are Life and Death, Time and Eternity. Indeed, the problem of Time hangs heavy on the human consciousness. It has touched to the quick philosophers and sages in all ages and climes; it is the great question that confronts the spiritual seeker, the riddle that the Sphinx of life puts to the journeying soul for solution.

¹"The Hound of Heaven"

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A modern Neo-Brahmin, Aldous Huxley, has given a solution of the problem in his now famous Shakespearean apothegm, "Time must have a stop". That is an old-world solution rediscovered by the modern mind in and through the ravages of Time's storm and stress. It means, salvation lies, after all, beyond the flow of Time, one must free oneself from the vicious and unending circle of mortal and mundane life. As the Rajayogi controls and holds his breath, stills all life-movement and realises a dead-stop of consciousness (Samadhi), even so one must control and stop all secular movements in oneself and attain a timeless stillness and vacancy in which alone the true spiritual light and life can descend and manifest. That is the age-long and ancient solution to which the Neo-Brahmin as well the Neo-Christian adheres.

Eliot seems to demur, however, and does not go to that extreme length. He wishes to go beyond, but to find out the source and matrix of the here below. As I said, he seeks a synthesis and not a mere transcendence: the transcendence is indeed a part of the synthesis, the other part is furnished by an immanence. He does not cut away altogether from Time, but reaches its outermost limit, its rim, its summit, where it stops, not altogether annihilated, but held in suspended animation. That is the "still point" to which he refers in the following lines:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.¹

He aims at the neutral point between the positive and the

¹ "Burnt Norton"

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negative poles, which is neither, yet holding the two together – at the crossing of Yes and No, the known and the unknown, the local and the eternal. That is what he means when he says:

Here, the intersection of the timeless moment

Is England and nowhere. Never and always.¹

First, the movement towards transcendence, that is the journey in the Night which you do throwing away one by one all your possessions and burdens till you make yourself bare and naked, you die – but you are reborn a new babe:

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion

Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,

The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning. ²

There must be a beginning, an affirmation. The other side of nature is not merely transcended and excluded, it must be taken up too, given some place, its proper place in the totality, in the higher synthesis:

So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna

On the field of battle.

Not fare wel1,

But fare forward, voyagers.³

That is the lesson that our poet has learnt from the Gita and that is the motto he too would prescribe to the seekers.

Now, a modern poet is modern, because he is doubly attracted and attached to things of this world and this mundane life, in spite of all his need and urge to go beyond for the larger truth and the higher reality. Apart from the natural link with which we are born, there is this other fascination

¹ "Little Gidding"

² "East Coker"

³ "The Dry Salvages"

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which the poor miserable things, all the little superficialities, trivialities especially have for the modern mind in view of their possible sense and significance and right of existence. These too have a magic of their own, not merely a black magic:

..... our losses, the torn seine,

The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar

And the gear of foreign dead men. . . .¹

or even these local names and habitations:

Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,

Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate.² ...

It is true the movement towards transcendence is stronger and apparent in our poet, but the other kindred point-of home and time-is not forgotten. So he says:

History may be servitude,

History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,

The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,

To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.

Sin is Behovely, but

All shall be well, and

All manner of thing shall be well. ³

Nothing can be clearer with regard to the ultimate end the poet has in view. Listen once more to the hymn of the higher reconciliation:

The dance along the artery

The circulation of the lymph

Are figured in the drift of stars

Ascend to summer in the tree

We move above the moving tree

¹ "The Dry Salvages"

²"Burnt Norton"

³ "Little Gidding"

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In light upon the figured leaf

And hear upon the sodden floor

Below, the boarhound and the boar

Pursue their pattern as before

But reconciled among the stars.¹

The Word was made flesh and the Word was made Poetry. To express the supreme Word in life, that is the work of the sage, the Rishi. To express the Word in speech, that is the labour of the Poet. Eliot undertook this double function of the poet and the sage and he found the task difficult. The poet has to utter the unutterable, if he is to clothe in words the mystic experience of the sage in him. That is Eliot's ambition:

.... Words, after speech, reach

Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,

Can words or music reach

The stillness, as a Chinese jar still

Moves perpetually in its stillness. ²

But, alas!

.... Words strain,

Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,...³

And a lower and more facile inspiration tempts the poet and he often speaks with a raucous voice, even as the Arch-tempter sought to lure the Divine Word Jl1ade flesh:

... Shrieking voices

Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,

Always assail them. The Word in the desert

Is most attacked by voices of temptation,4

Our poet is too self-conscious, he himself feels that he has not the perfect voice. A Homer, even a Milton possesses a

unity of tone and a wholeness of perception which are denied

¹ "Burnt Norton"

² Ibid.

³ Ibid.

4 Ibid.

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to the modern. To the modern, however, the old masters are not subtle enough, broad enough, psychological enough, let us say the word, spiritual enough. And yet the poetic inspiration, more than the religious urge, needs the injunction not to be busy with too many things, but to be centred upon the one thing needful, viz., to create poetically and not to discourse philosophically or preach prophetically. Not that it is impossible for the poet to swallow the philosopher and the prophet, metabolising them into the substance of his bone and marrow, of "the trilling wire in his blood", as Eliot graphically expresses. That perhaps is the consummation towards which poetry is tending. But at present, in Eliot, at least, the strands remain distinct, each with its own temper and rhythm, not fused and moulded into a single streamlined form of beauty. Our poet flies high, very high indeed at times, often or oftner he flies low, not disdaining the perilous limit of bathos. Perhaps it is all wilful, it is a mannerism which he cherishes. The mannerism may explain his psychology and enshrine his philosophy. But the poet, the magician is to be looked for elsewhere. In the present collection of poems it is the philosophical, exegetical, discursive Eliot who dominates: although the high lights of the subject-matter may be its justification. Still even if we have here doldrums. like

That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence –

Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution, Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.¹

we have also high flights like the lines I have already quoted:

Time and the bell have buried the day,

The black cloud carries the sun away.. . .

which make one wish to have more of the kind. Perhaps his previous works contained lines more memorable, for example, those justly famous

¹ "The Dry Salvages"

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Eyes I dare not meet in dreams

In death's dream kingdom

These do not appear:

There, the eyes are

Sunlight on a broken column. . . .¹

Here the poet is almost grimly tense, concentrated and has not allowed himself to be dissipated by thinkings and arguments, has confined himself wholly to a living experience. That is because the poet has since then moved up and sought a more rarefied air, a more even and smooth temper. The utter and absolute poetic ring of the Inferno is difficult to maintain in the Paradiso, unless and until the poet transforms himself wholly into the Rishi, like the poet of the Gita or the Upanishads.

¹“The Hollow Men”

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Nicholas Roerich

Ex oriente lux. Out of the East the Light, and that light is of the nature and substance of beauty, of creative and dynamic beauty in the life the spirit. This, I suppose, is Roerich's message in a nutshell. The Light of the East is always the light of the “ample consciousness” that dwells on the heights of our being in God.

The call that stirred a Western soul, made him a wanderer over the world in quest of the Holy Grail and finally lodged him in the Home of the Snows is symbolic of a more than individual destiny. It is representative of the secret history of a whole culture and civilisation that have been ruling humanity for some centuries, its inner want and need and hankering – and fulfilment. The West shall come to the East and be reborn. That is the prophecy of occult seers and sages.

I speak of Roerich as a Western soul, but more precisely perhaps he is a soul of the mid-region (as also in another sense we shall see subsequently) intermediary between the East and the West. His external make-up had all the characteristic elements of the Western culture, but his mind and temperament, his inner soul was oriental. And yet it was not the calm luminous static – ancient – soul that an Indian or a Chinese sage is; it is a nomad soul, newly awakened, young and fresh and ardent, something primitive, pulsating with the unspoilt green sap of life – something in the manner of Whitman. And that makes him all the more representative of the young and ardent West yearning for the light that was never on sea or land.

Is it not strange that one should look to the East for the light? There is a light indeed that dwells in the setting suns, but that is the inferior light, the light that moves level with the

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earth, pins us down to the normal and ordinary life and con­sciousness: it" leads into the Night, into Nihil, pralaya. It is the light of the morning sun that man looks up to in his forward march, the sun that rises in the East whom the Vedic Rishi invoked in these magnificent lines:

Lo, the supreme light of all lights is come, a vast and varied consciousness is born in us. . . .

It is not a mere notion or superstition, it is an occult reality that gives sanctity to a particular place or region. The saintly soul has always been also a pilgrim, physically, to holy places, even to one single holy place, if he so chooses. The puritan poet may say tauntingly:

Here pilgrims roam, that strayed so far to seek In Golgotha him dead who lives in heaven –

the pilgrim soul of Roerich declares with but equal vehemence and assurance:

All teachers journeyed to the mountains. The higher knowledge, the most inspired songs, the most superb sounds and colours are created in the mountains. On the highest mountains there is the Supreme: the highest mountains stand as witnesses of Great Reality.

Indeed, Roerich considers the Himalayas as the very abode, the tabernacle itself – the sanctum sanctorum – of the Spirit, the Light Divine. Many of Roerich's paintings have mountain ranges, especially snow-bound mountain ranges, as their theme. There is a strange kinship between this yearning artistic soul, which seems solitary in spite of its ardent humanism, and the silent heights, rising white tier upon tier reflecting prismlike the fiery glowing colours, the vast horizons, the wide vistas vanishing beyond.

Roerich is one of the prophets and seers who have ever been acclaiming and preparing the Golden Age, the dream that humanity has been dreaming continuously since its very childhood, that is to say, when there will be peace and harmony on

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earth, when racial, cultural or ideological egoism will no longer divide man and man – a thing that seems today a chimera and a hallucination – when there will be one culture, one civilisation, one spiritual life welding all humanity into a single unit of life luminous and beautiful. Roerich believes that such a consummation can arrive only or chiefly through the growth of the sense of beauty, of the aesthetic temperament, of creative labour leading to a wider and higher consciousness. Beauty, Harmony, Light, Knowledge, Culture, Love, Delight are cardinal terms in his vision of the deeper and higher life of the future.

The stress of the inner urge to the heights and depths of spiritual values and realities found special and significant expression in his paintings. It is a difficult problem, a problem which artists and poets are tackling today with all their skill and talent. Man's consciousness is no longer satisfied with the customary and the ordinary actions and reactions of life (or thought), with the old-world and time-worn modes and manners. It is no more turned to the apparent and the obvious, to the surface forms and movements of things. It yearns to look behind and beyond, for the secret mechanism, the hidden agency that really drives things. Poets and artists are the vanguards of the age to come, prophets and pioneers preparing the way for the Lord.

Roerich discovered and elaborated his own technique to reveal that which is secret, express that which is not expressed or expressible. First of all, he is symbolical and allegorical: secondly, the choice of his symbols and allegories is hieratic, that is to say, the subject-matter refers to objects and events connected with saints and legends, shrines and enchanted places, hidden treasures, spirits and angels, etc. etc.; thirdly, the manner or style of execution is what we may term pantomimic, in other words, concrete, graphic, dramatic, even melodramatic. He has a special predilection for geometrical patterns the artistic effect of which – balance, regularity, fixity, solidity – was greatly utilised by the French painter Cézanne and poet Mallarmé who seem to have influenced Roerich to a considerable degree. But this Northerner had not the reticence, the suavity, the tonic unity of the classicist, nor the normality and clarity of the Latin temperament. The prophet, the priest

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in him was the stronger element and made use of the artist as the rites and ceremonies – mudras and chakras – of his vocation demanded. Indeed, he stands as the hierophant of a new cultural religion and his paintings and utterances are, as it were, gestures that accompany a holy ceremonial.

A Russian artist (Monsieur Benois) has stressed upon the primitive-almost aboriginal-element in Roerich and was not happy over it. Well, as has been pointed out by other prophets and thinkers, man today happens to be so sophisticated, artificial, material, cerebral that a [all-back seems to be necessary for him to take a new leap forward on to a higher ground. The pure aesthete is a closed system, with a consciousness immured in an ivory tower; but man is something more. A curious paradox. Man can reach the highest, realise the integral truth when he takes his leap, not from the relatively higher levels of his consciousness – his intellectual and aesthetic and even moral status – but when he can do so from his lower levels, when the physico-vital element in him serves as the springing-board. The decent and the beautiful-the classic grace and aristocracy – form one aspect of man, the aspect of "light"; but the aspect of energy and power lies precisely in him where the aboriginal and the barbarian find also a lodging. Man as a mental being is naturally sattwic, but prone to passivity and weakness; his physico-vital reactions, on the other hand, are obscure and crude, simple and vehement, but they have life and energy and creative power, they are there to be trained and transfigured, made effective instruments of a higher illumination.

All elemental personalities have something of the unconventional and irrational in them. And Roerich is one such in his own way. The truths and realities that he envisages and seeks to realise on earth are elemental and fundamental, although apparently simple and commonplace.

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Rishi Dirghatama

MANY of the Upanishadic rishis are familiar to you. Vedic rishis are perhaps not so.

Today I will speak of one of the Vedic rishis. Some names of great Vedic rishis must have reached your ears-Vashishtha, Vishwamitra, Atri, Parasara, Kanwa (I do not know if it is the same Kanwa of whom Kalidasa speaks in his Shakuntala), Madhuchchanda. All of them are seers of mantra, hearers of mantra, creators of mantra; all of them occupy a large place in the Veda. Each one of them has his speciality, each one delivers a mantra that is in its tone, temper and style his own although the subject matter, the substance, the fundamental realisation is everywhere the same. For example, Vashishtha is characterised by a happy clarity, Vishwamitra has force and energy, Kutsa is sweetness, Dirghatama is well known for his oblique utterances, his paradoxical apopthegms.¹

Today precisely it is of Dirghatama that we will speak. Dirghatama does not mean as the word would indicate to the layman, one who is very tall – śālaprāmśurmahābhujah in Kalidasa's phrase. Tama is not the superlative suffix (most), it is tamas, darkness. So, from the name itself one may naturally expect that the person was not of an ordinary category. Indeed the amount of stories and legends that have been woven around the name is fantastic-queer, odd, unbelievable, impossible in every way. I need not open that chapter.

I shall speak only of what seems to me probable and believable and likely and it must be this that he passed a long time

¹ Sri Aurobindo says: "In the deep and mystic style of the Dirghatamas Auchathya as in the melodious lucidity of Medhatithi Kanwa, in the puissant and energetic hymns of Vishwamitra as in Vashishtha's even harmonies we have the same firm foundation of knowledge and the same scrupulous adherence to the sacred conventions of the Initiates."

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in darkness, engulfed in obscurity. The legend says that he was in his mother's womb long past the due time and it seems it was of his own will. His mother's name was Mamata and his father was Uchathya. When he came out of the darkness and saw the light, it was a light strangely glimmering with all the vibrations of the long obscurity to which he had been accustomed. It was indeed the Light beyond the confines of all darkness, nescience, and yet carrying a mystic imprint of the mysteries of darkness. So he started his quest with this questioning:

I am an innocent babe, my ignorant mind knows nothing, who will tell me of the secret seats of the Godheads?¹

Indeed the darkness and the blindness seem to have been the Divine's grace upon him, for his eyes turned inward to other domains and saw strange truths and stranger facts. We remember in this connection another blind old poet who even though fallen on such evil days composed the world famous epic poem (I am referring obviously to Milton and his Paradise Lost). We remember also here the deaf incomparable master of music Beethoven. Many of the sayings of Dirghatama have become so current that they are now familiar even to the common man. They are mottoes and proverbs we all quote at all times. "Truth is one, the wise call it in different ways" – the mantra is from Dirghatama. "Heaven is my father, Earth my mother" – this is also from Dirghatama. The famous figure of two birds with beautiful wing5 dwelling on the same tree comes also from Dirghatama. There are a good many sayings of this kind that have become intimate companions to our lips of which the source we do not know. When we read the mantras of Dirghatama we are likely to exclaim even as the villager did when he first saw Hamlet played in London, "It is full of quotations."

You must have already noticed that the utterance of Dirghatama carries a peculiar turn, even perhaps a twist. In fact his mantras are an enigma, a riddle to which it is sometimes difficult to find the fitting key. For example when he says, "What is above is moving downward and what is down is

¹ Rig Veda, 1. 164.5.

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moving upward; yes, they who are below are indeed up above, and they who are up are here below," or again, "He who knows the father below by what is above, and he who knows the father who is above by what is below is called the poet (the seer creator)", we are, to say the least, not a little puzzled.

The old delightful rishi – to use the epithets he gives to his Agni – and blind into the bargain, continues, the substance and manner in the same way paradoxical and enigmatic, perhaps deliberately tantalising and confusing:

Those who are called feminine are masculine, yes, only they who have eyes can see, the blind do not know.

The son is the seer-poet, he knows and he alone knows these things who is the father of the father.¹

Then again look at this picture almost surrealistic in its boldness:

The cow gazing upward holds with her front legs the hind legs of her calf and the calf with its front legs holds the hind legs of its mother.²

Needless to say these are signs and symbols and figures of a language seeking to express truths and realities of an invisible world, spiritual and occult. We are reminded of the "twilight" language of the poet-saints (Siddhacharyas) of Bengal of much later days.

There is no end to the problems that face Dirghatama with his almost tormented mind. Listen once more to this riddle:

Even he who has created this does not know it.

Even to him who has seen it, it remains veiled. One who is shrouded in his mother's womb with his many progenies has entered into untruth.³

Here are some more of his aspirations, the questions that trouble him, the riddles whose solution he needs most. He calls upon the world and asks:

¹ Rig Veda, 1. 164.16.

² Ibid., I. 164.17.

³ Ibid., 1. 164.32.

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Tell me where is the end of this earth? Tell me where is the nodus of this universe? Tell me what is the meaning of the energy-flow from the energetic steed?

Tell me again what is the word that is in the highest spaces?¹

To these abstruse questions he himself gives, I am afraid, abstruse answers:

This sacrificial altar is the extreme end of the earth, this sacrifice is the nodus of the universe, and this nectar of immortality (Soma) is the energy-flow of the steed and this Brahman is the Word in the supreme heaven.²

As are the questions so are the answers, equally enigmatic and obscure.

About the Word, the mystery which Dirghatama unveils is an extraordinary revelation – so curious, so illuminating. In later times many lines of spiritual discipline have adopted his scheme and spread it far and wide. Dirghatama himself was an uncommon wizard of words. The truths he saw and clothed in mantras have attained, as I have already said, general celebrity. He says: "The Word is of four categories. It has four stations or levels or gradations." The Rishi continues: "Three of them are unmanifested, unbodied; only the fourth one is manifest and bodied, on the tongue of man." This terminology embodying a fundamental principle has had many commentaries and explanations. Of these the most well-known is that given by the Tantras. They have named the fourfold words as (1) parā, supreme; (2) paśyantī, the seeing one; (3) madhyamā, the middle one or the one within and (4) vaikharī, the articulate word. In modern language we may say that the first one is the self-vibration of the Supreme Being or Consciousness; the second is the vibration of the higher-mind or the pure intelligence; the third is the vibration of the inner heart; and the fourth the vibration of physical sound, of voice. In philosophical terms of current English we may name these as (1) revelatory, (2) intuitive, (3) inspirational and (4) vocal.

Now in conclusion I will just speak of the fundamental

¹ Rig Veda, 1. 164.34.

² Ibid., 1. 164.35.

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vision of the rishi. His entire realisation, the whole Veda of his life, he has, it appears, pressed into one single rk. We have heard it said that the entire range of all scriptures is epitomised in the Gita and the Gita' itself is epitomised in one sloka – sarvadharmān parityajya ... Even so we may say that Rishi Dirghatama has summarised his experience, at least the fundamental basic one, and put it into a sulfa. It is the famous rk with which he opens his long hymn to Surya:

Lo, this delightful ancient Priest and Summoner; he has a second brother who is the devourer. There is a third brother with a dazzling luminous facet – there I saw the Master of the worlds along with his seven sons.¹

This is again a sphinx puzzle indeed. But what is the meaning? The universe, the creation has its fundamental truth in a Trinity: Agni (the Fire-god) upon earth, Vayu (the Wind-god) in the middle regions and in heaven the Sun. In other words, breaking up the symbolism we may say that the creation is a triple reality, three principles constitute its nature. Matter, Life and Consciousness or status, motion and Light. This triplicity however does not exhaust the whole of the mystery. For the ultimate mystery is imbedded within the heart of the third brother, for our rishis saw there the Universal Divine Being and his seven sons. In our familiar language we may say it is the Supreme Being, God himself (Purushottama) and his seven lines of self-manifestation. We have often heard of the seven worlds or levels of being and consciousness, the seven chords of the Divine Music. In more familiar terms we say that body and life and mind form the lower half of the cosmic reality and its upper half consists of Sat-Chit-Ananda (or Satya- Tap as-Jana). And the link, the nodus that joins the two spheres is the fourth principle (Turya), the Supermind, Vijnana. Such is the vision of Rishi Dirghatama, its fundamental truth in a nutshell. To know this mystery is the whole knowledge and knowing this, one need know nothing else.

A word is perhaps necessary to complete the sense of the commentary. Agni has been called old and ancient (Palita), but why? Agni is the first among the gods. He has come down

¹ Rig Veda, I. 164.1.

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upon earth, entered into matter with the very creation of the material existence. He is the secret energy hidden in the atom which is attracting, invoking all the other gods to manifest themselves. It is he who drives the material consciousness in its evolutionary re-course upward towards the radiant fullness in the solar Supra-Consciousness at the summit. He is however not only energy, he is also delight (vāma). For he is the Soma, the nectarous flow, occult in the Earth's body. For Earth is the storehouse of the sap of Life, the source of the delightful growths of Life here below.

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The Shakespearean Word

Two Sonnets of Shakespeare

ON the occasion of the 400th birth anniversary of Shakespeare, I present to you today two of the great Shakespearean sonnets. The sonnets, as you know, are all about love. They are however characterised by an incredible intensity and perhaps an equally incredible complexity, for the Shakespearean feeling is of that category.

Shakespeare has treated love in a novel way; he has given a new figure to that common familiar sentiment. And incidentally he has given a new sense and bearing to Death. From a human carnal base there is a struggle, an effort here to rise into something extracorporeal; that is, something outside and independent of the body and impersonal. The sense of the first sonnet is this: the body decays and dies, even as bleak winter seizes upon the beauties of Nature or black Night swallows up the light of the day. But love lingers still – as the song of sweet birds – and the dying cadence of love curiously invokes and evokes a resurgent love in the beloved. The second sonnet hymns the soul's conquest over Death. The soul is that which is sinless in the sinful, it is the pure, the unsullied – the immortal love – in this filth and dirt of a mortal body with its crude passions. Death eats away the body, but in this way the soul grows and eats away Death. This is the final epiphany, the death of Death and the resurgence of the soul divine in its love divine.

Sonnet 73

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When'yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

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Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin'd choirs where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou seest the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west,

Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.

In me thou seest the glowing of such fire

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the death-bed whereon it must expire,

Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.

This thou perceiv'st which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Sonnet 146

Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,

[Fool'd by] these rebel pow'rs that thee array,

Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,

Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?

Why so large cost, having so short a lease,

Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?

Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,

Eat up thy charge? is this thy body's end?

Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant's loss,

And let that pine to aggravate thy store;

Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;

Within be fed, without be rich no more.

So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,

And, Death once dead, there's no more dying then.

The Shakespearean conclusion 'And Death once dead, there's no more dying then' resounds in our ears like an echo of the famous lines of Sri Aurobindo in Savitri –

Even there shall come as a high crown of all

The end of Death, the death of Ignorance.

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Robert Graves

ROBERT GRAVES is not a major poet, and certainly not a great poet. He is a minor poet. But in spite of his minor rank he is a good poet: here he presents up a jewel, a beautiful poem¹ both in form and substance. He has indeed succeeded, as we shall see, in removing the veil, the mystic golden lid, partially at least and revealed to our mortal vision a glimpse of light and beauty and truth, made them delightfully sink into and seep through our aesthetic sense.

Like the poet his idol also is of a lower rank or of a plebeian status. He keeps away from such high gods as Indra and Agni and Varuna and Mitra: great poets will sing their praises. He will take care of the lesser ones, those who are moving in the shadow of the great ones and are hardly noticed. Even in these modern days, goddess Shitala, the healing goddess of epidemics, lives side by side with Durga.

But really it does not matter if the deity is small. For, if the worship is sincere and the offering pure, they ultimately reach the Divine. Did not Sri Krishna say in the Gita that whom-soever you may worship and in whatever way, that in the end' reaches him? The importance and significance of worship do not depend upon their size and scale: a little water, a leaf, a flower may more than do.

The small gods are small, but do not slight them – they are powerful. They are powerful because they are deities of the earth. In fact, like gods and goddesses in heaven, there are gods and goddesses on earth also. The gods in heaven are high and far away, but these unobtrusive deities are near to our hearth and home. The Greeks referred to the Olympian gods, of high caste and rank as it were, – like Jupiter and Apollo –

¹ "The Ambrosia of Dionysus and Semele" in New Poems 1962 (Cassel-London).

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and to those others who dwelt on the lowly earth and embraced its water and land, its rivers and trees and fields – the nymph, the satyr, and Pan and dryad and naiad. What are the powers and functions of these unearthly beings? They on their part are guarding the gate to heaven, questioning the pilgrim of their divine destination. Well, the sentinels have to be appeased first, satisfied and convinced. Surely the sands burn hotter than the sun!

We may ask in this connection which deity does our poet invoke here, to whom does he raise his offerings, to whom– kasmai devāya? One need not be startled at the answer: it is the toadstool. But the mushroom growth assumes a respectable figure in the guise of its Sanskrit name, chatraka. Kalidasa did one better. His magic touch gave the insignificant flora a luminous robe – śilīndhra, a charming name. The great poet tells us that the earth is not barren or sterile – kartum yat ca mahīmucchilīndhrāmabandhyām. The next pertinent question is: why does the poet worship a toadstool? What is his purpose? Does a toadstool possess any special power? This leads us to a hidden world, to the 'mysteries' spoken of by the poet himself.

In ancient days and in some spiritual practice and discipline this fungus had a special use for a definite purpose. Its use produces on one a drowsy effect, perhaps a strong and poisonous intoxicating effect. What is the final result of this drugging? We know that in our country among the sadhus and some sects practising occult science, taking of certain herbal drugs is recommended, even obligatory. Today Aldous Huxley has taken up the cue, in the most modern fashion indeed, and prescribed mescalin in the process of Yoga and spiritual practice. Did the Vedic Rishis see in the same way a usefulness of Soma, the proverbial creeper secreting the immortal drink of delight? However, the Tantrik sadhaks hold that particular soporifics possess the virtue of quieting the external senses and dulling and deadening the sense organs, and thereby freeing the inner and subtler consciousness in its play and manifestation.

Our poet too is saying something in the same line. He is appealing to the toadstool god to give him the right vision, to take him to the other shore, to lead him to the presence of the gods in heaven. Because he is the divine food, its self, the ambrosia. Not only that: by taking this ambrosia one enjoys, even

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while in the physical body, existence in heaven, ihaiva tairjitam, as the Upanishad said.

That he may pass me through when my star falls

Who have ambrosia eaten, and yet live.

Life extinguishes when the star falls, yet the truer, and another life awaits to be lived.

How does Graves invoke his god? Let us have a complete view of his mantra.

He begins by speaking of the birth of the gods. Well, a small truth needs to be revealed at this point. We have spoken of he lesser and smaller gods. These small gods are shielded and supported, in fact, by the big gods. This Shilindhra or toadstool has behind him Dionysus, the delight and loveliness and enjoyment and youth – a veritable symbol of ecstasy, of earthly ecstasy. That which is nectar in heaven is presented on earth in drugs and herbal juices. Shilindhra and ambrosia pertain to the same class.

The birth of Shilindhra resembles the birth of Dionysus. When King Zeus took the form of thunder and lightning and entered the womb of Semele, Dionysus was born. Similar is the story of the appearance of the toadstool, in the midst of rain and thunder and lightning and on the lap of mother earth. We have already said that there are two categories of gods or two types of them – one belongs to heaven and the other to earth. The Vedic Rishis announced that heaven was our father and earth the mother – daurme pitā mātā prthvimahīyam. The Vedantins usually and mainly worship the father, and Tantriks, the mother. Svarga, Dyaus, is the world of light, and earth or bhu is that of delight and enjoyment. We have already said that high above, up there, dwell Apollo and Zeus and Juno, and below here on earth, Dionysus and Bacchus and Semele and Aphrodite.

However the poet says that as the toadstool is born in the midst of thunder and lightning, his strength and capacity are of the nature of thunder – enduring and hard and powerful. Born thus it spreads everywhere and lasts through all time. From the beginning of creation this god has sprouted up everywhere, as giver of pleasure and ecstasy and intoxication. To

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worship him is to worship earth, to worship Dionysus himself. But one needs to worship this god in the right way, to give oneself away wholly to him. Once upon a time the demons for some selfish interest wanted to capture and imprison him. The result was disastrous – he thought of depriving them of their power of movement and drowning them into the ocean. On the contrary, to the devoted which world does he reveal, which delight bring? Let us listen to the poet:

Lead us with your song, tall Queen of earth!

Twinned to the god, I follow comradely

Through a first rainbow-limbo, webbed in white,

Through chill Tyrrhenian grottoes, under water,

Where dolphins wallow between marble rocks,

Through sword-bright jungles, tangles of unease, Through halls of fear ceilinged with incubi,

Through blazing treasure-chambers walled with garnet,

Through domes pillared with naked Caryatids

Then mount at last on wings into pure air,

Peering down with regal eye upon

Five-fruited orchards of Elysium,¹

Let us not be too curious to know the name of the five fruits whose taste brings an immortal delight, but do we not relish already a foretaste of its sweetness in these lines:

And still she drowsily chants

Gentle her voice, her notes come linked together

In intricate golden chains paid out

Slowly across brocaded cramoisy,

Or unfold like leaves from the jade-green shoot

Of a rising bush whose blossoms are her tears. . .

O, whenever she pauses, my heart quails

Until the sound renews.²

Here in this connection one is naturally reminded of Sri Aurobindo's The Other Earths. The poem reveals other earths

¹ "The Ambrosia of Dionysus and Semele".

² Ibid.

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like this earth of ours as reflections or projections or prototypes: like the concretely visible earth here, they too are equally beautiful, with million colours and shades. We are blind and cannot see them. But when we learn to see with the eye of our eye there appear clear before us

Calm faces of the Gods on background vast

Bringing the marvel of the infinitudes,

Through glimmering veils of wonder and delight

World after world bursts on the awakened sight.

Of course, in Sri Aurobindo we reach the inner and higher world through a luminous path, through worlds of light, ranging one upon another. It is a journey through pure air and clear light. Conversely the poet of the toadstool leads one by the passage of an acid drunkenness and a half-conscious drowse. If the goal here is a delight and a freedom they are arrived at after traversing a purgatory or undergoing a troubled purification. But this too leads verily to a world of the gods.

This "little slender lad, whose flesh is bitter, lightning engendered, born from dungs of mares" is perhaps a symbol of our human receptacle. We have to carry this mortal frame with its clay feet and make the effort towards self-transcendence: the alchemy's other name is self-purification and self-perfection. This tender shoot is a mysterious chemical storehouse, its fermentation and purification and use awaken in us the sleeping divine will, give a clear vision, guide us through the secret worlds and ultimately to the home of Immortality. The Vedic Rishis sang to the Soma creeper or god Soma, Tatra mām. amrtam krdhi, O Somadeva, carry us where thou flowest down and there make us immortal. For there abound all delight, all ecstasy, all enjoyment, all lure and the supreme Desire of desire – ānanda, moda, mud, pramud, kāma¹ – are these not the five fruits of heaven the poet of the West mentions?

¹ Yatrānandāśca modāśca mudah pramuda āsate kāmasya yatrāptāh kāmā – Rig Veda, IX. 113.11.

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George Seftris

SEFERIS is a poet of sighs. I do not know the cadence, the breath of the original Greek rhythm. But if something of that tone and temper has been carried over into English, what can be more like a heave of sigh than –

Stoop down, if you can, to the dark sea, forgetting

The sound of a flute played to naked feet

That tread your sleep in the other life, the submerged one.¹

It is the Virgilian "tears of things" – lacrimae rerum – the same that moved the muse of the ancient Roman poet, moves the modern Greek poet.

Seferis' poetry sobs – explicit or muffled – muttering or murmuring like a refrain – a mantra:

Oh the pity of it all!

What else is it, I repeat, but sobbing:

I look for my old house,

The house with the tall windows Darkened by the ivy,

And for that ancient column The landmark of the sailor. How can I get into this hutch?2

.......................................................

We are reminded of Jeanne d'Arc, the little maid who

¹ "Santorin" a – Gymnopaedia, in Poems, by George Seferis translated from the Greek by Rex Warner (The Bodley Head, London).

² "The Return of the Exile", From Log Book I.

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melted with great pity (grande pitié) at the sight of the misery _ll around, ravaging her sweet France like a pest and which drove her in the end to a more than classical tragic end: Seferis too in the same manner wails

Great pain had fallen on Greece.!

Great pain, ruin everywhere... Greece is but a sign, a symbol of the whole earth, the whole humanity. All around ancient – sempiternal – ruins...

.......walls, streets and houses there stood out,

Fossilised muscles of Cyclopean giants,

Spent power in its anatomy,.. .²

As if these were not sufficient, we must add new ones, fresh and bleeding-and not only material but moral ruins also– the dreadful results of our inhuman cruelties of war:

When you look round and you find

All about you swathes of feet

All about you dead hands

All about you darkened eyes;

When there is no longer any choice

Of the death you wanted as your own,

Listening to a great cry,

Even to a wolf that yells – "³

Indeed a great cry shoots out of your heart; an indescribable pity, the upsurge of a divine Pietà, seizes upon your being

and you are another person, you become a poet, a prophet, a God's warrior. Seferis too became in this way a poet and something of a prophet.

His poetry fulfils perfectly the function of the tragic drama, in the Aristotelian way – purification by evoking terror and pity – evoking terror, for example in these lines:

¹ "Helen", From Log Book III.

² "Engoroi", Ibid.

³ "Santodn".

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On our left the south wind blows and drives us mad,

This wind that bares bone, striping off the flesh.¹

Or the whole story of diabolical cruelty, the "Three Mules" , with these tremendous lines:

...those jolting breasts

Ripe as pomegranates with murder. . .²

This is terror, in excelsis. As for pity-his lines on Greece:

Great pain had fallen on Greece.

So many bodies thrown

To jaws of the sea, to jaws of the earth;

So many souls

Given up to the mill-stones to be crushed like corn.

And the muddy beds of the rivers sweated with blood. . .³

or

O nightingale, nightingale,

What is god? What is not god? What is in-between?4

Or this truly pitiful invocation:

But they have eyes all white without eyelashes

And their arms are thin as reeds.

¹ "South Wind", Mythistorema.

² "Three Mules", From Log Book III.

I quote here the whole passage in Warner's translation:

"The glorious animal of Queen Eleanor.

Against her belly those eperons of gold,

On her saddle those insatiable loins,

In her amble tottering those breasts

Bursting like pomegranates, with murder.

And when Neapolitans, Genoese and Lombards

Brought to the royal table on a silver tray

The shirt all bloody of the murdered King

And made away with his pitiable brother,

I can imagine how she neighed that night, –

Something beyond the impassivity of her race –

Like the howling of a dog,

Doubly caparisoned, golden-rump ed, in the stable,

Margarita, that mule."

³ "Helen".

4 Ibid.]

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Lord, not with these. I have known

The voice of children at dawn

Running on green hillsides

Happily coloured, like the bees

And like the butterflies.

Lord, not with these, their voice

Cannot even leave their mouths.

It stays there glued on yellow teeth.¹

But as I have said terror and pity are invoked not for themselves but for the sake of purification. They serve to wash and cleanse the troubled sentiments and bring in a purer clearer atmosphere. When we have passed through those heavy and cruel feelings, we arrive at a kindlier note. Thus,

Then I heard footsteps upon the pebbles

I saw no faces. They had gone when I turned my head.

Still that voice heavy upon me like the treading of cattle

Stayed in the pulses of the sky and in the sea's roll

Over upon the shingle again and again:²

Or this superb picture of the Holy Ascension:

Suddenly I was walking and not walking.

I looked at the flying birds: they had turned to stone.

I looked at the shining sky: there was amazement in the air

I looked at the struggling bodies: they stood still.

And in their midst was a face ascending into the light.

Over the neck the black hair flowed, the eyebrows

Had the beat of a swallow's wing, the nostrils

Curved back over the lips, and now the body

Was rising out of the labour, naked, with the unripe breasts

Of a virgin, Leader of Ways;

A dancing but no movement.³

Indeed, this is beauty cleansed and translucent, a beauty of the eternal Ionian sky. How limpid and serene, yet pulsating with a coursing life is this pastoral:

¹ "Postscript", From Log Book II.

² "Salamis in Cyprus", From Log Book III.

³ "Engomi", Ibid.

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In the sky the clouds were ringlets; here and there

A trumpet of gold and rose: the approaching dusk.

In the scanty grass and among the thorns there roamed

Thin breaths that follow the rain; it must have been raining

Over there at the edge of the hills that now took on colour.¹

Yet was he a Christian in mood or feeling or faith in the wake of his friend and comrade, kindred in spirit and in manner, the English poet T. S. Eliot? There was a difference between the two and Seferis himself gave expression to it. The English poet after all was an escapist: he escaped, that is to say, in, his consciousness, into the monastery, the religious or spiritual sedative – opium? Seferis speaks approvingly of a poet of his country, alike in spirit, who declared that he was no reformer in this sad world,² he let things happen, he was satisfied with being a witness, seeing nature unroll her inexhaustible beauty. Eliot's was more or less a moral revulsion whereas the Greek poet was moved rather by an aesthetic repulsion from the uglinesses of life. It was almost a physical reaction.

This reaction led him not to escape the reality but to detach himself and rise to heights from where he could see a clearer beauty in earthly things. He says:

Just a little more

And we shall see the almond trees in blossom

The marbles shining in the sun

The sea, the curling waves.

Just a little more

Let us rise just a little higher.³

Nor was he, we may now observe, a pagan, a secular aesthete. He has himself risen enough to glimpse and name his soul. It was not perhaps as clear a sight as that of Eliot that had a

¹ "Engomi".

² This is what exactly Seferis says about this "old man" of Greece.

"He has no inclination to reform. On the contrary, he has an obvious loathing for any reformer. He writes as though he were telling us: if men are such as they are, let them go where they deserve to be. It is not my business to correct them."

– Poetry (Chicago), October 1964.

³"Just a little more", Mythistorema.

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touch of the Upanishadic assurance. Still the sense of an im­mortal thing unrepressed by mortalities came to him, in an authentic manner. For such is his final vision:

And those bodies

Created from a land unknown to them

Have their own souls.

Now they assemble tools to change these souls.

It will not be possible. They will only undo them,

If souls can be undone.¹

Neither wholly an earthbound poet nor clearly an other­worldly prophet his question still remains:

What is god? What is not god? What is in-between?

Seferis is a being of this in-between world, his consciousness a golden seam joining two hemispheres.

¹“Salamis in Cyprus.”

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Two mystic Poems in modern French

Here is the first poem, I give only the text, followed by an explanatory paraphrase.

(1)

CHANSON DES ÉTAGES

II fait jour chez la reine.

C' est la nuit prés du roi

Déjà chante la reine.

A peine dart Ie roi.

Les ombres qui I' enchaîtnent,

Une à une, illes voit.

Le regard de la reine

Ne sy attache pas.

Le destin qui les mène,

Dont frissonne Ie roi,

Ne trouble point la reine.

Brillent la mer au bas,

Et, rythme de ses veines,

CelIe qui la brûla,

sœur de la vague même.

Ô minutes sereines,

Vous n'êtes plus au roi!

Le souvenir d'un chêne

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Sur son front de souci

Pose une tache claire.

C' est dans une autre vie,

Quand s'éveillait la reine

Contre Ie CrEur du roi.

Ah! ferme ton palais

Ou monte en ses étages,

Timide souverain.

Tu comprendras pourquoi

Sur un rocher sauvage

Le reine appuie son sein.

Tu comprendras pourquoi,

Et t' en consoleras.¹

RENE CHAR

EXPLANATORY PARAPHRASE

The queen upstairs is the higher consciousness. The king downstairs is the egoistic being in the lower consciousness. While it is dawn and daylight with the queen, it is night with the king - he is just entering into sleep. The king sees dark 'Shadows closing him in, binding him down - bonds of ignorance imprisoning him in the ordinary life and consciousness. The queen, the higher power, is free of all that.

Both are being led towards a high divine destiny. But the ego-being is frightened, while the higher consciousness has no worry. And yet the lower consciousness is aflame; for its veins are flowing with a secret fire which its own sister has kindled in it. Ignorance harbours within its bosom a secret knowledge that is a reflection of the higher consciousness.

There are tranquil moments in the lower eternity that come from on high, from the queen. They do not belong to the king.

At such moments a memory comes of a divine tree, the tree of immortal life, and imprints a white seal upon the king's tormented brow. The king feels it is another life, feels the queen awake by his side.

To have the queen always by his side the king must close

¹ Poetry, Volume 104, No 5, August 1964.

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the doors and windows of the lower storey of his palace and climb the stairs upward.

The king must shed all fear. There will be no palace to live in but a bare rock upon which he will find the queen lying down.

The king will understand that the higher consciousness must come down and touch and kiss the bleak earth-consciousness. The spirit must embrace the cold bare earth. Then only the human soul, the king free of his ego, will attain peace and felicity.

Here is the second poem. I follow the same principle - I do not give a translation but, as I said, an explanatory paraphrase, and I conclude by a short comment.

(2)

POÈMES

(Extraits)

(i)

Tes soleits sont de houx, de gui.

Jamais perdu, jamais saisi

Qui est en moi, qui ny est plus!

L' tau va et vient sous les talus.

Je ne vois pas ce que je vois

– Ta nuit de tilleul et de noix. Je vois ce que je ne vois pas

– Tes mains sont dans les resedas.

Oreille ouverte, oreille close

J' entends les lacs au.r lauriers-roses.

Ton nom de silence et de sel.

Mais je n' entends pas les pétrels!¹

(ii)

Mes lièvres, dans l'herbe obscure,quelqu'un les traque.

Un chien frais, un épervier pur sur ma piste.

¹"Et Les lIes Feront Silence," 6.

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C' est cache sans abri que ces fourrés, ces cistes.

Des menhirs de veTTe emmurent mes îles.

O lumière aiguë! Je m' enracile-m' exile.

Le seul feu que je fuis m' a déjà consumé.

Mon sang est pris. Mon sang ne se soumet

Aux signes sur la proie, mais n' est vivant que mort.

Ne plus tenter de voir, d'entendre, d'ouvrir l'or!

La ténèbre d' enfance est mangée de merveilles!¹

(iii)

Ce sang perdu comme un pas

N'a densité que d'en bas.

– Des basses eaux, de la cendre

Où l' arme aussi doit descendre.

Les statues marchent, s' attardent

Dans une mort tieède et fade.

J' ai man amour ennemi.

Ses sables m' ant endormi.

Qui charmera d' un chevreuil

Les tongues salles de deuil?

Ma bouche bourbeuse, vide

Crie par morsure d' acide

Sur le silence aggravé.

Un feu survient du névé.

JEAN-CLAUDE RENARD

EXPLANATORY PARAPHRASE

All the suns of the higher consciousness are hidden here in the heart of leaves and flowers–the tiniest beauties, the

¹ "Et Les lIes Feront Silence," 8.

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floating fragrances of nature. That I never lose, yet never catch, it remains within my heart and yet it is not there. The stream flows and passes through, under the embankment.

It is the hidden Reality that plays hide and seek with us.

I do not see with the outer eye what I see with the inner eye. For the outer eye moves in a darkness made by the wooded growths of the earth. I see with the inner eye what I do not see with the outer eye. The luminous hand of the higher consciousness moves about in the midst of the thorns of life.

With the inner ear open, with the outer ear closed, I hear the tranquil waters, bordered with laurels and roses, move somewhere within. That is a sea of silence and of salt, but the cry of the wild storm-bird is not there.

* * *

In the dark woodlands of our nature animals rush about. Someone is chasing them. A hound of heaven, a falcon of the sky is after its prey. There are hidden bushes, grottoes, secret holes and corners that shelter my favourite animals. But to the secret luminous eye the soild walls of the shelter are transparent, are seen through.

I follow the Light that pierces me. I uproot myself from my home. I seek to fly from that Fire but I am already burnt up.

My blood is now captured. It is the willing prey, the victim of its hunter. It is living only because it is dead. There is now no endeavour to seek and to hear, to run after the golden treasure, for now it is a child's consciousness made of a darkness, a forgetfulness crowded with marvels.

* * *

The earthly blood that loses its way is heavy because it treads here below. Here there are stagnant waters, dead ashes. The arm from on high must extend here too. Here all forms are walking statues. They delay and delay in a death that is yet warm – only lukewarm – but lifeless. The earthly love I bear is my enemy. Its fire ends in dust and I go to sleep into the unconsciousness. My home here is a mourning hall; how can it be changed into a hall of beauty and living and moving shapes? Yes, my mouth is empty and full of dust, yes, it cries bitten by a corrosive acid thrown upon an increasing silence. It is a fire that comes from the chill snowy heights.

Page 210

A NOTE

The relation between the Higher and the Lower, between the other world and this, the interaction between the two is all that mysticism means. The relation is spoken of sometimes as that of enmity and sometimes as that of friendliness. Ordinarily the two are incompatibles, enemies, as is quite natural. At times however, when the individual is ripe for the turnover, the two collaborate. The lower consciousness aspires for the higher and the higher comes down and enters into the lower to purify and change it.

Various figures and images depict the nature and relation of the two. The lower is darkness and the night, the higher is light and the day. Sometimes it is the opposite: the lower is the day (ordinary common light), the higher is dark night (because unknown and unfamiliar or because of the very dazzle of its light). The lower is imaged at times as a woodland, a shelter for wild growths and roving animals. The higher is the hunter, with his hounds chasing the creatures of the lower domain. Also the higher is the serene infinite sky, the lower the raging sea below. Otherwise, again, the higher is the vast sea, tranquil or quietly rippling above and the lower is the solid material universe. The higher is the delightful sun, the lower is the muddy slimy earth of the bed of stones and rocks. The consummation, the dénouement is the interlocking between the two and a final coalescence in which the higher penetrates into the lower and the lower is sublimated into the higher and the two form one integral undivided reality.

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Two Mystic Poems in Modern Bengali

Here is the first one as I translate it:

BARITONE¹

Let us all move together, one and all,

Together into the cavern of the ribs,

Raise there a song of discordant sounds –

Red and blue and white, kin or alien.

Listen, the groan plays on:

Dreams as if possessed

Swing, like bats on branches;

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Is now the time for the dance?

Come, let us all move together, one and all.

Let the streams meet in the body, one -and all,

Yes, let the bones brighten up still more;

Let us all go around the fire

And scrape and eat of the very Liver, the Muse's self –

Let us go, let us go, one and all.

DIP AK MAJUMDAR

Can you make any sense out of it? This seems to be surrealistic with a vengeance. Anyhow there is no doubt that it is a puzzle, a veritable Chinese puzzle. The puzzle however appeared to me interesting. I felt that the poet, through this cryptic – mantric – collocation of words and images, attempted to give expression to an uncommon experience. It was as though I entered into a Tantric experience – but of the left-handed path (vamacara).

There is a Tantric discipline which speaks of the body-fulfilment (kayasiddhi), a spiritual consummation in and through the body; the body-consciousness, according to this view, is the greatest reality. And whatever is achieved must have its final and definitive expression and manifestation there, in that concrete reality.

The body, the body-consciousness, our poet says here, is to be a confluence, where all the streams of consciousness, all the movements of the being, flow in: movements of life-force, movements of the mind, secret 1.1.rges of the subliminal physical consciousness – pure and impure, things foreign to its nature, things that are its own, elements friendly and unfriendly, all assemble in a market-place, as it were, the result being a huge horrid discordant music, a groaning, a bellowing of a queer orchestra – the bass, the lowest note of the system that the human vehicle is.

There is a call for all the parts of the being to precipitate to the very foundation of the being, coalesce and evoke a wild and weird, doleful and discordant symphony – a painful cry. Unrealised dreams, that had faded into oblivion, are now like possessed beings and hang like bats on darkling branches:

Page 213

they are about to begin their phantom dance. Even so, the body, the material precipitate into which they gather, gives them a basic unity. These elements with their ardour and zeal kindle a common Fire. There is a divine Flame, Agni, burning within the flesh, burning brighter and brighter, making the bones whiter and whiter, as it were – the purificatory Flame, Pavaka, of which the Vedic Rishis spoke, Master of the House, grhapati, dwelling in the inner heart of the human being, impelling it to rise to purer and larger Truth. But here our modern poet replaces the Heart by the Liver and makes of this organ the central altar of human aspiration and inspiration. We may remember in this connection that the French poet Baudelaire gave a similar high position – and function – to the other collateral organ, the spleen. The modern Bengali poet considers that man's consciousness, even his poetic inspiration, is soaked in the secretion of that bilious organ. For man's destiny here upon earth is not delight but grief, not sweetness but gall and bitterness; there is no consolation, no satisfaction here; there is only thirst, no generosity but narrowness, no consideration for others, but a huge sinister egoism.

The cry of our poet is a cry literally de prifundis, a deep cavernous voice surging, spectral and yet sirenlike, out of the unfathomed underground abysses.

The cry has nothing in it, very evidently, like the thrill of a skylark's throat.

Something of the purer atmosphere of the heights and heavens we breathe in our second poem. We move no more here in the darker left-handed labyrinthine path, but swim in a lighter clearer air through which passes the right-handed path. Here it is in its serene simplicity:

I EMBARK¹

Trampling my own shadow

on a long, long path I came

And saw a river of gladness.

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I pushed the bank with my left foot

And with my right landed in the boat.

Here a straw canopy over the head,

A wooden floor to sit upon,

A sure helm and an oar within reach

And a sail to unfurl in the sky:

All were there –

A whole lungful of breath

Grew into a flight of white pigeons

That found the sky.

PURNENDU PRASAD

Kasmai devaya havisa vidhema? To which god then shall we dedicate our offering?

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Hymn to Darkness

HERE is a modern poem in Bengali. It is characteristically modern, though perhaps not quite modernist. It is an invocation to Darkness:

That darkness is no more,

The darkness in which my heart plunged when you came, It is no more there.

Many are the lights now around the heart

Arrayed as in a festive illumination.

Ceaseless now

There is the earth's merry-go-round all the time.

But beyond still,

Outside Time, the mind, even this mind stands

And sends its call to Thee alone.

Yes, the Darkness is there no longer;

And yet stretching out both the arms

My mind yearns to reach the Darkness

And itself becomes the Darkness.

Invocation to Darkness has, it appears, become quite fashionable among a certain group of modern poets. It is a favourite theme on which many a poet, many a good poet has played each in his way, a characteristic variation. Curiously enough, I came across about the same time the work of another poet, a French poet, also modern and almost modernist and, curio user still, in the same manner, a worshipper of Darkness. He is Yves Bonnefoy, originally belonging to the school of Jouve, an earlier modern. He speaks of two kinds of Night, one darker than the other - the less dark one is our common day with its grey light. The other is on the other shore:

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Vers l' autre rive encore plus nocturne¹

This darker night on the other shore is not illuminated by any light, but there is fire there, fire and its flame and the transparency of that flame: here is his description of how they stand to each other, that Night and our familiar day:

Une torche est portée dans le jour gris,

Le feu déchire le jour.

Il y a que la transparence de la flamme

Amèrement nie le jour.²

But why bitterly? Perhaps the day (the common day) tasted bitter in the mouth of the poet.

The poet has not perhaps the spiritual sense as we in India understand it. He speaks in effect of a dark goddess, he calls her

Douve profonde et noire³

He names her Douve, perhaps in memory of his first master Jouve, and addresses her as Sombre Lumière (Dark Light). He evidently means his poetic inspiration; his vision of the other shore is that of the world of his poetic experiences and realisations. But the nature of the contents of that world is very characteristic. They are apparently qualities and objects fundamentally spiritual - transparent fire and even motionless silence. Yes, that world is of wind and fire (compare our world of Tapas) and yet calm and tranquil. So the poet sings:

Douve sera ton nom au l oin parmi les pierres,

Douve profonde et noire,

Eau basse irréductible où l'effort se perdra.4

¹ "Towards the other bank in a still darker night."

² A torch is held up in the day's grey,

The fire tears rifts in the day.

There's this: the flame's transparence

Bitterly denies the day."

³ "Douve dark and black."

4 "Douve shall be your name far off among the stones,

Douve dark and black,

Irreducible low water where effort shall spend itself."

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Inspiration, according to the poet, is not the high swell of garrulousness and anxious effort. It is the solid bedrock underground when all the surface effusions have ebbed away - a shadowy dark strong tranquil repose.

A modern English poet -Robert Graves -worships a White Goddess. But from the description he gives of the lady, she would appear to be more black than white; for she seems to be intimately connected with the affairs -that is to say -the mysteries -of Hades and Hecate, underground worlds and midnight rites. She incarnates as the sow, although a white sow, she flows as the sap within plants and rises as passion and lust in man.

We in India have a dark god and a dark goddess - Krishna and Kali. Krishna is dark, his is the deep blue of the sky. Kali is dark, hers is the blackness ofthe earthly night. The Vaishnava poet and saint sang:

Oh, I love black,

For black is the tamal tree, black is Krishna,

Oh, how I love black.

Ramprasad the Bhakta thus speaks of Kali, his dark Mother: the poem itself is very dark, that is to say, the meaning is dark, and the style, the phrasing is darker still. A literal translation is out of question. A very free rendering is only possible:

I have brooded over it and I am utterly confused;

She in whose name one defies dark time,

She at whose feet lies low the Supreme in his pure whiteness.

Why should she herself be black?

Many are the forms of blackness,

But here is a very marvel of blackness.

If you hold it in your heart,

the lotus there shall bloom and burn bright -

Oh, she is dark and her name is Mother Darkness:

She is blacker than blackness.

But one who has seen that beauty is lost for good,

He will have no eye for any other beauty.

Are the moderns on the same track as these older mystics?

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But why this panegyric in worship of darkness? Whence this fascination for blackness?

Our ancient Rishis speak of the supreme Light of lights, the Source of all the lights that burn here, the Light that is beyond darkness, on the other shore. Darkness is this world, the world of ignorance, our earthly consciousness; this is a

perception easily understandable. But in the mystic consciousness of a kind, darkness and light seem to be interchangeable. Darkness seems to be a form of light, nay even of a greater light.

It is said, the occultists say, that between the light of the day, that is to say, the light of the ordinary consciousness and the higher spiritual light, there is an interim world, an intermediate zone of consciousness. When one leaves the earthly day, the normal consciousness and goes within and to the heights, towards the other Light, one enters at first into a dark region (the selva oscura of Dante). Physically also, the scien­tists say today that when you leave the earth's atmosphere, from a certain height you no longer see the earthly light but you dive into a darkness where the sun does not shine in its glory as on earth. You see and feel the sunlight again when you approach the sun and are about to be consumed in its fires. In the same way, we are told that on the spiritual path too, the path of inner consciousness, when you leave the ordinary consciousness, when you lose that normal light and yet have not arrived at the other higher light you grope in an intermediary region of darkness. You have lost the lower knowledge and have not yet gained the higher knowledge, then you are in that uncertain world of greyness or darkness. Or it happens also that while in the comparatively faint light of the ordinary consciousness, you are suddenly confronted with the Superior Light -through some grace perhaps -you cannot stand the light and get blinded and see sheer darkness. Again, the infinite sky in its fathomless depth appears to the naked eye blue, deep blue, blue-black. Light concentrated, solidified, materialised becomes a speck of darkness to the human eye. Do we not say today that a particle of matter (consolidated darkness) is only a quantum of concentrated light-energy?

Something of these supraphysical experiences must have entered into the consciousness of the modern poets who have

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also fallen in love with darkness and blackness -have become adorers, although they do not know, of Shyama and Shyama.

Here, for example, is a hymn from the Rig Veda, a whole hymn addressed by Rishi Kushika to Night. Listen how the Rishi invokes his black goddess: Night and Light are unified - almost one -in his consciousness. The Vedic Rishis considered Night as only another form or function of Day - naktoasa samanasa viruPe-Night and Dawn have the same mind although the forms are different.

ODE TO DARKNESS

(Rigveda-X. 127.)

NIGHT spreads wide, she comes everywhere, a Goddess with shining eyes-she looms over these glories as their overlord. (1)

The Immortal Goddess fills up the Vast, above and below. She compels the darkness with her light (2)

The Goddess comes and veils her sister, the Dawn and glows through the blackness.(3)

She is now that to us wherein we shall rest even as birds do on a tree. (4)

In her repose all habitations, all the footed and winged crea­tures, even the fast racing eagle. (5)

0 Ocean-born Goddess! Smite the wolf, he or she, smite the robber! Carry us safely through. (6)

Black darkness clings to me all around; it stands here firm. Dawn! clear it even as you do my debts. (7)

Daughter of Heaven! A Herd of light is this hymn of victory that moves towards you. I have made it for your sake. Do thou accept it, 0 Night. (8)

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Mysticism in Bengali Poetry

BENGALI poetry was born some time towards the end of an era of decline in the Indian consciousness, almost towards the close of what is called the Buddhist period, but it was born with a veritable crown on its head. For it was sheer mystic poetry, mystic in substance, mystic in manner and expression. The poets were themselves mystics, that is to say spiritual seekers, sadhaks -they were called Siddhas or Siddhacharyas. They told of their spiritual, rather occult experiences in an occult or oblique manner, the very manner of the ancient Vedic Rishis, in figures and symbols and similes. It was a form of beauty, not merely of truth-of abstract metaphysical truth -that rose all on a sudden, as it were, out of an enveloping darkness. It shone for a time and then faded slowly, perhaps spread itself out in the common consciousness of the people and continued to exist as a backwash in popular songs and fables and proverbs. But it was there and came up again a few centuries later and the crest is seen once more in a more elevated, polished and dignified form with a content of mental illumination. I am referring to Chandidasa, who was also a sadhak poet and is usually known as the father of Bengali poetry, being the creator of modern Bengali poetry. He flourished somewhere in the fourteenth century. That wave too subsided and retired into the background, leaving in interregnum again of a century or more till it showed itself once more in another volume of mystic poetry in the hands of a new type of spiritual practitioners. They were the Yogis and Fakirs, and although of a popular type, yet possessing nuggets of gold in their utterances, and they formed a large family. This almost synchronised with the establishment and consolidation of the Western Power, with its intellectual and rational

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enlightenment, in India. The cultivation and superimposition of this Western or secular light forced the native vein of mysticism underground; it was necessary and useful, for it added an element which was missing before; a new synthesis came up in a crest with Tagore. It was a neo-mysticism, intellectual, philosophical, broad-based, self-conscious. Recently however we have been going on the downward slope, and many, if not the majority among us, have been pointing at mysticism and shouting: "Out, damned spot!" But perhaps we have struck the rock-bottom and are wheeling round.

For in the present epoch we are rising on a new crest and everywhere, in all literatures, signs are not lacking of a supremely significant spiritual poetry being born among us.

In order to give you a taste of what this poetry is and how it evolved I shall cite samples of the various waves at their crest as they rose from epoch to epoch till today.

The earliest Siddhacharya says:

That comes not down, nor does that go up;

That has no second to its self, that has attained

absolute fixity.

Kanhu says where the mind never cracks,

winds are stilled, there dwells the mistress

of the house.

or again

This is the seed of Time out of which the Lotus has bloomed,

O heroic enjoyer, even like a bee, take in with every

breath of yours the honeyed fragrance.

This is mysticism in excelsis and beautiful mysticism.

We dive down the centuries and when we come up we find

Chandidasa thus greeting us:

There is a shore poised on a shore,

Upon that a wave,

Waves dwell upon waves -

But a few only know.

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or again

It is the lover that knows the sweetness of love;

And who is it that pours out this sweetness?

Who is it that has abandoned all and become the two

and dwells in the Home of Delight?

From sheer symbolism we rise into some kind of mental apprehension of the symbolistic experience. That mental element further gains ground and seeks even an intellectual illumination in the songs of the Bauls and Fakirs that form the next stage of the evolution. Lalan the Fakir says:

It is within this man that the other man dwells;

It is Him that saints and sages through the ages

had sought and pursued.

As the moon is seen in the water

But flees the touch of your fingers,

Even so ever he dwells

Apart and aloof.

In the lotus beyond is his abode,

In the lotus with twin petals he is out and astir;

One sees all this easily, only when one has ascertained the

petals of his lotus.

Now, coming at last to the modern age, in Tagore we have the full-fledged intellectual mysticism. Here is the modem seer and prophet:

Within the finite, 0 Infinite, thou playest thy notes,

That is why so sweet is thy manifestation in me.

or again

The incense yearns to melt into the perfume,

And the perfume yearns to embrace the incense;

The sound seeks to be caught in the rhythm

And the rhythm hastening runs into the sound.

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or these lines

I dived into the ocean of forms

seeking the pearl of the formless -

Oh, I shall no more wander from port to port

plying my worn-out bark -

There where rises eternally the song

that ears do not hear

Shall I go with the harp of my heart

into the royal court in fathomless depths.

That is not the end or the nec plus ultra-nothing beyond - for there is a beyond and Sri Aurobindo has shown and taught what it can be like. Here is one daring poet:

Thy firm galaxies

Are tracing their script on our forehead.

This day, 0 Mother, all the terrestrial illuminations

Weave a garland of lights that come from beyond.

or this one, more mystically mystic:

The Bard wheels onward in his sweeping march:

He gathers in perfect the soul's obeisances,

Urges secreted in the heart of the sun-flower,

Hymns limned in her petalled gold!

or these almost surrealistic lines:

The Dark One has put on a golden garland,

And on her delicate forehead burns the flame of

red sandal -

She, the Eternal Memory, from the forgetfulness of

earth's depths

Kindles the first spark of the word born of the

churning -

One great characteristic of these mystics, particularly the older ones, is the conception of the spiritual or divine being as

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a human being-the soul, "the man there within this man here," is a human person and the human form has a significant charm which none other possesses. The Spirit, the Divine individualised and concretised in an earth-made man is a blazing experience with the Siddhacharyas and the experience continues down to our days. The Siddhacharyas themselves have added a peculiar, rather strange form to the conception. The soul, the inmost divine being is a woman whom one loves and seeks: she is an outcaste maid who dwells beyond the walls of the city; one, that is to say, the conscient being in us, loves her all the more passionately because she is so. The city means this normally flourishing confine of outer consciousness where we dwell usually; the Divine is kept outside the pale of this inferior nature. To our consciousness that which is beyond it is an obscure, valueless, worthless, miserable non -entity; but to the consciousness of the sage-poet, that is the only thing valuable and adorable. These mystics further say that the true person, the divinity that lies neglected and even despised in our secular life is truly the idol of all worship and when she is accepted, when she puts off her beggarly robes, the obscurities of our mind and heart and senses, then she becomes the mistress of the house, the queen whom none thenceforth can disobey -all the limbs become her willing servitors and adorers. The divine Law rules even the external personality.

The significance of the human personality, the role of the finite in the play of the infinite and universal, the sanctity of the material form as an expression and objectification of the transcendent, the body as a function of Consciousness-Force Delight are some of the very cardinal and supreme experiences in Bengali mysticism from its origin down to the present day.

A mysticism that evokes the soul's delights and experiences in a language that has so transformed itself as to become the soul's native utterance is the new endeavour of the poet's Muse.

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Rabindranath and Sri Aurobindo

"TAGORE has been a wayfarer towards the same goal as ours in his own way." Sri Aurobindo wrote these words in the thirties and their full significance can be grasped only when it is understood that the two master-souls were at one in the central purpose of their lives. Also there is a further bond of natural affinity between them centring round the fact that both were poets, in a deeper sense, seer poets-Rabindranath the Poet of the Dawn, Sri Aurobindo the Poet and Prophet of the Eternal Day, a new Dawn and Day for the human race.

And both had the vision of a greater Tomorrow for their Motherland and that was why both regarded her freedom as the basic necessity for the recovery of her greatness. How the inspired songs and speeches of Rabindranath and the flaming utterances of Sri Aurobindo created a psychological revolution almost overnight in the mind and heart of the people during the Swadeshi days forms a glorious chapter in the history of India's freedom movement. Profoundly touched by Sri Aurobindo's soul-stirring lead to the country, Rabindranath wrote a memorable poem, addressing Sri Aurobindo, which is still enshrined in the hearts of his countrymen. Rabindranath himself cal1led on Sri Aurobindo and read out to him his heart's homage. We remember with thrill the majestic opening lines:

Rabindranath, O Aurobindo, bows to thee!

O friend, my country's friend, O voice incarnate, free,

Of India's soul!¹

Sri Aurobindo retired from the outer political world to devote himself more intensively to the discovery and conquest

¹ "Salutation"

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of a new consciousness and force, glimpses of which he was having at the time and which alone could save mankind and recreate it. From 1910 to 1914 he was, he said, silently developing this new power in seclusion and in 1914 he began to give to the world the result of his realisations through his monthly review Arya. In five major sequences published month after month through several years, he envisaged, in the main, the progressive march of man towards a divine life on earth, towards the unity of mankind and a perfect social order. One of these serials was called The Future Poetry in which he traced the growth and development that world poetry is undergoing towards its future form that would voice the dawn of a New Age of the Spirit. Sri Aurobindo hailed those who feel and foresee this distant dawn behind the horizon as the Forerunners of the new Spirit, among whom he included Rabindranath, because he saw in Tagore's the first beginnings, "a glint of the greater era of man's living", something that "seems to be in promise." "The poetry of Tagore," Sri Aurobindo says, "owes its sudden and universal success to this advantage that he gives us more of this discovery and fusion for which the mind of our age is in quest than any other creative writer of the time. His work is a constant music of the overpassing of the borders, a chant-filled realm in which the subtle sounds and lights of the truth of the spirit give new meanings to the finer subtleties of life."

Characterising Tagore's poetry, in reference to a particular poem, Sri Aurobindo once wrote: "But the poignant sweetness, passion and spiritual depth and mystery of a poem like this, the haunting cadences subtle with a subtlety which is not of technique but of the soul, and the honey-laden felicity of the expression, these are the essential Rabindranath and cannot be imitated because they are things of the spirit and one must have the same sweetness and depth of soul before one can hope to catch any of these desirable qualities." Furthermore: "One of the most remarkable peculiarities of Rabindra Babu's genius is the happiness and originality with which he has absorbed the whole spirit of Vaishnava poetry and turned it into something essentially the same and yet new and modern. He has given the old sweet spirit of emotional and passionate religion an expression of more delicate and complex richness

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voiceful of subtler and more penetratingly spiritual shades of feeling than the deep-hearted but simple early age of Bengal could know."

Certain coincidences and correspondences in their lives may be noticed here. The year 1905 and those that immediately followed found them together on the crest wave of India's first nationalist resurgence. Again both saw in the year 1914 a momentous period marked by events of epochal importance, one of which was the First World War. For Tagore it was "Juga-sandhi, the dying of the old age of Night to the dawning of a new with its blood-red sunrise emerging through the travail of death, sorrow and pain". For Sri Aurobindo it was a cataclysm intended by Nature to effect a first break in the old order to usher in the new. The significant year 1914 was also the period when Rabindranath expressed in the magnificent series of poems of the Balaka his visions and experiences of the forces at work on earth, and Sri Aurobindo began revealing through the pages of the Arya the truths of the supramental infinities that were then pouring down into him and through him into the earth's atmosphere.

So it was natural and almost inevitable -written among the stars-that both should meet once more on this physical earth. Sri Aurobindo had been in complete retirement seeing none except, of course, his attendants. He was coming out only four times in the year to give silent darshan to his devotees and a few others who sought for it. It was in the year 1928. Tagore was then on a tour to the South. He expressed to Sri Aurobindo by letter his desire for a personal meeting. Sri Aurobindo naturally agreed to receive him. Tagore reached Pondicherry by steamer, and I had the privilege to see him on board the ship and escort him to the Ashram. The Mother welcomed him at the door of Sri Aurobindo's apartments and led him to Sri Aurobindo. Tagore already knew the Mother, for both were together in Japan and stayed in the same house and she attended some of his lectures in that country. It may be interesting to mention here that Tagore requested the Mother to take charge of the Visva Bharati, for evidently he felt that the future of his dear institution would be in sure hands. But the Mother could not but decline since it was her destiny to be at another place and another work.

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What transpired between them is not for me to say, the meeting being a private one. But I may quote here what Tagore himself wrote about it subsequently:

For a long time I had a strong desire to meet Aurobindo. It has just been fulfilled... At the very first sight I could realise that he had been seeking for the soul and had gained it, and through this long process of realisation had accumulated within him a silent power of inspiration. His face was radiant with an inner light. .. I felt that the utterance of the ancient Rishi spoke from him of that equanimity which gives the human soul its freedom of entrance into the All. I said to him, 'You have the Word and we are waiting to accept it from you. India will speak through your voice to the world, 'Hearken

to me'... Years ago I saw Aurobindo in the atmosphere of his earlier heroic youth and I sang to him:

'Aurobindo, accept the salutation from Rabindranath. Today I saw him in a deeper atmosphere of a reticent richness of wisdom and again sang to him in silence:

'Aurobindo, accept the salutation from Rabindranath.'¹

Vibhutis, emanations and embodiments of the higher destiny of mankind appear upon earth from time to time to lead and guide the race on the upward way. And we are fortunate that we are born in an age that has been blessed by two such Shining Ones.

¹ The Modern Review, July 1928.

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Appendix

I

WORDSWORTH*

I did not come to appreciate the poetry of Wordsworth in my school days, it happened in college, and to a large extent thanks to Professor Manmohan Ghose. In our school days, the mind and heart of Bengali students were saturated with the poetry of Tagore: .

In the bower of my youth the love-bird sings,

Wake up, O darling, wake;

Opening thy lids lazy with love,

Wake up, O darling, wake. . .

This poetry belongs to the type once characterised as follows by our humorous novelist Prabhat Mukherji through one of his characters, a sadhu, describing the charms of the Divine Name:

It has the sweetness and the sugar

of sandesh and rasogulla.

It is needless to say that to young hearts enraptured by such language and feeling, Wordsworth's

Oft I had heard of Lucy Gray!

And when I crossed the wild,

I chanced to see at break of day

The solitary child...¹

* Translated from the original Bengali by Sri Sanat Kumar Banerji

¹ "Lucy Gray".

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would appear rather dull and dreary, tasteless almost.

Let me in this connection tell you a story. We were then in college. The Swadeshi movement was in full flood, carrying everything before it. We the young generation of students had been swept off our feet. One day, an elder among us whom I used to consider personally as my friend, philosopher and guide, happened to pass a remark which rather made me lose my bearings a little. He was listing the misdeeds of the British in India. "This nation of shopkeepers!" he was saying, "There is no end to their trickeries to cheat us. Take, for instance, this question of education. The system they have set up with the high-sounding title of 'University' and 'the advancement of learning' is nothing more than a machine for creating a band of inexpensive clerks and slaves to serve them. They have been throwing dust into our eyes by easily passing off useless Brummagem ware with the label of the real thing. One such eminently useless stuff is their poet Wordsworth, whom they have tried to foist on our young boys to their immense detriment." This remark was no doubt a testimony to his inordinate love of country. But it remains to be seen how far it would bear scrutiny as being based on truth.

For us in India, especially to Bengalis, the first and foremost obstacle to accepting Wordsworth as a poet would be his simple, artless and homely manner:

Behold her, single in the field,

Yon solitary Highland lass!

And, as a classic instance of that famous homely diction, the line that follows:

Will no one tell me what she sings?

Who would' be moved by lines such as these?

On the gates of entry to the poetic world of Wordsworth is engraved this motto:

The Gods approve

The depth, and not the tumult, of the soul¹

¹"Laodamia", 74, Poems of the Imagination.

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It is as if the hermitage of old, an abode of peace and quiet, santa-rasaspadam-asramam-idam. All here is calm and unhurried, simple and natural and transparent, there is no muddy current of tempestuous upheavals. That is why the poet feels in his heart as if he were

. . . . quiet as a nun

Breathless with adoration.¹

or else

The winds come to me from the fields of sleep.

Here is an easy, natural, limpid flow, undisturbed in its movement and yet with a pleasant charm and filled with an underlying sweetness. But perhaps one has to listen intently to get at the sweetness and beauty of such lines. They do not strike the outer ear for they set up no eddies there; the inner hearing is their base.

She was a Phantom of delight

When first she gleamed; upon my sight²

Is this not a silent opening of the divine gates of vision?

Ethereal minstrel! pilgrim of the sky!³

Do not these words bear us far away on some unknown wings?

Tranquillity and a pleasant sweetness are then the first doors of entry. Through the second doors we come to a wide intimacy, an all-pervading unity, where man and nature have fused into one. This unity and universality breathe through and inspire such simple yet startling words:

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,⁴

¹ "It is a beauteous Evening, calm and free", Miscellaneous Sonnets.

² "She was a Phantom of delight," Poems if the Imagination, VIII.

³ "To a Skylark", Ibid., XXX.

4 "I wandered lonely as a dud," Ibid., XII.

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Or,

And beauty born of murmuring sound Shall pass into her face.¹

Or else, this easy and natural yet deep-serious utterance carrying the burden of a mantra:

Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:²

Once we cross beyond these second gates we reach an inner region, a secluded apartment of the soul where poetry assumes the garb of magic, a transcendent skill lends to words the supernatural beauty and grace of a magician's art. How often we have read these lines and heard them repeated and yet they have not grown stale:

A voice so thrilling never was heard. . .

Breaking the silence of the seas

Among the farthest Hebrides

Or,

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathéd horn.

This magic has no parallel, except perhaps in Shakespeare's

Daffodils,

That come before the swallow dares, and take

The winds of March with beauty; violets, dim³

Sri Aurobindo has referred to another point of greatness in Wordsworth, where the poetic mind has soared still higher, opening itself not merely to an intimacy but to the voice of a highest infinity:

¹ "Three years she Grew,"

² "Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour", Poems Dedicated to National

lndepenrknce and Liberty, XIV,

³ The Winter's Tale, Act IV, Sc. 4.

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The marble index of a mind for ever

Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.¹

Thus, with this poet we gain admittance to the very heart, the innermost sanctuary of poetry where we fully realise what our old Indian critics had laid down as their final verdict, namely, that the poetic delight is akin to the Delight of Brahman.

But even the moon has its spots, and in Wordsworth the spots are of a fairly considerable magnitude. Manmohan Ghose too had mentioned to us these defects. Much of Wordsworth is didactic and rhetoric, that is, of the nature of preaching, hence prosaic and non-poetical although couched in verse. Ghose used to say that even the Ode on the Intimations of Immortality which is so universally admired is mainly didactic and is by and large rhetoric, with very little real poetry in it. I must confess however that to me personally, some of its passages have a particular charm, like

Our birth is but a sleep and forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar...

But trailing clouds of glory do we come...

Atul Gupta had seen perhaps only the adverse side of Wordsworth. He had marked the heavy hand of the logician, sthula-hastavalepa, but omitted to see the delicate workmanship of the artist. But a man's true quality has to be judged by his best performance, and the best work of Wordsworth is indeed of a very high order.

Matthew Arnold brings out very well the nature of Words-worth's best work. Wordsworth at his peak, he says, seems to have surpassed even Shakespeare. He is then no longer in his own self. Mother Nature herself has taken her seat there and she goes on writing herself through the hands of the poet.²

Breaking the silence of the seas .

Among the farthest Hebrides,

¹ Prelude, III. II. 62-63.

² "Nature herself seems, I say, to take the pen out of his hand, and to

write for him with her own bare, sheer, penetrating power."-Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism.

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or else,

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn

are indeed the highest peaks of English poetry.

Sri Aurobindo has said that Vyasa is the most masculine of poets. Echoing his words we may say that Wordsworth is the most masculine of English poets. This classification of poets into "masculine" and "feminine" was made by the poet Coleridge. "Masculine" means in the first place, shorn of ornament, whereas the "feminine" loves ornament. Secondly, the masculine has intellectuality and the feminine emotionalism. Then again, femininity is sweetness and charm, masculinity implies hard restraint; the feminine has movement, like the flow of a stream, the play of melody, while the masculine has immobility, like the stillness of sculpture, the stability of a rock. This is the difference between the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, between the styles of Vyasa and Valmiki. This too is the difference between Wordsworth and Shelley. The Ramayana has always been recognised for its poetic beauty; Valmiki is our first great poet, adi-kavi. In the Mahabharata we appreciate not so much the beauty of poetic form as a treasury of knowledge, on polity and ethics, culture and spirituality. We consider the Gita primarily as a work of philosophy, not of poetry. In the same way, Wordsworth has not been able to capture the mind and heart of India or Bengal as Shelley has done. In order truly to appreciate Wordsworth's poetry, one must be something of a meditative ascetic, dhyani, tapasvi indeed,

. . . quiet as a nun Breathless

with adoration. . .

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Humanism and Humanism A GOOD many European scholars and philosophers have found Indian spirituality and Indian culture, at bottom, lacking in what is called "humanism."¹ 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.²It 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 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 rather to the Aristotelian tradition of Socratic teaching. Humanism proper was born – or reborn – with the Renais­sance. It was as strongly and vehemently negative and pro­testant in its nature as it was positive and affirmative. For its 1 Only the other day I found a critic in The Manchester Guardian referring to The Gila as something frigid (and confused)! 2 umanii nihil a me alienum puto. – Terence. Page 239 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 Graeco – Latin culture was essentially and predominantly humanistic. Even so, the mediaeval culture also, in spite of its theological stress, had a strong basis in humanism. For the religion itself, as has been pointed out, is 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 Grreco – Roman humanism, nor has it the religious humanism of Christianity. Its spirit can 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; and even his love for the bird 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 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 man of the world. Still there is a difference. And the critics have felt it, if not understood it rightly. The Indian bhutadaya and Christian charity do not spring from the same source – I do not speak of the actual popular thing but of the ideal – even when their manner of expression is similar or the same, 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 or he may not; and when he Page 240 does work, the spirit is not that of benevolence or philanthropy. 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 or 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 Vedantist 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 I son or anybody or anything in the world not for the sake of the wife or the son or that body or thing but for the sake of the self, for the sake of oneself 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 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, 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 less and less so. At the lowest rung and the most obvious in form and nature is what is called altruism, or philanthropy, that is to say, doing good to others, some good that is tangible and apparent, that is esteemed and valued by the world generally. In altruism refined and sublimated, when it is no longer a matter chiefly of doing but of feeling, from a more or less physical and material give and take we rise into a vital and psychological sympathy and intercommunion, we have what is Page 241 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, karuna 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 disappear 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 Selfhood humanism is totally transcended and transmuted, one dwells then 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 want 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 Boddhisattwa 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 viewpoint, 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 we may ask if it is egoism and selfishness to seek delight 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 that one loves this or that but for the sake of the self that one loves this or that. The fact of the matter is that here we enter a domain in Page 242 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 sense of individuality that one becomes ready to enter the glory and beatitude of the Self, or Brahman or Shunyam. 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 phraseology. The Personal and the Impersonal are two co-ordinates of the same supreme Reality – some choose (or are chosen by) the one and others choose (or are chosen by) the other, perhaps as the integral Play or the inscrutable Plan demands and determines, but neither is intrinsically superior to the other – although, as I have already said, from an interested human standpoint, one may seem more immediately profitable or nearer than the other; but from that standpoint there may be other truths that are still more practically useful, still closer to the earthly texture of humanity. The humanism, known to Europe generally, both in its profane and religious aspects, is all "human – too human" as Nietzsche pronounced it; 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 precisely envisages 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 apara prakrti. Human intelligence, human feeling, human sentiment, human motive do not move him. Humanism generally has 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. Page 243 Hedoes 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 Divine Will that makes him be and do whatever it chooses, human or not. There is, however, a type of humanism that is specially known in 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 of as such a Human Person – for the norm of the human personality 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 the human appreciation and has humanised it; in the other the human has been uplifted and made into an archetypal reality where the human terms have been more or less symbols and figures having not merely human but a supra-human significance. The entire Vaishnava Lila passes not on this earth at all, but eternally in the eternal world of 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 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 at all the human man, as modern humanists of our country would like to have. It does not mean the glorification of man's human attributes and movements, even if they be most sattwic and idealistic; it refers rather to the divinised type, the archetype that is eternal in the superconsciousness. And when such a Man lives and acts upon earth he does so in manner and measure that do not belong to this plane. Page 244

The Philosopher as an Artist and Philosophy as an Art

I WONDER why Philosophy has never been considered as a variety of Art. Philosophy is admired for the depth and height of its substance, for its endeavour to discover the ultimate Truth, for its one-pointed adherence to the supremely Real; but precisely because it does so it is set in opposition to Art which is reputed as the domain of the ideal, the imaginative or the fictitious. Indeed it is the antagonism between the two that has always been emphasised and upheld as an axiomatic truth and an indisputable fact. Of course, old Milton (he was young, however, when he wrote these lines) says that philosophy is divine and charming:

Not harsh, and crabbed as dull fools suppose,

But musical as is Apollo's lute.!

Well, I am not sure if the poet was anything more than being metaphorically rhapsodical, at the most he had only a poetic perception, he did not give us the scientific truth of the matter.

In the face of established opinion and tradition (and in the wake of the prophetic poet) I propose to demonstrate that Philosophy has as much claim to be called an art, as any other orthodox art, painting or sculpture or music or architecture. I do not refer to the element of philosophy-perhaps the very large element of philosophy -that is imbedded and ingrained in every Art; I speak of Philosophy by itself as a distinct type of authentic art. I mean that Philosophy is composed or created in the same way as any other art and the philosopher is moved and driven by the inspiration and impulsion of a genuine artist. Now, what is Art? Please do not be perturbed by the question. I am not trying to enter into the philosophy-the metaphysics

¹ Comus, I, 477-8.

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of it, but only into the science - the physics - of it. Whatever else it may be, the sine qua non, the minimum requisite of art is that it must be a thing of beauty, that is to say, it must possess a beautiful form. Even the Vedic Rishi says that the poet by his poetic power created a heavenly form -kavih kavitva divi rupam asajat. As a matter of fact, a supreme beauty of form has often marked the very apex of artistic creation. Now, what does the Philosopher do? The sculptor hews beautiful forms out of marble, the poet fashions beautiful forms out of words, the musician shapes beautiful forms out of sounds. And the philosopher? The philosopher, I submit, builds beautiful forms out of thoughts and concepts. Thoughts and concepts are the raw materials out of which the artist philosopher creates mosaics and patterns and designs architectonic edifices. For what else are philosophic systems? A system means, above all, a form of beauty, symmetrical and harmonious, a unified whole, rounded and polished and firmly holding together. Even as in Art, truth, bare sheer truth is not the object of philosophical inquiry either. Has it not been considered sufficient for a truth to be philosophically true, if it is consistent, if it does not involve self-contradiction? The equation runs: Truth=Self-consistency; Error=Self-contradiction. To discover the absolute truth is not the philosopher's task-it is an ambitious enterprise as futile and as much of a maya as the pursuit of absolute space, absolute time or absolute motion in Science. Philosophy has nothing more to do-and nothing less-than to evolve or build up a system, in other words, a

self-consistent whole (of concepts, in this case). Art also does exactly the same thing. Self-contradiction means at bottom, want of harmony, balance, symmetry, unity, and self-consistency means the contrary of these things-the two terms used by philosophy are only the logical formulation of an essentially aesthetic value.

Take, for example, the philosophical system of Kant or of Hegel or of our own Shankara. What a beautiful edifice of thought each one has reared! How cogent and compact, organised and poised and finely modelled! Shankara's reminds me of a tower, strong and slender, mounting straight and tapering into a vanishing point among the clouds; it has the characteristic linear movement of Indian melody. On the other

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hand, the march of the Kantian Critiques or of the Hegelian Dialectic has a broader base and involves a composite strain, a balancing of contraries, a blending of diverse notes: there

is something here of the amplitude and comprehensiveness of harmonic architecture (without perhaps a corresponding degree of altitude).

All these systems, commonly called philosophical, appear to me supremely artistic. The logical intellect has worked here. exactly like a chisel or a brush in the hands of the artist. It did not care for truth per se, its prime preoccupation was arrangement, disposition; the problem it set before itself was how best to present a consistent and unified, that is to say, a beautiful whole.

But the philosopher's stone is not, after all, a myth, as is being proved by modern science. Even so, the philosopher's truth -the truth, that is to say, in the noumenal sense, to which he aspires in his heart of hearts-is also existent. There is a reality apart from and beyond all relativities and contin­gencies: truth is not mere self-consistence, it is self-existence. Art and philosophy as an art may not comprehend it, but they circuit round it and even have glimpses of it and touch it, though the vision they have more often aberrates, distorting a rope into a snake.

It is a grain of this truth that is the substance and the core of all true art and philosophy. Philosophy works upon this secret strand by its logic, art by imagination-although logic and imagination may not be so incommensurable as they are commonly thought to be; even so, both art and philosophy arrive at the same result, viz., the building of a beautiful superstructure.

This golden core of truth comes from elsewhere-it is beyond the mayic circle of art and philosophy. To have access to it, a lid overhead is to be broken through-rather, as it is said, it is that that breaks through of its own accord and reveals its identity.

Plato would not tolerate the poets in his ideal society since they care too much for beauty and very little for the true and good. He wanted it all to be a kingdom of philosophers. I am afraid Plato's philosopher is not true to type, the type set up by his great disciple. Plato's philosopher is no longer

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an artist, he has become a mystic-a Rishi in our language.

For we must remember that Plato himself was really more of a poet than a philosopher. Very few among the great representative souls of humanity surpassed him in the true poetic afflatus. The poet and the mystic -Kavi and Rishi - are the same in our ancient lore. However these two, Plato and Aristotle, the mystic and the philosopher, the master and the disciple, combine to form one of these dual personalities which Nature seems to like and throws up from time to time in her evolutionary march-not as a mere study in contrast, a token of her dialectical process, but rather as a movement of polarity making for a greater comprehensiveness and richer values. They may be taken as the symbol of a great synthesis that humanity needs and is preparing. The role of the mystic is to envisage and unveil the truth, the supernal reality which the mind cannot grasp nor all the critical apparatus of human reason demonstrate and to bring it down and present it to the understanding and apprehending consciousness. The philosopher comes at this stage: he receives and gathers all that is given to him, arranges and systematises, puts the whole thing in a frame as it were.

The poet-philosopher or the philosopher-poet, whichever way we may put it, is a new formation of the human consciousness that is coming upon us. A wide and rationalising (not

rationalistic) intelligence deploying and marshalling out a deep intuitive and direct Knowledge-that is the pattern of human mind developing in the new age. Bergson's was a harbinger, a definite landmark on the way. Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine arrives and opens the very portals of the marvellous temple city of a dynamic integral knowledge.

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Towards a New Ideology

INDIA must evolve her own political and social ideology; she must discover and establish in this domain also, as in all others that concern her collective life, her own genius and rule. This is what Swaraj really means and demands.

Russia has her Sovietic Communism, Germany, for the present at least, her Nazidom, Italy her totalitarian Fascism, old England her Parliamentarianism and France her Bureaucratism; each nation finds the norm and scheme of self-rule that suits its temperament and character and changes and modifies that also in its own characteristic manner. Even so India must find her own scheme of Swarajya. If she is to live and be great and contribute something to the enrichment and glory of human civilisation, she must look to herself, enter into herself and know and bring out what lies there buried. It is a grievous blunder to try to transplant a Mussolinian or Leninian or a Hitlerian gospel on an Indian soil. It is not desirable nor is it truly possible.

If, however, we take a right about turn and look away from the West to the Far East, we already see in Japan a different type of national self-government. It is based on an altogether different basis which may appear even novel to the modern and rationalistic European mentality. I am refer­ring to the conception of duty which moulds and upholds the Japanese body politic and body social, as opposed to the conception of right obtaining royal rule in the Occident.

The distinction between the attitudes that underlie these two conceptions was once upon a time greatly 'stressed by Vivekananda, who was the first to strike two or three major chords that were needed to create the grand symphony of the Indian Renaissance. It is true Europe too had her Mazzini

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whose scheme of a new humanity was based on the conception of the duties of man. But his was a voice in the wilderness and he was not honoured in his own country.

The malady of the modern age springs precisely from this poisonous source, viz., it views man as a bundle of rights and its problem of social organisation is the problem of safeguarding and, if possible, even of increasing individual and collective rights. Thus came into being the competitive society-a society necessarily red in tooth and claw like Nature.

Vivekananda pointed out that one should rather think of

one's duties, how best to accomplish them and leave the rights to take care of themselves. Such an attitude would give a man the correct outlook, the correct poise, the correct inspiration in living the collective life. Instead of each one demanding and claiming what one regards as one's dues and consequently scrambling and fighting for them (and most often not getting them or getting at a ruinous expense - what made Arjuna cry, "What shall I do with the kingdom and all if in gaining it I lose everything that makes it worth having ?") if one were content with knowing one's duty and doing it with a single mind, not only would there be peace and amity on earth, but also none would be deprived of anything that is really due to him.

It may be answered that there does not seem to be any special virtue in the word "duty"; for, the crimes committed under that ensign are not less numerous or violent than those inspired by the ideal of Rights. It was once considered in some religions to be the duty of the faithful to kill or coerce or convert as many as possible of another faith; it was the bounden duty of the good shepherd to burn and flay the heretic. And in recent times the ceremony of "purge" be-speaks of the same compulsion of the sense of duty in the consciousness of modern Messiahs. But the true name of the thing in all these cases is not duty, but fanaticism.

For fanaticism may be defined as duty running away with itself; but duty proper, the genuine form of it is something self-poised, its natural and inherent tendency being rather to give than to demand, it is less easily provoked to aggression and battle. Even so, it may be claimed on behalf of Right that the right hand of Right is not likely to do harm, for it

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is then another name for liberty, it means the freedom to live one's life unhampered without infringing on an equal facility for others to do the same. But the whole difficulty comes in precisely with regard to the frontier of each other's sphere of rights. It is easy to declare the principle, but to carry it out in life and action is a different matter. The line of demarcation between one's own rights and the rights of another is always indeterminate and indefinable. In estabilshing and maintaining one's rights there is always the possibility, even the certainty of "frontier incidents", of encroaching upon other's rights. Liberty, alone and by itself, is not a safe guide - therefore so much stress is being laid nowadays upon discipline and obedience in modern ideologies.

But perhaps the real truth of the matter here is that all these terms - liberty or right or even duty - are mental conceptions. They are indeed ideals, that is to say, made of the stuff of ideas and do not always coincide with the deeper realities of life and hence are not able to produce the perfect and durable harmony among warring members whether in the individual or in the collective life.

We had in India a fairer word than "duty", a deeper and more luminous mantra: it is dharma. The expression has certainly "'fallen on evil days and on evil tongues"; it smells today of mediaevalism and obscurantism and whatever is not "forward" and "radical". Still we hark back to it: it is high time that we should resuscitate the old word mantra-in spite of its musty covering, it carries the purest nugget of gold.

Indeed, Right, Duty and Dharma are three terms that represent the three stages of an ascending consciousness in its play of forces. At the base and beginning the original and primary state of consciousness is dominated by the mode of inertia (tamas); in that state things are an inchoate mass and are simply jumbled together; they are moved and acted upon helplessly by forces that are outside them. A rise in the scale of growth and evolution occurs when things begin to be Drganised, that is to say, differentiated and coordinated. And this means at the outset the self-assertion of each and every unit, the claim and the right of the individual to be itself first and foremost. It is a necessary development, for it signifies the growth of self-conscious units out of a general unconsciousness.

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It is the appearance of rajas, the mode of life and

activity. Right belongs to this field and level: it is the lever that serves to bring out the individual nuclei from a general formlessness, it is the force that crystallises and organises the separative centres for separate fulfilment in life. And naturally it is the field also of competition and conflict. This is a stage and has to be transcended, from the domain of differentiation and contrariety one has to rise to the domain of co-ordination and co-operation. Here comes in the concept of duty which seeks to remedy the ills of the modus of rights in two ways, first, by replacing the movement of taking by that of giving, orienting the consciousness from the sense of self-sufficiency and self-importance towards that of submission and humbleness; secondly, by the recognition of the just rights of others also against one's own. Duty represents the mode of sattwa in action.

But the conception of duty too has its limitations. Even apart from the misuses of the ideal to which we have already referred, the ideal itself, is of the mental plane; it is more or less an act of mental will that seeks to impose a rule of co-operation upon the mutually excluding and conflicting entities. The result is bound to be imperfect and precarious. For mind force, although it can exercise some kin5f. of control over the life forces, cannot altogether master them, and eradicate even the very seeds of conflict that breed naturally in that field. The sense of duty raises the consciousness to the mode of sattwa; sattwa holds rajas in check, but is unable to eliminate wholly the propensities and impulses of aberration ingrained in rajas, cannot radically purify or transfigure it.

We have to rise above rajas and sattwa to enter a domain where one meets the source of inevitable harmony, where the units without losing their true self and nature and returning to the undifferentiated primordial mass, fulfil themselves and are yet held together in a rich and faultless symphony. This is Dharma, that which holds together. Dharma means the law of one's soul. And when each soul follows its own law and line of life, there cannot be any conflict; for the essence and substance of the soul is made of unity and harmony. The souls move like the planetary bodies, each in its. own orbit, and, because they do not collide or clash, all together creating the silent music of the spheres.

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This then is the basis upon which the new society and humanity have to be built up, if we want to have a life on earth really worth living. Individuals have to find out their real being and nature and embody that in life. Individuals will associate and combine and form groups in response to the urge and impetus of a group harmony that seeks expression and embodiment.

The system of varnas and ashram as of ancient India -even if it be supposed that it never existed actually in its purest ideal form-serves as a graphic example of how man as a social being should create and organise his existence in order that that existence might be rendered as perfect and integrally sound as things can be. That system we hold forth as only an illustration; we do not mean that it is a pattern of life that should be or could be implanted on our present day social circumstances. These are certainly very different and demand different groupings and hierarchies that must naturally grow out of them.

It should be noted that in contemporary life stress is laid upon one side, one part and one function of human nature which cover only a superficial -however useful and necessary - area. Man is not a political animal (even in the Aristotelian sense); and it is an error to say that he is an economic animal. These notions divide man's integral being into various sectional views only; they seek to cut out and suppress all other members excepting the favoured one. The politically militant bourgeois ideal of the Nazi or the Fascist and the economically militant ideal of the proletarian are equally guilty of this lapse. Even the ideal of man as a rational being does not go far enough to be able to save man and mankind. All of them evoke conflict, some deliberately, and the resolution of the conflict ends in suppression, amputation and atrophy.

We have to recognise that man, in his individual as well as in his collective being, is a complex entity, not something simple and one -dimensional. The healthy growth of himself and his society means a simultaneous development on many lines, all moving together in concord and harmony. And this movement of all-harmony can be found only when the movements are initiated from the very source of harmony which is the soul Certain soul-principles that seek expression in life today that

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are necessary to the age or to the coming age, have to be recognised and each given a field and a scope. That should be the basis of social groupings. And a composite variety of grouping with strands and strata, each expressing a particular mode of being of the one group-soul - which in its turn is an aspect of the Vishva Purusha in his play-is the ideal pattern of social organisation. What exactly the lines of grouping would be need not and perhaps cannot be settled now; a certain preliminary growth and change of consciousness in man is necessary before anything definite and precise can be foreseen as to the form and schema that consciousness will manifest and layout.

Still some kind of hierarchy seems to be the natural and inevitable form of collective life. A dead level, however high that may possibly be, appears to be rather a condition of malaise and not that of a stable equilibrium. The individual man cannot with impunity be brains alone-he becomes then what is called "a barren intellectualist", "an ineffectual angel" ; nor can he rest satisfied with being a mere hewer of wood and drawer of water - he is no more than a bushman then. Like-wise a society cannot be made of philosophers alone, nor can it be a monolithic construction of the proletariat and nothing but the proletariat-if the proletariat choose to remain literally proletarian. As the body individual is composed of limbs that rise one upon another from the inferior to the superior, even so a healthy body social also should consist of similar hierarchical ranges. Only this distinction should not mean-and it does not necessarily mean-a difference in moral values, as it was pointed out long ago by Aesop in his famous fable. The distinction is functional-and spiritual. In the spirit, all differences and distinctions are based upon and are instinct with an inviolable and inalienable unity, even identity. Differences here do not mean invidious distinction, they are not the sources of inequality, conflict, strife, but make for a richer harmony, a greater organisation.

However the crucial point arises here-how is the collective life, the group existence to be made soul-conscious? One can understand the injunction upon individuals to seek and find their souls; but how can a society be expected to act from its soul and according to the impulsions of its soul? And then, has a collectivity at all a soul? What is usually spoken of as the

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group-soul does not seem to be anything spiritual; it is an euphemism for herd instinct, the flair of the pack.

The real truth is that a group has the soul-the spiritual being-that is put into it. How can that be done? It is done by the individual, in and through the individual. Not a single individual perhaps, but a few, a select body, a small minority who by their conscious will and illumined endeavour form the strong nucleus that builds up automatically and inevitably the larger organisation instinct with its spirit and dharma. In fact all collective organisations are made in the same way. The form that a society takes is given to it by the ideology of one man or of a few men. All depends upon the truth and reality, the depth and fecundity of the inspiration and vision, whether it will last a day or be the eternal law of life, whether it will be a curse for mankind or work for its supreme good. Naturally, the higher the aim, the more radical the remedy envisaged, the greater the difficulty that has to be surmounted. An aggregate always tends to live and move on a lower level of consciousness than the individual's. It is easy to organise a society on forces and passions that belong to the lower nature of man - although it can be questioned whether such a society will last very long or conduce to the good or happiness of man.

On the other hand, although difficult, it may not prove impossible to cast the nature, character and reactions of the aggregate into the mould prepared out of spiritual realities by those who have realised and lived them. Some theocratic social organisations, at least for a time, during the period of their apogee illustrate the feasibility of such a consummation. Only, in the present age, when all foundations seem to be shaking, when all principles on which we stood till now are crumbling down, when even fundamentals - those that were considered as such - can no more give assurance, well, in such a revolutionary age, one has perforce to be radical and revolutionary to the extreme: we have to go deep down and beyond, beyond the shifting sands of more or less surface realities to. the un-shaking bed-rock, the rock of ages.

And India is pre-eminently fitted to discover this pattern of spiritual values and demonstrate how our normal life–individual and collective – can be moulded and built according to

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that pattern. It has been India's special concern throughout the millenaries of her history to know and master the one thing needful (tamevaikam janatha atmanam anya vaco vimuñcatha), knowing which one knows all (tasmin vijñate sarvam vijñatam). She has made countless experiments in that line and has attained countless achievements. Her resurgence can be justified and can be inevitable only if she secures the poise and position which will enable her to impart to the world this master secret of life, this art of a supreme savoir vivre. A new India in the old way of the nations of the world, one more among the already too many has neither sense nor necessity. Indeed, it would be the denial of what her soul demands and expects to be achieved and done.

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The World is One

WE say not only that India is one and indivisible (and for that matter, Bengal too is one and indivisible, since we have to repeat axiomatic truths that have fallen on evil days and on evil tongues) but that also the whole world is one and indivisible. They who seek to drive in a wedge anywhere, who are busy laying some kind of cordon sanitaire across countries and nations or cultures and civilisations, in the name of a bigoted ideology, are, to say the least, doing a disservice to humanity, indeed they are inviting a disaster and catastrophe to the world and equally to themselves. For that is an attempt to stem the high tide of Nature's swell towards a global unity that shall brook no resistance.

The distinctions and differences that held good in other times and climes can have no sense or value in the world of today. Race or religion can divide man no longer; even nationhood has lost much of its original force and meaning. It is strange -perhaps it is inevitable in the secret process of Nature's working -that when everything in conditions and circumstances obviously demands and points to an obliteration of all frontiers of division and separation -economically and politially too - and all drives towards a closer co-operation and intermingling, it is precisely then that the contrary spirit and impulse raises its head and seems even to gather added strength and violence. The fact may have two explanations. First of all, it may mean a defence gesture in Nature, that is to say, certain forces or formations have a permanent place in Nature's economy and when they apprehend that they are being ousted and neglected, when there is a one-pointed drive for their exclusion, naturally they surge up and demand recognition with a vengeance: for things forgotten or left aside that form

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indissolubly part of Nature's fabric and pattern, one has to retrace one's steps in order to pick them up again. But also the phenomenon may mean a simple case of atavism: for we must know that there are certain old-world aboriginal habits and movements that have to go and have no place in the higher scheme of Nature and these too come up off and on, especially when the demand is there for their final liquidation. They have to be recognised as such and treated as such. Radical and religious (including ideological) egoisms seem to us to belong to this category.

In the higher scheme of Nature, the next evolutionary status that is being forged, it is unity, harmony that is insisted upon, for that is the very basis of the new creation: whatever militates against that, whatever creates division and disruption must be banned and ruthlessly eschewed. In the reality of things, in the actual life that man lives, it will be found that on the whole, things that separate are less numerous and insistent than those which unite, man and man and nation and nation, if each one simply lives and lets live: on the contrary, it is the points of concordance and mutuality that abound. A certain knot or twist in the mind makes all the difference: it brings in the ignorance, selfishness, blind passion-a possession by the dark forces of atavism that makes the mischief.

We ask for freedom, liberty of the individual, self-determination -well and good. But that does not mean the licence to do as one pleases, impelled by one's irrational idiosyncrasies. The individual must be truly individual, not a fractional being, the self must be the real self, not a shadow or surface formulation in order to have the full right to unfettered movement. Liberty, yes; but that means liberty for all which means again the other two terms of the great trinity, equality and fraternity. Individuality, yes; that means every individuality, in other words, solidarity. The two sides of the equation must be given equal value and equal emphasis. If the stress upon one leads to Nazism, Fascism or Stalinism, steam-rollered uniformity or streamlined regimentation, the death of the individual, the other emphasis leads to disintegration and disruption, to the same end in a different way. But in the world of today, after the victory in the last war over the Nazi conception of humanity, it seems as though the spirit of disruption has gone

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abroad, human consciousness has been atom-bombed into flying fragments; so we have the spectacle of all manner of parochialism pullulating on the earth, regional and ideological -imperial blocs, nations, groups, parties have chequered ad infinitum, have balkanised human commonalty.

We badly needed a United Nations Organisation, but we are facing the utmost possible disunity. The lesson is that politics alone will not save us, nor even economics. The word has gone forth: what is required is a change of heart. The leaders of humanity must have a new heart grafted in place of the old. That is the surgical operation imperative at the moment. That heart will declare in its beats that the cosmos is not atomic but one and indivisible, ekam sat, neha nanasti kiñcana.

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The Pact and its Sanction

THE Pact if it is to be a success must be implemented at three levels. First of all, at the highest level, at the source itself, that is to say, between the Governments who initiated the move. The ministers and members at the top should themselves maintain an entente cordiale (in the literal and true sense of the phrase) and set an example by their word and deed, and what is more difficult and important, in their thought and feeling. They that are on either side of the fence should meet and talk and intermix as real friends and comrades, devise ways and means as to how best to carry out what they sincerely wish and desire. If they do not believe in the agreement in their heart of hearts, if they accept it simply because forced by compelling circumstances and because there was no other way out, if they entertain doubts and reservations and take it up as a pis aller, than surely more than half the force of the Pact is already gone. If the Pact is not sealed by the truth of our heart, then it becomes a mere scrap of paper and is sure to go the way of all such papers. It will not be stronger than the hundred and one contracts that are made between states only to be broken at the earliest opportunity. We have taken as the motto of our government the flaming mantra of the Upanishad, Truth alone leads to victory; we should not forget the continuation of the text, and not falsehood.

The leaders overhead should be actuated by the truth of the soul (indeed for that they should have first a soul). A mainly political deal covers up the fissure, an apparent solution or easing of the situation hides a festering sore. We should have understood by now, it has been the bitter lesson of the epoch comprising the last two great wars that mere politics does not save, on the contrary, it leads you into a greater and greater

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mess. And still if governments have not learnt the lesson, if they follow the old system of real-politik, well, we can say only God save us, for we are heading straight over the precipice - a final crash or a terrible revolution.

The Pact has to be implemented not only at the top but equally at the bottom. Here the matter seems somewhat easier. For in reality the common people have no interest in quarrels, they would prefer to live and let live peacefully; the burden of daily life is sufficient for them and they are not normally inclined to be busy about things that would disturb their routine work. Difference in religion or caste or creed is not such a serious matter with them. They tolerate and accommodate themselves to any variety easily and if there is a clash on an occasion, they forget it soon, and live amicably together as before. That has been the life in the villages for millenia. And if there is a formal Pact on the upper levels, it is what is normal and natural to the common mass.

The difficulty comes from the middle region, from the second element of the tripartite sanction. It is the "middle class", not quite in the economic but in the ideological sense. In other words, in every society there are people who have risen or are attempting to rise above the mass level. They look around and above: they are not satisfied with their lot, they aspire towards higher and wider ideals. They are the material out of which what we call reformers and revolutionaries are made. In the general mass who are more or less contented, they are the discontented: they form the leaven of cells that move and stir and work for change. Now all depends on what kind of leaven it is, what is the quality of the force that is called up, the nature of the ideal or idea that is invoked. For it can be either way, for good or for evil. There are elements that belong to the light, and there are elements that belong to darkness. There are mixtures in men no doubt, but on the whole there are these two types: one helps humanity's progress, the other retards and sometimes blocks completely. If the mass of mankind is tamas - inertia -there is a kind of rajas-dynamism -that drives towards greater tamas, as the Upanishad says, towards disintegration, under the garb of reformation it brings about disruption.

So we have to see the type of cells that grow and become

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consciously active in the body politic. It is sattwa - light-that brings in knowledge and harmony. And the movement for reformation and growth among the mass has to be inspired by that quality or mode of consciousness. A sound and healthy structure can be raised effectively upon that basis alone. The man in the mass, as I have said and as is well known, is a good-natured malleable material, but it is ignorant and inert: it can easily be worked upon by any kind of strong force, worked up to any kind of mischief. Shakespeare has made us very graphically familiar with the reaction of a mob and that remains true even today. Even if right direction is there at the top, at the higher governmental level, reflecting the mind of the true intelligentsia, a well-meaning plan is doomed to failure if it does not touch and move the middle strata that are the real executive agents.

The government in modern times represents indeed the executive power of the nation, itself is composed of the three social elements we speak of. First of all, the high or top-ranking officials, as they are called, who can think out and initiate a policy; next, the intermediate services who form the dynamic limb of the organism; lastly, there is the rung of the subordinate services. Here too the difficulty is with the intermediate grade. It is there that the "disaffected" are born and bred - disaffected not because of grievances or injustices done, but because of the urge of ideals and purposes, ideas and designs. The subordinate man - postman, railwayman, clerk, school master, daily labourer - has no ambitions, is not tortured by nostalgic notions: left to themselves, these people accommodate themselves to circumstances and take things as they come without worrying too much. But the point is that they are never left to themselves. It is told to them-not without reason, though-that they do not live, they vegetate: they are dead, otherwise they would be living and kicking. The rousing of the masses has always been the sacred mission of all reformers and saviours of humanity. For they form the bulk of humanity and its future is bound up with their destiny.

The whole difficulty centres upon the question: who rouses whom, and what is the principle that is meant to rouse. There is a slogan that incited the Red Terror of the French Revolution; there is the other one which inspired the Nazis; there is

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still another one rampant that had the seal and sanction of Stalin and his politbureau. These have spread their dark wings and covered the saviour light. On the other hand, the voice of the Vedic Rishi that hymned the community of faith and speech and act, the kindly light that Buddha carried to suffering humanity, the love and sacrifice of Christ showing and embleming the way of redemption, the saints and sages in our own epoch who have visioned the ideal of human unity in a divine humanity, even secular leaders who labour for "one world", "a brave new world"-all point to the other line of growth and development that man can follow and must and shall follow. The choice has to be made and the right direction given. In India today, there are these two voices put against each other and clear in their call: one asks for unity and harmony, wideness and truth, the other its contrary working for separativeness, disintegration, narrowness, and make-believe and falsehood. One must have the courage and the sagacity to fix one's loyalty and adhesion.

A true covenant there can be only between parties that work for the light, are inspired by the same divine purpose. Otherwise if there is a fundamental difference in the motive, in the soul-impulse, then it is no longer a pact between comrades, but a patchwork of irreconcilable elements. I have spoken of the threefold sanction of the covenant. The sanction from the top initiates, plans and supports, the sanction from the bottom establishes and furnishes the field, but it is the sanction from the mid-region that inspires, executes, makes a living reality of what is no more than an idea, a possibility. On one side are the Elders, the seasoned statesmen, the wise ones; on the other, the general body of mankind waiting to be moved and guided; in between is the army of young enthusiasts, enlightened or illumined (not necessarily young in age) who form the prana, the vital sheath of the body politic. All - by far the largest part of it-depends upon the dreams that the Prana has been initiated and trained to dream.

This life principle of a body politic seems in Pakistan to be represented by the Ansars. The question then to be determined is whether they have accepted the Pact or not. If they have, is it merely a political expedient or do they find in it a real moral value? We have to weigh and judge the ideal and motive that

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inspire this organisation which seeks to be the steel frame supporting or supported by the Government. We ask: is this a nucleus, a seed bed for the new life to take birth and grow, the new life that would go to the making of the new world and humanity? And we have to ask India too, has she found her nucleus or nuclei, on her side, that would generate and foster the power of her soul and spirit? The high policy of a government remains a dead law or is misconstrued and misapplied through local agents: they are in fact the local growths that feed the national life and are fed by it and they need careful nurture and education, for upon them depends ultimately the weal or the woe of the race.

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Brahmacharya

BRAHMACHARYA means the storage of energy in the body and its sublimation. The energy in view is mainly physicovital energy, the vital energy based upon and imbedded in the physical body. Brahmacharya naturally meant a strict observance of certain rules and regulations involving a strenuous discipline.

Brahmacharya was the very basis of education in ancient India: indeed, it was the basic education upon which Indian culture, Indian civilization, Indian life was based and built up. Without it there was no entry into the business of life.

Modern education means storage of information, knowledge of things-as much knowledge of as many things as it is possible for the brain to contain. The older ideal, however, was not so much knowledge, that is to say, packet of knowings, but capacity, first capacity in a general way, and then as its application, the capacity of knowledge. The problem was to locate, that is to say, find out the source of energy then master it, increase it, harness it and utilise it. The physicovital energy is the most elementary and elemental energy that is nearest to us and most easily available. It is the basic energy; man starts his life with that, a child possesses it abundantly. The first problem is how to store it; evidently it is most liable to be thrown or frittered away. The first form of the discipline in the preparatory stage of early life is regularity in habits, methodical physical exercises; even a fixed routine sometimes helps much. Next comes self-control, continence, physical purity. This is Brahmacharya proper. It means the exercise of conscious will.

We do not speak of Brahmacharya in relation to a child. The discipline can be taken up only when the body and the

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consciousness have attained a certain degree of growth and development. A child grows in the full free play of its life movements: the care or attention of others should weigh upon it as lightly as possible, maintaining only an atmosphere of happy influence and protection. The transition from the stage of free play to conscious control is marked in Indian society by the ceremony of upanayana, the first approach or initiation: it is the beginning of the life of Brahmacharya.

It must be understood that this discipline is not merely for those who wish to follow a religious or spiritual life, but for all without exception. Brahmacharya is the first ashrama, order or stage of life with which one begins one's organisation of life; one has to pass through it to others leading to greater and higher degrees of fulfilment. It forms the foundation, prepares the necessary ground upon which the life structure

can safely be raised and maintained. It is the secret fund of strength, the source of pure energies that vitalises life, enhances its values, makes it worth living.

The energy that one stores by continence, regular habits and self-discipline increases also in that way. Sometimes special methods - kriya - are adopted to help the process, Asana or Pranayama, for example. But an inner and a more psychological procedure is needed, a concentration of will and consciousness-a kind of dhyana, in other words-in order to be able to take the next step in discipline. For after the storage and increase of energy comes the sublimation of energy, that is to say, the physico-vital energy transmuted into the energy of mental substance, medha. Sublimation means also the increase of brain-power, an enhancement in the degree and quality of its capacity. This has nothing to do with the volume of knowledge enclosed (the mass of information to which we referred before) the growth is with regard to the very stuff of the mind from within, the natural strength of intelligence that can be applied to any field of knowledge with equal success and felicity.

The basis and the immediate aim of education according to the ancient system was to develop this fundamental mental capacity: the brain's power to think clearly, consistently and deeply, to undergo labour without tiring easily and also a general strength and steadiness in the nerves. The transference

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of nervous energy into brain energy is also a secret of the process of sublimation. It is precisely this aspect of education that has been most neglected in modern times. We give no thought to this fundamental: we leave the brain to develop as it may (or may not), it is made to grow under pressure-more to inflate than to grow-by forcing into it masses of information. The result at best is that it is sharpened, made acute superficially or is overgrown in a certain portion of it in respect of a narrow and very specialised function, losing thereby a healthy harmony and homogeneity in the total movement. The intellectual's nervous instability is a very common phenomenon among us.

In recent times, however, we have begun to view children's education in a different light. It is being more and more realised that things are not to be instilled into the child from outside, but that the child should be allowed to grow and imbibe naturally. The teacher is only a companion and a guide: he is to let the child move according to its own inclinations, follow its own line of curiosity; he can open up and present new vistas of curiosity, seek to evoke new interests. Sympathy and encouragement on his side giving scope to freedom and autonomous development for the child-this is the watchword and motto for the ideal teacher.

This new approach has rectified much of the wrong handling of the problem of education to which we have been accustomed. Even this new orientation, however, is not sufficient: along with freedom and autonomy, the element of discipline and order has also to be brought in, if not quite in the old way at least in a new manner. It will not do to say simply that it must be self-discipline and self-order, but the question is how it is to be practically carried out. In ancient times it was done by living the life of an aspirant, not merely by studying and going to school, being only a student-but living in the hours of the teacher, in the atmosphere of his direct presence and influence: the teacher too was not a machine issuing mechanical instruction, but a Person who loved and whom one loved, a warm embodiment of the ideal.

In our days there has been this unhappy division between the student and the aspirant. In the student life, life and study are things apart. One may be a good student, study very

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seriously and attain considerable eminence in intellectual achievement, and yet in life one may remain quite the ordinary man with very normal reactions. Along with the brain we do not endeavour to educate the life instincts and body impulses. This portion of our nature we leave all alone and do not dare or care to handle it consciously. Sometimes we call that freedom; but it is more slavery than freedom, slavery to our commonplace animal nature. Because one follows one's impulses and instincts freely, without let or hindrance one feels as if he were free. Far from it.

This hiatus in our nature, the separation between intellectual culture and life movement has to be healed up; human personality must be made a unified whole. The training given under Brahmacharya will be of immense help in that direction. The deeper purpose, however, of this discipline is not merely a unification of the personality, but a heightening also, lifting it to a level of consciousness from where it can envisage its spiritual destiny and seek to realise it.

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The Democracy of Tomorrow

THE great gift of Democracy is that of personal value, the sanctity of the individual. And its great failure is also exactly the failure to discover the true individual, the real person.

The earlier stages of human society were chiefly concerned with the development of mankind in die mass. It is a collective growth, a general uplifting that is attempted: the individual has no special independent value of his own. The clan, the tribe, the kula, the order, the caste, or the State, when it came to be formed, were the various collective frames of reference for ascertaining the function and the value of the individual. It is in fulfilling the dharma, obeying the nomoi, in carrying out faithfully the duties attached to one's position in the social hierarchy that lay the highest good, summum bonum.

Certainly there were voices of protest, independent spirits who refused to drown themselves, lose themselves in the general current. That is to say, a separate and separative growth of the individual consciousness had to proceed at the same time under whatever duress and compression. An Antigone stood alone in the inviolable sanctity of the individual conscience against the established order of a mighty State. Indeed, individualised individuals were more or less freaks in the social set-up in the early days, revolutionaries or law-breakers, iconoclasts who were not very much favoured by the people. In Europe, it was perhaps with Luther that started a larger movement for the establishment and maintenance of the individual's right. The Reformation characteristically sought to make room for individual judgement and free choice in a field where authority -the collective authority of the Church -was all in all and the individual was almost a nonentity.

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In India the spiritual life, it is true, was more or less the individual's free venture to the unknown. The Buddha said, Be thy own light; and the Gita too said, Raise thy self by thy own self. Yet here too, in the end, the individual did not stand, it rose but to get merged in the non-individual the universal, the Vast and the Infinite. The highest spiritual injunction is that God only existed and man has to annul his existence in Him.

The great mantra of individual liberty, in the social and political domain, was given by Rousseau in that famous opening line of his famous book, The Social Contract, almost the Bible of an age; Man is born free. And the first considerable mass rising seeking to vindicate and realise that ideal came with the toxin of the mighty French Revolution. I t was really an awakening or rebirth of the individual that was the true source and sense of that miraculous movement. It meant the advent of democracy in politics and romanticism in art. The century that followed was a period of great experiment: for the central theme of that experiment was the search for the individual. In honouring the individual and giving it full and free scope the movement went far and even too far: liberty threatened to lead towards licence, democracy towards anarchy and disintegration; the final consequence of romanticism was surrealism, the deification of individual reason culminated in solipsism or ego-centricism. Naturally there came a reaction and we are in this century, still, on the high tide of this movement of reaction. Totalitarianism in one form or another continues to be the watchword and although neither Hitler nor Mussolini is there, a very living ghost of theirs stalks the human stage. The liberty of the individual, it is said and is found to be so by experience, is another name of the individual's erraticism and can produce only division and mutual clash and strife, and, in the end, social disintegration. A strong centralised power is necessary to hold together the warring elements of a group. Indeed, it is asserted, the group is the true reality and to maintain it and make it great the component individuals must be steamrollered into a compact mass. Evidently this is a poise that cannot stand long: the repressed individual rises in revolt and again we are on the move the other way round. Thus a

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never-ending see-saw, a cyclic recurrence of the same sequence of movements appears to be an inevitable law governing human society: it seems to have almost the absolutism of a law of Nature.¹

¹ In this connection we can recall Plato's famous serial of social types from aristocracy to tyranny, the last coming out of democracy the type that precedes it, (almost exactly as we have experienced it in our own days). But the most interesting point to which we can look with profit is Plato's view that the types are as men are, that is to say, the character and nature of man in a given period determines the kind of government or social system he is going to have. There has been this cyclic rotation of types, because men themselves were rotating types, because, in other words, the individuals composing human society had not found their true reality, their abiding status. Plato's aristocracy was the ideal society, it was composed of and ruled by the best of men (aristas, srestha) the wisest. And the question was put by many and not answered by Plato himself, what brought about the decline in a perfect system. We have attempted to give our answer.

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Buddhism and Hinduism

I

BUDDHISM, or for that matter, Christianity or Mohammadenism or any credal and personal religion, is easy to understand. For they are each of them a single and simple entity, whereas Hinduism is a multiple and complex organism. The difference is that between a tree, a huge mighty tree, may be, and a vast and tangled forest. Buddhism, for example, "may be likened to the great Bo tree under which, one may say, it was born; but Hinduism is a veritable Dandakaranya.

For Hinduism means all things to all men, while a personal religion is meant truly for a certain type of persons. Hinduism recognises differences and distinction even while admitting the fundamental unity of mankind; it does not impose uniformity as the other type does. Hinduism embraces all varieties of religious experience; it is not based on a single experience however overwhelming that may be.

Varying the metaphor we may say again that Buddhism rises sheer in its monolithic structure, an Asokan pillar towering in its linear movement; Hinduism has its towers, but they are part of a vast architecture, spread out on ample and chequered grounds-even like a temple city.

II

Hinduism, one may even say, Indianism, has cast Buddhism out of India, the mother country, to the wonder of many. Buddhism came to rub out the dead deposits and accretions on the parent body and in doing so it often rubbed on the

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raw and against the grain. Hinduism had to accept the corrections; in the process it had to absorb, however, many elements contrary to its nature, even antipathic to its soul. Buddha was accepted as an Avatar; he was given a divine status in the Hindu Pantheon. Divested, apparently, of all heterodoxical and controversial appendages, he was anointed with the sole sufficing aspect of supreme kindness, universal compassion. Even so, in and through this Assumption, not a little of the peculiarly Buddhist inspiration entered the original organism. The most drastic and of far-reaching consequence was the inauguration and idolisation of monastic life, which has become since then in Indian conception, the summum bonum, the supreme goal of human existence. It was not without reason that India's older and truer tradition cried out against Shankara being a crypto-Buddhist (pracchanna bauddha), who was yet one of the most consistent and violent critics of Buddhism.

Life is an expression of the Divine Presence, earth is the field of labour for the gods-such was the original old-world Vedic view. It was the Buddhist dispensation that made life an inferior truth, a complex of unreality and decreed that the highest aim of man is to disappear from life. after life's fitful fever to sleep well -that seems to have been the motto given.

Buddhism saw and accepted a world of misery; therefore it knew how to touch the human heart, open up the doors in human consciousness to sympathy and compassion and love. Life it envisaged as an unreal persistence and therefore awakened and installed there the fiery urge towards withdrawal, ascension and transcendence. It was Buddhism that canonised the way of asceticism, laid out the path of the Everlasting Nay - although called (somewhat euphemistically perhaps) the Middle Path being tempered by an attitude of sweet reasonableness in the inner heart.

The original and primeval Indianism was built upon the Vedic realisation of the Everlasting Yes. That luminous body of an integral realisation, which means the Veda, came to be covered over by a more strenuous demand of immediate necessity, by an over-emphasis on one side or aspect or line of growth of the human consciousness; a negative approach was needed for man to rise out of its too earthly a tegument,

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to glimpse his divine possibility beyond, before he could hope to build it here below. The long reign of Siva was a necessary preparation for the advent of Vishnu.

And yet Mayavada even while it reigned supreme, was never the be-all and end-all of the inner Indian spirit. Always there was along with it the other strain; in the background, driven underground its presence is felt persistently. The Shunyam, the Asat, the Akshara Brahman could never totally obliterate the Sat Purusha, the Purushottama or the Mahashakti. The Line of the Everlasting Yes was kept living and vibrant in the Tantric discipline, for example, although at times it also suffered a change under the compelling impact of the Great Negation.

III

The distinction between the two conceptions-the original and the derivative-may be brought out in contrasting counter-points. Thus:

(1) Hinduism is based upon the Veda. Buddhism rejects the Veda.

Veda means revealed knowledge; a body of ascertained truths already in existence which one has to accept in order to grow and progress in knowledge. Buddhism enjoins to take nothing on trust, but to test everything by one's own reason and experience.

(2) The first principle that Vedic Knowledge posits is Sat, Being, Pure Existence, Reality. The first principle according to Buddhism is Asat, Non-Being, Non-Reality.

This creation has a fundamental basic reality. Behind the fleeting appearances there is a solid truth of Being. Everything else may pass away but That abides for ever. This is Hindu or Vedic tradition.

The Buddha says, take off the elements that compose the creation one by one, nothing would remain in the end. Creation is only an agglomeration of discrete elements; there is nothing behind them or within them that is permanent and holding them together. When names and forms go, at the end there is only dissolution, pure and simple, Nothing, Nihil.

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(3) This metaphysical position is faithfully translated, one may point out here, in their respective logical positions of the two.

Buddhist logic consideres negation as a simple contrary to affirmation; it is not an entity, it is the lack of entity. Zero or cypher means simple absence. Hindu logic makes of negation a positive statement but on the minus side, even as Hindu

mathematics did not consider a zero as valueless but gave a special value, a value of position to it. Do we not hear of negative positives (positron) in modern science today?

The Buddhists deny likewise the real existence of general ideas: according to them only individuals are real existences, general ideas are mere abstractions. The Hindus, on the other hand, like Plato who must have been influenced by them, affirm the reality of general ideas-although real need not always mean material.

(4) The Vedic Rishis declared with one voice that all existence is built upon delight, all things are born out of delight and move from delight to delight, and delight is their final culmination. Buddha said misery is the hallmark of things created; sorrow is the marrow and pith and the great secret of existence. Sabbe samkhara anichcha. Sabbe samkhara dukkha. Sabbe dhamma anatta.¹

¹Dhammapada, 278.

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The Mission of Buddhism

BUDDHISM came as a blaze of lightning across the sky of India's tradition; it was almost a fiery writing on the wall, bearing the doom of a world. Buddhism opposed and denied some of the very fundamental principles upon which the old world rested. It was perhaps the greatest iconoclastic movement ever thrown up by the human consciousness. First of all, it denied the tradition itself; it did not recognise the authority and sanctity of the purve pitarah, the ancient fathers, nor their revealed knowledge, the Veda. Buddhism enjoined the priority and supremacy of the individual's own consciousness, own effort and own realisation. Be thou thy own light. Work out thy own salvation. That was the injunction given. Not to take anything for granted - not even God or Brahman - but to judge and see for yourself where and what is the truth. It was the first protestant reaction recorded in human history.

Buddhism has sometimes been called the rebel child of Hinduism. The word need not be a term of abuse. A rebel is not always a mere destroyer, a pure negator. A negation can be only a form of stating something positive, an affirmation of a truth and reality. Not unoften a rebel means a call back to a truth that has been neglected, inadequately treated or completely omitted and by-passed; it is an urgent demand that that which has been forgotten and left behind, uncared for and undeveloped, must now be taken up again and brought forward, made a full-grown and mature element in a greater and more perfect organisation of human consciousness.

Buddhism cried halt because of two omissions: it turned man's mind to two new directions. In our eagerness to reach the spiritual and the supra-sensual, we gave scant recognition to the mental and the rational; and yet mind and reason should

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be the very basis of the life spiritual. And in the pursuit of God and the gods and the things divine, we became blind to human problems, things concerning man in the human way. The earlier vision gives us a happy picture of humanity. The world moves, it was said, from delight to delight, it was born in delight and it consummates in delight. One sang of immortality, of the solar light, of men being children of Heaven and Beatitude. That this material structure on which man leads his precarious existence is a texture of age and disease and death, that misery and undelight is of the very substance of human life was a hard fact that did not get due recognition. Perhaps it was an earlier, that is to say, a younger humanity

A simple Child,

That lightly draws its breath,

And feels its life in every limb,

What should it know of death ?¹

Yes, it was the age, almost a golden age, when man lived with his sense married to the Dawn, spontaneous in his reflexes, prime-sautier, intuitive and imaginative, full of a natural, unspoilt, unsophisticated happiness and hopefulness. But the Age of Reason had to come, and man's maturer nature, perhaps some "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought". Such an age of Reason and Ratiocination and pure brain power was ushered in by Buddha in India, and almost contemporaneously by Socrates in Greece and Confucius in China. The rational, that is to say, the scientific or analytical attitude to things appeared in the human consciousness for the first time in its fullness and almost exclusive sway. Neither the Vedas nor the Upanishads knew of logic as an instrument-a necessary instrument-for knowledge and expression. The old-world method was, as I said, intuitive, experiential, empirical, dogmatic. Also the atmosphere of that world, the stress of the consciousness was theocratic; what the new world brought in was what is called humanistic.

We say then that it was a necessity: it was a necessity that the rational, logical, ratiocinative, analytic mentality should be brought out and given its play and place. It is perhaps an inferior power of the mind or consciousness, but it is a strong

¹ Wordsworth, "We Are Seven".

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power and has its use and utility. It is the power that gives the form and pattern for the display of consciousness and intelligence in outward expression and external living; it is a firm weapon that gives control over these inferior ranges of consciousness. The leap from the sense-consciousness or the ele­ments of consciousness, from a mental growth just adequate and not too specialised, straight into the supra-sensuous and the transcendent had been an inevitable necessity, so that the human consciousness might get the first taste of its supreme status and value: a similar necessity brought to the fore this element of the mind, the mind's own power - of judgement and will-so that there might be a greater and wider integration of human nature and also that the higher realities may be captured in our normal consciousness. Even for the withdrawal of the mind from the outer objects to the inner sources, the mind itself can be used with much effect. And Buddha showed it magnificently. And of course, Shankara too who followed in his footsteps.

To abrogate the matter of fact, rational view of life in order to view it spiritually, to regard it wholly as an expression or embodiment or vibration of consciousness-delight was possible to the Vedic discipline which saw and adored the Immanent Godhead. It was not possible to Buddha and Buddhistic consciousness; for the Immanent Divine was ignored in the Buddhistic scheme. Philosophically, in regard to ultimate principles, Buddhism was another name for nihilism, creation being merely an assemblage of particles of consciousness that is desire; the particles scattered and dissolved, remains only the supreme incomparable Nirvana. But pragmatically Buddhism was supremely humanistic.

As it took man as a rational animal, at least as a starting-point, even so it gave a sober human value to things human. A rationalist's eye made him see and recognise the normal misery of mankind; and the great compassion goaded him to find the way out of the misery. It was not a dispassionate quest into the ultimate truth and reality nor an all-consuming zeal to meet the Divine that set Buddha on the Path; it was the everyday problem of the ordinary man which troubled his mind, and for which he sought a solution, a permanent radical solution. The Vedanist saw only delight and ecstasy and beatitude; for

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him the dark shadow did not exist at all or did not matter; it was the product of illusion or wrong view of things; one was asked to ignore or turn away from this and look towards That. Such was not the Buddha's procedure.

These are the two primary truths - arya sarya-which Buddha's illumination meant and for which he has become one of the great divine leaders of humanity. First, he has discovered man's rationality, and second, he has discovered man's humanity. Since his advent two thousand and five hundred years ago till the present day, in this what may pertinently be called the Buddhist age of humanity, the entire growth, development and preoccupation of mankind was centred upon the twofold truth. Science and religion today are the highest expressions of that achievement.

They speak of the coming of a new Buddha (Maitreya) with the close of the cycle now, ushering another cycle of new growth and achievement. It is said also that humanity has reached its apex, a great change-over is inevitable: seers and savants have declared that man will have to surpass himself and become superman in order to fulfil what was expected of him since his advent upon earth. If we say that the preparation for such a consummation was taken up at the last stage by the Buddha and Buddhism, and the Buddhistic inspiration, we will not be wrong. It was a cycle of ascending tapasya for the human vehicle: it was a seeking for the pure spirit which meant a clearance of the many ignorances that shrouded it. It was also an urge of the spirit to encompass in its fold a larger and larger circle of humanity: it meant that the spiritual consciousness is no more an aristocratic or hermetic virtue, but a need in which the people, the large mass, have also their share, maybe in varying degrees.

A new humanity broad-based to encompass the whole earth, expressing and embodying the light and power and joy of spiritual heights, forming a happy world state, may very well announce in the new age the descent of a supreme truth and principle of existence here below.

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Communism: What does it Mean?

Human Destiny

ANTHROPOLOGISTS¹ speak of a very interesting, if not strange biological phenomenon. A baby monkey's face, it seems, is much nearer to the adult human face than to its own form when adult and grown-up. Also the characteristic accentuations that mark out the grown-up ape come in its case too soon, but the human being continues, generally and on the whole, the stamp of his early, i.e., immature animality through-out his life. The rough and gold blotches, the rude and crude structures that make up the adult simian face, meaning all the specialisation of its character are not inherited by man; man retains always something of the fragility and effeminacy of the child. Reference is made to the fore cranium proportion, delicate jaws corresponding smaller teeth, shortened cranial base, expanding brain, bulging forehead, face retracted neatly beneath the brow which are characteristics of the simian baby. There is a lack of a certain forceful hard masculinity that becomes so dominant in the ultimate phase.

This phenomenon is akin and may be linked to the other one also pointed out by anthropologists. A new species, it is said, grows not out of a mature, fully developed, that is to say, specialised type, but out of an earlier, somewhat immature, undeveloped, non-specialised type. The new shoot of the genealogical tree branches out not from the topmost, the latest stem, but from one just below it, an earlier stock. The latest means the most developed, that is to say, the most specialised, and that means fossilised —barren; nothing new can be produced out of that; it can repeat only what was before so long as it does not die out and perish.

The aboriginal types that have survived today are, it has

¹ The Immense Journey , by Loren EiseIey.

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also been pointed out, a growth towards decline and deterioration, owing to a stereotyped functioning and a consequent coarsening and hardening of traits, both psychological and physical, a loss of plasticity, loss of the "early innocence."

The continuance and maintenance of an innocent baby animality in man shown in his physical features has been termed reversion to type or fœtalisation. Some declare that for man at least it is a sign of weakness, a possible incapacity to face squarely the blows of life and nature. This is due to culture and refinement that makes one sensitive but weak. There have been races in the past that attained cultural effeminacy-the Egyptians for example-and could not last, last long enough to withstand the impact of less cultured, less refined, but more vigorous races. The Græco-Roman succeeded the Egyptian, but they too in their turn were overwhelmed by the onslaught of ruder races, the Nordic barbarians, and gave way and perished. And once more, in the modern age, do we not see the repetition of a similar drama? The more cultured, the more refined, the older races seem to have paid heavily for their culture and refinement by being more and more delicate and weak and thus being slowly pushed to the wall by newer races built with heavier and coarser gram.

But that perhaps is not the real truth of the matter. It may be considered in a somewhat different perspective. We say cultures, races, species die not because they become too refined, delicate, effeminate, but rather because they develop on a single track; they become lop-sided, specialised, rigid, fossilised, as we have already said. Circumstances change, the environment brings up new conditions and if the previous form continues in its groove and does not know how to react adequately to the demand, is petrified and unchanging, then it breaks and is thrown away as a thing of the dead past.

A certain plasticity, a good deal of it, a little less finality with regard to structure and function, youthfulness, in one word, is the basic condition of life and life's progress. Hence even an immaturity, a certain slowness in pubescence, a longer adolescence signifies a more enduring plasticity, that is to say, the capacity for change and progress. A quick leap into old age and fixity, as is the rule with the lower animals, means

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arrest of all growth and sooner or later decay and dissolution. Even if such a life-form continues to exist, the existence is only death in life; a fossil exists for millions of years: it is not a significant existence.

If man has maintained a longer and greater youthfulness than his animal forbears, it means he has greater possibilities and through longer vistas of time. But leaving aside the animal creation, if we consider man himself and his prospect, certain conclusions forcibly present themselves which we shall try to clarify.

On a comparatively shorter view of the human evolution we observe as, for example, Spengler has shown, a serial or serials of the rise and fall of races and nations and cultures. Is that a mere repetition, more or less of the same or very similar facts of life, or is there a running thread that points to a growth, at least a movement towards some goal or purpose to attain and fulfil? The present cycle of humanity, which we may call and is usually called the historic age, dates from the early Egyptians and, in India, from the ancestral Vedic sages (purve pitrah). On a longer outlook, what has been the nature of man's curve of life since then to the present day? Races and cultures have risen and have perished, but they have been pursuing one line, moving towards one direction - the growth of homo fabricus - the term coined by Nietzsche -Man the artisan. Man has become man through the discovery and use of tools - from tools of stone to tools of iron, that marks his growth from primitiveness to civilisation. And the degree of civilisation, the distance he has travelled from his origins is measured precisely by the development of his tools in respect of precision, variety, efficiency, serviceability. Viewed from that standpoint the modern man has travelled indeed very far and has civilised himself consummately. For the tools have become the whole man; man has lost his human element and almost become a machine. A machine cannot run indefinitely, it has got to stop when life is not there. So it is often prognosticated now that man is at the end of his career. He is soon going to be a thing of the past, an extinct race - like one of the prehistoric species that died out because they could not change with the circumstances of life, because they became unchanging, hard and brittle, so

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to say, and fell to pieces, or otherwise they continued to exist but in a degraded, a mere vegetative form.

But, as we have said, man seems to have yet retained his youthfulness. He always just falls short of the perfect perfection, that is to say, in any single form or expression of life. Life did become stereotyped, mechanised, and therefore fossilised, more or less, in Egypt of the later Dynasties; in India too life did not become less inert and vegetative during two long periods, once just preceding the advent of the Buddha,.

and a second time just preceding the Moslem advent-and a third time perhaps just preceding the British advent. And yet man has survived all falls and has been reborn and rejuvenated every time he seems to be off the stage.

The very lack of perfection and fixity in the human consciousness leaves a kind of plasticity in his nature and therefore an opening towards further life and progress. However perfect man's sten-gun is, it is not as sure and efficient as the bee's sting. Man outlives, because he progresses through apparent regressions. The cycles of human life upon earth are not mere repetitions of the same pattern as some have supposed, they indicate a growth and development. We have referred to the growth and development in the matter of tools,. but that is only a sign and expression of another growth and development - development in mind and consciousness. In the earlier races of mankind there was a vital, a kind of instinctive and intuitive - Bergsonian - light of consciousness; that slowly has grown into a rich intellectual consciousness, and significantly and characteristically, into a more and more self-conscious consciousness. That points to man's characteristic progressive march through all the changes in his life-pattern.

The danger in the growth and progress of the consciousness is that it progresses along a definite line or lines, cuts out a groove and in the end lands into a blind alley or cul-de-sac.This, as I have said, is perhaps the original or secret cause of decline and fall of many individual races and nations. But on the whole mankind steps back, it seems, just at the danger point and escapes the final catastrophe. A new vein of consciousness awakes in man and gives him a new power of self-adjustment. From Imperial Egypt to, say, modern France or Russia is a far cry; the two ends give very different connotations

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of the human consciousness, although there are many things common in certain life-instincts and some broad mental impulsions. And there is not only progress, that is to say, advancement on the same plane, but there is a kind of ascension on a somewhat different plane. Yajnavalkya represented a type of elite which is far away and far other than that of Vivekananda, for example, today.

We have described man, especially, modern man as homo fabricus; but that is a particular aspect of application of homo intellectualis. And it is a sign and warning that he must step back and look for a new connotation of his consciousness in order to go forward and continue to exist. If, as we have said in the beginning, man is capable of a durable youthfulness, by his very nature, it means he has a resiliency that will enable him to leap into new conditions and adapt himself to them more easily and without much delay.

Mankind has to enter and is entering into new conditions of life, it has to adopt a new mode of living; and for that a new mode of consciousness is imperative and imminent.

Human history has shown that man is capable of facing catastrophic changes and himself undergoing such changes. At this critical turn of human history where we stand today, man has to choose his destiny -either the Capitol or the Tarpeian Rock, as in the classical phrase. Either he becomes a new man with a new consciousness or he goes down into inconscience and is no more man.

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From the Known to the Unknown?

FROM the known to the unknown: that is a well-known principle of procedure in the matter of knowledge, of action and of life generally. It is a golden rule that one should never take a step forward unless and until the previous step has been held firm and secure. But after all is this counsel the supreme counsel of perfection or even in point of fact does this represent an actuality? We have our misgivings.

For may not the contrary motto - " from the unknown to the known" - be equally valid, both as a matter of fact and as a matter of principle? Do we not, sometimes at least, take for granted and start with the unknown number x to find out the solution to our problem? Why go far, the very first step that the child takes in his adventurous journey of life, is it not a veritable step into the unknown? Indeed, many, in fact most of the scientific laws - the Laws of Nature - are they strictly the result of calculation and deduction from known and observed data or are they not rather "brilliant surmises", "sudden revelations" that overwhelm by their un-expected appearance? Newton did not arrive at his Law of Gravitation in the trail of a logical argument from given premises towards unforeseen conclusions. Nor did Einstein discover his version of the Law in any syllogistic way either. The fact seems to be more often true that the unknown reveals itself all on a sudden and is not reached through a continuous series of known steps. Examples could be easily multiplied from the history of scientific discoveries.

For the fact is that man, the being that knows, is composed not merely of known elements, known to himself and to others, but possesses a hidden, an unknown side which is nonetheless part of himself. And even though unknown, it is not inactive,

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it always exerts its influence, imposes its presence. Man has a submerged consciousness which is in contact and communion with similarly submerged worlds of consciousness. Man's consciousness possesses aerials that catch vibrations from unknown regions. He has a secret sensitiveness that receives intimations from other where than his physical senses and his logical reason. His external mind does not always recognise such unorthodox or abnormal movements; he only expresses his surprise or amazement at the luminosity, the authenticity of solutions that come so simply, suddenly, inevitably, the unknown revealing itself miraculously.

In the spiritual field the unknown is a fact of primary importance and has to be given the first place, the foremost consideration. For the call is towards the Beyond and no amount of trafficking with the actual-the near and the known-can lead you out of it. There must be a sudden leap at one time or another. That is what is meant by saying that the deep calls unto the deep. For man has the power, the privilege to contact directly the thing that is unknown and beyond. There is an opening in him, a kind of backdoor, as it were, through which he can pass straight into another dimension.

That is why it is said constantly by the ancient sages that the truth cannot be found by much inquiry and much study, the truth is found only when it condescends to reveal itself to the inquirer. The true truth is not at our beck and call, you cannot get it as and when you like, it does not wait comfortably just at the terminus of your investigations and argumentations. This does not mean, however, that we remain helpless and hopeless until the manna falls from heaven. No, something lies in our power, a spontaneous and natural faculty, to create at least favourable conditions for the light to descend and appear. A quiet awaiting in the being, calm concentration and aspiration, a sincere opening are some of the conditions under which it is easier for the unknown x to reveal its identity.

It is not a blunder and it need not lead inevitably to a catastrophe if, for example, a child were given its first education not through his mother tongue, but through what is termed a foreign language. Would it, for that matter, harm a child invariably and necessarily, if he did not confine himself within

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the walls of his school in the midst of the known and the familiar, if he were to stir out and venture into wilds - how otherwise would Alice discover her Wonderland? A foreign tongue, a foreign atmosphere would often interest a child more than things known and familiar. The very distance and imprecision and even the peculiar difficulties exert a charm and evoke greater attention in the child. This is not to say that familiarity breeds contempt, but that unfamiliarity does not repel but attracts also.

There is some point in a system of education which seeks to pull out the child from its familiar old-world milieu and place him in the midst of conditions where he can grow freely unencumbered by ties of the past and the immediate. The Russians have been blamed for many of their revolutionary, if not scandalous changes in social life and pattern: the child not knowing its father and mother, but being brought up in a common, almost anonymous nursery where he loses his family brand but develops a consciousness that is cosmopolitan and widely human. It seems it is only when one is thrown into strange and unfamiliar and unknown surroundings that one gets the best out of oneself. If you wish to increase the stature of your being, that is the way-if not the way, at least one effective way.

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Towards the Future

THE Buddhists consider being as a stream of consciousness, a ceaseless flow of sensations. An individual formation, a creature, a human person has no permanent self-identity. It is like the Heraclitean river where one does not bathe twice in the same water.

Besides, .what is more interesting, it is not an uninterrupted continuous flow with no gap or hiatus, but a movement of disconnected units. It is an unending series of disparate moments of consciousness. The sense of continuity is a make-believe, an illusion.

We know today, thanks to modern science, of the mystery of particles. The ultimate constituents of the material world consist of particles (or wave-particles), that is to say, packets of material energy strung together or merely juxtaposed, but held together somehow. Now the Buddhists added that these are particles of energy no doubt, but the energy is not mere material, i.e., electrical energy; they are desire-energy. Human being or consciousness is an aggregate of cells of desire-energy. The task man has before him - the alchemy or laboratory work man is to do is to empty the cells of desire and so annihilate "them; desire gone, cells crumble away - existence becomes Nihil - an inexpressible stillness or tranquillity.

There is however another solution. The cells can be emptied -of desire, but a new element can be put in the place of desire .or desire itself can be transmuted.

Science speaks of the transmutation of material particles, 'i.e., of material mass into energy-electric, kinetic or radiant energy. An inert mass thus becomes a light particle. And we may conceive of a material body becoming a luminous body, the human form a globe of light.

Yoga envisages precisely such a consummation. But the process is somewhat different. The equation here is not E=mc²

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but M=C?, M meaning transmuted Matter; the transformation of Matter not into mere energy but into Consciousness. Energy of the Spirit, this happens when the material particle is raised to the potency of infinite Consciousness.

Pursuing the mathematical imagery we may describe the Buddhist equation as desire raised to the power of zero equals Nirvana: D°=Zero. Buddha thought like that. He thought annihilation of desire means annihilation of existence, for he equated desire with existence. But mathematics tells us that anything raised to the power of zero is not zero but one, that is, the unit, the pure existence-Sat (or Sachchidananda as the Vedantists say.

Science and mathematics tell us today of a truth or just point to a truth which a spiritual realisation reveals. It is, as I have already said, the mystery of transformation, or transubstantiation as the Christian faith figures it.

This world, this material existence is to be transmuted-the portion of earthly human existence at least, with which we are most concerned. It is at present made of ignorance and sorrow and incapacity-composed of the particles of these entities; poor and sorry as they are, these have to be replaced by entities of light and joy and love, of peace and strength and wideness. Well, it is a transmutation or transubstantiation of the kind which Nature has already attempted as an experiment; I am referring to the alchemy of fossilisation. The present human formation must be dipped and soaked-and held under high pressure in an environment of the desired material or materials that one has in view.

Such an environment does exist. It is pressing from within or from above and is heading towards a resultant material action. It is an awakened dynamic spiritual reality which awaits and is working for its supreme and inevitable destiny.

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An ocean of Light shall I become,

A thousand rivers of light flowing into it and rising out of it -

Light playing with light, light woven into light-

A solar world made of the glories of the gods!

October 1, 1932

III

ALL my heart melts into a fountain of gratitude

And tears rush to the eyes -

Such sweet tears, angel-stars that come from afar

With healing Peace and Bliss.

Love transcendent

That disdains not our crawling mortalities,

But embraces them with a passion beyond the little human heart to know,

Love that in its supreme love has given itself away

And become the clod of earth we are. . . . . .

Yet human life is but a blind rejection, a heartless denial

Of this one thing that makes life living.

My poor limbs are all astir within,

A faint and muffled echo sways along their closed and dark-some corridors!

Is it the awakening of the sleeping goddess?

Is it the resurrection of the self-immolated One?

My heart yearns to welcome Him whom the ages have ignored.

And melts into a fountain of tears!

October 2, 1932

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IV

IN silence move the stars,

In silence mounts the sap within the plant,

The secret energies of Nature work and create in the deeps of silence.

Out of the uttermost stillness the whirling universe was born -

All the turmoil and tumult, the roar and fury that meet the eye

Flourish upon an unfathomed quiet below.

In the tranquillity of death a new birth prepares itself,

The gathered calm of Night's ending ushers in the rejuvenated Sun .

And were my wild senses to turn back, they would face the abysmal silence of the soul.

The cry of the heart shoots up like a column of silence -

That voice alone reaches straight to the High Throne and moves it to grace.

The gods descend along a path of luminous silence spread in

the farthest spaces of our inmost being.

October 3, 1932

V

I LAY myself bare-limb by limb,

From the outmost to the inmost, from the highest to the lowest,

From the crown of the head to the tip of the toe,

From my senses to my soul.

I lay myself bare - simply and wholly -

To the touch of the one who is our Beloved,

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---

Like a babe, all beauty in its sheer nakedness,

Reposing ecstatic in the warmth of the mother's lap.

The clothings and trappings, the pretences and falsities -

All the proprieties that make up our adult wisdom-

Cast to the winds -come as innocent as when you were born

And bathe in the wide sunlight of the Love Divine.

October 4, 1932

VI

MAHESHW ARI

VAST and serene as the infinite spaces,

Far away from our little earthly world,

And yet overarching and leaning down in a protective gesture-

The Mother of Light, the Mother of all-comprehending wisdom, throned on the highest heights,

Sheds, equal and unruffled, her benign compassion on obscure mortals,

Draws them infallibly ever nearer to her through the rolling ages -

Her very presence is the power that decrees, the grace that redeems.

October 5, 1932

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VII

MAHAKALI

SHE has burst open the veil and leaped to the front,

Into the very thick of the combat

Our Captain, our Warrior - her flaming sword, her battering mace,

Her thundering cry sweep the field.

She brooks no delay, has no mercy for weakness -

Straight is her path and swift she speeds to the goal:

Here and now shall be her victory.

Terrible Mother who presses her children through blazing fire,

The sooner to burn out the dross and free the gold -

The sooner to smother them with her passionate bliss!

Her every tread crushes a demon's head,

Unseals for mortals a fount of immortality.

October 6, 1932

VIII

MAHALAKSHMI

MOTHER of Delight-

Of Love that moves the sun and stars!

She is the Rapture that quickens our inmost heart,

She is Beauty's self that enthrals our earthly senses; In her is the whole meaning of existence.

She has come down close and intimate to a humanity avid of joy;

She casts her noose of charm and captures us even by our weakness;

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Her radiant smile transfigures a whole world of gloom and pain

Into an Abode of Bliss -

And we know not when have we transcended our human frailties

In our eagerness to contemplate her gracious form,

To kiss those glorious feet of hers

That trail the Dawn!

Hasten to welcome her, O heart, hasten!

0Lest she turn away -

For she will not force herself,

Our adorable and shy Mother!

October 10, 1932

IX

MAHASARASWATI

SUPREME Artisan and Fashioner of perfection,

Atom by atom she builds up the world-she is slow, patient, faultless.

And by her consummate craftsmanship the universe-and each object in the universe -

Is a marvel of pattern, a model of divine arabesque,

A carefully wrought jewel.

Hers is the keen eye, hers the deft finger, the sure handling

And they compel intractable Matter

To bend and bow down to her as to its sovereign Mistress.

She is the growing divinity within us that like inevitable fate

Is slowly taking possession of our human life,

She is moulding it as she wills it to be -

A vessel and an instrument-a visible embodiment

Of the Consciousness, the Power, the Bliss

Of the Divine Mother.

October 14, 1932

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ON this troubled world, distracted beyond measure,

Erring in the double darkness of ignorance and ill-will,

Seeking remedy and refuge from evil

At Evil's gate,

Pour, pour thy soothing Light, 0 Divine Compassion!

When men have passed through their little illusions,

They will love thee and cling to thee the more passionately,

And understand thee with a clearer vision;

They will know thee and will come back to thee

At the end of all their nightmare!

Thou art the one pivot on which revolves the universe,

The hidden spring that presses my heart to a ceaseless beating;

The light thou scatterest to the farthest star

Shines in my eye with a purer gleam;

Thou art the gladness that makes the earth green and the sky blue -

Thou art the ecstasy that has turned the blood in my veins To a crimson red!

October 15, 1932

XI

IT is the Eye of the eye and yet it is the object that the eye contemplates;

It is the Sense of the senses and still the senses can apprehend it;

It is not merely the inmost, it is as well the outermost.

It thins itself out to utmost tenuity -even into nothingness,

And it condenses itself to impenetrable solidity -

It is Pure Consciousness and it is absolute Matter.

Spirit is Matter sublimated, Matter is Spirit crystallised.

Soul is Body introvert, Body is Soul extravert.

October 16, 1932

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XII

THOU hast fashioned thy limbs into the curves of every human contact;

Thou art neither too subtle nor too vast, neither the far transcendent, nor the wide universal;

Thou hast framed thyself into the limits of common mortality,

And standest level upon the earth.

This is thy utter self-giving and this thy supreme grace -

This smile of kindness has brought here below

All the bliss of an unseizable beyond,

The words of thy mouth incorporate

The inexpressible silence,

And this Flesh has made the Immutable Truth

Living and throbbing, warm to our embrace!

October 17, 1932

XIII

UPON this mortal earth thou buildest a garden of Paradise,

O Mother of Dreams, Mother victorious!

Overwhelmed with wonder the heart lies prostrate at thy feet,

O Mother victorious!

Saints and great souls sing to thee in adoration,

O Mother omnipotent, Mother victorious!

Blind darknesses fall faint and numb before the arrows of thy Light,

Mother victorious!

Saviour from all evil, deliverer from pain is thy Great Name,

O Mother victorious!

A home of safety is the refuge at thy feet,

O Mother of Bliss, Mother victorious!

The fear of death and age vanishes today,

O all-conquering Mother, Mother victorious!

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The seas of sorrow disappear at the touch of thy Grace,

O Mother of Peace, Mother victorious!

The sheen of gold pales before thy hue that enthrals my soul,

O Mother of Light, Mother victorious!

In the heart of the devotee thou art the delight that is heaven's nectar,

O Mother of Love, Mother victorious!

October 29, 1932 [Translated from Bengali]

XIV

MAHALAKSHMI

DEAR to thee are gardens of the lotus,

Where else shall I spread thy seat, O Mother?

On the lotus of my heart press the dawn-roses of thy feet and make it flower.

Things ungainly afflict thee, O Mother,

I will not cherish them anywhere in me even a little.

O Queen of Beauty, charmer of the worlds,

Keep abiding thy grace upon me.

Thou sufferest not an arid heart,

So of thyself hast thou come and put on bonds of affection -

O Mother, by the magic of thy sweetness, quicken and upheave me with Love.

[Translated from Bengali]

XV

GOD THE SUPREME MYSTERY

HE is the Soul of our soul, He is the Body of our body -

Our eye veils Him, but He is revealed to the Eye of our eye;

He is Soul embodied and He is Body ensouled.

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He is the farthest of the far and the highest of the high -

The senses cannot accost Him nor any human instrument inveigle;

He is the nearest of the near and the lowest of the low -

The very earth of our body is kneaded out of His substance.

He is the goal towards which the creation wheels in its ceaseless cycles,

He is the firm foundation upon which the universe is reared.

The vast and fathomless Peace and Silence of Uncreation is He,

He the vehement Energy that swirls out in the aeons and the worlds.

He is the Father whose wise love marshals our destinies,

He is the Mother whose passion-white light accordantly

fashions us and bears us through,

He is our own Self, ourselves beyond the ignorance and the

bondage of the moment.

He is there and we are He -

To bring down on earth and incorporate in this body

Something of the high divinities that form His Nature -

Through the travail and storm and stress of yearning mortalities

To give birth to an Immortality

Secured and housed here below.

April 10, 1933

XVI

FAINT Heart! Kindle your faith and take courage!

Stupendous obstacles block the way?

But omnipotent is the Power that awaits you,

And under her ensign you will conquer -

Conquer all that looks unconquerable

And much more besides,

Worlds now beyond reach and out of sight.

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The little being within appears so small and so helpless!

And yet it is the diamond-point

That cuts through even the hardest matter as through water,

It is the streak of light that easily pierces

The densest sway of darkness.

There is a breath that moves mountains,

There is a touch that makes the dead arise,

There is a voice that is the doom of Yesterday

And the radiant herald of Tomorrow.

May 26, 1933

XVII

LORD, this is my prayer:

May the voice of thy silence enter me, -

Rousing every atom of my being,

Till it vibrates to thy Truth,

And is the harp of its utterance

And is its visible embodiment.

All the tumultuous surges of the wide world

Rush towards me assured of victory-

May they roll back in confusion and turn away upon themselves

And leave me as a virgin rock

Tranquil and ever firm on its pristine foundations.

May the universe dissolve, may it vanish

Even like a dream -

And thou alone appear, thou alone abide

One in thy multitudinous reality;

I shall find a new world in Thee, a world made of Thee;

Therein each limb of mine shall realise its fullness of union with Thee

And shall taste utter felicity.

May 28, 1933

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XVIII

LORD, thou hast heard our prayer,

And come down into our mortal ways -

Assumed the form, the flesh that build our weakness,

Thou hast deigned, to be close to us and wear our make,

To be with us and to be of us.

But we have taken thy humanity in a too literal and familiar way,

We have forgotten the Aspiration and the Descent, the

answering Grace that took shape in thy advent;

And now we blame thee and slight thee, because thou art

become like us-earthly and human.

Divine, thou art too far-human, too near!

For, the aberration of our petty minds knows no limits!

:But thou sufferest all

And keepest thy unruffled and unabated benignity -

On thy lips is the smile of eternal and infinite Grace,

The smile that is thine alone.

June 1, 1933

XIX

THE MARCH INTO THE NIGHT

ENDLESS, endless labours the way:

Its meanderings seem always to come back near to the same old familiar spot.

We have travelled through long ages and countless lives,

Through immemorial vistas of Time, as though through all the length of Eternity -

And yet see we not the same old sun jogging up and down

Between its same old prison bars?

The lone luminaries afar that appear so close to the very heart of the Great Mystery,

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Twinkle and blink as inconsciently as ever;

The cold and barren face of the moon stares as bland and stupid as its wont;

The same old shadow still lingers at our feet and entangles them inexorably;

And the eternal viper remains coiled fast into the darkness of our entrails. . . .

The march of aeons has brought us none the nearer to Light or Deliverance.

Ah, Soul, we have indeed progressed into obscurity,

Into a deeper and deeper gloom have we entered -

Yet who is this intrepid voyager that has dared the other

Unknown, the nether profundities?

It is thou, O my Soul, it is the Light itself, the beacon from above!

For whither else could Progress lie?

Towards Light and more Light?

But the Soul is All-Light and needs no illumination;

It is Darkness that yearns for the Light

And so the Soul has descended in answer

Into the gloom -

The gloom stretches interminable,

The abyss seems fathomless, -

Only to the spirit that ventures with its own lantern;

But my Soul is never alone -the Mother of Light upbears it -

A cataract of limitless blaze swirls behind

And presses it forward in and through the gloom

That will roll out and melt,

Sooner perhaps than one may believe, -

The soul and gloom and all -

Right on the other side

Into the free and infinite and sheer translucence.

July 24, 1933

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XX

THERE is a deep within the deeps,

There is a height beyond the farthest heights. . . .

A cooling breath, a silence immaculate

Abides for ever,

Unbroken and ceaseless reigns over sinful earth

A smiling Grace.

A ray, the shadow of a Hand,

The touch of a happy unspeakable sorcery,

Bends down to our mortality held fast in pain and ignorance -

A wide quietude suffuses and masters the heat and turmoil of the senses,

We obey the gesture of a compassion that sees and feels, that relieves and delivers.

This surface is a veil, a tissue made of obscurity,

It is a level plain that circumscribes a crawling vision -

Peel off the dull crust, release the living translucence of inmost fires,

Soar on the wings of the soul's high destiny to stellar infinitudes.

Deep is the obscurity, but there is a light behind,

Long is the suffering, but there is a supreme joy in which it culminates;

For the utmost clearness of human day is but the faint echo of another Sun,

And the most exquisite, the purest pleasure on earth is no

more than a soon-sinking beacon

That lures us on towards other Delights, intimate, unseen, unfailing, ineffable.

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XXI

LET me not shame thee, my soul,

Let me not profane thee -

With a faithless glance or a straying step

Or a sigh that heaves not for thee.

Straight as the sun's ray, clear as the virgin spaces

Let my whole being converse and fix upon thee.

Thy voice is still and small -

Oh the delicatest thing that ever bloomed in a mortal frame!

Thy slightest wish, the most casual inclination

Be for me a thundering command and an impetuous drive

To immediate embodiment.

Thou art the Architect that builds from within,

From the deepest foundations:

The edifice thou rearest rises inexorably;

Nothing can mar it, nothing can shake it,

It stands a marvel of ages -

Time lies prostrate at its feet in awe and adoration.

Thou art the Child that we carry as in a womb

And nourish with the light that we press out of every cell and every pore;

Thou growest with each drop of the Grace that distils from above into our mortality-

Our common clay that houses the Divine Inhabitant thins out and dissolves,

Like a shadow passes out and merges into thy substance.

September 19, 1933

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XXII

My eyes have followed the lines of thy beauty,

The winging curves of grace that embody thee -

In a delight that was gathered to its core of utmost intensity,

To its height of supreme exquisiteness. . . . . .

A light bathed them, a glory suffused them slowly -

A clear and vast vision entered,

I stood face to face with the Truth -

And the scales of Ignorance fell away!

The enraptured contemplation of thy embodiment

Quieted and soothed the heat and turmoil

Of my feverish hungers

That had rushed so long incontinent towards a myriad mirages -

My desire has found its one haven of rest,

An unspeakable tranquillity holds my mind and heart, An utter purity nestles me!

My ears have drunk thy voice -

Its ringing sweetness filters through the depths of my being,

And it awakens crystal listenings that mirror and capture

The mother-harmony of immemorial spheres,

Thy rhythm divine that graces and moulds my life.

My hands have touched the roses of thy feet -

The very soul of fragrance has passed into the substance

Of my transmuted earth. . . . ..

This body has grown sheer into thee as if it were thy own limb!

October 3, 1933

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XXIII

THERE is no darkness, we only close our eyes

and shut out the Light;

There is no pain, it is only our shrinking

from an intense and unwelcome Delight;

There is no death, it is only our dread of the Life Eternal

that comes back upon us and smites us.

Our senses are tremulous and fearsome

and cling to the empty littlenesses of the surface moment,

they heed not the vast surges of Infinitude

that sweep and pass by.

Calm, calm, my soul! Sink down and deep:

Fashion the crystal bowl of thy heart

with all the serene profundity of the unknown spaces -

and drop by drop will gather there

a bliss immortals only can taste,

and ray by ray will dawn the Light supernal. . . . . .

Or -be prepared for this too, soul, my soul -

the down-rush of a myriad undyked cataracts,

the sudden bursting of a whole stellar conflagration.

March 17, 1935

XXIV

LEST I become proud of my strength

thou hast revealed to me the bundle of weakness that I am. . . .

Lest I sink down and wallow in my weakness

thou hast set blue-kissing wings to my feet

and made me soar high -

high towards heights beyond all my dreaming.

Thou art the Strength of the strong,

and the stronger he becomes the more he knows it:

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weakness is but thy absence -

one has only to fill up the void with thyself

to be transformed into the very store-house of power.

Thy grace, 0 Lord, has made this dumb one eloquent, this lame one it has made to cross the mountains.

April 8, 1935

XXV

I T bent, bent down and touched the earth -

the gracious Light -

even as the wide azure curves and kisses the level horizon:

all my soul flushed roseate with delight,

and this body stilled to trance shone vibrant with an inly glow -

a bride led to the altar.

The scars of a thousand pangs that had branded the limbs

through aeons of ignorance

are now smoothed out, and with the freshness of a morning life

my being is dowered whole and entire.

Behold! I am a new-born babe in the lap of the Immaculate Mother -

the glory of her love pulsates in every cell and fibre,

a whole futurity of her vision

is incarnated in this frail earthly vessel.

A mighty secret is being wrought upon in the far depths -

but it shall out one day

and blaze like a rising sun on the brow of creation.

April 11, 1935

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XXVI

I AM not ashamed of my failings,

I do not claim to be an angel of heaven,

I cannot boast that I have never faltered -

I am not ashamed of my humanity.

I possess not the halo of saintliness,

nor do I wear the tares that tangle me round as a crown of glory -

Lord, thou hast made me humble,

But I have known to be humble with humility.

Through all my failings and errings

thou hast proved me to be the commonest of men,

a child of clod and clay -

Through my failings too thou hast led me on:

across the shoals and marshes and quagmires

thou hast guided me on to higher and firmer and surer footings -

thy Grace in its chrysaline warmth has enveloped

this earth-bound worm.

Thou hast proved, O mighty one,

that the meanest of things here below is rounded

with a divine ending,

and man is not all too human:

there is a prophecy in mortal creature that only bides its time,

nothing is impossible even in this sorry world -

For, behold, I am no longer what I was.

April 14, 1935

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XXVII

NOT for me, not for me

I breathe and move and act -

not for me, not for me,

but for the beloved Lord of my life.

I have cast myself away -

oh, the rapture of looking up to Him, of listening to Him alone:

I am the slave of His Will,

a plaything in His sweet hands.

But I am no more -

this is a mere vacant frame that you see,

its ancient substance has dissolved -

it is now my Lord's tabernacle, it is His gestures that are traced there.

The I that seems is an empty thing

that bubbles up with His breath as He chooses

and utters and enshrines His iridescent Delight

and sinks back again and melts into His tranced silence.

April 22, 1935

XXVIII

IN the wide, wide sapphire stillness of my heart's heaven in trance,

the diamond tips of other-world raptures

peep out and twinkle and beacon -

Oh, the radiant sisterhood of the benign Graces

who distil upon my earth the Lord's love-laden smile.

Is it a gloom that invades? a frown that menaces?

But these hosts of the Enemy hurl themselves in vain

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against the blazing armour that my Lord's laughter

has fashioned around me -

they are turned back upon themselves and are scattered.

In the shade of the Light, a happy traveller I move on

Ever secure and tranquil.

I have heard His call and He has embraced me

intimately from afar;

Lo, I am grown into the translucency of His divine serenity,

the earth-made cells of flesh are now spirit-stars

that bear the undecaying lustres of immortality.

April 30, 1935

XXIX

GRACE is the golden lining to the dark cloud:

it is the touch of love that rounds off all our faults,

he Divinity that lies imbedded in our earth,

revealing itself a-sudden like a lightning flare.

I t is the flaming heart of things

that nothing has yet been able to extinguish:

it is that which breaks out,

through the obdurate rock and the damping water,

in volcanoes and geysers.

It is the vaulted infinite answering back

to the unheard still cry, out at the other end;

it is the ardent call of the Beyond

that has travelled down to a forgetful Here Below,

awakening us to reminiscences of our ancient and eternal estate,

our only Home.

May 11, 1935

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XXX

TURN my gaze away from thousand nothingnesses -

One thing for me is enough and more,

O Queen of hearts!

What avails the senses each to pursue its luring fire

That leads but to a dismal engulfing bog,

To nothingness or worse?

The Sense of the senses dwells at home

And through its moon-lit grace distils

Peace and ease and rapture exquisite!

The essence of delights, the secret sap of blooms,

The winkless Light beyond all flickerings,

The one treasure intimate -it is Thou!

My all has melted away and vanished

Into the single orb of thy compassion, .0 my One and All!

September 1, 1936

XXXI

LIVE it, my soul, live the Truth

Than which never a fairer or truer one

Has been vouchsafed to man -

Live it and be blessed!

Earth carried it in her womb

Ever since she was born -

She was born to bear it

And deliver to the expectant world.

The shining divinities once came down:

They anointed themselves with the earth of earth,

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Entered the prison of ignorance and pain and grief

And became the mortals that we are -

Even as the blooming flower and the luscious fullness of the fruit

Once lay hid within the dark and dank tortuous striving and travail of the roots!

To come out and regain the native and pristine estate,

To become the sun and the air and the glory that is abroad,

To be in flesh and bone the radiant secret self,

To embody the prophecy that inspired the march of the ages

To fulfil, the golden day is come!

September 6, 1936

XXXII

I SAW Her footsteps just flit across the sky. . . . . .

And the sun blazed up and still it burns incontinent

And so the stars to the end of the world -

But the little moon was consumed outright and became the pale dead mass it is.

The golden trail of Her footsteps has kindled a quenchless Fire in my heart,

And all my life is now a volcano with its thousand tongues of flame leaping up to kiss the trail -

But where are the little senses' little pleasures gone

And all the spell of the near and the dear and the small?

They have gone the way of the lunar light and its borrowed lamp

When the sun is high.

Lo, he is made to ride the comet that sweeps the expanding spaces,

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The creature who once crawled in his murky pit......

A glance has melted,

A touch has moulded

A mortal into an Immortal!

September 11, 1936

XXXIII

I SLEPT away......

And awoke into a sunbright wakefulness

Far-gazing, untwinkling, tranquil, intense!

A breath from somewhere came a-sudden

And wiped my memory out once for all....

I stood new-born, fresh with other thoughts, feelings, urges

High and clean and scintillating,

Like rills that flow on summits and still bear the pristine snow-touch.

An utter distaste filled my mouth

And this wide world of milk and honey turned mere sand and dust. . . .

Behold the sea of delight that burst upon me,

The ecstasy that became my being!

I died. . . .

And emerged on the other shore

Into the Life Immortal!

September 15, 1936

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XXXIV

THY Voice rings clear and loud

In the 'bluest depth of my heart

Through the gathered silence of unfathomed ethers......

It dims as it rises into the confused noise of my thoughts and desires, ,

It is wholly lost amidst the turmoil and bustle of life and the world.

Thy Face shines bright and near limned in all its compelling

beauty, When I gaze beyond where the golden sun-gate opens......

It dims and fades as its rays descend and are scattered and dispersed here .

In the muddled illusions, the swirling mirages of life and the world.

* * *

Close eyes, close ears, close up entire

Even like a rose bud

And hold within and be, O my soul,

The stilled fragrance of Love unsensed.

September 18, 1936

XXXV

IN Thee I am a perfect slave,

Sovereignly free and happy!

Without Thee I become the master,

Bound head to foot, a .figure of misery !

*

The two worlds are cloven apart

And a chasm yawns between,

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The deluding midworld that with its lurid

shadow Divides Heaven and Earth!

But one day they shall come close

And the lightning fire leap out

To consume the shadow track

And turn it into the gleaming path

For Heaven to descend upon earth.

September 18, 1936

XXXVI

THE sky is clear, the breeze is brisk....

Unfurl all the sails, my soul,

And forward!

The white waves are hurrying on with a gleeful murmur;

They go tripping towards the verge of the world-

The blue Infinite calls them!

They keep me company, the little sisters

Tossing their diamond tresses,

Scattering their silvern laughter;

They fill my sails with the fragrant breath of their little mouths-

And forward drives my bark!

Lo! I have grown golden wings,

And I soar into the blue of the high heaven,

Right on the verge of the spaces!

My little brothers are all around,

The bright twinkling star-angels;

A very galaxy of them escorts my winging voyage,

Each holds aloft his blazing discus-

Avaunt, Darkness and Night!

Hail, Light of the Beyond!

September 22, 1936

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XXXVII

THE Fire shines there, but burns not......

It burns when it descends here below

And lies imprisoned in the crust of earth:

Then its tongues leap out in red-hot wrath

And consume the narrowing barriers

And the entrenched darkness.

The work done, it regains its own natural and superior self,

The keen and serene substance of Bliss that it is,

The solar light with the soul of the Moon's concentrated ecstasy.

The Fire burns-

It burns the dross, but illumines the core of gold;

It tears and tortures the obdurate and the unwilling,

It tones and braces the docile and the willing.

I t is the pure energy of the Gods,

The clear knowledge that fashions bodies of delight.

But the unregenerate flesh

And the self-will of Ignorance

Feel it as the dread devouring Flame.

September 25, 1936

XXXVIII

You think this thing you love and that,

You hunger for this other with all the yearning of your entrails,

And without that other again your heart seems to cease beating!

In vain you seek to bind your soul to earthly moments:

It pursues another orbit encompassing Infinity,

And the myriad shadows on this side of life

Veil not its glorious face for ever turned to the Eternal Sun.

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It heeds not the little joys the flesh offers it,

Nor do tearing anguishes leave a scar upon its diamond clarity:

It passes through, undeviated, gathering lights

From out of the darknesses of its many lives,

Presses onward to the one goal,

The fullness of Illumination in the Supreme Light!

It is lone in its own orbit -

Or, the One Companion is enough for it,

The one inner Presence.

Orbits may touch or cross each other,

As they traverse the terrestrial zone -

But the souls themselves rest apart -

None waits, none looks for another, but all move on,

Each absorbed in its one and single passion for That within,

The Soul of souls.

September 27, 1936

XXXIX

I HAVE now learnt to love the sun, even the sun of the burningdesert. . . .

Once I drew back from it and liked the shade and the glade,

Cool pleasant walks and humid grottoes,

All that is darksome, dank and moist,

The rippling curtain of ceaseless rains,

The chillness and haze of a grey winter sky, -

All that narrowed down the being to its smallest stature,

Hid from it far visions and wide extensions,

All that shrank from the touch of the warm empty distances, -

For I chose to close the blinds and lie screened,

In the cosiness of ignorant moments, level with the sap and

ooze of earth.

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But now as I open my eyes with the rise of the sun,

Scales fall off and I feel a glowing clarity coursing in my veins,

I yearn to scan and traverse, eagle-like,

The vastnesses that lie bare under the glare of the noon.

The torrid heat and the scalding sands and the steaming air

Throb with a naked and palpitating life, clean and ardent and vigorous......

Even so the burning Truth brings me a male delight,

It has drained and dried the marshes of small desires,

Scattered the fog and mist of doubting fearsome mind,

A glorious veilless heaven it has branded upon my earth!

October 1, 1936

XL

WAVES come from the immemorial past, they sweep into the unending future;

They who stand on the plains shall lose their foothold and be carried away.

Rise to the dry land of serene heights and let the flood pass by underneath.

There is no other way but to take wings and soar aloft -

Never be tempted to wait and brave the onset of centuries,

The most skilful swimmer is sure to come to grief:

None can stop or retard the inexorable wheel of Time, none who is within it;

Only if you leap up and go beyond can you find the secret that controls it.

This human frame is a thousand-mouthed sponge,

You cannot leave it on the flood-level and hope to find it free from slime and water;

Hold it up, as high as the farthest and bluest skies,

Let it drink in and be satiate with the golden light of the sun.

October 3, 1936

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XLI

ASPIRE wholly,

Ask for the fullness of Grace -

But weigh not the measure of Response,

Nor repine if it seems doled out scantily, niggardly.

The high wisdom knows and gives just what is needed -

Could we only rest contented and move in its rhythm an d not transgress its will,

Serene would be the path and perfect and even prompt the achievement;

But our greed and vanity and self-love

Magnify our worth and distend our girth:

We lay claim to that and pull at that which is beyond our desert,

We force the supreme Bounty and infinite Abundance,

And in answer it condescends to come down....

But we are unable to contain it and the inflated receptacle we have made ourselves to be

Bursts and crashes a ruined and shattered heap!

Give yourself wholly and ever more and more,

It is your unreserved giving that will create the spaciousness

to hold safely the gift from the Divine.

October 9, 1936

XLII

THE lamp lies unlit and dismal dark -

Bring to it the spark of your morning love and life,

The lamp is lit and burns.

The lamp burns low and dim -

Bring to it your earnest loyalty and clear adhesion,

The lamp burns high and bright.

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The flame mounts slow uncertain -

Bring to it your ardent yearning and unshakable faith,

The flame mounts swift and firm.

The flame sweeps tireless ever upward -

Call unto it the bending Grace from beyond,

The lamp has become the Sun!

October 13, 1936

XLIII

THE child has eyes for nothing else than its mother,

Its entire bound of vision is rounded in by the radiant presence of its beloved.

It cannot but be so, for where does the Mother abide? - Within its own eyes!

Fearsome figures appear now and then -

A night rife with dark and dangerous bodings,

A whole sky of cloud scowling and rumbling -

The child sees the mother at game and laughs-all disappear:

The beaming smile of the adored one alone is there!

All beauties-the rising morn, the reposing eve, the bloom

on the rose, the light of the awakening soul in the human face -

All, all are radiances from the sparkle of her eyes,

The eyes that hide within the eyes of the child.

The child looks at itself, its own person -

Lo, itself has become the mother,

And takes in its arms the entire world

And fondles it as its child

With the passionate love of innocence.

October 18, 1936

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XLIV

WHITE - colour of the moon poised on high in an autumn night -

The soothing peace, the quiet heave of an in-gathered rapture!

White -colour of the sun glaring overhead in a midsummer sky -

White heat of the Energy that quickens the universe,

The creative ardour of the light of Truth!

White-colour of the pearl reposing in the womb of the mother-of-pearl -

Innocence of a little heart, delicate and fine and strong in trust.

White - colour of the diamond, miracle of the black-souled ore transfigured -

The immaculate consciousness of the Mother, the Mother yet of a sin-bred earth!

White-colour of the snow piled on wind-swept peaks grim and bare -

Naked and frigid austerity that juts sheer into the inviolate worlds beyond!

White-colour of the foam breaking and bubbling exultant -

All the passions of my entrails surging and speeding to the tranquil refuge of Thy embrace!

White-colour of the jasmine so candid and pure and unpretending -

The smiling perfume of the Grace that has touched my soul!

White - colour of the lotus -

the endless commiseration of my Lord

that has taken body upon earth!

October 30, 1936

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XLV

QUIET the waves that roll and ripple,

Hush the murmur that crowds the- air,

Let the myriad glistening sparks die out

In one seamless sheet of soothing blue.

Draw back from the outgazing facets,

Veer round and dive into the core -

The stop and pause and perfect repose,

The rock of light self-luminous,

The frozen sea of compact delight.

This is the silence and annihilation,

Beyond the little voices and lesser forms,

The Mother of absolutes -

This the Void that has devoured all And still lies vacant!

November 16, 1936

XLVI

FIRE Red - the red wrath of Rudra

that burns the dead mass of earth, melts and consumes it

into tongues of leaping ardour

that cry out for Beatitudes beyond.

Sun Red at dying eve - the breath of a god

sweeping over the darkening horizon

the debris of a vanishing life and world,

scattering the last shreds of mortal ties that

yet strive to linger.

Blood Red -the red sap of life

that anoints the far Spirit and sets it throbbing

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---

and welling out into an earthly mould -

immortal's homage to flesh-throned mortality.

Wine Red - the quenchless thirst and passion,

even the lust of the body

wholly uplifted and transfused into the ethereal Bliss,

Bliss made here and now a sensuous rapture -

poignant and exhilarating and undecaying.

Ruby Red - the concentrated essence of the supreme substance

brought down into our lower sphere

and glowing and blushing with new-born love in a human frame.

November 28, 1936

XL VII

O my soul, once you lay

Nude and innocent in the womb of the Eternal.

What dreams had you then?

What hopes, what urges?

Were there star-lit expanses, galaxied blues,

Constellated depths after depths?

Or a rose-gold sun hanging on the rim of infinite horizons?

Or a radiant smile swaying the throb of Timelessness' heart?

It stands today, the self-same soul

In daylight's rude broadness,

Amidst the stone-hard reals,

In the externals and the crusts,

Under noon-tide's blazing eye...

Oh, no longer the sweet simple innocence of yore:

The child has grown and now its limbs are hewn

Out of a marble-consciousness!

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---

The Dream has become the iron will,

The secret urge the body's urgent gesture:

A human being that was has yielded to the godhead's devouring embrace,

The Divine is set in human limbs.

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TOWARDS THE LIGHT

---

Of Love and Aspiration

THERE is a Light before which all other light is darkness.

There is a Strength before which all other strength is weakness.

There is a Joy before which all other joy is suffering.

***

Forward to the Farthest!

Upward to the Highest!

Downward into the Deepest!

At the farthest awaits a humanity fulfilled and realised,

At the highest broods the Divinity that propels and forges,

At the deepest dwells the Instrument -the Individuality - that obeys and executes.

Be aware of these triple elements, house their triple movements;

Find your one and total self in the dynamic union of the Three : -

This is the gate to fulfilment and harmony and the spirit's delight in life.

***

The human in man seeks Divinity, the Divine in man seeks humanity.

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Your smallnesses only you can call your own; your greatness is the greatness of the Divine in you.

It is the Godhead in you that can reveal God to you; there is no other proof of God.

***

What you want to possess absolutely as your own, will also claim to possess you as absolutely its own.

Lose all-and you fall into the bosom of boundless plenitude.

Sacrifice all-but into the radiant fire of Aspiration that flames up to the gods.

***

The Heart is the blazing hearth of Aspiration, the divine door that opens into Immortality.

***

Of Love Ananda is the soul, self-mastery the head, and purity the foundation.

***

The human approaches to the Divine are dangerous. Seek God in God's ways.

***

Aspire and love. . .

Ascending Love leads to Immortality.

Descending Love leads to Death.

Love is defeated as often as Lust is victorious.

Love is ascending Ananda that leads to Immortality.

Lust is descending Ananda that leads to Death.

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The secret of Love is the joy of self-giving.

The secret of joy is self-giving. If any part in you is without joy, it means that it has not given itself, it wants to keep itself for itself.

***

Divine love has an element of detachment which human love has not; and yet Divine love can be as passionate as human love, nay, Divine love has an intensity which human love carowt attain.

It is the element of detachment which intensifies love, because it is this which purifies love.

Detachment means freedom from attachment to the body and to the bodily desires and, more than that, freedom from attachment to one's own self.

The love that is thus detached and free makes no demands, for it has no hunger. It is, it exists and therefore possesses the fullness of delight; it can only give itself and ask nothing.

***

The strongest attachment is the attachment to one's own self-not to what one really is, but to what one has actually become. To remain what one has been in the past or is at present, to refuse to be what one is meant to be-this is human, too human.

The human self must yield, surrender and dissolve itself into the Divine self.

***

Never seek through your desire-soul the person you love. You invite thereby not only misery to yourself but bring a curse upon one you profess to love.

Place always a space of detachment between yourself and your beloved; make the Divine your mediator.

Then shall you secure pure and perfect enjoyment -whose true name is Bliss; and then too can you become the instrument

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to bring a bliss and blessing to the object of your love.

This is the secret of the sweetest and most exquisite and intimate relation possible with persons or things, that it should be made and established in and through the Divine.

***

The closer we come to the Divine, the stricter are the conditions we have to fulfil, the severer grow the tests through which we have to pass.

An absolute and thorough winnowing and cleansing is demanded in him who aspires to be the Divine's favourite.

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Of the Divine and Its Help

IT is the Divine alone that is capable of immediate and absolute surrender.

But is there not in the human that which is divine?

* * *

Discover the centre of your being and hold fast to it; only from there can you describe the perfect circle of life rounded into its absolute fullness.

* * *

Do not strive and struggle to do. Only be conscious of what is being done for you.

* * *

There is a Power that is not grim and violent, but smiling and translucent and yet irresistible. It does not give out heat and soot but radiates a soothing and persuasive clarity. It is not the Fire of our earth that burns and bruises, smokes and crackles-it is something like the serene and silent luminousness, the steady and unaging radiance of the distant stars that energises the cosmic symphony.

* * *

All activity should carry with it a sense of repose. Doing everything you must feel as if you were doing nothing-even while most energetic, know how to be perfectly at rest.

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In the same way, all repose must be filled with intense activity-tranquil and immobile, yet a dynamo of the swiftest and surest energies.

* * *

One must know how to wait - calm, patient, unshakable - wait indefinitely, as long as that is demanded, accepting even what looks like defeat.

But when the time arrives, one must know also how to be swift, impetuous, violent even-and victorious.

* * *

Await every moment, with all the concentrated expectancy of an imminent motherhood, the birth of the Divine in you. Await in calmness, await in breathless readiness.

* * *

Silence is the gate through which you enter the Divine. The senses silent, you will sense the Divine. The brain silent, you will understand Him. Your passions silent, you will love Him. Your desires silent, you will possess Him.

* * *

The Divine never withdraws from you; it is you who move away from the Divine and imagine the contrary, as the earth might think it is the sun that is moving and not its own self.

* * *

You cannot possess the Divine: your movement must not be a grasping -for, the more you grasp at the Divine the farther will it recede from you. Approach with self-abandonment: the greater the abandonment, the closer to you will you find the Divine.

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Tamas means hoarding for oneself, Rajas squandering for oneself: both mean stealing from the Divine.

Sattva is a sharing with the Divine. Neither steal nor share, but give thyself and all to its Divine owner.

* * *

Knowledge and power belong to the Divine and are bestowed when and on whom He chooses; covet them not. But devotion and love are man's and by love and devotion you can enter into divine power and knowledge.

* * *

Man is the net that the Divine Fowler has spread to capture the wide and fleet universal physical Nature, so that through him it may be brought under control, tamed and transfigured.

* * *

If you think for yourself or feel for yourself or act for yourself, you become a misappropriator, a dishonest trustee - a thief of force.

* * *

Let the Divine think through you, feel through you and act through you. Then only right and perfect use will be made of the instruments that compose your being.

Let the Divine's Thoughts shine in your mind, Divine's Love swell in your heart, let the Divine's impel your limbs.

* * *

Let the taste of Immortality fill my mouth. . . all mortalities will turn insipid.

* * *

A little of Her Grace is sufficient for my little soul; but even

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if my soul were as big as the entire universe, that self-same little would be more than sufficient to fill it to overflowing.

* * *

Thou art the goal, Thou the way.

Thou art Thyself what we have to be; by Thy example Thou showest us how to be.

Thou givest us the power to work and achieve; Thou art That which works and achieves; and that which is achieved in us is Thou.

* * *

What is the Truth? The Man who bears the Truth.

Ask me not to test and toil for the Truth: ask me rather to love the Man who bears the Truth.

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Of Desire and Atonement

WHEREVER you meet a ray of real light, a gleam of genuine beauty, a particle of true truth- go back with it to its original source. Follow the track to the end and you will find yourself in the embrace of the Divine.

***

Close not your senses -however earthly they may be. Fling them all wide open -open always and everywhere, but to the Divine.

***

Life itself becomes Art - the very highest form of Art - when it is moulded in the rhythm of the Supreme Beauty, when its steps follow the cadences of the Divine.

***

Every softening of the heart towards things of the earth is a hardening of it to the things of Heaven.

***

Of the host of desires you cherish, not many are really fulfilled; and even these are fulfilled only in a way.

Not much is lost by not harbouring desires; mostly, it is not enjoyment of desire, but the deceptive pleasure of anticipation that you lose.

Desirelessness brings about a sovereign fulfilment, not of

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desires, but of the out - reachings of a divine Will in you, of which your desires are the negation.

Desire lost opens the way to the enjoyment of Delight supernal.

***

There is not much virtue in going down the slope; all can do that-for the natural gravitation of the consciousness is downward.

He is the hero who resists the temptation to let himself slip, even for a moment, even to the extent of a hair's breadth.

***

The only atonement for a wrong thing done is to do the right thing on the next occasion.

***

Tapasya: Never to let yourself slip down, always to maintain your progress up the slope.

***

Never say, "I cannot." Look more closely, you will find that it means in reality, "I want not."

***

Each difficulty can be an opportunity for a new progress. For what is meant by a difficulty ? A flaw in the nature brought before the consciousness that it may be dealt with and remedied.

Behind every difficulty is hidden a Truth; overcome it and a passage is made clear for that Truth's manifestation.

Every apparent Negation is an index to an Affirmation waiting behind it.

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You increase your difficulty by thinking it difficult; consider it easy and it will be made easy to you.

Maya is real only because you - are unwilling to think it otherwise; once awake from Maya and you will find not only that it is no more, but that it has never been.

***

Facts by themselves are not great or small; it is the forces behind them that give them their real stature.

Facts have value in so far as they are significant-significant of forces, of dynamic possibilities that work out in and through them.

Facts in their outward form may even directly contradict the very forces that manifest through them or are embodied in them.

***

Do not turn back seeing the desert in front. Traverse it with courage and fortitude-for beyond is the promised land flowing with milk and honey.

***

None is truly weak, not even any limb or element in him. One has only to open to the Universal Power, the Divine Mother; she is the origin and fountain-head of all strength and energy and she can make the mute speak and the lame leap over the mountains.

***

There is no error that cannot be repaired and even turned to advantage.

There is no loss that cannot be made up and even turned to a greater gain.

Each fall or failure should be only a drawing back so that you can leap to a greater height - till you reach the summit and fall and fail no more.

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Your past has created your present; create by your present the future.

You can not only obliterate the past, but make it even as if it had never been.

***

As the consciousness rises upwards from the Present and broadens out, it not only creates the Future but also recreates the Past.

***

Years are not needed to undo the sins of years - a single moment can efface an age.

A solitary second can be the spark potent to explode a whole past.

A dip into the ocean of Grace and you come out clean, shedding all the Past, reborn unto the Future.

***

A single drop of poison can vitiate the entire stream of whole some blood in the body.

But there is too a Purity, a drop of which can render crystal clear a whole morass of soil and dirt.

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Of Beauty and Ananda

TRUTH is Beauty's substance-it is Beauty self-governed.

Beauty is Delight perfectly articulate.

Love is Beauty enjoying itself.

Knowledge is the light that Beauty emanates.

Power is the fascination that Beauty exerts.

***

All Art is the re-creation of Truth in Beauty.

Rhythm is the gait of Truth dynamic with Delight.

The Truth of a thing is its native substance, the being in its absolute self-law. Satyam is that which is of Sat.

***

Beauty is delight organised.

Poetry is the soul's delight seeking perfect expression in speech.

Speech is self-expression. It is the organ of self-consciousness. The nature of the speech shows the nature of the self-consciousness. The degree of perfection in utterance measures also the extent to which one is conscious of oneself.

***

Beauty is the soul's delight perfectly articulate and organised.

Where the soul does not speak out, where the rhythm of the spirit does not manifest, there comes in ugliness.

Things are ugly when they are not true to themselves, not sincere, not self-expressive.

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In a sense, natural and beautiful are the same, the perverse commensurate with the ugly.

***

Beauty is not merely balance, symmetry, measure, a regular disposition of features. A form, an embodiment, need not be pretty to be beautiful.

Mere formal beauty is a power, but a surface power; there is a deeper unity of rhythm in the embodiment that is beautiful by its transparent soul-expression.

***

Art is the incarnation of Truth in Beauty,

The Divine the truest Truth and the Beauty most beautiful, The incarnation of the Divine the supreme Art.

An art with the Divine left out is like a trunk without the head:

It is built with the lower members and not with the higher members of Beauty;

Skill it may possess but not greatness;

It may please the senses, but cannot enrapture the soul.

***

The very nature of Art is rhythm and harmony.

The Divine is integral harmony and perfect rhythm.

The element of divine harmony and rhythm is the measure of the beautiful in Art.

Even so it is with the art of life.

***

All things are beautiful, for the All-beautiful is in every thing.

The domain of Art encompasses the entire creation.

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The Divine is present everywhere, but in essence.

In the manifestation there is a varying and developing degree of the Presence.

***

The Brahman is there equally in the saint and the sinner, in the knowledge and in the ignorance, - it is the static Brahman.

But the saint and the knowledge manifest and embody the dynamic Brahman.

***

The stress of Life is to reveal and incarnate more and more of the dynamic Divine, the creative Ananda of consciousness in its self-nature.

The progress of art too consists in recording this march of .the soul in its ever-growing consciousness and ever-deepening Ananda towards a higher incarnation of the Divine.

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Of Some Supreme Mysteries

THE Supreme is infinite, therefore He is also finite.

To be finite is one of the infinite aspects of the Infinite.

Creation is the de-finition of the Infinite.

***

All creation is fundamentally an act of self-division.

The multiplicity of the divided selves of the Supreme forms the created universe.

In and through the unnumbered divided selves, the one undivided Self still stands intact and inviolate.

***

With each successive self-division, the Supreme descends into a more concrete form of creation.

The Supreme has pulverised himself into the atoms of Matter.

Matter is Spirit divided ad infinitum and infinitely concretised.

Utter Nescience is the focussing of utter Intelligence the farthest away from itself and upon infinite points.

***

The Soul is a portion of the Divine, enshrined in the heart of the human being; it is the child of the Mahasakti, it is the immortal in mortality, the secret godhead that urges the earthly creature ever forward and upward in the march of-evolution, ever expressing and embodying more and more of its inner truth in the actualities of life.

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The Self is the Purusa in the individual; it is the consciousness as pure being, simply existent in its own delight, which sees and sanctions all and is yet aloof from the mutabilities of the life becoming.

The Spirit is the Self immanent, universal and transcendent. The Supreme Divine is Purusottama, - the Spirit and its expression and its continent, the Sat and the sakti.

***

The Soul is God's Grace upon Matter; it is the living spark from the Heart of the Divine, sent down into Matter, in order to lift Matter into Divinity.

The gods are the glories of the Supreme Divine; they are the agents that effect this transmutation and the types that embody the transmuted reality.

The gods are the individualised Name-Forms of the Supreme.

***

You are always an instrument, a mere tool, so long as you are in the unconsciousness.

It is when you are conscious that you become an agent.

As long as you are unconscious, you are mostly an instrument in the hands of the Dark Forces.

When you become conscious, you are an agent who can act for, and act with, and act as, the gods.

***

To be conscious means to become aware of the truth of one's nature and to live with the light and the force of that truth.

To be unconscious means to be ignorant of the realities that make one's true nature, to be a mere tool driven and utilised by the forces of Untruth.

***

To be free and independent does not mean that one lives and moves as one chooses or has the feeling of doing so.

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A soul captured in the mind and the life and the body is: never free or independent; its sense of freedom or independence is only a make-believe so that Inferior Nature might all the more easily utilise the imprisoned soul for her own purposes.

***

If you happen to be in the way of the Divine Power, either you yield to it and are taken up into its substance and constitution, become an integral part of it, execute in it a special function -

Or, you oppose it and are mowed down and destroyed.

The Dark Power tries to work in the self-same way; but it cannot touch you, even though you oppose it, if from the outset you are armed with the protection of the Divine Force.

The Dark Power too gives protection to its devotees, but it cannot maintain them long against the inexorable oncoming of the Divine.

***

Consciousness is the light that flows from the Truth of existence.

To be conscious means to be aware of the Truth of one's nature and live and move with the luminous force of that Truth.

Awareness is not a mere passive phenomenon; it is supremely active and dynamic. To be aware means a constant radiation of the light of consciousness and by the touch of that light a continuous purification and new-creation.

***

Consciousness: the movement by which existence goes out of itself and turns back upon itself in order to experience itself.

Will: the selective and realising power of consciousness.

***

Faith: Certitude born of the soul's secret communion with the Truth.

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Faith is the urge of the soul's truth-the truth that has not yet come down and become evident to the reason and the brain-mind.

Faith brings out not only your own latent power, but opens the gates to a Power higher than your own.

There is no limit to your own power, if you know how to push back this own of yours nearer and nearer to the Divine.

***

The consciousness seeks in its ordinary movement to lean upon something, something outside itself; alone and within itself it feels a void and is uneasy and short of breath, as if in a rarefied atmosphere.

The Higher Consciousness feels a completeness in itself, is full to the brim with its own reality and needs no going out for materials and objects necessary to fill a vacuity.

***

Two consciousnesses are there at two extreme and opposing poles-one of the Spirit and the other of Matter. Both are static.

A dynamic consciousness lies between; it joins, harmonises, energises both - it is the Occult Consciousness.

The passage from the world of the Spirit to the world of Matter and back lies through the Occult World.

***

Two godheads are there: one above, the other here below. One is transcendent, the other immanent; one is eternal, infinite, immutable, absolute, the other is of the temporal and in it, wedded to the finite, the changing, the relative; one is sovereignly conscious, the other imbedded in the unconscious.

One is the godhead that is, the other the godhead that is becoming.

One is the godhead in eternal Truth - nirya, svarupa; the other is the godhead in ever progressive Reality-vyavahara, ruPa. Both are one and the same deity. The godhead above,

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descending, has become the godhead here below ascending to meet again and recover its original nature not there, but here.

Creation is the interaction of these two elemental Powers expressing themselves as Nature-Nature, an Involution and Evolution of the double Divinity.

Progress is the march of the godhead below towards a triumphant self-revelation; its self-finding is the luminous realisation in itself of the godhead above.

Earth has a consciousness, matter is instinct with an Aspira­tion; only the consciousness is involved and turned inwards, the Aspiration is mute and knows not itself.

The consciousness is that of a Divinity which has precipitated and taken this material form, the Aspiration is to regain God-head even in this form of matter, to sublimate itself into that Divinity here and now.

. The secret urge of Evolution lies there in the compelling stress of that consciousness and that Aspiration.

In so far as man embodies in himself and gives expression in his terrestrial life to this consciousness and Aspiration, to that extent is he in line with the march of Evolution and fulfils his high destiny.

***

Religion is a worship of lesser gods; often, even, it is the worship of beings that are not gods at all but pose as gods, simulating their truth, usurping their status, acting arbitrarily in their divine name and aping their authority.

The pseudo-gods are not always evil, nor do they lead men only to perdition: their worship may often be useful, even salutary. But what these beings will not allow is to let man pass beyond a given frontier; they will not suffer him to rise in the scale of consciousness higher than a certain limit. Any attempt or turn towards a transcending of that limit they watch with jealous vigilance and suppress it with vehemence, even with violence. Within their domain, subject to their dharma, they accord to their worshippers prosperity and power, some-times perhaps even a certain elevation of consciousness.

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The lesser gods and the pseudo-gods are none other than the various forces that reign in the world of the mental, the vital or the physical consciousness. These are the three planes that, in the cosmic as well as in the human scale, form the fundamental notes of the Inferior Hemisphere of Nature.

The true gods belong to higher reaches, they are powers of the Superior Hemisphere; living beyond the triple mundane consciousness, in the Fourth-turiya-they are native to the domain of the Spirit. They embody the mighty universal laws of that vaster Truth-Consciousness (Rtam).

To go beyond all the dharmas of this threefold Lower Nature, attain to the Truth-Consciousness of the Fourth Status, incarnate in all that we are, know, will, feel and do the Law or Dharma of the Spirit and of the Spirit alone, is what we mean by Spirituality.

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