CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

TRUANCY FROM LIFE'S SCHOOL

From the side of Buddhism, too, Radhakrishnan protests that "to make people long for escape from this world and its blackness is a little overdrawn." Yet in the wake of such statements of the sound position of these two systems, it seems wholly incongruous and self-contradictory when we hear Radhakrishnan assert that "to both Jainism and Buddhism life is a calamity to be avoided at all costs." With none but an outward superficial view of life's values, our existence here can, of course, appear terrible enough to make a soul cry out: Let me escape; let me die! This note is given such prominence in the rationale of Hindu systems that many of them have announced that the one remedy for all life's woes is to escape their thraldom. The philosopher considers that Buddha overemphasized the dark side of things. The Buddhist view of life, he says, seems to be lacking in courage and confidence. "Its emphasis on sorrow, if not false, is not true . . . . There is a tendency in Buddhism to blacken what is dark, and darken what is gray." This is the strong and apparently invincible dominance of the spirit of pessimism that pervades Hindu thought at all times. Out of this tendency came the predilection to extol and glorify the paradoxicality of earthly gloom and sorrow, the release of the soul from all conditioned consciousness, to woo the bliss of the hypothecated freedom of the absolute. And in spite of all their recognition of the presence of the eternal in the world experience, the Upanishads accentuate that the eternal is bliss and the transient is painful. As long as the soul is attracted by desire, which of course it centers on worldly things and conscious states that can not be permanent, it will be courting sorrow and disappointment, as the prizes won or lost fade out in emptiness. "All that is, when clung to, falls short" (Naji. Upan., 32).

This somber view of life dominating Indian thought has been received with too little critical scrutiny. An almost universal feeling as to life's stressful and painful and fruitless character has haloed the doctrine with a certain specious legitimacy and even nobility both in India and elsewhere. But if it does not bespeak an outright lack of spirit for life and fortitude to work cheerfully through its

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hardships, if it does not betoken an overt cowardice in the face of life's challenge to the valiant soul of divinity animating the life of the race, it at least reveals a total want of the philosophical resources that are available to balance the negative strain with the assurance of positive values. As intimated earlier, Oriental philosophy hardly merits the dignified name of philosophy, the high function of which is to rationalize the actual experience of humanity, and not to dodge this task by declaring the experience invalid. The Hindu systems do not so much explain life, as explain it away; or if they do attempt to rationalize the experience, they do not leave the final and decisive verdict a positive one. They sound the nullity and futility of life as their most dominant keynote. To bring the issue down to a close analysis, the Indian religions stress not the good of life, but the good to be found by getting out of it.

The Buddhist and other Indian systems announce a dialectic that analyses man's presence in the world as itself an evidence that he has wandered away from true being into false existence. His presence here is due to his sin, obviously committed in some former state. (This is seen to match closely the Christian doctrine of the Adamic "fall.") Some quirk or aberration in his nature at some juncture in his history led him to desire an experience of low sensuality and unreal being, and the cosmic law which fulfils desire in life's conscious units gratified his craving by bringing him here where he could play with the objects of his desire freely. But the desire itself is in the first place given force by the root cause of all non-blissful existence,--ignorance (avidya). Man's one sin is to have been born as the result of desiring to be born. If souls were not obsessed by avidya they would have avoided birth and life. They would have managed to stay in heavens of dreamy blissfulness and have seen through the false glitter of life's superficial and tawdry attractions, for they would know that under its glitter it hides sorrow. "Men are unhappy simply because they are alive." The source of all sorrow is the affirmation of life. And the force of ignorance is so strong that in spite of grievous suffering men still cling tenaciously to it. This "philosophy" is carried to its extreme form in the assertion that man does not generate the sorrow,--he is himself the sorrow! His individual sense of I-ness, his very selfhood, which fosters his illusions, is itself an illusion. Individual existence is the symptom as well as the disease. Ignorance and individuality are virtually inter-

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dependent, for both imply limitation. So ignorance can cease only with the extinction of the individuality. In this doleful strain runs on the wail of Buddhistic dialectic and most Indian theology.

That it falls short of being a philosophy worthy of the name is evident on the surface, but also is stated by Radhakrishnan. His analysis shows that it fails to explain what it postulates.

"The whole scheme rests on avidya, but we are not told how avidya arises. It seems to be a blind end or an incomprehensible reality which we must accept unthinkingly . . . Buddhism seems to assert the eternity of ignorance. In the chain of causation it is put first, for through it comes willing and through willing existence."

It seems never to have struck the mind of any of the millions of students of the Buddhistic philosophy, or any of its own millions of devotees, that this great religion's central doctrine, the postulation of ignorance as the primal cause of life and life's misery, is, on Radhakrishnan's pronouncement, itself grounded solely on ignorance. If Buddhism wishes to be regarded as a world philosophy worthy of man's fullest loyalty, let it tell us how ignorance arises and why. If one of the two greatest modern Hindu thinkers can say that this root cause of human sorrow is a blind end and an incomprehensible reality Buddhism is asking us to follow a philosophy that rests only on an insoluble mystery. It takes no profound wisdom for any mind or any system to tell us that most of human woe springs from ignorance. It is an everyday observation. But a competent philosophy must tell us the raison d'etre, or the beneficent function of this ignorance in the total scheme of being. Greece and Egypt have rationally explained the ultimate good role of ignorance. But India, overwhelmed by the horrid spectacle of suffering due to ignorance, throws up its hands in dialectical despair in the face of the prodigy, crying our helplessness to turn it to good account and urging the destruction of our very selfhood to escape the dire entanglement. And confronted with the inexorable power of the predicament that it can in no wise explain as beneficent, it has perforce to declare all life evil. To live is to be ignorant; to be ignorant is to live; therefore to avoid ignorance, it is better not to live. This is India's syllogism and it ends in negation. "Life on earth is a pilgrimage in a strange land which the true knower is not anxious to prolong. Salvation consists in the unmaking of ourselves."

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Greek philosophy in forthright terms characterizes the soul's peregrination through the kingdoms of nature in many forms of incarnation openly and categorically as a veritable "death" for the divine unit of life. It even outdoes Hindu mythopoetic art in dramatizing the soul's incarnation in body as a loss of its celestial beatitude, a direption from all supernal consciousness, a plunge into a dark stream of life dominated by low animal sense and base pleasures, to suffer an obscuration of divine vision, to lose the memory of transcendental things and find its clearer view of reality distorted and diffracted by a mental blindness that makes its existence here a groping in dark labyrinths. It even designates the body which soul animates here as its prison-house, its bird-cage, its dark tomb (soma, body, sema, tomb in the Greek!) and the grave of its crucifixion. Egypt denominated the human body the coffin or mummy case.

But,--except as this typism has been misunderstood by shallow exegetics--never does it take all this as the ground for pessimism, or a repudiation of its complete beneficence. The descent of soul into body, while it confronted the soul with the challenge of empirical good and evil hap, was held to be the normal natural life procedure for ends of good. Its "evil" aspects were seen as relative always to later ultimate good. And since the end was good, the whole process could be categorized as good. Its "death," its distraction, its loss of divinity in exchange for earthly animality first and humanity later, all were stages relative to the glorious destiny that came with consummation, or came in part with any advance. "The sufferings of this world are not to be compared with that glory which shall be revealed," declares St. Paul. Through the muck and murks of the earthly experience the Greek mind could keep in view the glint of that shining goal of evolutionary glory, that very ananda that Hinduism so constantly predicates and so insistently urges us to grasp in a sudden rush out of the earthly compound in a wild vain effort to dissolve the temporal and seize the eternal.

India apparently knows nothing of what was elementary to the Greek consciousness,--that we are not gods, but only sons of God; and that as recently born sons, we must start evolution at the humble beginning, which predicates at once a start in and from ignorance. There is not and never should have been a deep mystery

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about ignorance in philosophy: it is simply the state that exists before knowledge comes! India does not seem able to rationalize this ignorance apart from the association of evil with it. Unwarped thought sees no evil in a child's ignorance of its life on earth. It is inevitable, natural and certainly amoral. Man's initial ignorance as the child of God should be accepted on this analogy. But India has made it a matter with not amoral, but definitely moral connotations. Christian dogma has in like manner connected man's inceptive state with moral action and alleges that it involved him in sin. Man's "transgression" was committed in his evolutionary infancy, in spite of the fact that theology dare attach no stigma of sin to the acts of childhood! In both Hinduism and Christianity theology has perpetrated a gigantic travesty of interpretation in this respect. Unless all life is to be finally discountenanced as dire evil in the absolute sense, the ignorance which is naturally incident to the early stage of life in this sphere can not rationally be stigmatized as evil, or categorized as the cause of life's woes, and certainly not without correlation with the total beneficent purpose of life itself. And this total beneficent purpose has apparently never been discerned or acknowledged in Hindu philosophy. Instead of a philosophy and a message of truth, this great land which so strenuously acclaims its superior role as the Mother of Religions, has given to the world nothing but a wail of grief over the evil nature of existence. Its supreme evangel to humanity has been the hatred of life. Its spiritual science has been a technique for the destruction of life.

But if this was the dolorous outcome of the Eastern philosophy, it is now found to be incongruous with the more positive affirmation of life's values in the Upanishads. From this angle it might perhaps be said that India has not succeeded in communicating its true gospel to the world. Seemingly in direct contradiction of the principles of Buddhism just elaborated, Radhakrishnan's further dilation upon this religion presents elements that ring out a positive note. He says that mental culture requires the training of the senses so as to discern the real worth of sensual experience. Spiritual insight is an expansion and development of the generally despised intellectual vijnana and sense perception working in concert to perfect their operation.

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Again we read that the self apart from the contents of its experience is characterless and barren. But also the contents apart from the self leaves the ego under the law of external determinism. There is more to the world than mechanical law, even though all desires and thoughts have a natural history under the rule of law. Karma asserts and guards the orderliness of natural and logical creative processes, as well as of spiritual growth. The lower floors of the edifice of life are not scorned. "Mystical contemplation without practical goodness is not perfection." "The ascetic is not he who punishes the body, but he who purifies the soul."

Buddha does not call for a suppression of emotion and desire, but asks for the cultivation of true love of all the creation. This glowing emotion must fill the whole universe so as to animate and motivate all life with good-will. The growth in good-will requires the constant breaking of fixations of habit in the life below spirit. The hardening of disposition in set attitudes through repetition is to be interrupted and the soul kept pliant, alert for the grasp of ever true recognitions. Habit can all too readily bind the self and destroy its freedom. We can not escape the effects of our acts. To advance in the future necessitates that we constantly liquidate the bills and mortgages of our past.

Max Mueller and Childers are cited by Radhakrishnan as testifying that after systematic examination of all passages relating to Nirvana, they have to conclude that "there is not one passage which would require that its meaning should be annihilation." The human envisagement of the concept--or the reality--of Nirvana is doubtless inane, as its conceivability is beyond man's reach. Presumably it can be thought of only on the immediate analogue of the persistence of the self of man under, behind and through the unconsciousness of sleep. Selves are all of the essence of the total Self of Being, and all philosophy argues that there can be no annihilation of this eternal Being-Self. There is a something which now, ultimately and eternally is, and basically that which is can not cease to be. All that our intellectual faculty empowers us to know of it is that it alternately manifests itself in periods and cycles of activity, in which it expresses its nature and purposes in the evolution of consciousness by involving itself in matter, and then dissolves the manifest modes of this expression and retires back into unconsciousness. So to say, it gives itself an experience

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in consciousness and in turn sleeps in unconsciousness, as do we who are made in its image.

Perhaps the only eligible way for us to think of Nirvana is that it is the nonconscious state of being. Surely being does not cease, or there never would have been, never be or never to be any being at all. That which can be now must ever have been and never not be. It must be agreed that being it not annihilated. It does not cease to be, but in Nirvanic state it does cease to be conscious. The analogy of sleep and waking must guide our thinking here. How it retains the power to recover or renew consciousness after its periodic lapses into unconsciousness, or Nirvana, the human mind will not know until it knows how our permanent selves subsist during dreamless sleep. The only hypothesis conceivable seems to be that the constitution of man is multiple; that a series of outer bodies of graded degrees of the sublimation of atomic matter, from finest "spiritual" through "ethereal," "psychic," "astral," "pranic" and finally physical, are essential to beings developing the potentialities of consciousness; that as, in dissolution, consciousness retires from one after the other of these, there is left as the indissoluble core one final body nucleated of what must be called the ultimate essence of matter; and that into this body the abiding self of the being retires, to subsist there in a state of being completely out of relation to its mode of existence in the bodies through which it evolved the powers of consciousness. As the entire mechanism through which it attains consciousness is dissolved at the cycle's end, there is no consciousness existent that is able to register what its condition of non-consciousness can be when it is not functioning in consciousness.

The problem is complicated by our almost inescapable tendency to identify being with consciousness. As Being alternates between consciousness and unconsciousness, it must be primarily assumable that it can be as well without as with consciousness. In Nirvana it simply is, without being conscious. We base nearly all our religion on the universal assumption that our soul is a durable thing, which alternately puts on and takes off an earthly body. Religion generally assumes that it retains some sort of consciousness when the body is dropped. There is wide diversity of opinion as to what grades of consciousness it may manifest in its disembodied state.

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If it has this series of differentiated bodies, it would obviously exercise a different degree and grade of consciousness through each one.

It is also obvious that the design of the construction of ancient sacred temples, with an outer court, several courts successively inner to those outside them, and finally the innermost chamber, or Holy of Holies, was to configurate these several bodies in the constitution of man--and the universe. The innermost sanctum, the center of ineffable holiness, represented the indestructible inner body, in which the most real being resided in its purest form. By analogy--our only guide--we must think that total Being puts on and takes off its vestures. Nirvana must be to total Being what our night's sleep is to us.

As Radhakrishnan brings out, even extreme monists recognize that becoming depends on being. That which emerges in emanation must be what being projects from itself. Hegel rightly perceives that the conditions of a concrete world are a subject and an object. It takes the combination of these two to generate and expand consciousness. The two phases are in the constitution of being eternally, but alternate periodically between polar opposition and polar neutralization. They swing apart, and between their opposite pulls uphold the worlds. Again they merge together and the universe recedes into inanition. In the latter state it "enjoys" Nirvana.

It has been the habit of philosophy to regard the untensioned, unconditioned period of the cycles as the "perfect" or "pure" state of absolute being. It is then "real;" but when it is in the process of expressing itself in the active arc of its cycles, it is "unreal." So far as one can discern, this turn of thought simply got a start and became a conventional or habitual reaction in all thinking down the centuries. It has been repeated so often that the assumption of its truth has prevailed. It doubtless arose from the reflection that obviously the total has not, and perhaps can not, express the whole of itself in any stage or form of its manifestation. On this ground and in this sense the ascription of unreality to its manifestation in the world order might be legitimate.

It is a matter of wonder whether it is legitimate to apply the criterion of either perfection or reality to the manifest, the conditioned existence at all. It surely is not demanded of it that it be either perfect or real in the absolute philosophical sense. It frankly

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admits to being perfect and real only as far as it goes. Further perfection and fuller reality await it on the road ahead. Conditioned existence, or becoming, is in this way being charged with failure to be something other than what it has the right to be. It has no absolute obligation to be either perfect or real in ultimate grade. To charge it with imperfection is simply to accuse it of not having finished its work, when the time has not yet come for that finality. As, by analogy, we have no right to charge an acorn or sapling oak with imperfection on the ground that it is in reality a giant oak, but has somehow failed to manifest its true finished or perfected ideal, so we have no right to judge temporal existence as unreal because it does not demonstrate at the given moment its ultimate perfection. Pure subjective philosophy takes no account of time and, as far as human language can express the truth of the matter, it takes this element of time to bring reality to pass. To fail to consider time as the element introducing relativity into the scheme of being is to make the problem impossible of solution on rational theses.

In Radhakrishnan's words Nirvana is not a sinking into nothingness, but the perfection of being. He says further that it is better to consider it as concrete than abstract, citing for this that each higher principle is more concrete and inclusive, more real and substantial, than the one below it. Therefore ananda, which is the consciousness of Brahman, is the ultimate concrete and conclusive principle. From it flow all things. The concrete ananda is the real revealed to thought,--and he would have to add, only partly revealed in experience. The self-conscious God, who later develops into an organic whole of existence, is the maximum of being and the minimum of non-being. He is least permeated by objectivity and affected by externality. Yet a significant corollary of this fact has not been scrutinized by Hindu philosophy: that even the highest and most perfect gods do not sequester themselves in their presumed rich enjoyment of abstract existence, but choose to descend for the sake of experience into the lower levels of matter. It is to be noted that in one item the Hindu analysis of worldly experience regards the act of creation as a sacrifice, with Purusha, the spiritual principle, as the victim. This must be seen as identical with the great self-oblation of the gods on the altar of matter for the sake of enriching lower life, which found such general expression in universal mythology and in Greek, Hebrew and Christian theologies.

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It should be a sobering reflection for the cultist of denial to note what the psychologist Jung has to say with regard to the possibility of realizing higher values of spirit by blotting out the world: "Flight from life does not free us from the law of age and death." What this actually says is that the effort to blot out the world and our relation to it is doomed to failure. Nature, not spirit, is the victor in the end. By no way save that of hypnotism--or by death--can one sever his affective connection with the world.

The highest and all-embracing conception reached in the Vedic hymns is that of the One Reality realizing itself in all the infinite multiformity of existence. The highest aim of being is to enhance itself through cycles of existence. It is well to recur to Plotinus' statement that it is not enough merely to be; life must show what it can create! The great reality that is postulated as existing above nature is the same reality that is coming to view in nature. The Brahman is the Atman and the Atman is the Brahman. The supreme power is now in each man's heart; the supreme life is now in nature, in process of self-realization. The eternal Be-ness, or potential being, must produce creatural units of itself in whom it can develop and enjoy the consciousness of an entified being. Its consciousness would be in the abstract, and hardly a true consciousness at all. There would be no delight in that status; it must become individualized self-consciousness to enjoy the blissful Lila or delight in being. As Das Gupta (History of Indian Philosophy, 214) says, the self is in itself without consciousness, and if it desires consciousness (which is apparently the first great "sin" in Buddhist theology), it can come to it only through its connection with sensory organs and manas, or mind.

By all the varied vicissitudes of experience, even by the ignorance, by struggle, by work, by enthusiasm, by the conglomeration of elements and events which is precipitated when purusha throws its energies into the arms of prakriti, nuclear consciousness pursues its path toward the bliss of full self-awareness. Out of the jumbled experience come action, feeling and knowledge, which could not be generated without this ordeal. These expressions are the varied forms which the ego-activity takes, and can take, only in association with the life of nature, with the body and with the world. It is the

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final and radical truth in this matter that the soul that undergoes mundane experience is itself generated and brought to birth only by this ordeal of tension set up between the raw potential of consciousness and the external concrete world. Hindu belief always contemplates the soul as of itself taking rebirth in all kinds and grades of creatural existence, the successive choices being freely made of its own volition. As light can not be seen apart from the candle, so the self can not be seen, can not have its existence, apart from the body.

All question of the reality of existence would seem to be answered categorically by what Radhakrishnan says: "That from which these beings are born, that in which when born they live, and that into which they enter at death, that is Brahman." It is evident then, that there is never a time when the conscious unit is not immersed in the real being of the Lord of life. As Radhakrishnan sets forth, the ego implies the non-ego and therefore can not precede it. It arises with it and by virtue of its polarization with it. As he puts it, the timeless whole is ever (periodically) breaking out of its inanition to give itself the delight of becoming something it has conceived, willed and energized for creation. It is forever rushing forth in series of becomings. And the process begun in each will go on until the self in each unit life reaffirms the fulness of its potential self-creativeness through the rich if rugged course of experience. The world is not a purposeless phantom of some false grade of consciousness--as Christian Science so glaringly errs in saying--but the arena of the evolution of God, who is embodied in the creative whole in the individuality of his own sons, the potentially conscious life units.

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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

THE PANORAMA OF REALITY

It is one of the paradoxes of which life furnishes so many that the very act of the absolute's self-realization of its nature is also a concealment of it. There is no doubt that the revelation is open, clear and complete; there is nothing hidden that shall not be revealed. Yet it is not, so to say, physically visible, so that he who runs can read it. But physically visible it is after all, for that is precisely how it is revealed,--in physical forms. Always it must be remembered that while its physical form or embodiment is seen with the eye, the eye alone can not report the full truth of the hidden noumenal idea or form which it bespeaks. To catch the ideal form in the object the power of the eye must be supplemented with the power of the mind. The eye will not pierce the hard shell of matter to discern the inner meaning unless aided by intelligence, which can bring the faculties of reason, deduction and the great beacon light of analogy to aid the revelation. It requires the expert and facile talent of transmuting the features and qualities of a physical object or phenomenon into an abstract mental form identical with it in construction, to elicit the cryptic meaning of the world. One must be able, as it were, to mentally dissolve a physical object into the ethereal structure of a mental concept. The mortal form hides the immortal idea. The objects in space and time conceal the logoi of divine thought. Radhakrishnan says that the passing semblance of life is in no wise its immortal truth, that the real being is above these things. God manifests himself, but draws a veil over his face. Indian thought always presumes that what the senses report to us is not the truth of things. It can be admitted that it is not, where there is no intelligence or genius in the interpretation of the senses' report. The meaning of the world of life is always hidden from the ignorant. That does not certify that it can not be revealed to the inner eye of intelligent mind.

This truth has been obscured in Indian philosophy by the traditional force of Oriental intellectualism in its tendency to explain away, instead of explaining, the life experience. Surely it is hardly logical to assert that there is any concealment when an object, otherwise invisible, is made concrete and set out to open view in the sight of all men. We would have concealment if this proced-

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ure were exactly reversed. As it is, we have revelation full, complete. All may see who will look, but with the mind as well as with the eye. It is because we have looked without seeing that we have been led to think that God has hidden himself behind his creation. St. Paul says that what makes God knowable to us is manifest, not hidden. The Talmud enjoins us to open wide our eyes on the visible. The veil is not over God's face; it is over our eyes. In Exodus God says to Moses (man) that as he in his glory passes by, he will place his hand over Moses' eyes, so that the overpowering effulgence will not blind his feeble vision; and when his glory has passed by, he will remove his hand and then man may safely look upon God's hinder parts. The hinder or reverse side of God's spiritual glory is matter. Man may not gaze upon God's full cosmic glory of spirit, for it is said that no man can look upon the face of God and live. That glory is so fierce in brightness that it would in a flash burn man's body to a crisp. Only when dimmed by its incorporation in the lower vibrations of matter can man safely gaze upon it.

Yet the material forms are shaped over the pattern of the divine thought and in fact are those thoughts concreted in matter. Man can read them if, as Sir Joshua Reynolds said of his paintings, he will mix his observation with brains. He must become adept in the subtle art of transferring the form of a physical object into its image and counterpart in a noumenal conception. "With sharp and subtle mind is He beheld," says the Kath. Upanishad (III-12). The world of religious thought would not have fallen into the sluggish groove of calling the objective world an unreality and a phantasmagoria of deceptive shadows caricaturing the real essences if the perspicacity to read the noumenal idea in its earthly entifications had been kept alive and the "sharp and subtle mind" needed to see the one through the other had been assiduously cultivated.

Radhakrishnan discerns this requirement when he says that in the enjoyment of a melody, in the appreciation of art, nature, beauty, or a work of mental genius, we exercise a high degree of mystical faculty. Mysticism of this grade, grounded on objective beauty, is a permissible and a true mysticism. Earthly things viewed with this sensitivity to the presence of the divine thought which they embody, are thus transfused with the light of the eternal.

Again the philosopher assures us that the Upanishads do not preach a renunciation either physical or dialectical, of the objective

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existence. The essence of ethical life is not a sublation of the mind and will in metaphysical states alone. The false doctrine that holds life to be an illusion is out of unison with the sentiment of the Upanishads. To flout the world in a strained spiritual pietism, to retire from the world's society and a close and friendly contact with nature, is to despair of humanity and to assume even God's discomfiture in his evolutionary enterprise. We are asked to see through outer forms to their internal and eternal realities, and to come to feel the presence of God in the world of nature and of society. Then comes from the philosopher a forthright declaration worthy of great applause from seekers of truth over all the earth: he says that a philosophy of resignation, an ascetic code of ethics and a temper of languid world-weariness are an insult to the creator of the universe, a sin against ourselves and the world that has a claim upon us. The Upanishads believe in God, and so believe in the world soul, since that is the ray of God in the world. In the light of such a rebuke to Hindu preachments, it is evident that Mother India will have to amend its own spiritual message by the clearer light shining in Greek philosophy and even in its own Upanishads, before it can substantiate its claim to the lofty distinction of being the world's foremost spiritual teacher.

If, as Radhakrishnan says, the soul in man is the keynote through which we look out upon the world landscape, it must be that God has turned the gaze of soul outward, and given us a window through which to look. Evidently it was conceived that soul needed to look without, and therefore provision was made for the extroversion of view. And if there was this necessity, it is to be concluded that the soul's growth to its full awakening was only to be effectuated by having it receive its education through what it could learn in the world. The philosopher bends toward the conventional exaltation of the inner spirit in saying that the soul's attention turns from the outward physical fact to the inner reality of its own immortal possibility; and that we need not look to the outer sky for the bright light; the glorious fire and flame is within.

Yes, this is true; but it is always erroneously related in Eastern theology to the thought of increasing the inner shining by withdrawing the inner spirit from all intercourse with the scene outside the window of its house. This is the false orientation of the view of soul enlightenment. That soul-light evidently could not be made to

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enhance its glow by remaining aloft in the spiritual skies. There was no fuel there to feed its lamps. Only on earth could it draw from below the energies that would enable it to magnify its potential glory. Therefore to despise earthly influences is to flout and defeat the prime purpose of God in the human creation.

Several times, according to Radhakrishnan, the Upanishads strike a distinctly positive note in appraising the value of life in the world and the necessary role of the body. The Indian thinkers believe in the dependence of mind on the body, and so prescribe purity of food as necessary for purity of mind and soul. We are not to despise the body, or regard it as an encumbrance or clog on the soul. The body is the servant of the soul and not its prison. A note of joy in the soul's participation in the life of the world permeates the Upanishads. To retire from the body is to despair of humanity, is to retreat in the face of life's challenge. But not even the Upanishads have been able to avert the surrender of general Hindu philosophy to negativism and pessimism. The Upanishad conception of the world stands as a direct challenge to the valiant powers of the spirit in man. If the world is very evil, the spirit is here tenanting in the flesh to redeem the world from its evil. God so loved the world that he sent his Son into it, not to condemn it, but to redeem it to divinity. The philosophy that urges the soul to shrink from its cosmic assignment to regenerate itself in the garden of earth is a renegade philosophy.

It is even granted in the Upanishads that human love, so sharply falling under the condemnation of the suprasensual cast of thought, as being low, fleeting and binding to earth, is admitted to be the shadow of divine love. "We may love our wives for the sake of the joy that burns at the heart of things." Husband and wife are dear, but not for their own sake. "For the sake of the Atman is the husband dear," assert the Upanishads. The objects of the world are represented not as lures to sin, but as pathways to the divine bliss. The righteous man is not he who retires into a cloister, but he who lives in the world and loves its objects and interests, however, never for their own sake, but for that of the infinite they contain, the universal they conceal. Love of human beings and external things for their own sake or for one's personal pleasure is a false motive. They must be loved for the sake of the infinite self which, in individualized seed form, is sent here to expand its joy by loving them.

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Plato is called to testify that thought is best when the mind is gathered into itself and no outward things distract its absorption in the contemplation of truth. The ego must be so far untrammelled by bodily interests that it can survey clearly the field of its own activities. Nothing can too long inhibit its aspiration after the deeper realities of being. This can be considered valid doctrine as a general principle, and it is certainly most true for the high moments in our psychic life when we do seem to be lifted out of the commonplace realism of the level of daily interest to a sense of more buoyant modes of being. But it would hardly substantiate a universal deprecation or belittlement of the value of our concern with things. Things are necessary for the conditioning of the body, so that it may serve as the basis for the mind's power to think without distraction. To despise things because they are not spirit and are rated in value below spirit, is to fail to see things in their proper perspective.

We are brought back again to a further consideration of the doctrine of maya. Its place in Hindu systematic thought is so prominent and its influence so decisive throughout that the cursory treatment already given it can profitably be supplemented by further elaboration. The rank negative view of the world as maya or illusion is stated in Das Gupta's review of the Buddhist philosophy in the Lankavatara:

"All our phenomenal knowledge is without any essence or truth and is but a creation of maya, a mirage or a dream. For it is said that illusion is like the principle of maya, which may explain the origin of other notions. There is no category which can be called maya, because all entities or appearances being similar to magic, are called maya. All things are called similar to maya because they are false and as evanescent as lightning sparks."

The appearance of the many changing things in the world is called maya. Anything considered to be other than the One undifferentiated pure unmanifest Being is called maya. Everything below the absolute is declared to be the maya. The one in its pure essence is alone real. "All things that appear as compounded are but dreams and maya. Appearances are produced only apparently, not in reality; their coming into being is still maya, and that maya again does not exist."

What sort of logic that can be which explains a phenomenon as being due to something which itself does not exist, we are at a

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loss to comprehend. Christian Science has enmired itself similarly in this illogical syllogism. It claims that sin, sickness, evil and death are the creations of "mortal mind," which on another page is blandly stated to have no existence. So steeped in the attitude and spirit of negation have the illusion philosophies become that even the cause of the illusion is declared to be an illusion. By all the laws of reason this should end up in the affirmation of things denied, since the negation of a negative asserts a positive. To say that a non-existent thing produces another non-existent thing says nothing at all. This double negativism doth protest too much and strangles itself to death.

On this we find Das Gupta saying that the negation alleged in the maya argument is not a separate entity, but is only a peculiar manner of the manifestation of the positive. Elaborating on this, he presents the dilemma in which the maya doctrine involves itself. Using the term ajnana (not-knowledge, illusory opinion, Plato's doxa) he argues that if the untrue knowledge (ajnana) is a nonentity altogether, it could never arise at all; and if it were a positive entity it could never cease to be. The ajnana therefore is a mysterious category midway between being and non-being, a something indefinable in any way, and so it is characterized as indefinable and indeterminable either as real or unreal. It is unreal as an indeterminable character; but nevertheless real as needing to be dealt with. That which itself is only the name for the absence of a positive essence is no determinable thing; it is only to be dealt with in relation to the thing it is the want of. For instance, ignorance is nothing that can be described, seen, made palpable or handled. It is the dark abyss left by the absence of intelligence. It can not be dealt with as ignorance; it can only be handled by entifying intelligence. As the sun comes up darkness disappears. As intelligence dawns ignorance disappears.

There are rebuttals of the bald denial aspect of the doctrine, and Das Gupta presents this one: the stuff of maya--the things of the world--undergoes a transformation through change. As this change is asserted to be the basis of the non-real or illusory character of the world, it itself must be real. If, then, Brahman is credited with absolute reality because "he" does not change, while his creation is subject to change, reality must then pertain to both aspects of being, the changing and the changeless. And if maya is re-

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garded as a power exercised by Brahman, how then can the power of Brahman, as well as its transforming work, be regarded as unreal and false, while the possessor and wielder of the power is regarded as real and absolute? This posits a real, in fact the real being of the universe as generating an unreal illusory world. Heraclitus asserted that the ultimate reality of the changing world was found in the nature and meaning of the change.

Das Gupta argues that if we accept the doctrine of the creation as illusory maya, it would have to be conceived that God created the universe as mere sport. This, it is to be recalled, is precisely what Aurobindo affirms, but without any slur on the word "sport." Das Gupta would seem to deride the Lila doctrine; Aurobindo takes it with straight seriousness and aureoles it with its proper nobility at the supreme cosmic level. We can not, he thinks, imagine a higher cosmic motive than God's delight and enjoyment of his majestic work of creation, and it is not demeaned by calling it play or sport.

A boiling down of many varied dissertations on the theme of maya leaves one with the precipitate which seems to comprehend the essence of all of them: maya is the exertion on the part of absolute being to give itself expression. Maya is the order and nature of being when it sets itself to the task of actual becoming. It is the absolute when it has ceased to remain asleep, ceased to abide in quiescence, and begun to awake to the exertion of creation. It is the absolute manifesting its capabilities. It is be-ness stirring to action, having broken out of the death-grip of aeonial sleep to plunge into the delight of a new morn of world building. It is life breaking out of the bonds of its stagnation in unity to throw itself into the tension of duality and polarity, so as to set consciousness over against objectivity. In the process it veils its absoluteness with condition and limitation for the sake of bringing consciousness to birth and then to sharp acuity.

Quoting Bradley and Green to the effect that the relation between Brahman and the manifest world can not be known by us (why Brahman created the world at all, if we do not assume it was for Lila, his delight and enjoyment, is an insoluble riddle to us, they hold), Radhakrishnan says that the reason for God's exertion of himself to create the world is inexplicable to us, and says that the later Vedanta gave it the name of maya. He says that a "white

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intellectual modesty born of the imperfection of human intelligence" compelled the authors of the Upanishads to attempt nothing beyond negative statements when confronted with the question of accounting for the nature of the supreme reality and its creational motives. On the other hand, he states, false imitators of the Upanishad ideal, in an extreme display of arrogant audacity, declare that Brahman is an absolutely homogeneous impersonal intelligence. He takes this to be a dogmatic assertion alien to the true spirit of the Upanishads. Such a positive characterization of the being of Brahman is illogical, he maintains, citing Sankara as saying that the real is non-dual, advaita, and nothing positive.

Activity, the exertion of energy, is almost divorced in mayavic philosophy from the being of Brahman. It is made to appear that the Brahman is only real when, so to say, it is asleep. What it does or creates in its work in the waking state must bear the stigma of unreality. This is refuted by the assertions of Radhakrishnan, based on the Upanishads, that active exertion to consummate self-expression is an inherent and eternal attribute of the Brahman, the aspect of its nature which it expresses in alternation with its periods of relapse into sleep in its regular rhythms. Force and its deployment are inherent in absolute being. Maya, the bent of God to exert his energies in creation, is potentially eternal in being. It is not a human construction or product, because it is prior to our intellect and independent of it. It is itself the generator of both things and intellects; it is the immense potentiality of the created world. It is sometimes called prakriti.

But slipped into this descriptive data is the sentence which says that the world of becoming is an interruption of being. But, as has been shown already, this reverses the proper rating of values: it regards the sleep condition of Brahman as real existence, and its active period as its unreality. By analogy it becomes a question whether we shall call our daily existence between our nights of sleep the interruption of our being, which we partake of in dreamless repose, or whether that sleep interrupts our real being of the waking state.

Radhakrishnan is led by Hindu thinking to say that maya is a reflection of reality. As a reflection is usually inverted, this is to say that the world process is not so much a translation of immutable being as its inversion. This may be affirmed as a not untrue way of viewing the process, if the word or the idea of inversion is

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not made synonymous with negation of immutable being. It is an inversion in the sense that, being the opposite polar force to quiescent being, it manifests the opposite complement of that being, i.e., its manifestation, and is not taken to be its denial. To quiescence it manifests the opposite phase of activity and objectivity, or the reverse of inaction. There can not legitimately be any connotation of unreality attached to the idea of matter when considered as the obverse of spirit. It is indeed its foil, the power against which spirit must exercise its full strength, and thus grow in might.

There is much evidence to demonstrate that the conception of maya was well enough comprehended to be generally understood in its true light as nothing apart from or independently opposed to the supreme being and reality, but was inherent in, a deployment of and entirely dependent upon ultimate being itself. Maya represents the power of the One existence to throw itself into the distinction residing at the very heart of reality, its inherent necessity to manifest itself by division. Maya is the self-generated force in the heart of being which drives it to express itself through growth. It is a striking way of describing the soul to say that it is an individual unit of the Atman coupled with sense and mind. Hindu thought has been misleading in holding that this union with the transient forms of sense and mind, feeling and thought, is a calamity, an experience of unreality, a hindrance or interruption of real being. It is the Atman unit at work to bring itself along to supreme attainment of something more real than innocuous vacuity in an unconditioned state.

The apparent imperfection of the world life is due to the circumstance that the two elements in play, the potential divine and the natural, being polar opposites, and able to do their proper work only as such, are seemingly at strife and incapable of effecting a harmony. But the problem exists only by virtue of the ignoring of time, a tendency paramount in all monistic speculation. The accumulation of experience in repeated lives is the dialectical as well as the actual solvent of the problem of disharmony. Time will eventually bring about the at-one-ment, the complete neutralization and perfect union of the two sides. For it is the evolutionary task of the divine part of us to use its potentially capable genius to effect the harmonization. The experience is its education; the upsurge of its expanding power gives it vision and knowledge. It learns how to transmute the mere animality in the human into

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something lovelier and sweeter, until the product of the struggle emerges in spiritual ecstasy and the beatitude of supreme peace.

But, contrary to all the perfervid assumptions of the monistic and illusionist theories the Upanishads are insistent that as long as man is finite and human he can not dissolve the conditions under which he partakes of the largesse of life at his present stage and actualize any final achievement of unconditioned real being. Thus the entire ground-claim of these egregious cult philosophies is declared to be itself a substanceless figment of philosophical error.

The Scriptures strike the note of truth in telling us that the soul is a fragment of deity, a seed unit of universal being planted in a world for growth and aspiring by innate impulse to become an embodiment of the whole. This great basic truth was dramatized by the Gospel Jesus in the breaking of the bread, declared to be his own (spiritual) body, into fragments in the Eucharist, and by the parables of the seed. The growth involves the struggle between the divine drive of the soul and the demoniac obsession of the personality. But only by the hard road of victory in this battle can the divine realize the fulness of the stature of its godliness. The divine part would vegetate and stagnate in continued quiescence and inanition if it was not challenged by opposition of the (relatively) non-divine elements. The confrontation to it of diverse influences arouses it to exertion. Everywhere the finite is striving for enlargement of being, expansion and heightening of consciousness; and this tension, as it centers in man's life, constitutes his tense moral struggle.

Wherever the word maya occurs, says Radhakrishnan, it is used only to signify the might or the power: "Indra takes many shapes quickly by his maya." It is his power, which is never separate from his eternal being and never negative to it, by which he is able to unleash his creative genius in the expression of his delight, his majesty and his glory. Through the unwarranted misconception attached to the terms reality and unreality, the idea of maya has been subverted in so much Hindu and general philosophy into the category of unreality and illusion, a perversion which, with its concomitant derangements of the understanding, has to be numbered among the major tragedies of human delusion.

All the while the great light was shining, though shaded under myth and allegory, in the great literature of ancient divine authorship, that would have illuminated the dark recesses of the human

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mind on the subject of maya. In Scriptures and in mythology almost universally the mothers of the Christs, Messiahs, Avatars and Sun-gods, bore the name of Maya. Here was the unmistakable intimation that maya was the mother of our divinity. The assumption that maya is a dream of unreal existence reads into the ancient mythos of truth an eccentric and untenable postulate: for by analogy it says that while Maya's divine son was the expression and essence of reality, his mother was only a phantom of unreality. Are we to suppose that the great myths are telling us that unreality gives birth to reality? By every principle of logic this is what the myths do tell us, if we are to accept the philosophical derogation of matter, the eternal mother of all things, as the phantom of unreality. Shall we glorify the divine sonship and in the same breath vilify the motherhood? This sharp delineation indeed sets in vivid contrast the discrepancy between a natural view and the twisted theses of the mystics. When the full significances of the analogical parallels are recognized, it is apparent that every slur cast upon matter, the body, the physical world, is so much mud thrown in the face of the divine motherhood. An immense portion of religious ardor has been expended in the disastrous effort to magnify the Son by traducing his mother. How can we suppose that Maya can bear the Christs, and yet be catalogued in theology as the vessel of dishonor? It can bear the Christ-child of course only if it is impregnated by the seed of that divine birth. But that is what a thousand myths had cryptically delineated in their structure. That is what the world, the matter, the maya is; eternal substance fecundated by the creative blood essence of the divine paternity of spirit.

He who rails out against the evil of life, of matter, and holds it as vile and diabolical, is reviling the eternal mother of life. Being and non-being are correlative terms; one is destitute, impotent, incapable of existence, without the other. Perhaps the most luminous realization that the pursuit of philosophy can bring to the race of mortals is the knowledge that the earth, and the human body by which the divine spirit is attached to earth, are the garden in which a seed of God's life has been sown, and that therefore the most immediate and constant practical end in life is to gain the knowledge and the wisdom to promote to best advantage the growth of that seed in that soil. India would verily uproot the seed or the developing plant out of that soil. Obviously this can not be philosophy, or religion, or science; it must be charted as ignorance and fatuity.

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