CHAPTER SEVEN

MAYA AND LILA

One of the most marked phenomena of twentieth century history undoubtedly is the rapprochement now taking place between the religious philosophies of the Orient and Occident. It is to be questioned whether an adequate study of this event has been undertaken in the field of psychology. A full survey of the incursion of Hindu spiritual systems into the Western world has been made by Mr. Wendell Thomas in his Columbia University degree dissertation, Hinduism Invades America, to be cited later. In an edition of an ancient Chinese classic called The Secret of the Golden Flower, published some years ago, some pertinent comment appears in a Foreward by Dr. Richard Wilhelm, which it is desirable to quote:

"The relation of the West to Eastern thought is a highly paradoxical and confusing one. On one side, as Jung points out, the East creeps in among us by the back door of the unconscious, and strongly influences us in perverted forms; and, on the other, we repel it with violent prejudice as concerned with a fine-spun metaphysics that is poisonous to the scientific mind.

If any one is in doubt as to how far the East influences us in secret ways, let him but briefly investigate the fields covered today by what is called 'occult thought.' Millions of people are included in these movements and Eastern ideas dominate them all. Since there is nowhere any sign of a psychological understanding of the phenomena on which the ideas are based, they undergo a complete twisting and are a real menace in our world.

A partial realization of what is going on in this direction, together with the Westerner's native ignorance and mistrust of the world of inner experience, build up the prejudice against the reality of Eastern wisdom . . . . Mastery of the inner world, with a relative contempt for the outer, must inevitably lead to great catastrophe. Mastery of the outer world, to the exclusion of the inner, delivers us over to the daemonic forces of the latter, and keeps us barbaric despite all outward forms of culture. The solution can not be found either in deriding Eastern spirituality as impotent, or by mistrusting science as a destroyer of humanity. We have to see that the spirit must lean on science as its guide in the world of reality, and that science must turn to spirit for the meaning of life . . . .

The reshaping of values in progress today forces the modern mind out of a nursery world of collective traditions into an adult's world of individual choice. He knows that his choice and his fate now turn upon his understanding of himself. Much has been taught him in recent years about the hitherto unsuspected elements in his psyche, but the emphasis is all too often on the static side alone."

The view presented here certainly can not be considered unbalanced; it points to the high value of Oriental spirituality. Yet it characterizes the sweep of Hindu ideologies into the West as fraught with grave menace. It intimates in its last words what is perhaps the weightiest charge against the Eastern philosophies, that they strain to abstract the consciousness of humanity out of the flow of its evolution in a time process and fix it in a static immobility, making bliss synonymous with motionlessness and the destruction of time.

Deep in the heart of the Eastern spiritual systemology is the great doctrine of maya, a word practically synonymous with illusion. If, as Dr. Wilhelm avers, the Oriental thought contains an element poisonous to the scientific mind, it streams forth mainly from this element in the Eastern dogmatism. Since this doctrine, which received its most authoritative exposition and promulgation in the system of the sage Sankaracharya, has set the character of nearly all Hindu systematism, it is purposed here to subject it to as searching a scrutiny as possible, in as much as its influence weighs heavily in determining vital issues for the future of world life. It will enter deeply into a large portion of the discussion throughout.

As an example of how it has been employed in the formulation of the dogmas of various cult systems, we may present Mr. Wendell Thomas's condensed summarization of the teachings of the modern Swami Vivekananda:

"Reduced to clear outline the argument runs as follows: God is the only reality. The world is quite separate from God. Hence the world is unreal. Now the function of religion is to give men true escape from the world into God."

He follows this shortly with the statement:

"There is not an orthodox Hindu cult that does not regard the world as the result of an undesirable causal cycle, and reality as the realm of painless bliss. The highest good, then, is obviously some kind of escape from the world into bliss . . . the advaita or acosmic pantheism of Sankara gives the simplest and most uncompromising presentation of this ideal."

He also cites another of those Swamis who have brought Hinduism to America, Yogananda, as holding that "there is no value in the finite, in life itself."

Speaking of maya, Aurobindo writes:

"If maya creates its forms, yet erects a superstructure which has nothing to do with reality, is not true, or potential in reality . . . it makes things that are not possible, or in accordance with it."

This restates the idea enunciated above. If in our use of the gift of fancy our mind constructs forms that have no basis in actual verity, it creates impossible things, spurious creatures. Such illegitimate formations, such hybrid products, should be seen as the real illusion. And it is an illusion that can go on into delusion. The mind that attempts this sort of creation of its own world, having as a preliminary emptied itself of all forms derived from experience with the outer world, will build over no pattern related to reality, will build without substantial bricks, and will end by building monstrosities and chimeras. The folly of perpetrating such a miscarriage when God, the cosmic mind, has revealed to us the pattern of his living truth in the forms he has created in the world, must be evident.

The great and basic question now arises: why has philosophy so universally pronounced our life here an illusion? By what warrant does it call our life here maya? For directly negating this position in philosophy stands the universal verdict of human experience that all the show of things in the world is entirely real. It is by no means a naive belief that our life here is our chance to gain whatever glory life in the large has to offer its creatures. Yet philosophy has insisted that the consciousness that life develops in us is unreal, is deceptive, an illusion. Our limited sensory and mental equipment it avers, shuts us off from the real world. They are an obstruction to our perceiving and knowing the real world. Our life here is a dream, not a reality, and our paraphernalia for contacting the physical creation about us, in which our lives are cast, prevents our waking out of the dream. We are like somnambulists, acting our parts in a dream.

So India, in primis, asks us to be rid of the equipment of sense, of emotion and of mind, all of which keeps us in the dream. It would persuade us that if we can throw these off, inhibit their inhibitions, we may stand free from the delusion of the dream.

But Aurobindo asks (as every sane mind must ask) why and how did unreality come to be a product of the operation of the cos-

mic mind? The question confronts thought again with the old, old problem of the origin of evil, how it got inwoven into the texture of eternal good. And Aurobindo answers:

"Even the illusionist must admit that Maya, the power of self-illusion in Brahman, is potentially eternal in potential being; and then the sole question is its manifestation or non-manifestation."

Then he says that we have to assume that the power of Supreme Being imposes this life as an experience of illusion on itself!

And why should it do such a thing, which seems to intimate it is attempting to indulge its freedom of action by imposing a delusion on itself? Does not philosophy run out into fantastic nonsense in presenting such a solution seriously? Can we rationally conceive of life entertaining the purpose of hypnotizing itself, casting over its own eyes a veil through which all its experience here would appear in the unreal forms and colors of a dream? Certainly it must be assumed to be rational to think that the experience here would not be one that deludes, but one that would yield reality and true satisfactions.

Well, then, can philosophy supply the answer to the alternative question: why would the eternal consciousness subject itself to the illusory play? And Aurobindo answers it; as the German philosopher Fichte answered it; as ancient philosophy answered it: life indulges in this creative play because it gives it delight, because it yields enjoyment to the consciousness disporting itself in the play. Agreeing with all archaic wisdom, Aurobindo says that life's motive in creation is Lila, translated as the play, the sport, the joy, the recreation of God. The eternal Consciousness-Force (as Aurobindo terms it) is free to do what it pleases. And, says the philosopher, as part of its play, it pleases to put its seed units, by which it eternally renews its sense of self-existence, under limitation,--in effect to put chains on itself.

Again we have to ask why. And again the final, the only competent answer comes: for Lila, for delight. The Hindu thinker sums it up:

"If, then, being free to move or stand still, to throw itself into forms or to retain the forms in itself, it indulges its power of movement and formation, it can only be for one reason,--for Delight."

And he elucidates:

"The world, then, is the play of the mother of things, moved to cast herself forever into infinite forms and avid of eternal outpouring experiences. If we look at World-Existence, rather in the relation of the self-delight of eternally existent Being, we may regard, describe and realize it as Lila, the play, the child's play, the poet's joy, the actor's joy, the mechanician's joy, of the Soul of things, eternally young, perpetually inexhaustible, creating and recreating himself in himself for the sheer bliss of self-creation; of that self-representation, of God himself at play, himself the play, himself the player, himself the playground."

Here at last, in the most forthright terms, is the answer to the great riddle of existence, and it is stated by one of the most astute minds of the modern age and in full agreement with ancient seership. Yet the answer, to naive mentation, appears irrational, arbitrary, even whimsical and fantastic, particularly in view of the realization, never very far out of mind, that this experience which gives the gods delight entails suffering, even for the young god-units that undergo it. So that the eternal question retains the dilemma which it forever presents to human thinking, for the answer given by philosophy sets up an obvious clash between a motive of delight and an experience of suffering, virtually arguing that life extracts delight out of suffering. If for play God imposes suffering upon himself or even upon his children, then somehow suffering must yield delight or itself be of the essence of delight.

But this word suffering needs a better analysis and definition, as it is found used in theologies. From the Latin sub-(suf)fero, it means to carry on under limitation, or simply to undergo experience. It need not necessarily involve the unit of experience in what the word suffering commonly connotes, the experience of pain and distress. The ancient understanding puts it in clearer and far more acceptable light. It means simply that the unit of potential divine life, which we call a soul, is and remains only potential until it unfolds latent capabilities into actual faculties and powers, which can only accrue to it as the result of an experience that subjects it to a tension and a pressure between the two poles into which its original unity is split apart, the only condition that implements the conversion of its potential into actually conscious being.

This is philosophy's final and adequate answer to any and all questions challenging the logic of "suffering" in a scheme of total good. If life's original unity is not broken apart into the duality of

consciousness and object, it will remain unconscious of itself. It will do or be nothing. It will remain forever static; will never enjoy the delight of feeling, seeing itself grow, never know the joy of living, conquering, expanding in power. It would remain eternally asleep. On the contrary, its law, under which it binds itself, requires it to alternate perpetually between periods of sleep and periods of waking, periods of activity and periods of rest. By such a rhythm it accentuates to its consciousness the realistic experience of each node by way of contrast with its opposite. Each phase gives to the other its sense of actuality, the source of the creative delight--Lila.

Says Aurobindo on this: "The world-existence is the ecstatic dance of Shiva, which multiplies the body of God numberlessly to the view." If God is to give himself the delight of further growth, he must do so by multiplying the number of fragments into which from the first two and the three, he subdivides his being to endless multiplicity and multiformity. From his unity he projects numberless seeds of himself and gives to each the potential of infinite growth. The multiplication and growth of the countless units of his body infinitely increase the dimensions of his own life, his glory and magnitude. But, for each unit to grow, to have birth and growth, it must undergo (etymologically suffer) the experience which is necessary to awaken its latent capacities into self-conscious becoming. And, says Aurobindo, "the only being is becoming." Polarity is the sole awakening power, the ineluctable way for being to actualize becoming. The human mind can philosophize truly and to sound conclusions only when this principle is integrated in the premise of thought. Once it is grasped and given due weight, the sole remaining source of wonder is why this experience of becoming should ever have been, in philosophy, tabbed with the name of "illusion." For if the experience can not be categorized as real, we can then have no experience of reality, since this is all the chance at life we have. To get rid of this grade of existence, in order to gain a truer reality, now appears to stand out in all the glaring crudity of its folly. To throw away what we have, with nothing to replace it but an empty void, seems too illogical to be even debated.

And Aurobindo comes forward here with the statement that this world experience, which cult religion so bitterly denounces, is positively part of the eternal Brahman itself, and is therefore a part of eternal reality. God's own experience with matter, shared

through our experience with it, is part of the reality of ever-existent being. It is not separate from it and contrary and hostile to it. Brahman projects his self-being out into these many forms of expression, not that he may have less abundance of life, but surely that he may have more. You can not multiply an ear of corn unless you plant its many grains. And this world is the Eden in which God plants us, the seeds of his great being. It should signify everything of moment in the authentication of this philosophical dialectic, that the Gan Eden, in which God planted his children, means "the Garden of Delight."

Through his seed units God undergoes this experience so that he may convert more and ever more of his latent unknown and untried potential of life and being into actualized self-knowledge. And although the ordeal of birth and growth of these cells in his body is necessarily attended with a certain stress and strain--as their birth-throes--still the joy of feeling the emergence of his powers and faculties is the rich reward of delight that arises from the experience. In this view the "ordeal of life" takes on the vivid hues of thrilling adventure, as every step is haloed with the joyous surprise of unexpected discovery of new genius. The only intrinsic source of lasting joy is the sense of mastery over new powers. As the process moves onward, the expectation of further revelations and ampler satisfactions generates a zest that then enhances and quickens the drama to heightened tempo. This goes on until, as India so clearly indicates, the soul undergoing the experience approaches as an end goal, a state of transcendent bliss,--ananda.

But the unbalanced handling of the maya philosophy errs in its presumption that this bliss is to be won simply by annulling, killing out, suffocating the run of physical experience, on the presupposition that if these "less real" modes of consciousness were pushed out of the way, the divine bliss would at once supervene in fulness. It is Aurobindo who makes the correction of this false assumption, in according to lower grades of active sense-life their full validity, indeed their indispensable utility in the scheme of progression. Not through its invalidation by an unwarranted dialectic, and crying for its eradication to release into consciousness a more radiant dynamism, but by "making use of this good thing," using Paul's words, is the road of evolutionary advance to be traversed.

With the Indian philosopher's masterly diagnosis we can per-

haps now see better what this maya in reality is, catching the corrected view that it is not in any way an experience of deception. He says that it is potential eternally in Brahman, so that Brahman can resort to its use at any time. The derivation of the word illusion becomes all-important here. It stems from the Latin word meaning to play, ludo, with the past tenses formed on the stem lus-. Illusion is the play activity, the play-exercise of God's mind in creation. It is the joyous thrill of trying his hand at creation. We, made in his image, derive our most genuine delight, pleasure and satisfaction from the labors of construction. The topmost joy in human life is the gratification we feel in having accomplished something masterfully, to have unfolded a new power. So Brahman uses its freedom to throw its energies into the tensional relation between positive and negative polarity, so that out of the exertion his potential being may evolve through becoming. In this, as observed, is the solid answer to the baffling question of philosophy. Seldom, if ever, has it been set forth so lucidly as we saw it in the passage quoted from Plotinus.

Confuting whole volumes of Hindu philosophical exposition, Aurobindo says that while the pure existent is a fact of the universal reality, that is, being detached from all circumscription by matter, "the movement of pure being down into matter for the purposes of becoming is also a fact." This straightforward assertion flatly contradicts the asseverations of its non-reality, which also imply its non-factuality. Aurobindo's thesis is that if the experience is integrally in Brahman, as he declares it is, its reality can not be impugned. And whatever it may be to higher creatures, gods, solar logoi, thrones, principalities, powers, archangels of the hierarchy, it is certainly real to us. The completely naive approach to the problem would seem to warrant our saying that if it is not real to the being undergoing it, it can hardly be rated as an experience. And for whom else would it be real? It would appear unthinkable that the entire mass-volume of human experience here should be an experience of unreality. If by any quirk of logic it might be held to be so, then it must be postulated that evolution has planned that we are to grow and unfold divinity through an experience of unreality. That elevates unreality to a place of grand utility in the cosmos. This dialectical strait is the predicament in which this negative philosophy of maya-illusion has involved itself. Can evolu-

tion be conceived as having employed falsehood and deception to promote life's conquest of reality? This is what the maya doctrine asks the mind to accept.

There are, however, several senses in which the word "play" can be considered, and it is not too easily determined which one is foremost in the ancient sages' use of the word. Aurobindo has gone straight with the ordinary meaning of play as recreation, sport, free active exercise. Perhaps also the meaning which would describe the creation as the play of the motions of God's mind, as we speak of the play of lights and shadows on a scene, is implicit. This would be a legitimate rendering of the word in its ancient usage. But it seems possible to read into it also the play of God, in the sense of his playing a part, acting a character, representing through his acting some deep true elements or aspects of reality which his outer show merely dramatizes. If the meaning of "play" is taken in this sense, there is at least a specious figurative warrant for philosophical thought to regard the outer creation as a mayavic curtain hiding a more real being behind it. But it goes no farther than to permit one to say that the outer show of phenomena is only relatively unreal. And that in the end concedes nothing to the maya doctrine, since to everything below the absolute truth and reality are only relatively true and real, as well as relatively untrue and unreal.

What is certainly important to notice is that this play of Brahman's mental creative activity carries no connotation of deception. Illusion, in the properly balanced sense of the term, it may possibly be, as granted in the preceding paragraph. But delusion it assuredly is not. Shallow handling of the concept in philosophy has taken illusion to be equivalent to delusion. This is a glaring blunder. The implications of the profound ancient philosophy have pointed the direct way to a capable understanding of the term maya. This word, beginning with the M that is found in all names of characters representing the motherhood of life, is the name of nearly all the mothers of the many Christ-figures in national religions: Maya, Maia, Mary, Moira, Myra, Myrrha, Miriam, May. This stands as a robust datum that challenges the philosophical denunciation of the world, matter, the body, the flesh. For, whether it be rated as a deception or a reality; it is clear that in the philosophy behind mythology it is considered that the experience of reality in the body on earth brings the Christhood in humanity to its birth.

If the voice of a recondite ancient seership speaks truly in this depiction, then it is decisively proclaimed that, so far from being a delusion of the soul, the maya illusion is actually the maieutic, (how fittingly the word falls in here!) or mid-wife principle that brings our Christ nature to its birth! All diatribe and abuse of the matter element of the duality meets its rebuff and refutation in this item of the sagas of old-time wisdom. And the item establishes the truth that, if it is still in any way permissible to characterize the mundane experience as an illusion, then illusion again must be considered as wholly beneficent. Mythology furnishes the conclusive testimony that maya is the prolific alma mater of our Christhood! Let those who take their beliefs from priesthood without critical examination know that the despised berated evil element of matter is what they worship when they pay adoration to the Holy Mother and recite their "Hail Mary" salutations.

Pious indoctrinated belief and maya cult philosophy never stop to reckon the disastrous psychological consequences of their illusion and detachment ideologies upon human society. Whether it segregates the individuals devoted to it physically from the world, as in the migration of thousands into the Eastern deserts in the early centuries of Christianity, or merely results in the abstraction of mental interests from the life of the world, it in any case takes its devotees out of the world. Aurobindo points directly to this danger. He is speaking of those who have claimed to find liberation from all worldly interests:

"If his inexorable removal through the very act of illumination is the law, then the world is condemned to remain eternally the scene of unredeemed darkness, death and suffering."

This is to point to the observation that if the grandiose exaltation of the spiritual consciousness amounts in the end to the sainted individual grasping his own salvation, letting the devil take the hindmost of those still mired in the pit of earth, there will never be a reclamation of the world out of its low wretchedness. Each human, as he graduates into sanctification, would abandon the world to its own evil. How would the world ever be lifted up?

Also Aurobindo observes that if we detach our life from the life and plan of the world, we will be able to make no integration of world meaning. When we take ourselves out of the context of

world life, which in the divine plan is the nursery ground of our spiritual growth, we are in no position to learn life's meaning, to make a correlation of the elements of its experience. The significance of the world and of life can not emerge out of events when either spirit or matter is detached from each other's influences. They bear meaning only when in interrelation. "The harmony of the two tendencies is the condition of all life that aims to be really divine," affirms our philosopher. And he rebukes the Indian philosophies that ignore the presence of God in nature and in the world. We can with confidence seek God in nature; we can find nature embodying God's thoughts, because he says:

"Prakriti [nature] turns back to perceive Purusha [spirit]. The world seeks after the Self; God having entirely become Nature, Nature seeks to become progressively God."

Again:

"For Life, these things that seem to deny God, to be the opposite of Satchitananda [Existence-Consciousness-Bliss] are real, even if they turn out to be temporary. They are the very material of her [Life's] workings."

And let a dark and lugubrious theology take note of his next statement:

"These [evils] are not the punishment for a fall, but the condition of a progress. They are the first elements of the world he has to fulfill; the price he has to pay for the crown which he hopes to win; the narrow way by which nature escapes out of matter into consciousness; they are at once her ransom and her stock . . . . for out of these false relations and by their aid the true view is to be found."

By the ignorance we have to cross over death, he has said.

"It would be, then, not when he has excised the evil in Nature out of herself by an act of moral surgery, or parted with life by an abhorrent recoil, but when he has turned it into a more perfect life, lifted the small things of human limitation into the great things of the divine vastness, transformed suffering into beatitude, converted evil into its proper good, translated error and falsehood into the secret truth, that the sacrifice will be accomplished, the journey done, and heaven and earth, equalized, join hands in the bliss of the Supreme."

Here we have the voice of a true philosopher, an oracle uttering sage wisdom that has disastrously been beclouded for an aeon of history. In the light that these words cast on the scene of human

life we can see only too clearly what would happen if, by some hallucinatory mind-magic, we were able to lift or abstract ourselves out of the experience which is ours on this plane, at this stage of our peregrination through the long cycles that will carry us on to the heights of ineffable being. And what will be the disappointment of those who urge us to cast off the fetters that bind us to the life of body and of sense and of mind! "In getting rid of the ignorance of the Ego and its resultant limitations we do indeed eliminate the dualities; but we eliminate along with them our own existence in the cosmic movement."

The challenge to an irrational excess of subjective monistic persuasion, the rebuke to unjustified claims for the benefits of a spiritual detachment from the physical life, is here voiced for a welcome sanification of the general religious mind. Duality, we have seen from the first verse of Genesis on through the venerable Egyptian and the later Greek systems, is the essential condition for the birth and evolution of consciousness in creature life. The ultra spiritual-subjective philosophies aim to dissolve the duality, and so to release the ego-spirit that is, at one end, tied in with the non-egoic matter. Fatuously this thought looks simply to the release of the spirit bound--injuriously, as it claims--under the heavy darkness of matter and the flesh. What a sagacious philosopher unfolds to the holder of this view is that the only possible outcome of the presumptive liberation of the spirit nucleus from its "bondage" in matter would be the extinction of the unit of consciousness that is supposed to be liberated. It is in a fair degree of analogical exactness comparable to the action of a person imprisoned in a house, who decided that he can free himself by blasting that house with a charge of dynamite: he goes out of existence with the house. True enough, as the thinker states it, we succeed in eliminating the dualities, we nullify the tension of opposites, but only at the cost of our own annihilation. Consciousness has arisen out of the tension generated in the duality; eliminate the tension and consciousness goes out like a lamp with it. Such an elimination of our sense of existence would be rationally desirable only if the consciousness was left to enjoy the release from the strain. But with the destruction of the tension, what is left is a blank. The philosophies here brought under critique come close to announcing their preference for a blanking out of all existence-consciousness, the annihilation of any life at all.

Existence is declared an evil, its burden a suffering. The only good of a creature caught in its meshes is to destroy the sense of it; and this destruction is so welcome to the earth-hater as to be acceptable even if it involves the annihilation of the entity desiring it. What good its destruction would be when no entity would be left to recognize its absence, logic seems incompetent to tell us.

The negation philosophies appear to have no stomach, no patience for the long, slow and in some part necessarily painful march of human progress from the beast level through the human arc up to the divine. It is bent wholly and solely on annihilation of the consciousness that arises out of the tension of polarity. And who can gauge the fatuity of the philosophy which aims at supernal felicity by destroying the grade of consciousness through which presumably the felicity could alone be enjoyed? The rebuttal of this logic would be in saying that the aim is not to destroy the consciousness by which the bliss may be enjoyed, but to destroy a lower form of consciousness which is blocking the way to the more blessed realization. A rational expectation would be that in due course of evolution a lower and more inhibiting grade of consciousness may be transcended by the emergence of a higher and more joyous grade. But this sane formulation of the process is just what the Hindu negativist systems and the maya philosophies expressly reject. They clamor for the destruction of those modes of consciousness--sense, emotion, thought--the full and perfected development of which are the means, and the indispensable ones, by which such true advance to higher state could be achieved. These present capabilities of our consciousness are not seen as useful adjuncts, or wayside stations along the road of progress, but are all discredited and spurned as anti-utilitarian enemies of the spirit, imprisoners of the self, and constitute a maya-illusion in their totality. They are accorded no function of usefulness in a scheme of growth to enhanced being, but are declared to be the enemies of the spirit.

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE VEIL OF THE ABSOLUTE

The liberation philosophy contends that all our experience is unreal because it is only relative to a larger and truer reality, the true reality. In a proper balance of the conception no one disputes this. No wise thinker would claim that our mode of consciousness, or our grade of experience here, is in any sense the experience of absolute reality, certainly not in its form of absolute finality. No one asserts that our life in the present is the be-all and end-all of potential being. To do so would destroy all the meaning that goes with the word "evolution." It would cut us off from prospect of a future in any way grander than our present.

Yet that our form of life is an essential element in the conscious evolution of reality for both the Brahman and for his creatures is certified by Aurobindo in unmistakable terms:

"The movement, on the contrary, is the field of the relative, and yet by the very definition of the relative all things in the movement contain, are contained in, and are the Absolute."

At the extreme opposite of the claim that all our experience is an unreality, a dream, an illusion, he declares that it is the heart's core of reality.

"The movement in time, the movement in space, is real. Space and time are real. What is, is the eternal invisible succession of time, carrying on its stream a progressive movement of consciousness, also invisible. Duration, then, eternal succession of movement and change in time, is the sole Absolute. Becoming is the only being."

It is the old debate between Heraclitus and Parmenides over again. And the modern Hindu gives the palm to Heraclitus: the life that is moving is the true being, not the life bound in eternal motionlessness. As Dr. Wilhelm said, the Oriental philosophy has put too much emphasis on the static side alone. Life not only wishes to be, but to express itself, and this it can not do if it is bound in eternal silence and immobility. As Plotinus said, it is not enough for souls merely to exist; they must show what they are capable of begetting. Life must be free to act. Its values come to its creatures on the wing. The joy is in the sweep and swing of the movement up hill and down dale.

The mind hugging its maya belief can not endure the thought that any self-limitation of the free spirit of life can be salutary for soul's progress, or a necessary instrumentality for it. Progress out of limitation toward wider liberty does not satisfy it; it wants immediate release from the tension implicit and indispensable in becoming. It is impatient with the slow ascent of the ladder, or the keyboard, of existence and believes that the long treadmill of gradual progression is unnecessary. It thinks that the grand apotheosis of ecstatic consciousness can be consummated in one fell rush upon the citadel of divine glory. It can not tolerate the idea of life's taking one step at a time.

But hear Aurobindo:

"And first, if there were not this factor of the successions of Time, there would be no change or progress; a perfect harmony would be perpetually manifest [would this not rather be unmanifest?] coeval with other harmonies in a sort of eternal moment, not successive to them, in a movement from past to future. We have instead the constant succession of a developing form in which one strain rises out of another that preceded it, and conceals in itself that which it has replaced" [and the promise of the one to follow it].

Here is the point-blank refutation of the philosophies that would eliminate time and evolution out of the cosmic procedure in the unfoldment of life. Also again, hitting the claims that the experience here is not of real being, but a maya, Aurobindo says:

"Those forms have been created not outside, but in the divine existence, Spirit-Force and Bliss; not outside, but in and as a part of the working of the divine Real-Idea. There is therefore no reason to suppose that there can not be any real play of the higher divine consciousness in a world of forms, or that forms and their immediate support, mental consciousness, energy-vital Force and formal substance, must necessarily distort that which they represent. It is possible, even probable, that mind, body and life are to be found in their pure forms in the divine truth itself; and there in fact as subordinate activities of this consciousness, and part of the complete instrumentation by which the Supreme Force always works. Mind, life and body must be capable of divinity."

"This earthly life need not necessarily by forever a wheel of half-joyous, half agonized effort; attainment may also be intended and the glory and joy of the Lord made manifest on earth."

If mind, life and body also hold the capability of divinity, it is time that the droning dirge of their imperfection, their transitoriness, their illusory and evil character give place to a joy-song ex-

pressing appreciation of the gracious service they render in the evolutionary economy. That which the philosopher puts forth here suggestively as a high probability, and almost in an apologetic tentative voice,--even at that exceptional for a Hindu mind--was stated with unabashed positiveness by the ancient sages. Surely attainment of the highest grades of conscious being and joyous life is intended in the scheme of organic process; its very stresses promise that. And the glory of the Lord of Creation is to be made manifest on earth. The philosophies of old prescribed the definitive laws of life and the discipline of consciousness by which humans might grow toward divine estate without impaling themselves constantly on the spikes of suffering.

And Aurobindo depicts vividly the illogicality and final futility of the maya philosophy when he summons our thought to the inescapable fact that

"even when it knows that they [world objects] are not things in themselves, it is obliged to deal with them as if they were things in themselves. Otherwise it could not subject them to its own characteristic activities."

Here, it would seem, the mayavic creed and claims receive their knock-out blow. In a world wherein the elan vital is manifesting positive values this code of ideas asks its believers to take a mental pose of negation and denial toward the things which all the while their very existence requires that they accept as real. What must be the chaos inbred in a mind which daily asserts the non-reality of houses, bread and milk, yet finds it is every day dependent upon these things for very existence! And what the folly of denying the real being of one's own body!

The actual and veridical being of the material world is forthrightly asserted by Aurobindo:

"And, as we have already discovered that matter is only substance-form of Force, so we shall discover that material Force is only energy-form. Material Force is in fact a sub-conscious operation of Will . . . We may say, therefore, that it is a sub-conscious Mind, or Intelligence, which, manifesting Force as its driving power, its executive Nature, its Prakriti, has created this material world."

Here is corroboration of our elucidation that the laws of nature are the operations of the sub-conscious mind of the universal creator.

If this is so, it at once and in finality negates all philosophies that draw sharp lines of separation between the ideal world of real being and the asserted unreal world of spurious material objectivity. This conclusion is certified by the fact that the activities of the subconscious mind are simply the previous activities of the divine conscious mind made automatic by repetition. This is what Aurobindo implies when he says that the things of the world that seem to deny God and the Supermind are nevertheless also in the Brahman, a part of real being. So he says that material force, creating material things, is a sub-conscious operation of Will. This is a timely discernment that can be brought in to guide thought to correct conclusions in its attempt to rationalize the earthly life.

The philosopher himself asks, what, then, is Life? And what relation does it bear to the Supermind? By what necessity does it come into being? And he recalls that there has come ringing down the centuries the ancient cry that life is a delusion, a delirium, an insanity, from which we have been incessantly exhorted to flee by posting our minds in an attitude of total negation of the life here. Why, he asks, has the Eternal wantonly inflicted this evil? Why has he brought into being this terrible all-deluding maya? His answer may sound unrealistic and a little-over wordy and pedantic to most. Nevertheless it deals with the factuality of the case as clearly as it is possible for the human understanding to grasp and rephrase it:

"And, however brute and void of sense it seems to us, it is yet, to the secret experience of consciousness hidden within it, delight of being, offering itself to this secret consciousness as subjects of sense in order to tempt that hidden godhood out of its secrecy. Being manifest as substance, force-in-being cast into form, into a figured self-representation of the secret self-consciousness, delight offering itself to its own consciousness as an object,--what is this to Sat-chit-ananda? Matter is Sat-chit-ananda represented to his own mental experience as a formal basis of objective knowledge, action and Delight of existence."

Then he uses a figure of representation which is singularly in accord with a dramatization employed in the Old Testament. Saying that the Overmind sends matter as a "delegate" to the ignorance manifested at the lower grade, he pictures matter as a sort of protective screen thrown over the consciousness of that grade, permitting it to enjoy the universal light in a moderate subdued de-

gree, when it could not receive the full force of the blinding light of the Sun of divine glory. This poetically limns what is as correct a way of thinking about it as any we can conceive. A similar figurism is obviously behind the trope used in the Psalms (84), "the Lord God is a sun and a shield." Also it seems to be the thought in the allegory in the Scripture in which the Eternal tells Moses, the type of man, that he will hide him in a cleft of the rock, and, as the Eternal's "glory" passes by, he will place his hand over man's eyes so that the human sight will not be blinded by the blazing effulgence of the undimmed divine light. The divine hand will be removed when the glory has passed. It needs little ingenuity in symbolism to correlate the "hand" emblem with matter. Matter is the "eternal feminine," life's universal mother; and hand is found to be of the feminine gender in nearly all, if not all languages. But the main earthly symbol of matter is water, the actual mother of the biological chain of life on the globe. And so the figurism of the Old Testament not only mitigates the overpowering brilliance of the divine glory by the coverage of God's hand over man's eyes, but also encloses man in a cloud of vapor (water), when God comes down to commune with his children on Mount Sinai, definitely a glyph of ancient usage for the earth itself. Matter is definitely that "shield" which the cosmic mind-fire providentially interposes between its pure and unmitigated energy and the consciousness that can as yet function only in the lower and dimmer chambers of existence. So Aurobindo's depiction of matter as deity's "delegate" to a lower grade that can not apperceive pure spirit-forms and must therefore have such forms represented in concrete objectivity, is entirely, if poetically, valid.

Swinging over to a different figure he refers to Purusha (spirit) and Prakriti (matter) as respectively the soul and the executive force of nature; they together produce a harmony, as they are the two balancing energies of one and the same power. This being so, he says "there can be no disequilibrium or predominance of one over the other."

Here are words of such vital import to man's sane balance of mind in his effort at rationalization of his life experience that their full realization would have salvaged humanity from centuries of misguided religious fanaticism, bigotry and superstition, and from today could inaugurate a brighter and less horrendous era in world

life. Had their sound message been purveyed, grasped and applied in philosophical thought in the past centuries, this cry that Aurobindo catches ringing down the ages, "the world is very evil," would have been silenced from the beginning, and the insensate denial of the world's good would have been supplanted by a just and happy appreciation of its present and its ultimate beneficence. There can be no refutation of the assertion that in that case human life would have been both happier and nobler.

In lack of this understanding of the equilibration of the two forces of spirit and matter, the major effort in world religion has been almost totally a blind attempt to disrupt the eternal, or aeonial, polarity, to disengage the positive pole, spirit, from its tension with its negative, matter. All the while the ends of the entire evolutionary scheme are to be subserved by keeping the two in the polar relation "until the harvest." Only perhaps in the light of this scientific approach to the situation will the folly of exalting and straining to effectualize the one by attempting mistakenly and perforce vainly to crush down and silence the other, be realized at last. Happily for the future of religious significations, Aurobindo comes forward with the resounding assertion that there can be no disturbing or relaxing the polar balance between the heavenly and the earthly. And perhaps now in the spirit of Tennyson's "ring out the old, ring in the new," the old bleating cry of the evil of the world may now be drowned out by the clarion carol of the world's high function of good.

The discerning philosopher elucidates that the "many," which it has been the habit of a dour theology to berate because they stand at variance with the eternal unity, are just the one, which has broken itself up into multitude for the cosmic purpose of giving to each unit seed-portion of itself the chance to grow up through a self-realizing experience under the birth-strains of polarity. Only thus can it multiply its own being, for thus it can bring more hosts of its own units from ignorance and initial powerlessness up to the consummation of the divine Sat-chit-ananda, or the ultimate trinity of being, existence-consciousness-bliss. It superficially gives the appearance of existence plunging into an apparent non-existence; consciousness going into an apparent unconsciousness; delight of being sinking down into a cosmic insensibility and "deadness," from which a diviner ray has to rescue it. (It has been the inveterate

propensity of shallow theologization to mistake this apparent downward plunge for a real fall of soul into darkness.) Over the centuries the feeble efforts of the human mind to explain this seeming calamity to life have become crystallized in the unfortunate and inept theological doctrine of the "fall into sin." Never with adequate conciseness was it recognized that the split of primal life energy into duality was in no true sense a "fall into matter," to be viewed as a dire miscarriage and catastrophe, but that it was the precipitation of the conditions necessary for the soul units' adventure for the birth and self-discovery of their divinity. The bifurcation and polarization were necessary because under cosmic law a good quality can emerge only out of the repercussion of wrestling with its opposite, evil.

Hence all the systems that decry the evil nature of matter, sense, the world and the flesh are now, in a rectified view, to be seen as unbalanced and naively childish presuppositions. The positive truth is that these elements are the base of our life and the source of our power to grow. We climb ill, Aurobindo courageously asserts, if in our advance from cruder levels to more ethereal and radiant heights "we forget our base." His words are so notable that full quotation is warranted:

"Life, in its self-unfolding must also rise to ever new provinces of its own being. But if in passing from one domain to another, we renounce what has already been given us, from eagerness for our new attainment, if in reaching the mental life we cast away or belittle the physical life which is our basis, or if we reject the mental and physical in our attraction to the spiritual, we do not fulfil God integrally nor satisfy the conditions of his self-manifestation. We do not become perfect, but only shift the field of our imperfection, or at most attain a limited altitude. However high we may climb, even though it be to the Non-Being itself, we climb ill if we forget our base. Not to abandon the lower to itself, but to transfigure it in the light of the higher to which we have attained, is true divinity in nature. Brahman is integral and unifies many stages of consciousness at a time; we also, manifesting the nature of Brahman, should become integral and all-embracing."

A further amplification of the central idea here expressed in such forthright terms is also quite worth citing:

"The integral view of the nature of Brahman avoids these consequences. Just as we need not give up the bodily life to attain to the mental and spiritual, so we can arrive at a point of view where

the observation of the individual activities is no longer inconsistent with our comprehension of the cosmic consciousness or our attainment of the transcendent and supracosmic. For the world transcendence embraces the universe, is one with it and does not exclude it, even as the universe is one with it and does not exclude it, even as the universe embraces the individual, is one with him and does not exclude him. The individual is a center of the whole universe; the universe is a form and definition which is occupied by the entire immanence of the formless and Indefinable."

Since our mentality refuses to attribute anything in the order of life and nature to an arbitrary or whimsical fiat of fate, we are forced to see in the oppositions of spirit and matter, which we so quickly and glibly pronounce evil, the beneficent conditions and provisions for our slow and strenuous progress. So our philosopher elucidates it: "Whatever is created must be of the substance of the utterly Real, and must be Real." This being so, "a vast baseless negation of reality can not be the outcome of eternal truth or the Infinite Existence." But both directly and by implication the maya doctrine asserts a negation of real being. And hardly less than sharply rebuking to these negative postulates is his statement that "all that a timeless eternity of self-awareness sees in itself as truth of being, the conscious power of its being manifests in Time-Reality." Here finally the perpetual cry of the negativists that the human mind will look in vain in the particulars of the time process to discover the great truth of being is bluntly refuted and denied. And against the insistent preachment decrying the value of the world "below," the philosopher launches this positive rebuttal: "It is not denial; it is one term, one formula, of the Infinite and Eternal Existence." Again he confutes the opposing ideas with the statement: "Moreover the experience of soul and Nature as dual is true." The maya cultism has inveterately declared it to be false.

Logical explication of the duality is given in the following:

"An apparent duality is created in order that there may be a free action of Nature working itself out with the support of the spirit; and again a free and masterful action of the spirit, controlling and working out Nature."

Nature here is a limited expression of the cosmic Super-Nature above. And the supreme pronouncement of a virtually conclusive verdict of error in the philosophies denouncing the world and nature is a statement that "what Nature does is really done by spirit."

However slowly and mutely rendered, it is ever the voice and the message of the spirit, Purusha, which nature, Prakriti, repeats on earth. The heavens speak and earth echoes the tones. "The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork."

The maya doctrine affirms that we are to destroy our conscious connection with this world by "killing out" the senses, the emotions and the mind, by all of which our conscious attachment to the world is maintained. Shallow thinking has always missed noting the consequences of this prescription. But Aurobindo sees it and points it out.

"If we withdraw back from her workings, then all can fall into quiescence and we can enter into the silence, because she consents to cease from her dynamic activity; but it is in her quiescence and silence that we are quiescent and cease. If we would realize a higher formation or status of being, then it is still through her, through the divine Sakti, the consciousness-Force of the spirit, that it has to be done; our surrender must be to the Divine Being through the Divine Mother."

Here again is wisdom uttering momentous pronouncements of oracular truth, and the world that they can bless has waited only too long to hear them. Religion, in its overweening persuasion that boundless "glory, laud and honor" were to be rendered to mortals to the Supreme Spirit alone, has exalted the Father in heaven, while slapping our equally divine and holy Mother of Life on earth rudely in the face!

"The original status is that of the Reality, Timeless and Spaceless; Space and Time would be the same Reality self-extended to contain the development of what was within it."

Stoutly he affirms that at all times the alleged "evils" have their persistent reality and importance in our present phase of the manifestation, nor can they be a mere mistake of the divine consciousness, happenings without any meaning in the supernal wisdom, without any purpose of the divine joy, power and knowledge to justify their existence.

These citations bring us face to face with the inadequacy of the escapist philosophy to meet the realities of the world situation and to account for them in a rational scheme of exegesis. It all reveals to us the patent fact that escapist philosophy is such just because it

can not rationalize apparent evils. If life can be rationalized in a scheme of good, no escapist philosophy is necessary or justified. Failing an insight that would render a wholly rational explication of the world life in full consonance with a conception of good, mayavic postulates are driven to resort to the disingenuous ruse of disqualifying the reality of the experience which seems to present evil aspects, along with the instrumental sources of our evidences of that experience, our senses and our mind. Unable to justify the world experience as good, the negative philosophy ends the debate by virtually throwing the experience itself bodily out of court as insufficient ground for the trial of the case at all. It impugns the evidence as all false. Always its plea is that man is not legitimately qualified to pass judgment on his experience or to determine its true rationale, because his equipment for assessing its real value is inadequate and defective. So the dialectical ruse of asserting that our experience is only to be evaluated through the lens of a higher and more perfect power of consciousness appertaining to a higher world is subtly utilized with considerable speciousness. For centuries this thin "logic" has been put forth by one school of thought after another, without its inherent illogicality being detected. If man needs for his balance and happiness a rationalization of the live problems of existence, he needs them at his own level and in the terms of his own grade of mind power, within the reach of his own comprehension, not in the supposititious or predicated terms of some hypothecated higher consciousness. What archangels and gods may understand far beyond man's capabilities should not be made the standard of judgment or appraisal in man's rationalization of his world. It is his world that he has to rationalize, not that of the gods. Man must be the judge in the court of trial of the values of his mundane experience. And he must render judgment in the terms of his own codes of understanding.

It is, not at any rate directly, no rational elucidation of man's dialectical problems to summon down the Super-conscious mind of the cosmic Logos to supply a supra-rational exegesis, disqualifying man's own faculties. He must have a solution acceptable and satisfying to him at this level. When it is a matter of the poise and mental balance of our life here, philosophy must not put off our answer by referring us to another world of understanding, which we may, if at all, cognize only by cutting off all our conscious connection with

the actualities of our present state and mode of being. Aurobindo insists on this, positively asserting the validity of our experience with world objectivity in the formation of our value judgments. The more surely is this to be taken as irrefutable in view of the fact that, as he has pointedly observed, it is impossible that we should attempt to disqualify our own report on our experience at the sense-and-mind level as invalid for judgment. However unreal we may argue and protest our experience to be, we must, as he notes, act as if it is real. So that all sublimated philosophical attitude toward the world as an unreality can be maintained only by means of an artificially superinduced pose much in the nature of a hypnotization. This last word virtually describes in general the philosophical posture of mind generated by negative cult postulates. They can only wield a sway over minds by gaining control of them through the mysterious force of dogmatic mesmerism. This force has long been denominated "auto-suggestion." It had better be called plainly self-hypnotization.

But a philosophy that alone can yield to man its salutary integrating influences must be one that he can grasp with the sharp edge of his normal endowment and through his own keenly awakened faculties. Being a Hindu of deep proficiency in every reach of mental acumen, Aurobindo is aware of this fatal propensity of the human consciousness to charm and hallucinate itself by mental magic, and he warns against confusion and delusion from this source. It can be bluntly affirmed that in a broad sense hundreds of cult movements in the run of history have swept large groups into one great mass hypnotization after another. Under the siren power of emotional surges any scheme of specious rationalization can be accepted as real. If, as the maya cults assert, the truth of life is only to be recognized or realized by a process of abstracting consciousness wholly out of the world which factually presents itself to us, and viewing and judging it from the vantage-point of a transcendental world, it is indeed necessary, as it is not denied, for man to destroy himself as man, in a predicated effort to reorient himself as a being divine and absolute. The outcome, then, of the cult teachings is the destruction of man.