CHAPTER NINE

THE MOTHER OF REALITY

Philosophy has signally failed in its high function if it has not been able to assure the cultured world-mind that life is capable of being lived, not only in the hypothetical "eternal now" of a timeless super-mind consciousness, but in the flowing stream of the temporal now, in the full, if relative and imperfect, sense of its effective reality. If life, as it unfolds its potential at the given moment, is not real, then thought and mind would have to be forever postponing the moment of reality to some distant epoch or climactic denouement of our evolution, and the living experience would indeed be robbed of its realized and realizing power by the false and superficial posture of mind set to denial. As Aurobindo so strongly asserts, the present experience with an objectivity that can be characterized as relatively unreal, is all a part of the whole movement of life in the Conscious-Force of Brahman. It is no negative criterion of reality that an ordered manifestation of life in the being of eternal reality finds it necessary to appear in a vast range of differentiated modes of realization to creatures of endless grades of evolved, or unevolved, conscious powers. It is no criterion of reality that is grasped in different ways by different people in different worlds, or by different people in the same world; that it can be apprehended with a fuller and more vivid sense of its true nature by higher creatures than by lower. Reality is wherever and however it appears to the creature experiencing it, although one's reality is not another's. Reality is not to be dismissed as unreality simply because it can not be made absolutely uniform throughout the universe. In effect that is what the absolutist and monistic theorizations predicate as desirable, necessary and--possible.

In relation to the questions examined here the voice of another outstanding Hindu philosopher may be listened to with much profit. In his magnificent two-volume work on Indian Philosophy the eminent philosopher-statesman, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, has outlined the whole structure of Hindu religious thought with a view to its clarification for Western minds in particular. The great question of maya is handled most perspicaciously. "Maya is not a human construction. It is prior to our intellect and independent of it." (Then certainly our philosophy could affect it little.) He

equates it with Prakriti, the manifest universe. If maya is prior to and independent of our intellect, it must be objective to our intellect. It is not born out of our intellect, as an illusion would be. Therefore it would seem that maya can not be of the nature of illusion, but is a part of the enginry of reality itself. Being prior to our intellect, it can not be a product of our intellect. This conclusion shakes to their foundations such theorizations as those of Christian Science and kindred idealistic systems which make our own minds the creators of whatever reality encompasses us, whether objective or subjective. It is also the decisive answer to the thesis in philosophy that man's mind is the creator of illusion. The illusion--if such it indeed be--was here before the human mind. In this light Radhakrishnan's declaration that maya is not a human production, being prior to our intellect, takes on especial force and importance. If it divests the doctrine of maya of its humanly generated illusory character, it marks an epoch in the history of religious philosophy.

Maya is Prakriti, the world of becoming, and to this the philosopher adds that "the world of becoming is the supreme reality and that therefore anything that interrupts it is to be rated in the category of unreality, if not of evil. It is closely in accord with Indian thought to rate becoming as evil, for in its processes the life on earth, deprecated by Eastern philosophy as a breach in the continuity of absolute good, is generated. The Indian mind dislikes to think of pure being as suffering any interruption of its static beatitude. If it occurs it is a calamity. The prime aim of Hindu speculative philosophy is to liberate consciousness from the throes of becoming and restore it to its primal state of pure and undisturbed being. In sharp contrast with this view we may now see how far Aurobindo has traveled to arrive at a point where he could say "the only being is becoming." It makes him almost a revolutionary against all previous Indian philosophy.

But do we not face a sharp and crucial clash between the expressed views of the two great philosophers? Aurobindo flies far away from the static aspect of being to say that the only being is becoming; Radhakrishnan now says that the world of becoming is an interruption of being. By unimpeachable logic the two statements would add up to saying that the only being is an interrup-

tion of being. Becoming is true being, but becoming interrupts true being. If both philosophers speak truth, then in this case truth clashes with truth, truth destroys itself.

But it is possible that the clash may be found reconcilable if we consider the word "interrupt." It is possible that an entity or a process can interrupt itself without destroying itself. The issue hinges on the particular sense in which the word was used in Radhakrishnan's dialectic. As employed by him it does seem to intimate the negation of being and reality, in fact their destruction. But so drastic a meaning may not need to be assigned to it here. Interruption of being would not necessarily connote destruction, or even opposition to being. It could well and legitimately mean temporary alteration of the mode of being. And this is obviously what it does mean, and this rendering permits the two apparently self-destructive statements to stand. For truly enough it can be affirmed that becoming interrupts being in precisely the same sense in which we would say that waking activity interrupts sleep. The analogy seems adequate and valid on every side, since becoming is to being what waking activity is to sleep. And this relation of becoming to being at the same time opens out a clearer vista into the meaning of the maya conception. It helps us see that maya is the disposition, the posture, the mode into which absolute being projects itself as it awakens out of its sleep condition, called in India pralaya, to undergo the long process of pushing itself from unconsciousness to the unlimited heights of glorious self-consciousness. Maya is the condition of the becoming operation and becoming is true being, again by irrefutable logic maya is the conscious coefficient of true being. This deduction is in sum pretty much what this essay is aimed to establish.

Maya is what the absolute being precipitates itself into when Purusha commits itself to Prakriti for the very sake of achieving for itself new birth and infinite growth of its dormant or unawakened potential. The false presumption of so much "spiritual" philosophy as of religious conception in the large, is that the unit soul-consciousness is forced out of an Elysium of perfect bliss of full being to plunge into a lower limbo of Prakriti and maya, and wander almost like a lost soul through aeons of an unreal experience symbolized by every type of darkness, non-being and forlornness, its

one hope of felicity being to find some way of escape back to the Paradise lost. The change of habitat is doubtless true, but every philosophical implication as to its purpose and its rationale in the designs of cosmic mind seems to have been distorted most outrageously awry. The truth is evident that the direful necessity that forces potential god-souls out of Paradise,--in which, contrary to most religious belief, they do not share or enjoy the felicity of all-perfect being, not yet even having entered the stream of becoming--is in its ultimate evaluation neither calamitous nor dire; no more so, at any rate than the necessity which requires an acorn in October to fall from its parent oak down into the damp ground at its base. Souls in the empyrean in their incipient stage, generated by the Father's powers of self-reproduction, are not participants in the bliss of pure being, as naive religious minds have been misled to believe. Their descent to earth does not tear them ruthlessly away from celestial blessedness; it in fact simply initiates the run of experience that will unfold their capability to actualize such felicity. They are but the seeds of life and love and glory in heaven; they must fall into the ground of earth if they are to grow. As it has been fittingly expressed, they emerge at the start out of pure be-ness, to proceed through a long course of becoming to attain unto true being. Religion generally has mistaken the primal be-ness for the perfected being. True being is never an unearned gratuity; if it were so it would be worthless. It must be labored for and won, and all its values spring from the exertion and the winning. True being is what life wins at the end of the process of becoming, not what it is before the process begins. Aurobindo is right: becoming is the only being. And in the proper understanding of the terms, Radhakrishnan is right: life interrupts the being it has attained at any stage in order to attain a greater being. So far is soul's "expulsion" from Paradise not a calamity and a "fall," that it is in truth its cosmic opportunity to enter the stream of becoming. In the simplest possible form of statement, it is their glorious chance to be. India still regards it as dire calamity.

In a stricter use of the words, however, it is important to consider the possible error in Radhakrishnan's position. For the creatures concerned, being can not be interrupted, because it is not yet a going reality. A thing that is not yet running can not be interrupted. And when being is attained, it never will be interrupted,

except to produce finer modes of being. Being is the distant objective at which the infant souls aim. In falling from Paradise to earth souls do not fall out of true being, with the sad necessity of climbing back to the happy region whence they fell. They do not so much have to regain Paradise as to gain it for the first time. It was in the ultimate sense not a Paradise lost, because it had not yet been won. It was only the leaving of the parent's home to go out to a distant school where a rigorous education would generate the power to build Paradise of its own as the rich fruitage of sacrifice. Maya is the valley of becoming.

The misconception just elucidated involves Radhakrishnan in the impassable bogs of deeper questions, for it drives him to a negative answer and to a confession of inability to rationalize the "fall" of the soul by the analogy of the planting of the soul-seeds on the earth. He writes (Indian Philosophy, Vol. I, p. 86):

"Philosophy tells us that so long as we are bound by intellect and are lost in the world of the many, we shall not seek in vain to get back to the simplicity of the one. If we ask the reason why there is avidya, or maya, bringing about a fall from vidya, from being, the question can not be answered. [Italics ours]. Philosophy as logic has here the negative function of explaining the inadequacy of all intellectual categories, pointing out how the objects of the world are relative to the mind that thinks them and possess no independent existence . . . . It can not help us directly to the attainment of reality . . . . The supporters of pure monism recognize a higher form than abstract intellect, which enables us to feel the push of reality. We have to sink ourselves in the universal consciousness and make ourselves coextensive with all that is. We do not then so much think reality as live it, do not so much know it as become it."

This passage is most important because it so clearly delineates the basic position of Hindu dialectic in all religious systematism. If a competent critique of it can be instituted, that, too, would be important. Two items involving great principles are here to be scrutinized: the asserted impossibility of answering the question as to why the soul on earth has "fallen" into avidya, ignorance; and the constantly reiterated incompetence of the intellect to acquaint us with reality. The two items are quite definitely related to each other.

Taking up the first, it is odd that Oriental thought has forever bleated its inability to answer the question of the "fall," which is

100

essentially the question as to why souls are on the earth. Most singular it must seem also that India has continued to render this negative answer, when ancient Egypt and Greece, the inheritor of Kamite wisdom, have fully and competently answered the great question. The answer, already specifically outlined in this work, could be elaborated at great length. It may perhaps bear review and new accentuation, briefly.

In the Plotinus passage quoted previously we are told that souls come to earth "by a voluntary inclination, to develop their powers and to adorn what is below them." They are not sent here to suffer the loss, or "sacrifice" of anything precious. They are infant soul units, so named in ancient systems in various ways: in India called Kumaras, "virgin youths," "celibate young men;" in Egypt spoken of as "the younglings in the egg," "the younglings of Shu," the children of Osiris; in the New Testament allegorism denominated them "the Innocents" whom "Herod" tried to destroy in their infancy; in the Greek mythology they are typified by divine heroes in their youth, such as the infant Hercules strangling the two great serpents in his cradle. In the Egyptian allegory the soul itself, personified, states that it takes its position "on the horizon," the borderline between heaven and earth, where spirit and matter are exactly balanced, which equilibration is found only in the body of man. Here it says that it comes to bathe in the divine pool beneath the two divine "sycamores" of heaven and earth, the Pool of the North and the Pool of the South, the Pool of Natron and the Pool of Salt, the Pool of the Sun and the Pool of the Moon, "in order that I may purify this soul of mine in the most high degree." Here is set up the great balance in which all souls are weighed, for elsewhere the divine pool is called "the lake of equipoise and propitiation." This place of equilibration between the two natures which must ever be united in polarity if life is to be existent, is the great balance, the Libra of the zodiac. Repeating that it comes to feed upon the bread of Seb, or the food of the earth, it adds that it has many rebirths in the flesh: "I die, and I am born again, and I renew myself, and I grow young each day." And again it says: "I am Horus, who steppeth onward through eternity." "The name of my boat is Millions of Years." "My name is eternity and everlastingness."

It appears worthy of noting how the philosophy of Egypt and Greece rings with the tone of positive value in its view of life, in

101

the sharpest possible contrast to the sour negative attitude expressive of India's thought. Inasmuch as historians have traced the provenance and the character tone of the religions that have preponderated in the West in the period since Plato's day to the influx and influence of the Hindu philosophy upon the earlier Egypto-Greek systems expressing the positive view of life, this contrast and vast discrepancy must be seen to be a thing of momentous significance in the last twenty-five hundred years of history.

The other item of Radhakrishnan's analysis is the incompetency of the intellect to give man knowledge of reality. India has forever asserted that if the human is to have experience of reality, he must interdict the activity of the intellect and utilize a "higher" power of consciousness, which Radhakrishnan here describes as a feeling of the push of reality, a recognition higher than knowing and which he calls a "living of reality," and finally a "becoming it," so that we contact reality by being it ourselves. Philosophy has wrestled endlessly with this question. It looks very much as if it were all a matter of more precise and specific definition of the term "intellect," as well also of the term "reality." In the Hindu position as stated, the intellect seems to be spoken of as a mental power limited to the work of logic and formal relation of propositions under strict methodological rules, such as those governing mathematics. It seems to be restricted to only a very limited area of the total possible range of mind faculty.

It may be allowed that under this strict definition the intellect is neither a name nor a faculty capable of covering the range of mind-function as a whole. The mind may justly be claimed to have other functions or forms of cognition transcending its purely ratiocinative power. Also the debate continues indecisive probably because the intellect is being condemned or subjected to a critique of incompetence on the ground of failure to fulfill an office which is not properly within its sphere of function, and which it should not be asked or expected to discharge. The specific task of the mind is to give us knowledge of the world of life, to interpret the data of knowledge into terms of value, to give us understanding and that grasp of the relation of things and states of consciousness which we call meaning. These offices are assigned to it for the obvious purpose of enabling us to establish the right relation of our lives to the world, to promote most harmoniously the ends of cosmic intent.

102

Perhaps, then, philosophy, especially Eastern, may have been quite "out of bounds" in its demand that intellect give us the full experience of reality. It certainly has been evolved, and is qualified, to contribute an indispensable element in the sum total of our power to experience reality. Perhaps it may be granted that the function of the intellect is not to give us, at any rate directly, the experience of reality. Feeling, rather than knowing, may be the mode of our contact with being. The function of the intellect is not, in this narrow sense, to feel life; but it certainly is to judge life, appraise it, evaluate it and interpret it in the terms of understanding. Its business is to know, and to interpret the data of knowledge, for the purpose of determining all life action as good or otherwise. Life itself furnishes us with a body of experience, and life has developed the faculty of intellect so that we may know how best to guide the current of our lives in the proper channels. To ask this function to give us the total or ultimate experience is to ask it something lying beyond the boundary of its province, something it is not equipped to give. It is only the judge of action and experience, and must wait until these are brought before it to receive its judgment. A thousand judgments of its intelligence may be the necessary condition precedent to one moment of exalted insight or rapturous communion with whole being in the mystical consciousness so highly extolled by spiritual romanticists.

When, therefore, Oriental or other philosophy rates the intellect as incompetent to afford us the experience of reality, it is simply bringing in an exhibit as evidence which is not denied as sheer fact, but which is wholly immaterial and irrelevant to the argument and has no legitimate place in it. Incidentally it operates to institute a prejudice against the "defendant" by being introduced at all. The possible failure of intellect would consist, not in its failing to give us experience of reality, but in giving us faulty judgment on possibly insufficient data. It must be remembered, too, that in this function the intellect is like a mill,--its business is to grind out judgments from the data fed into its hopper. And it must look to experience for its adequate supply of proper data. Much of the maya creedology seems to assume that the intellect can gather the data for its circumspection and evaluation from the metaphysical world rather than from the physical, for always it disdains the material world.

103

In its contempt of the intellect the Hindu thought has bent its effort in a quite practical way toward the exploitation of means of cognition which it regards as "higher" than the powers of the mind, such as the intuitions, grades of mystical exaltation, states of trance, dream fantasies, abstracted consciousness and the ecstasies of samadhi, which it superinduces by various practices of steady contemplation and fixity of mind. The often vivid character of such experiences give the impression that they bring consciousness closer to the apprehension of reality than does the intellect.

But the obvious fact that life can use other faculties beside and "beyond" the intellect to bring experience to its conscious units should establish no adverse judgment against the intellect, when it is not asked to overstep its proper function. These do not debase the intellect by comparison, for they are not its function, either to equal or excel. And in the end, no matter how far they may "transcend" the intellect, they must themselves still be brought before its court for judgment as to their legitimacy, their right or wrong character, their good or evil influence. They do not condemn it to low or incompetent rating. It has final judgment over them, and may in proper case disallow their claim to render a service higher than its own.

Even with this exemption from the false judgment of an unjust condemnation, the adverse critique of the intellect seems quite unwarranted on more direct grounds. If it is not the faculty by which experience is gained (though certainly it is itself an integral element of the experience), its function of judgment and appraisal of experience value enters so vitally into the context of all experience, and its function of judgment is so powerful an agent of psychological determination, that it stands almost always as the dominant element in the final mode and character of experience itself. It is what the intellect does with or about the experience that determines the final deposit of influence which the experience makes in the bank of life. Certainly without the intellect to assess the final value of experience, all living would be more or less valueless, senseless and indeed chaotic. It is only when it presides over the sum total of events and supplies the principles of relationship by which they are bound together in meaning, that the experience takes on the character of event in the soul's evolution. All experience only rises out of chaos into the category of history for the individual when the

104

intellect steps in to provide an integration which alone yields both meaning and zest and value to the run of history.

We have seen all this too well authenticated in the high philosophies of two, among others, of our great philosophers, Spinoza and Kant, to need fresh elaboration here. Spinoza won the appellative of "the God-intoxicated philosopher," and yet it was he who established the intellect as the faculty instrumental in the highest rhapsodies of the human spirit. The divine mania was not achieved in regions above and beyond the intellect, but through its own direct capabilities. He it was who coined the expressive phrase, "the intellectual love of God." And endless folios of history can be scanned to confirm the verdict that the so-highly exalted principle of love can run into paths of unwisdom, and generate tragedy if not held in line by the mind. At any rate in the purview of such an enlightenment as Spinoza caused to shine in the minds of his readers, the highest raptures of our introvert adventuring would not yield their consummate joyousness without the guidance and supervision of the intellect.

Likewise we have Kant testifying in much the same way to the play of the intellect in the highest ascensions of consciousness into the peaks of spiritual realization. The highest attainable reach of the human consciousness was attained, he found, in the comprehensive summation of all cognitive faculty in what he called the "synthetic unity of apperception." The philosopher saw that it was not alone the conscious events that constituted the reality of human experience, but the final synthesis of these events in an integrated vision of their meaning; and this was the work of the intellect.

It can not be without positive significance also that in the great works of the Neo-Platonic philosophers the highest grades of conscious beings in the cosmic hierarchy, the gods, are not termed "spiritual," but "intellectual and intelligible" grades. The intelligible world is rated highest and the intellectual world next below it. In his notable passage, already quoted, Plotinus begins with the statement that the soul had its divine birth or origin in the "intelligible world."

It is notable also that a modern writer whose books on the exaltations of Oriental mystical practice have been enjoyed by a large reading public, Mr. Paul Brunton, reviewing his experiences in the science of yoga, gives his conclusions in his volume, The Hid-

105

den Teachings Beyond Yoga. Earlier in his career, enraptured with the mystical subjectivism and introversions of Hindu practice, and extolling them highly, he later came to see that they should, as this essay contends, rank always below, and be held in subordination to, intellectual philosophy. He saw that the habitual practice of the meditative exercises under the yoga system left the devotee standing apart from his world, becoming a moral and spiritual Sybarite, a self-centered hedonist, a mystical Epicurean. Several of his statements are so trenchant that they merit citation here:

"I did not know, when I first landed on India's surf-sprayed shores, that I had embarked on a quest which would ultimately carry me even beyond the boundaries of mysticism and the practice of meditation itself, which for so long I had deemed the highest life open to man . . . . I did not know that I had thrown dice with Destiny and that the game was not to be concluded in the manner I had been led to expect, that is, by settling down to an existence which made physical and mental withdrawness in profound contemplation its highest goal and sublimated fulfilment. Yet when the intermittent satisfactions of mental peace entered into conflict with an innate ever-inquiring rationalization, tremendous questions slowly became insistent. I perceived that although the little pool of light in which I walked had indeed grown wider, the area of darkness beyond it was as impenetrable as ever."

"Meditation, to oneself, was a necessary and admirable pursuit, but it did not constitute the entire activity which life was constantly asking of man. For the efflux of time had shown me the limitations of mystics, and more time showed that those limitations were accountable by the one-sidedness of their outlook and the incompleteness of their experience. The more I associated with them in every part of the world the more I began to observe that their defects arose out of sheer shriveled complacency, the hidden superiority complex and the holier-than-thou attitude which they had unjustifiably adopted toward the rest of the world, and also out of the premature assumption of total knowledge of truth, when what they had attained was only partial knowledge. The question was finally forced on me that the perfection of human wisdom would never develop out of any mystical hermitage, and only a synthetic complete culture could offer any hope for its unfoldment . . . The instructive episodes of daily living confronted me with deeper disillusionment; with the limitations and deficiencies of mysticism and the intolerance and defects of mystics . . . I saw that intuition must be put in its proper place and not to be expected to perform miracles. Both had been tested and found wanting. I became acutely aware that mysticism was not enough by itself, to transform or even discipline human character or to exalt its ethical standards towards

106

a satisfactory ideal. It was unable to link itself thoroughly to life in the world. This gap was too serious to be ignored. Even the emotional exaltations of mystical ecstasy--wonderfully satisfying though they be--were fleeting, both in experience and effect, and they proved insufficient to ennoble man permanently. The disdain for practical action and the disinclination to accept personal responsibility which marks the character of real mystics prevented them from testing the truth of their knowledge as well as the worth of their attainments, and left them suspended in mid-air, as it were. Without the healthy opposition of active participation in the world's affairs, they had no means of knowing whether they were living in a world of sterilized self-hallucination or not."

This candid expose of the failure of mysticism by a competent investigator should serve as corrective of so much sycophantic worship paid to India's reputed "spiritual" systems by impressionable but uncritical and inexperienced Westerners. Mr. Brunton's further analysis of the theme presents so much of our own feelings and conclusions with regard to it that another lengthy quotation is not objectionable:

"Meditation, apart from experience was inevitably empty; experience without meditation was mere tumult. A monastic mysticism which scorned the life and responsibilities of the busy world would frequently waste itself in ineffectual beating of the air. The truth obtained by contemplation needed to be tried and tested, not by pious talk, but by active expression; a so-called higher knowledge which failed to appear in homely deeds was badly learnt, and might be nothing more than vacuous vagary. The true sage could be no anemic dreamer, but would incessantly transform the seeds of his wisdom into visible and tangible plants of acts well done. Emotional exaltations won through religious devotion, indeed personal satisfactions, might become dangerous illusions when they failed to find a proper external balance . . . The spiritual dreamer . . . needed to change his attitude toward the despised world of activity, to stand intermittently aside from his dangerous ascetic pride and to broaden and balance his outlook by intellectual culture. A more integral culture was needed, one which could be perfectly rounded by reason, and which could survive the test of every experience. Such a culture could come only from facing the fact that man was here to live actively no less than to meditate passively. The field of his activity was inevitably out there in the external world, not here in the trance world."

It would be difficult to find anywhere a more succinct reduction of the situation here under discussion to its simplest elements of

107

truth. Here is expressed the central axis of all the rationale of understanding of the philosophy of our life. Here is the incontestable refutation of the introvert philosophies which advocate and exalt as man's highest good an escape from the life of the world into the alleged glories of rhapsodic superconsciousness experienced in what virtually are trance states. Not to be missed, too, is the positive testimony that to belittle and deprecate the intellect leads to disaster.

"The practice of meditation did not lead him to self-sufficiency. This was because the external world was always confronting him on his return with the silent demand that it also be thoroughly known and properly understood. Unless, therefore, he inquire deeply into its real nature and unite the resulting knowledge with his mystical perception, he would remain in the twilight and not in the full morning sun, as the entranced mystic thought himself to be. Most mystics in attempting to know themselves metaphorically shut their eyes to the profounder enigmas of the surrounding world, but that act did not lead to its dismissal."

No, the world is not to be dismissed or dissolved by a mere blotting it out of mental vision, and it were time that idealists, mayavists, monists and spiritists recognize it. Mystics miscalculate the pressure of life's drive to give itself, through its creature units, the tensional stress that will evolve its higher potencies, when they think they can evade the necessities involved in the incarnational and evolutionary process. Life will not accomplish its ends through an inane passivity or anemic inactivity on the physical side of its expression. In coming to earth it left dream and fantasy behind, since it was in fact surfeited with that phase of consciousness, and from reaction to it roused itself to come forth and enjoy the fresh relief of facing actuality in the field of self-consciousness. One does not magically disenchant the world's power by mere contemplative intensity. As the Bhagavad Gita proclaims in its figurative drama, the soul, Arjuna, must not stand aloof from the battle, though in weaker mood it would shrink from the ordeal.

108

CHAPTER TEN

THE LENS OF THE MIND

If the soul, once on earth, attempts through mistaken persuasions to annul the outer world's experience and withdraw into the inner subjective sanctuary, it renounces a degree of its lordship over its consciousness and lays itself open to the haunting by the same phantoms it was beset with in the mystic heavens. Out of his own experience Mr. Brunton testifies to this. Speaking of meditation, he writes:

"When wrongly done or when carried to excess, it becomes a hindrance to philosophical activity, breeding fresh evils, whims and fancies which will need to be overcome."

Then he registers a strong point in the argument:

"The philosophical aim is definitely different from that of mysticism. In the latter the neophyte rises in the scale by repressing thought; here he rises by exerting thought. The one teaches inertia, emptying of the mind, whilst the other teaches activity, the expansion of the mind . . . . The mystic stills the mind in order to get thought control, but once the control is attained, he should begin to think vigorously. Thus he should kill thoughts only to use them better later. Meditation practice must in this more advanced stage be set behind the study of philosophy; the correct order now is to begin with the one and finish with the other."

This is all most apt to a sane view, and might perhaps be summed up by saying that the mistake in the mystic view lies in the aim to gain thought control only to kill thought forever. The mystic does not really aim at thought control, but at thought suppression. Essentially this is the thing reduced to its terms of ribald illogicality, when carried to its ultimate exploitation. It is as if the student were to master all the knowledge and skills of his profession so as never to practice it any more. The practical mind of the non-mystic would seek thought power in order to put it to great use in the interests of progress. But the mystic strives after thought control to end all thought.

Then this author reaches the height of sagacity in saying that when one passes beyond mysticism to the study of philosophy, in which the mind will be called upon to exercise its supreme power to discern the forms of truth,

109

"whereas before he suppressed thought, now he should seek to examine and direct it. Henceforth he will be alert to Nature and note her workings, where before he dismissed her and cared only to turn within."

Here indeed is fine grist for the mill that grinds out this essay. Precisely as this effort has already elucidated, the true sage goes deep within himself to learn the use of that miraculous lens of truth discernment, his developed instrument, the mind, and then turns it, not further into profound vacuity, but outward upon the world where the supermind of the cosmos has already written the characters of the creative ideation in the forms of Nature.

And in another passage he utters a truth of such transcendent import that it is impossible to stress it too heavily, when he exposes the terrible danger from the sweep of powerful feeling unregulated by the intellect:

"Strong gusts of emotionalism therefore provide a barricade against which the attacks of reason are futile. Emotion unchecked by reason is one of the great betrayers of mankind."

He adds that the philosophical student can not afford such emotional luxuries, since he knows that when feeling dominates the consciousness it inhibits the intellect. And as the mind is (says Brunton, in the face of all mystical doctrine) his chief instrument for gaining truth, he must by no means crush it out, but sharpen it to keenest edge, so that it may be the surest instrument to serve him in his conflict between reason on the one side and indulgence in emotion and passion on the other.

Then Brunton brings out another reflection of great astuteness and certainly of critical significance in the debate. Considering the so-highly-extolled flights of mystical ecstasies, he sets forth the truth that throws back in abject defeat the great argument, rather the sheer protestation, that the exalted afflations of the ego-consciousness are something high above thought, beyond the province of the intellect, and are things to which the intellect can not introduce man. He says:

"They, too, are really nothing more than thoughts, however unusual in character they may otherwise be. Hence there is no difference between the word spiritual and the word mental. All conscious life is thought life. The most spiritual man lives in thoughts as much as the most materialistic man . . . The riddle of life can be solved with man's present resources."

110

Here is corroboration for our earlier contention that man must engineer his successful progress with the resources provided for his use by life at the level where he stands, and must not be expected to call down from the empyrean the agencies of life at levels far transcending his own.

Of course in the dictionary sense it is not quite allowable to say that there is no difference between the meanings of spiritual and mental. But in the broad use of the terms in yoga, the statement is warranted. The real dialectical issue here is that the difference is not that one province of consciousness, the mind, is mental, and a higher province, the soul, is spiritual. Both sorts of conscious activity, says Brunton, are mental; they both have to do with mind, are exercised through mind. But in common ideation, the alleged higher state of soul consciousness, called spiritual, is so designated in reference to a marked difference in the nature and contents of the ideas and feelings reflected upon the mind. Brunton would doubtless allow this as a traditional differentiation, but probably did not note it because he felt it was minor and inconsequential. Surely he is right in asserting that all these ranges of the power of mind and intuition are in the province of the mind. It must be permissible to say that many of the realizations of mystical uplift are in the higher reaches or regions of the mind's gamut of activity. But even that can be objected to as a gratuitous concession to tendencies of common uncritical thinking and indoctrination.

Brunton's last sentence just quoted is so directly a refutation of the "orthodox" position in mayavic philosophy that it becomes indeed a notable utterance. If the riddle of life can not be solved with man's present resources, God is then asking of his children something that he has given them no fit tools to accomplish. How silly it would be if life, evolution, expected man to achieve given tasks for which the required tools were not placed in his hands! It is the egregious folly of all these philosophies negating man's competence to achieve his destiny, that they not only proclaim the inadequacy of the ordinary range of faculty, the intellect in particular, but aver that if man is to escape the direful consequences of this inadequacy, he must destroy them altogether. This is put forth on the theory that if they are not left to clutter up and obscure the area of consciousness, then completely competent divine faculty will have a chance to deploy into action, and perform blissfully what the imperfect inferior faculties failed to do.

111

But must it not be seen as insensate folly to act on the idea that if life's instrumentalities at a given stage of evolution seem inadequate to attain the end goal, the "logical" thing to do is to crush them out? Would not common instinct, instead, dictate the desirability of improving them? Would a carpenter or machinist, hampered by poor tools, act on the presumption that all he has to do is to throw away the imperfect ones he has and a geni out of heaven will automatically supply perfect ones? What assurance has man ever picked up from his contact with life and nature that if he casts away his present endowment of faculties and powers, a perfect repertoire of instrumentalities will automatically supervene? Always the ideological absurdity remains in any claim that man must, or can, achieve an evolutionary task for which he has not the present equipment. He can not be expected to work with what he has not. If his present resources are not adequate to what life demands of him, the blunt truth is that he is lost. He can not look to the heavens to send magic raining down upon him for his salvation if he disdains to use or destroys the equipment life gave him.

It must not be overlooked, too, as an argument of some weight, that if yoga practices or meditative intensities can in any way superinduce states of consciousness transcending the purely intellectual characterization, these capabilities must themselves be considered to lie within the range of the human mental capability, even though, in common usage, they be not denominated as of the mind, but rather of the spirit. This is the point which Brunton emphasized, in claiming a greater breadth for the term mental. And it is a legitimate claim. Why, then, go on urging us to effectuate a transcendence of the mind and intellect, when the powers we would use in making the transcendence are themselves still mental? Is it not infinitely more sensible to urge us to use the mind in the whole great range of its powers? Much more must be said on this theme when discussion touches the claims put forth for the intuition, as distinct from mind.

It is not, of course, to be claimed that the riddle of life can be solved in all its final completeness with what man has to use at present. The view that looks for a solution of life's great enigma as a matter of the successful achievement of a stated specific task of definite limited magnitude, like the completion of a course in college, is a faulty one. The accomplishment of absolutes, finalities

112

and ultimates is hardly in the province of man's life or in the reach of his accoutrement. Life goes on and on; solution of a lower-grade or simpler problem qualifies him to labor at a more complex one. But what can be positively asserted in the discussion is that the capabilities for solving the present phase of a problem in his evolution must be adequate for that task, his present resources must include those capabilities. Else his progress could not continue. This would seem to dispose of another of those baseless and specious arguments of the mystical schools of thought.

But again it is a sane and true observation of Brunton's, and one of prime importance, when he says that the quest of truth and reality, unaided by philosophy, can run riot in sheer emotionalism and lead a soul to disaster. He asserts that the qualities of reason, critical balance of judgment, thoughtful relation of feeling to the reality of the world, are conspicuously wanting among mystics. And he also notes that if the realm of supramental truth is open to mystical discovery and experience, there ought to be fair unanimity in the reports which mystics bring of the enraptured wonders of that Beulah land. On the contrary, he avers, mystics betray by word and deed that they have found or achieved no such uniformity, no identity of experience. Their exaltations are recorded as utterly individual, and carry certainty only to the individual experiencing them. Neither do men of vision or men of faith agree, says Brunton. And we must ask with him what is the guarantee that can assure us that what they see and feel is the real truth, or truth at all? Their testimony may carry no more acceptable warrant of truth than the reports of sensitives, spiritists and psychics in the realm of psychology generally. Goethe he cites as saying that mysticism was the "scholastic of the heart and the dialectic of the feelings." The experience is almost purely one of feeling, and feeling is hardly amenable to fixed laws by which its truth or falsity can be gauged, whereas thought does come under this category. Brunton even asks why an extraordinary inward peace should be sufficient title to certify the authority of a truth held concomitantly with it. It must be clear that even the highest, most rhapsodic elevations of mystical feeling can not qualify to stand as criteria of truth, beyond the certitude which they bring to the individual himself. Such criteria, if there be any, must be supplied by the laws of thought and the principles of truth, which philosophy must be challenged to

113

furnish. Ammonias in his school at Alexandria taught mysticism, but always in correlation with philosophy, Brunton advises. Plotinus, his famous pupil, rated as one of the world's great mystics, certainly built his profound system upon the basic principles of philosophy.

This testimony from a Westerner who has ascended to the heights and plumbed the depths of Hindu yoga should count weightily in the critique of the dominant philosophies of the Orient. Measured at least by his own experience and the normal standards of valuation, he came to see that its highest afflations of mystical uplift, possessing as they naturally would a certain unique and challenging appeal to our deepest susceptibilities, nevertheless fell short of supplying adequate answers--if any answers at all--to those fundamental questions which the human mind ever demands for its stability and its more valiant waging of the battle of life. He found that such mysticism did but temporize with the deepest soul of man, supplying not the everlasting peace and poise of enraptured communion with the eternal unconditioned unity of being, but only the enticing diversion of ephemeral transports. They could be taken up and pursued for a time in the fashion of any sensationally engaging new interest, and they brought certain realizations well worth the knowledge, no doubt. But they could not last at any high and perennially fresh pitch of zest and piquancy, for man's ecstasies are never permanent or steadily persistent. A high moment sweeps in upon us, delivers its message and is gone, leaving us the richer for its largesse of exalted insight. But the unction is preserved not in its living poignancy of feeling,--which the organism can not sustain beyond the moment--but in the memory and in the thinking principle it outlined in momentary grand light. Rom Landau, in his God Is My Adventure, has well said that a brilliant illumination of the psyche or a new revelation of truth that lifts one to the heights, if it only touch the emotions without affecting the intellect, simply can not last. He does not disqualify its good service, but declares it can not persist in its original power. Not all commitments even to the intellect endure with steady permanency. But they are stored at least subconsciously in the memory of their value for all later cogitation in the bank of the mind. So that in spite of all the protestations of the mystics, and

114

the enraptured eulogies of transcendental experiences of the sort, it remains true, as Mr. Brunton in his sincere "confession" has set forth, that those more enduring and ultimately more soul-nourishing satisfactions which the ego seeks under the divine push of inward being, are to be absorbed and treasured in the intellect.

Emotion and feeling are not to be decried outright. They have their proper function and it is a high one. Feeling is in fact one of the four component tones in the song of conscious life. If it were left out the harmony would never be complete. The four notes are sounded, one each in or through the four grades of consciousness, sensation, emotion, thought and spiritual intuition. A new element or influence in consciousness, to be inwoven into the texture of the life, must send its radiation through all four of the levels or planes of the individual life. If it is a new sensation, it must then impinge on the feelings, then sweep up into the mind and finally affect the spirit. If it is an emotion, it must induce a new sensation below it, a new idea and a new spiritual recognition above it. If it is a thought it must touch the feelings and the body sense below and reach up to the soul. And if it is a soul's awakening to new wholeness of understanding or rapture, it will assuredly flood down upon the mind, the feeling and the sense. In this way only does man become an integral unit of the life energy, or maintain the integrity of his life. This is the necessary integration that psychology insists upon for the completeness and stability of the individual.

Emotion, then, is one of the four ingredients essential to the wholeness of our experience. It is not to be decried. It is to be steadied, purified, ennobled. Neither, then, is intellect to be decried. Neither is sensation, nor mystical elations. Each has its place in composing the full chord, which would be defective if any one was lacking. And what is of great moment in the survey is the fact that, if any one is missing, the final force released by any high realization is not likely to come through to consciousness in its richest and purest tonicity. The chord must ring out all the four tones in harmony. Mystical philosophies here under critique have insisted that only the top note of the chord must be sounded by the highest tonal instrument, mystical feeling, demanding at the same time that the three lower vibrations be entirely silenced. The evident truth is that the supreme beauty and most penetrating sweetness of the conscious realization are only produced by the unison of

115

the four, not by the one top note alone. If analogy could speak with force on the point, the harmony of the four voices conjoined is a truer and more beautiful rendition than the soprano alone, sweet as that may be.

Speaking of the number four, Plutarch (Morals III, 110) says:

"Of this number the soul of man is composed; of mind, knowledge, opinion and sense are the four that complete the soul; from which all sciences, all arts, all rational faculty derive themselves. For what our mind perceives, it perceives after the manner of a thing that is one, the soul itself being a unity."

That all four ingredients of man's conscious life are indispensable to his well being and successful on-going is made clear by B. A. G. Fuller, dissertating on Greek philosophy in his splendid History of Philosophy:

"To the Hellenic mind man was primarily a natural fact, allotted, along with other facts, his specific nature and place in the universe, and enabled by the world process which had produced him to live happily and completely within the bounds imposed by that place and nature. Supernatural sanctions to a supernatural destiny were not necessary to right living and well being. Nor, on the other hand, was there any conflict between an essentially lower and an essentially higher nature to oppose a fundamental obstacle to self-fulfillment and happiness. Man had a single, though composite, character. Nothing with which nature had endowed him was alien to his best interests or a stumbling-block to his perfection. His good lay in as complete and as generous as possible an adjustment of the claims of all his various instincts and desires and interests. All were entitled to contribute their due part to his happiness and to receive their due share in it.

"Since, then, all right action and its reward in happiness was, for the Greeks, a matter of a purely intellectual determination of the exact measure and proportion in which the four grades of consciousness were intermixed in actual living, the dialectic irrefutably placed mind action--not spiritual illumination--as the center and base of all determination of life, character and destiny. No matter how high and blissful its rapture, it had to ask the mind to determine what were best for the earthly domicile it inhabited. And those raptures themselves depended largely upon the proper regimes of bodily discipline and habit, which it was the function of the mind to regulate."

Mystical theory has gone on interminably decrying the intellect, even declaring it an obstacle in the path. The greatest phil-

116

osophers, fortunately, have put themselves on record as to this item. We have lightly touched upon Spinoza's contribution to this feature of the discussion. More extended quotations could be made from his Ethics to very great advantage. What is brought out is that, not only can the intellect not be dispensed with, scorned, silenced in the hope of evoking the magical spiritual realizations and raptures, but the true exaltations of consciousness to the thrilling rapports and insights and visions can not supervene unless and until the intellect has exercised itself to the near-perfect mastery of its powers. In very truth the highest of the afflations are nothing other than the work of the intellect itself, performing its proper function with such alacrity and clarity that its swift motions appear to come as the play of some higher faculty, which has commonly been accorded the name of intuition. In the lightning flash of its mercurial activity one does see truth as if it lay outlined under the eye; and that is the meaning of intuition, from the Latin in-tueor, "to look upon" directly. Intuition differs from the apprehension of truth by the reason that by it one sees truth by direct looking, whereas by reason one arrives at it through a process of logical deductions from antecedent propositions. What is seen by immediate observation needs no proof by reason or logic. On this basis intuition has always been rated a higher faculty than the intellectual processes.

But let us hear what some of the great philosophers, who lifted their minds to the lucid vision of integrated truth, have had to say about the processes by which they attained to the heights of illuminated vision.

In his exegesis of the great Aristotle's philosophical system, our historian of philosophy, B. A. G. Fuller expounds the prime function of the intellect as "the task of fitting the pieces together." The pieces are the phenomena and events in the run of world experience. This indeed is the only way in which a creature that finds itself launched on the moving stream of life could hold its place in the line of march, or even secure its safety. Without an instrument to perform this function there would be no chance to seek anything higher than sheer physical existence. Without such intelligence the entity would be but a floating chip, powerless to orient his position in line with the free movement of the current.

In altiloquent terms the mystic proponents laud and magnify the proclaimed inundation of mind, first emptied of banal earthly

117

contents, by the flash and sweep of the beatific vision, the ecstatic realization and the supramental knowledge. This, as has been seen, is on their claim a downflow from the empyrean of supernal consciousness, and descends when the lower human mentality has been stilled. It is, they assert, in no way dependent upon the exercise of the brain-mind, which, so far from being a preparatory stage to the outcropping of the inner power, is actually the chief obstacle that stands in its way and must therefore be by-passed. In Fuller's words we have Aristotle's dictum on this matter, and implicit in his luminous view as now presented is a veritable overturn of all the cult philosophy in vogue:

"Now, before the truth can 'flash' upon the intellect in such wise that we cry triumphantly 'I have it,' 'I know,' our minds have to go through all this preparatory pother of synthetic judgment, trains of thought and so-called 'discursive reasoning.' We have to puzzle, argue, knit our brows and rack our brains before we see all at once how the pieces fit, or get sudden inspiration as to how the picture as a whole, or some portion of it, hangs together. Human reasoning, then, is a process; a means toward an end; an actualization of the potential; not an end in itself containing its own reward."

Here is forceful and straight rebuke to the unfounded asseverations of the mystics. To their vauntings that intuition gains nothing from the prior use and training of the intellect, and indeed flashes best when the mind is in abeyance, the answer can be given in Fuller's strong sentence: "He who will scorn the mind will never know the sweep of intuition." Here is the dynamic truth that will jar and jolt an ignorant cult of folly-ridden introvert ideology out of its fatuous dream of floating aloft in roseate Edens of mystical bliss by ignoring and flouting the mind. What the votaries of such ideologies will get out of their straining aspirations, instead of true visions of reality, will be chimerical phantoms of sensual hedonism.

Leaping from Aristotle to Spinoza, we hear Fuller expounding the latter's view of intuition:

"The final form of knowledge Spinoza calls intuition. By this we are not to understand some new faculty superseding reason, by which we are fused with an indescribable Reality transcending the categories of logical thought. Spinoza's intuition is not the mystical ecstasy of Plotinus, or Erigena or Master Eckhardt. Nor is it the sort of pious 'hunch' with which some modern intuitionists think to evade reason as a final authority, when the results of reason wound

118

their feelings, upset their preconceived notions or run counter to their desires . . . . It is an intellectual vision, attained by reason alone, of a reality that is through and through intelligible . . . . it sums up and sees in a single glance the whole system of ideas and truths logically implied by the nature of reality . . . . The thing, the thought, the emotion, the feeling, the love, the thrill of ecstasy, the starry heavens and the moral law, are no less present, no less living, no less poetic, no less charged with value, no less sublime, for being understood."

It is a question if mystical philosophy does not receive its most deadly thrust from the sublime but cutting sarcasm of these last words of Fuller's. For it shows them guilty, in their disdaining the intellect, of acting on the predication that the highest attainments of human consciousness are hindered by understanding, are the better for not being understood. Here at all events we have a source of accepted high authority positively and categorically throwing straight contradiction into the face of the endlessly reiterated asseverations of the mystic claimants. The intellect, the reason, which their philosophy berates and decries, is here declared to be the foundation and pillar of the whole possibility of the intuition which they place so far above the intellect.

"On the contrary, to the happiness that comes from experiencing them is added the new . . . . supreme happiness of knowing their causes and their necessary place in the infinite being of God."

And then follows the clear pronouncement of the climactic truth about this item in philosophic discussion that should enable all parties to comprehend the true status of the problem at last. Fuller says that this is a description of intuition that is not a denial of reason, but its sublimation.

In this last word is to be found the resolute of all debate, all partisan and partial views. The error perpetually committed by the mystical claimants, especially of the Orient, has been to regard and treat intuition as a faculty or level or grade of consciousness entirely separate from and independent of the mind, even a power with which the mind was at enmity, or to which it was an obstacle needing to be removed. The Spinozistic view regards intuition, not at all as a faculty independent of the mind, so that when it functions we can drop the use of the mind, inhibit its working and substitute the intuition in its place. In his view intuition is simply the con-

119

summation and perfection of the mind's own function. This is implied in Fuller's use of the word "sublimation." Intuition is the intellect sublimated, subtilized, apotheosized at its supreme level of perfection in a higher dimensional grade of consciousness. Intuition can be said to be the divine efflorescence of the intellect at the summit of its perfected powers. This must be so, since in the gamut of life's stages and tones of expression each higher faculty or reach of consciousness grows out of the perfection of the faculty generated by the grade below it. As the vegetable grows out of the refinement of the mineral, the animal out of the vegetable, the human out of the animal, so this intuitional vision, man's near approach to the divine estate above him, grows out of the intellect when that flowers out in its perfection.

A direct statement that corroborates this view is found in a work, The Christian Answer, by George F. Thomas. "The faculty of reason is not superseded, but raised to a higher level of vision under the influence of the divine inspiration." Christianity, he says, is opposed to the modern humanistic belief in the autonomy of reason in so far as that belief flatters the pretensions of men to discover the nature and purpose of God without the aid of revelation.

"But it insists that the deepest truths about God and his purpose are revealed to men in and through all their faculties of reason, imagination, conscience and feeling."

Again he eulogizes reason as "the candle of the Lord lighted by God and lighting men to God." The eminent psychologist, Jung, writes that "the soul is fructified by the intellect."

In his Ethics Spinoza gives the intellect its high and indispensable rating in the economy of the unfolding life:

"It is therefore extremely useful in life to perfect as much as we can the intellect or reason, and in this alone does the supreme happiness or blessedness of man consist; for blessedness is nothing else than the satisfaction of mind which arises from the intuitive knowledge of God . . . . Wherefore the ultimate aim of a man who is guided by reason, that is his greatest desire by which he endeavors to moderate all others, is that by which he is brought to conceive of his intelligence . . . . To know adequately the things which are within the power of the mind is to know God."

Again he discourses in similar strain:

120

"Inasmuch as the intellect is the better part of us, it is certain that, if we wish to seek what is truly profitable to us, we should try above all things, to perfect it as far as we can. Our highest good indeed should consist in intellectual perfection."

Plato in his Laws allocates to the mind the highest function in the rulership of life:

"If there were any man so sufficient by nature, being by divine Fortune happily engendered and born, that he could comprehend this, he would have no need of laws to command him. For there is not any law or ordinance more worthy and powerful than knowledge; nor is it fitting that mind, provided it be truly and really free by Nature, should be a subject or slave to any one, but it ought to command all."

Greek philosophy defined the divine coefficient of man's conscious life as a "pure fire infused with reason."

From Anaxagoras we find the high function of the intellect set forth in a way that should end all petty disposition of mystics to belittle mind's supreme service in the life of man: "All things were confused one among another; but Mind divided and reduced them to order." As Mr. Brunton states, the enraptured mystic does not concern himself with any ordered systematism of the relation or the meaning of the elements of world existence. It is enough for him that he sits bathed in complacency and titillated with his inward "phantoms of delight."

In exactly similar vein the Greek philosophy makes intelligence the cause of the order that exists in the soul, and as far as it has it, in the world. According to Plato intelligent soul is thus placed in the world to be the cause of the proportional structure and stable order of the universe. The great principle announced by the Platonic school, that the order of the world is sustained by the cosmic mind, is thus seen to be the logical base for the postulation of a mental power behind the phenomenal universe. Without the operation of such a cosmic intellect, there would be no possibility and no ground for the prevalence of the exact measure and proportion in which all multitudinous things in the world are sustained and stabilized. A universe running without the supervision of mind could be only a chaos. Intimations of beauty spring from our perception of this exactitude in the measure and proportion and balance with which all things are mingled in the world, after the primal

121

unity of being has divided itself into infinite multiplicity, which sets for it the stupendous task of commingling the multitudinous elements in that due balance which insures the beneficent orderliness of the manifest existence.

Water being the symbol of the body in which soul has to live in incarnation, Heraclitus, great Greek philosopher before Plato, expresses the soul's "natural propensity for the downward way," meaning its cosmic urge to incarnation, in his terse statement that "souls like to get wet." And, once here in body, divulsed from the higher dimensional consciousness of the upper spheres, and immersed in the surging waves of sense and emotion sweeping in on it from the side of the body, the soul would be subject, as the Greek philosophy has so capably established, to a life of chaos, unless man developed some power to distinguish between the diverse elements of his experience and could by it order his life with judicious judgment. That potential saving power is the reason. The soul would be overwhelmed in the flux of unrelated events if it did not develop a faculty by which it can guide its way safely through the surging waters of sense. So Heraclitus says: "The senses reflect the flux alone, but the reason sees through the flux to the Logos."

122