CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

THE IMAGE OF SUPERMIND

The case for the theses advanced in this work will be seen to be stoutly supported by much testimony that can be adduced from the writings of the great world philosophers, to the general effect that the depreciation and inhibition of the intellect in the evolution of man toward deity is a counsel of superlative folly.

In Fuller's treatment of Spinoza's philosophical system we find a statement descriptive of the true rank and function of the mind that stands in direct refutation of the vacuous predications of the idealists and mystics: "In mind the nature of God achieved its most complete expression . . . Mind, moreover, represents the end of God's outgoing from himself, and a reverse movement of withdrawal into himself."

Perhaps it is not technically true to say that mind is the farthest point of God's outgoing from himself, as matter and body are still farther out. The Greeks quote the ancient sages as saying that God placed the units of his spirit in the next lower or coarser vehicle, soul, and "soul he placed in mortal body." The mind stands intermediate between soul and body. Still the statement of Fuller is true in the less technical sense that the human mind is the last limit to which the creative thought power of God proceeds in the emanation. And from there it turns back as involution impulse swings around the stake fixed at the human stage and enters upon the return path of evolution,--to bring to fruition that which the involution planted as seed.

In short, intuition is that sweeping insight into the nature of the aggregate compounded of the harmoniously integrated elements of the whole picture, instead of the process of discursive reasoning from one item to another. And in truth it is not a higher faculty than intellection, but the nimble adeptness of the intellect itself.

Radhakrishnan indeed speaks of the humility of the knower of truth, as against the swollen pride of the fanatic who is sure his is the only true religion, and he says that none can lay hold of the whole of truth. "It can be won only by degrees, partially and provisionally." And he comes out with a positive declaration that should chill the super-heated extravagances of mystical fervor:

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"Nobody can tread the higher road without fulfilling the requirements of the lower," a simple, straight and rudimentary truth that should have kept the minds of religionists from bubbling over the brim of sane understanding into the region of exuberant fanaticism in defiance of all reason.

We find the English philosopher Joad (Return to Philosophy, 31) saying about intuition that it is a word which, loosely used, covers a multitude of intellectual sins. He rates it unqualifiedly as one of the most valuable, as being the last evolved, of human faculties, and when rightly used, it is capable of leading the mind to an awareness of aspects of reality inaccessible to logical reason. He thinks it can thus yield the most vital experience of which the human mind is capable at its present level,--which certainly implies or permits no relegation of the mind to a position inferior to some higher power, much less its total occlusion by such a power. He includes in the intuitional field such afflations as the artist's appreciation of beauty, the religious mystic's love of God, the sublimations of mathematical genius, the inventor's sudden leap to a perception of method and the apprehension of relations of data in synthetic unity.

Yet intuition is not, he thinks, in the long run something set apart and divorced from reason, repeating Fuller's notation on Spinoza's ideas to the same effect. The truth of the matter seems to Joad to be rather that the habit of close reasoning developed by a disciplined intelligence prepares the mind to make those ascents to the mounts of expanded vision and take those leaps into sudden discovery or clear perception, which thus seem like revelations from the blue sky of divine light, but are the natural culminations of the ordinary reasoning processes. These sudden sallies into the region of bright light and clear seeing are apparently not due to or produced by the reason; yet they occur mostly to people who have given long training to the reasoning faculty. They would hardly come if reason had not cut a road through the underbrush of sense and emotion to the possibility of their incidence. Then he adds that while intuition may be so defended, it is not thus that it is normally employed. "The resort to intuition is too often in practice a device to avoid hard thinking, or a cover to disguise the lack of thought." And he concludes a long analysis of the theme with the statement that intuition has little communal human value, be-

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cause like toothache, it can not be communicated to others for their realistic experience.

In treating of Plotinus Fuller makes it clear that in the Neo-Platonist's scheme of salvation there was no dodging of the discipline of clear and exact thinking according to the canons of logic established by the cosmos itself, and no substitution of edifying emotions and deathbed conversations in its place. Reasoning, to be sure, could not take one all the way to deepest truth, or to final Godhood. But the mind was surely not ready for inundations of Edenic rapture until the discipline of close reasoned thinking had been carried to its highest perfection. Plotinus even set some modest limits upon the capability of the soul to encompass full truth or experience high realities. The best she can do is to transform a disordered and unorganized jumble into an ordered and unified whole, such as Plato portrayed in the world of ideas. This is indeed her humble, yet divine, function. The culture of the soul involves the passing from the perfection of one discipline to the development of another; for, according to Plotinus, the soul in the world is confronted with the necessity of hard, clear and correct thinking. She must perfect her powers of reason as well as discipline her moral nature. She must solve intellectually the hard problems presented by the universe and follow where strict logic leads.

Again, on Plotinus, Fuller says that intuition can never safely be substituted for straight thinking. Indeed it can not supervene until logical thought has brought it to the threshold of quick perception.

"The divine intellect, meditating upon the structure of true being, lies between her and the One, and there is no circumventing it or avoiding the strenuous mental exercise of her climb toward it. The soul, then, if she would become pure contemplative reason, as she must before she becomes the one, has to philosophize. She must piece together the puzzle of real existence and work her way bit by bit to the principles and the forms that underlie the sensible world and guide her conduct in it. She must grasp the final categories of thought and being which pervade and organize the intelligible structure of the universe and provide the fundamental terms in which she reasons."

Here is philosophy, divine philosophy as the Greeks called it, illuminating the cognitive intelligence of a reader with truth that

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carries its own force of conviction as to its integrity and its significance for sensible men. It comes with the grateful acceptability of something refreshing to the very soul that, being potentially divine, longs for such refreshment in a weary land of meaningless events. It stands man on his own feet on homely ground made beauteous with the sheen of glorious understanding, as it edifies him with the gleaming vision of meaning pointing ever to shining heights ahead. In sharp contrast it stands to the Hindu maundering with conceptions that ask him to tear himself loose from all that has woven its strands into the fiber of his conscious life and leap blindly into some emptiness beyond the homely and the companionable in the earth and the certitude of good purpose in his reflection upon it. Here he can stand on his own ground and know that the very earth beneath him and the tree or the sky over his head hint to him of the ineffable majesty of meaning in the life here and persuade him that if he will apply his superb endowment of thought and reason to the task, the world and its life, which he shares, may speak their sublime oration to him. If it is presumed to have meaning, if he is here to be edified and exalted by it, then he can dwell amicably with it, till it whisper its oracular pronouncement to his intelligence. Only India tells him that he must turn his back on it, and scorning it as an impertinence, throw himself with abandon into the void that stretches above the viable province of mind.

The modern John Dewey has evidently caught the viewpoint of the Greeks. In The Quest for Certainty (p. 262), speaking of intellectual competence under the name of tact, or judgment, or "good taste," he says that the high mode of judgment that we call intuition does not precede reflective inquiry, but follows it, because it is the product of it, the outcome of much thinking based on experience. Expert judgments and cultured tastes are at once the result and the reward of the constant exercise of thinking. Instead of there being no disputing about tastes, they are the main things worth disputing about. Good tastes, in the best use of the words, are the outcome of experience brought simultaneously to bear on the sound estimates of real worth of things and actions, likings and aversions. Nowhere does a person so completely reveal himself nakedly as in the things he likes and dislikes. Only by discriminating evaluations of the sort does one save himself from being dominated by beliefs more or less, generally less, well grounded on

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verity, by blind impulse, by chance circumstance, inveterate habit or sheer self-interest of crude motivation. "The formation of a cultivated and effectively operative good judgment or taste with respect to what is essential, admirable, intellectually acceptable and morally approvable is the supreme task set to human beings by the incidents of experience."

And this, the supreme task of man in converting himself from a semi-savage brute into a cultured citizen of a social group evolving to the estate of divine lordship over life, would be totally negated, flouted and stamped out by the infatuations of mystical propensity and entranced intoxications of the mind. The addiction to negative cultism does not fall short of demonstrating that the deluded practice of suppressing the mental faculty stands as a positively perilous threat, as far as minds can be hypnotized by preachments of the sort, to the order and stability of human society. To dissociate oneself mentally from the area of interests which mortals share at their current level of sensual emotional and intellectual modes of conscious life is, as Aurobindo has pointed out, to abandon human society to the imbecilities and imperfections of its unintelligent mass consciousness and play the traitor, the deserter from the ranks of human fellowship, out of the motive of a self-centered personal salvation, all sense of brotherhood flung to the winds. If this attitude is not the heart's core of selfishness, it is close to it. It is again the demonstration, if not the proof, of what some few thinkers have noted, but in the main has gone unrecognized by mystics themselves, that the adoption by the mind of absolutistic conceptions inevitably tends to sever the ties of its devotees with the common human fraternity, and in short to dehumanize the individual so oriented. An attitude of revulsion against life, a negative view of its values, inexorably weakens concern for the human brother and thus becomes the most disintegrative force in the world.

Not for a moment does this fact abrogate in the least degree the individual's right, indeed his necessity of saving himself from victimization at the hands of the low moral and intellectual standards of the "vulgar masses." His obligation to the divine nucleus of potential glory within him guarantees to him the right to segregate himself as much as need be from the tyranny of low norms established by the "rabble" or the commonalty at low level. This

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is itself a most important phase of the spiritual life and needs emphasis. But it does not carry so far as to validate a total dissociation of the unit life from that of the human group at the level whereon it wrestles with the overt problem of existence. It is again a matter of finding the golden mean between individual separateness, freedom and self-development, on the one side, and on the other the relation of human fellowship with the commonalty. One can be in the world and not of it. Hindus themselves have at times declared that an ascetic renunciation of the world is never necessary as a condition even for personal salvation. The Buddha is said to have gone as far as he could on the path of asceticism and tried the way of withdrawal, but abandoned both out of a sense of his cosmic ties with the race at large.

India is beginning to see the ill effects upon her people of the exaggerated degree to which her philosophies have driven them in the direction of detachment from society and its objective concerns and needs, even of food. A reversion from introversion to extraversion is moving out with considerable force today. Condemnation of life is bound to take its toll. Life will not tolerate too much flouting of its inexorable drive, so trenchantly elaborated by Schopenhauer, to realize its divinely ordained objectives. And India must take stock of the realization that life has objectives, which in the nature of the case must be actualized objectively. As these two of her greatest thinkers whose views this work has exploited have at times expressed it, all conscious values are born out of the cosmic interlocking of the forces of being and non-being, spirit and matter, in the polarity. This being known and taken into account, it is evident beyond all quibbling that the external objective aspect of reality is as important as the internal subjective. It is thus validated as indispensable, and no excuse is left for further propagation of the philosophies crying the need to abrogate humanity in order to attain divinity or that which is alleged in pure absolutistic theory to lie even beyond divinity, the enjoyment of pure negation.

The conclusion is inescapable that in sum and substance the only possible outcome of the negative belief of the Hindu systems is the thesis that, man at his present stage being an unreal entity, his strategy should be to destroy himself as he now is, under the persuasion that he can then become his true self. It is all too likely

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that this notion is held in supreme ignorance of the fact that, if he destroy himself, his life sentence will indeed be ended with a period. Psychology regards a person with suicidal intent as sickly. That indeed must be a sickly and unbalanced mind which hugs the notion that a state of greater blessedness than this life offers is to be gained by ending the possibility of any consciousness, and therefore any blessedness at all. It is irrational to presume that a better condition can be won by destroying the possibility of all condition.

Then all life confronts the thinking human with another inexorable fact and law: in the evolution of conscious potential a higher stage in the gamut of rising values can never be attained until all preceding lower stages have developed their possibilities to the highest degree. It is the simplest deduction from this recognition that if man wishes to unfold his divinity, he must first perfect his humanity. India says he need not perfect his humanity; it is a shorter cut to kill it. If he hopes to bring out his intuition, which is his ability to apprehend truth by instantaneous recognition, he must first, as the great thinkers tell us, sharpen his intellect to its keenest edge. He will acquire no power beyond what he now can wield until he exploits his present potential to the full. Is it too extravagant a thought that a people who flout the intellect may themselves be caught in the toils of evil situations generated by their poor intellection? It must be asked how evolving creatures can rise to a higher rung of the ladder if they destroy the rung on which they are now standing; or destroy themselves; or throw down the ladder itself.

Psychology in its modern development has opened out a vista of a hitherto unsuspected world of consciousness, into which we have been given glimpses through the basement window of the "unconscious." India has recommended in its philosophy the occlusion from our consciousness of the ordinary modes of psychic reaction to our environment, namely sense, emotion and thought. These are to be "killed out," with the presupposition that then another world of supernal blessedness will disclose its magic to the enchanted subject. And India has elaborated an extraordinary technique for the designed manipulation of consciousness in these states. Four grades of entrancement are listed in the scheme of Buddhist psychology. Several grades of dream consciousness and dreamless sleep are classified as the steps which the neophyte must

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become proficient in superinducing if he would be on his way to the final obliteration of his waking consciousness.

But Western psychology, making a more pragmatic approach to the investigation, discovers that, so far from finding the realm of consciousness lying outside the normal waking state a flower garden of exquisite color and beauty, this superconscious region is disclosed to be the habitat of entities and elements that are anything but angelic or seraphic in character. Its wraiths may be goblins and gremlins as well as urim, thummim and cherubim. Many in the West who have opened their inner eye upon closing the outer, have found themselves consorting with the horrendous population of psychic slums in the purlieus of human baseness, and have been horrified at the sight. In some cases in our knowledge, with the doors opened to the intrusion of these entities into human consciousness, it was impossible to shut them out, and psychic disaster was the consequence.

Mr. Francis J. Mott, an astute writer, in his significant book, The Meaning of the Zodiac, (p. 92) gives us a statement of the actualities in the case:

"Often, of course, such reports of subjective experiences manifest evidence of great confusion. Often it is not the supernal creative forces of the psyche which are glimpsed by the mystic, but instead the contents of the 'emotion-memory' field of Cancer occupy his attention. The seer mistakes the contents of his own subconscious (and the contents of the collective unconscious) for spiritual reality. Then his reports do not concern themselves with such majestic realities as those described by Tennyson, but with the grotesque and often malicious contents of the psyche, as well as with its beautiful [but none the less arbitrary] contents."

India would no doubt put this down as the half-knowledge of groping empirical science, and say that such things are merely some incidental fringe phenomena of the true master-science of authentic mysticism, in no wise discrediting that true science.

But it would seem to be the truth of the matter that what would supervene upon inner consciousness when the normal outer awareness is shut out, would bear a character in some definite manner related to the character of the individual in the case. In some ratio to the quality of nobility or ignobility of the person would be the nature of the subconscious contents brought to the surface.

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Even the collective unconscious would be modified in cases of high development, intelligence and purity of life. But this is the product of lives of conscious experience in the area of self-controlled awareness, not the product of introversion in subjective detachment from the world and sense. It would be generated by experience in the extravert direction, for that is what the soul came into body to gain.

Mystical philosophy commits the arrant blunder of assuming that the course of life evolution is to be gloriously consummated by transferring it suddenly out of its cosmic cradle in earthly body into the elysian fields and asphodel meads of some asserted transcendental consciousness beyond the human range. Philosophy will never achieve the sane balance it must have if it is to elevate man in the scale of being or normalize his life on earth, until it instructs humanity in the assured knowledge that the growth and destiny of the human are determined solely by his reaction to his experience in his normal waking consciousness, not by the obliteration of that consciousness. For the ego can grow only by the exercise of free activity under terms of responsibility for consequences, and the sense of responsibility can not consciously function in the supernormal states. His progress is advanced always by what he thinks and does in his earthly life and his daytime state of consciousness, not by whatever irresponsible phantasmagoria of psychic mirages he may witness subconsciously in visions of the night, or in afterdeath states. It will be a hard conclusion for mystical ideology to accept, that the waking state is supreme in the determination of progression to higher being. Destiny is generated in the lives on earth, not in the dreamy passivity of heaven, for heaven is the place of reaping what has been sown on earth, not the place of sowing. Karma is borne along, altered, liquidated by the soul's activities when alive and awake, not in sleep or in death. The active, not the passive, life of the soul is forever the crucial phase. The rest periods, the inactive intervals, are, to be sure, not wholly inconsequential for growth, for they renew exhausted energies and balance the outgoing forces. But the matter of vital knowledge for philosophy is that the living conscious state of the ego is the experience on which all growth hinges. It is the period and the experience through which the soul is brought face to face with reality, yet it is this reality of conscious experience that the idealists call illusion. This experience the soul must undergo with the resources of its own equipment,

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this being life's method of stimulating its evolution and growth. Maya is the mother of the gods.

Not only is this a cardinal truth, but it is supplemented by the further truth that it is here in the body and on the earth that the soul has its own birth. It is entified here as the pure primal potentiality of seminal being, to be brought to its perfection by the exercise of its latent powers in the exigencies of self-conscious experience. It is germinally sown in earthly bodies--a unit measure to each body--for the specific purpose of being challenged, being goaded on by outer circumstance to the full deployment of all its capability. It is potentially all things spiritual, but it would never evolve its actual potencies in the unpolarized state in the heavens of spirit. To earth it must be sent if it is to rise to lordship over life. How could it ever become a lord of life if it did not become king of life through actual mastery of the natural energies which life must command for its ever fuller expression?

There is a question in some of the schools of Indian thought as to whether there is a self, an ego, an individual unit of nucleated being that can defy disintegration. Is man really a self? The alternative to the existence of the self in man is that spiritual man is just a congeries or series of successive states of consciousness which fill the area of his experience. But it seems incredible that we should not predicate the existence of a real being or entity that can coordinate the items of the experience to make them generate the thing called meaning. The succession of states must have meaning for some entity. The denial of existence to an ego poses many difficult questions. How can the continuity and integrity of the experience itself be maintained if there is no abiding identity within or behind the successive waves of conscious experience? It would appear incontestably logical to postulate an experiencer to be the subject of the experience. It is illogical to think that the sensations, emotions and intelligences experience themselves. Does a thought think about itself, or its accompanying sensations and emotions? This would reduce it to the absurdity, or at least the oddity, of saying that a thought is a thought about a thought. Yet Hindu mentation indulges in abstrusities and abstractions that often run into such dead end streets as this.

The question arises, too, as to how any moral responsibility can be in any way attached to a mere succession of conscious states,

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if they are not the morally weighed projections of a unit consciousness that maintains a continuity of identity. In face of the Oriental law of karma, too, how could there be reward and punishments to be meted out to a non-integrated run of ideations and feelings? If there is to be predicated--and practically all systems do predicate--Kant's, Spinoza's, Aurobindo's and Radhakrishnan's "synthetic unity of apperception," the postulation of a unit-self present to make and record the synthesis appears inescapable. There must be a central intelligence in the midst of all the experience to aggregate, compare, sift and judge the innumerable units of the conscious content, or there could be no summarized effect or deposit of the experience and no synthesis. The latter would not be possible without the constant presence of that which remembers. Are we to suppose that a thought or idea in the brain now remembers a thought of fifty years ago? It seems as necessary to postulate the self as to assume the existence of the spider if one sees the web. There could not possibly be the universal sense of self-identity without this unit of permanent being. And according to India's own philosophy there is the immutable absolute behind or above all experience of life and consciousness.

If it is not a hollow piping of poetic fancy to assert, as do the great Scriptures, that man is a microcosm formed in the image and likeness of the total macrocosm, then it is to be assumed that in the life of the microcosmic unit there must be an immutable and absolute principle behind and above the experience, but in fact expressing itself through the experience. This indeed is what the best thought of these two--and other--great Hindu pundits have been able to give the world in answer to the deepest questionings of the human mind. If there is not a self, what is it that, according to the traditional understanding of Oriental thought, goes peregrinating through all forms and grades of matter from coarse mineral to the most sublimated spiritual essences? What is that entity that, according to Plato, suffers a veritable exile from its supernal home and an imprisonment in earthly body!? Who are the individual members of that group of mortals that St. Paul calls "a colony from heaven"? What must be that unit of something that in the sacred Scriptures undergoes the cycles of birth, circumcision, baptism, temptation, trial, death, crucifixion, resurrection and

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return to its celestial haven, if it is not an individual entity permanently identifiable with itself? There must be a stable and abiding hard core of real being forever indissoluble to bear the consequences and carry the accumulated wealth of its continuous experience in the realms of existence.

The Hindu propensity to read the solid essence of reality out of the world of manifestation has gone so far beyond rational bounds as to have dissolved the self in man. As to the asserted manifestation itself, it is irrational to speak of it without implying the existence of something that can manifest. As to its nature it is universally admitted that we can know nothing and say nothing. It is of the essence of the infinite, the unknowable, the ineffable. Both thought and speech recoil from any effort to cognize or express it. Yet much Indian thought ventures the possibility of man's complete knowledge of, nay his complete absorption into, this inconceivable reality.

Yet again, from the other side of the argument, there is equally irrational folly in the preachment that the human entity can at some moment of time merge into the ultimate essence of something in the inmost being of which he already is and never has not been, and outside of which he could have, or have had, no being at all. If the creature is to merge into some other being, it must be separate and distinct from that other being. Yet it is Hindu philosophy that denies this separateness in its graphic phrase "thou art That." If man is already identical with the ALL, where the logic of speaking of his "merging into Brahman?" He can not "merge" because he was never apart from the absolute. In this sense all Yoga philosophy, all union, all atonement, all reconciliation doctrine, so undeviatingly held forth as the promised goal of the religious effort, is itself a tacit repudiation of that equally universal basic predication that "in Him we live and move and have our being." In sheer factuality it can not be said that a soul will unite with God when it has never been disparate from him. We can not become something we already are, units in the being of God. If we had not been one with God, we would not have been at any time or be now. There is no being apart from God.

To discover the origin of such phrases as those speaking of our eventual consummation of union with the All-Being, it is necessary to understand how human speech represents ideas that are con-

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ceived in relativity, since absolutes are beyond the human sphere. If God were a simple single essence of one undifferentiated nature, there would be no sense whatever in our speaking of merging with the absolute. But a technical sense can be accorded the phrase when it is known that God has not remained in or as an absolute being, but has, as Aurobindo explains, thrown himself into the realm or state of the conditioned and the relative. It is ever disconcerting and almost inconceivable for monistic idealism to realize that, as part of the world of ordained relativity, the manifestation of deific being presents itself at all grades, forms and levels of organization from the most inert and static up to the most subtle and lively. In this light there is the possibility of the human mind's grasp of a principle of understanding by which he may indeed and at last know how to think of the entire structure and meaning of the world's and his own living phenomena. From the vantage point of his knowledge of the graduated scale of organic being comprehended by the whole, the conception of his own life as immersed in God, yet obviously only a partial and weak manifestation of the totality of God's being--in him, yet immeasurably remote from wholeness of stature and dimension identical with him, is to be held as a fully rational truth in the understanding that he is in God, but at one of the lower levels of the gradient of God's expression. He can know himself to be integrally one with God in a small segment of his being, yet not one with him in the entirety of that being. His participation in the self of God is limited and partial; it is by no means complete. Time must work to bring it to vaster scope and measure of participation. He is identical with God in nature, but as it were, not in the full self-realization of the wholeness of that nature's potential. Though it expresses it too mechanically, it might do to say that he is identical with some portion of God's nature, but not with all of it. St. Paul speaks of our growing into the measure of the fulness of the stature of God. Monist philosophy will not countenance for a moment any divisions within the body of God nor consider a movement of consciousness up a gamut of values and degrees of expression. A One embracing all, without differentiation, is its philosophical charter. But, as our Indian philosophers assert, man lives in the realm of the relative and must deal with relativities as the actualities of his experience. He may disregard them theoretically, but as long as he is man he will not dis-

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regard them actually. His mind may repudiate them, but his body can not,--except at the peril of self-destruction. Theory can abolish the differentiation between things, since all are composed of the same one universal essence; but it cannot abolish the differences in the endless recombinations and organizations of the particles of the essence.

The explication here advanced is, we find, quite fully endorsed by Ramanuja as against the absolute, unconditioned, ungraded reality asserted by the great sage Shankara. As set forth in Hervey D. Griswold's Insights into Modern Hinduism, it is analyzed as follows:

"Shankara denied that anything except the fullest reality is real, all else being cast into the limbo of the unreal. For to him absolute unconditioned and necessary being is the hall-mark of reality. Ramanuja, on the other hand, accepted various levels of the real on the principle that reality is a 'thing of degrees.' Thus for Ramanuja the contrast was between independent and dependent reality; for Shankara, between complete reality and illusion, Brahman and Maya. Shankara's unity is the unity of a bare naked monad, while Ramanuja's is the unity of a system. The one is an idealist theory pushed to the utmost extreme; the other is comparatively realistic."

But India in the main is intolerant of relative values; not comparative realism, but absolute reality is her lodestone for the human spirit. Directly on this point Griswold speaks from knowledge based on long personal experience during residence in India. For the sake of its general impressiveness his whole paragraph should be seen (p. 26):

"There is no other land on earth where there is such reverence for the religious mendicant and such readiness on the part of multitudes for a life of extreme hardship and even self-inflicted torture as in India. But here, too, reverence for the ideal of renunciation is often an indiscriminating one, responsible for the existence in India of no less than five millions of mendicants; vast numbers of whom are certainly not religious in any sense; and as a non-producing element in the population are a serious economic drag. In like manner the capacity for self-sacrifice in connection with religion has too often realized itself in selfish and unpractical ways, the religious devotee usually being supremely concerned about his personal salvation alone, and seeking it by a process of self-annihilation rather then self-development."

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The last eight words of the quotation express with great vividness the gist of many pages of our elucidation in this work. No two words could more truly set off the difference between what we might venture to call true philosophy and Hindu divagations from it, the true view of life being summed up as a self-development within the absolute, the false Hindu view (not shared by Ramanuja) being the recommended method of self-annihilation.

Griswold again pictures much the same Indian repugnance to life from a slightly different angle. Mentioning the Vedanta phrase "Aham Brahma," "I am Brahma," he writes:

"Whatever else this formula may mean, it voices the aspirations of many of the saintliest thinkers of India for a union with Deity so close as to be equivalent to identity. It expresses the longing of the Indian heart for release from the trammels of the phenomenal world, and participation in the changeless perfection of the Absolute."

On this bent of the general religious consciousness of India, her own scholarly expositors and the students of her systems speak with practically one common voice. The Indian soul is simply sick of life and its deepest yearning is to escape its rigors.

In his valuable work Hinduism Invades America Wendell Thomas quotes the great Hindu missionary to America, the noted Swami Vivekananda, as saying that in view of our many desires and few satisfactions, life is nothing short of hideous. And his Raja Yoga system, says Thomas, simply points "the way out." "All orthodox systems of Hindu philosophy have one goal in common, the liberation of the soul." They are not concerned with its education, and, lacking anything in the nature of a synthetic philosophy that takes all factors and all data of experience into account,--indeed ignores experience as being futile and productive of no real value--they aim only at salvation from it. What, asks Thomas, did the famous Swami teach? "Just the old-fashioned 'knowledge' and 'meditation' of India, the jnana-yoga and the raja-yoga, aiming at the suppression of the body and the exaltation of the spirit." In all the hundreds of books that deal with this formidable theme, which in a balanced view has its legitimate place of great importance in rational religion, there has possibly never been expressed any perception of the immense gulf of difference that intervenes between a view that looks to the exaltation of the spirit

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through the most perfect development of the body as the instrument of that exaltation, and the wholly irrational view of Hinduism that the exaltation of the spirit is to be achieved only by the suppression of the body. The second and erroneous view virtually challenges Deity with having grossly blundered in relating spirit to earthly bodies at all. As hinted earlier, the Oriental thought finds itself under no obligation to answer the first and most elementary question of all human inquiry: for what purpose are souls dispatched to earth, or at any rate are brought to birth in mortal bodies in such a world?

Its great systems of philosophy therefore in the main only argue, so to say, in the upper stories of a building for which they have laid no foundation. And they are airy and wispish and gossamer because they do not rest on the ground of basic consideration of rudimentary truth. The foundation of a true philosophy would be the elements of solid fact that human life, generated by the union of soul and body, has a specific purpose that is predicable as good, and that it offers to the soul units thus allotted a destiny in such a milieu, the glorious opportunity to grow into heights of being that will be crowned with immortality and bliss. Greek, Egyptian, Hebrew and the most and best of Western philosophies are built on these ground bases, and their systemologies therefore develop consistently with the premises of fact and reality. If Hindu systems include these basic principles in their elaboration, they do so with incidental light touch and with never the emphatic accentuation they should be given in a truth-seeking synthesis.

Thomas (p. 60) writes that "there is not an orthodox Hindu cult that does not regard the world as the result of an undesirable causal cycle, and reality as the realm of painless bliss. The highest good, then, is obviously some kind of escape from the world into bliss."

Of the other Swami who "invaded" America with much success, Yogananda, Thomas says he instructed the "classic yoga, which teaches the annihilation of mental activity."

To India life can not be philosophically explained because it can not be justified as beneficent. On the statements of her own religious founders, thinkers and protagonists, in failing to explain the life and world that most of all demand rationalization, India's philosophies in the main are bankrupt from the start. India finds

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itself in a world that is in truth, as Greece and Egypt so discerningly noted, a burning fire of living elements, in whose "crucible of the great house of flame" the divine souls of men are to be forged into gods of immortal glory and power; and all that India can do in face of this open opportunity to conquer all life is to cry escape from the living flame. That flame she can see only as torturing her and threatening destruction. She seems to lack utterly the ability to understand it as the tempered fire that will forge humanity into radiant divinities.

Ignoring and scorning the world, she is naturally not going to cull from its garden those generic principles that are discernible to vigilant eye in the open world process, and which are the basic archai, the essential ingredients in the rational structure. Those archetypal forms are the ribs, beams and stays of the cosmic logos, and they are both implicit and manifest in the order of the world creation. But, disdaining to consider nature worthy of her notice, holding it even as an evil impertinence, India has not looked intently enough at nature's cinematograph of truth to have abstracted from the phenomenal show its noumenal significances, its laws and ordinances. It therefore can not offer to philosophy a rational elucidation of the problem of mundane existence. Thomas has said that India does not attempt to explain life; it only explains it away. If one seeks from India the meaning of life, he will have no answer; he will be told to root out from himself the elements that cause him to believe the world is of importance. It is much as if one should in serious illness apply to a physician for remedy and be told that he had best cure the trouble by destroying himself.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

EPITHALAMIUM

Chanting the theme-song of avidya (ignorance), Indian philosophy continues to repeat parrot-like the incessant charge that the human has got himself entangled in nescience, and instead of preaching the counsel of sanity embodied in the advice to work through and out of the avidya to vidya or knowledge, it counsels only escape from the darkness by self-annihilation. The norm-attitude toward a difficult situation would be to handle the elements of the predicament so as to gain the most from it, not to flee before it. It is in fact impossible that India's philosophies should be considered rational systems. They are expressions only of a world-weary, world-sick despondency. They express no valiance of the spirit of man to battle and win something out of wrestling with the forces challenging him to arouse his divinity. They only sound retreat.

This is all most astonishing and paradoxical in face of the fact that the Bhagavad Gita has come, through Gandhi's influence, to be almost the "Bible" of India. For the supreme message of that document is the necessity of fighting the great battle of the soul against its enemies with resolute determination and vigor. To the shrinking faint-hearted Arjuna (man) the spiritual Lord, Krishna, drills home to his intelligence the inexorable duty (dharma) to wage the conflict with all one's might. For man to withdraw and fold his hands in peace would be to let the issues of cosmic gravity hang in static inanition. It is to be hoped that this Scripture will goad India out of her mental lethargy, out of her traditional mood of dreamy passivity, to lay hold on life realistically.

Oddly enough, one finds a note of complete reconciliation with the world in a passage in Theos Bernand's book on Hindu Philosophy (p. 16).

"The Tantras are aware of the fact that the world of name and form with its sorrow and suffering can not be dissolved by logic alone. They teach that only by growth and development can the obstacles of life be surmounted. They accept the world around us as it is, exalting everything, discarding nothing, relegating everything to its rightful place and providing a spiritual prescription for an orderly life according to the Laws of Nature."

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Unfortunately the voice speaking here does not express any uniform or dominant strain in Hindu philosophy. It is a nearly lone key drowned out in the heavy monotonous droning of the dirge of earthly woe and the cry to escape. If India had as a whole and uniformly accepted the gist of this excerpt, that the world of name and form can not be dissolved by logic or any mental process, nor eradicated from influence on man by any force other than those released by growth and development in time, the history of the human race over the last two and a half millennia would certainly have been written in brighter letters than those that have had to record it. It is certain that a large measure of the gross superstition in religion that even Indian students have had to deplore would have been diminished in volume and degree. Philosophy must rest on and start from an acceptance of the universe as intrinsic expression of the cosmic mind. A positive philosophy must base its postulates on the assumption that the universe and man's relation to it manifest the realities of being. A creature's refusal to accept it and to base his mental attitudes on volitional inharmony with it can only set up a discord both in the universe and in the creature's psyche. If he puts himself mentally out of harmony with its elan he does but disorganize his own life. If he insists in viewing it through a dark glass of pessimistic theory, he does but throw his own vision out of focus, and therefore sees it all askew. One indeed may blank out the world, but only by blanking out his own vision. As long as India continues to shout into the ear of mankind, as its supreme message, the unrelieved threnody of earthly sorrow and its suicidal cry of escape by self-immolation, it will but add to the sum of suffering. One may flout the courses in the school of life as one might flout the courses in a college, and with the same result. But one will not flout them with beatitude.

It is both a curious and a revealing fact that the Buddhistic and general Hindu formula which makes the desire for conscious life itself the one cause of sorrow has been accepted with so little criticism or rebuttal. It can not call upon human experience for validation of its truth. The consensus of mass human opinion and experience itself refutes it in large part. No one denies the massive existence in the world of sorrow and suffering. But the common experience of the world belies the postulates which India weaves into their connotation. India flatly or tacitly asserts that sorrow

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and suffering are the whole of the experience. If it can be shown that this is not the full truth, the hollowness of the Hindu claims can be established.

If there is the admission that life offers at least a modicum of joy and distills some sweetness out of its tribulation, the false basis of the dour philosophies will be demonstrated.

But it hardly needs demonstration that human life is not wholly or even predominantly tragic. The view that makes ill and pain the essential categorization of life is a narrow, short-sighted and eccentric half-truth. India steadily commits the dialectical sin of attempting to segregate one aspect of the polarity from the other, if only in the thought-structure, and this disturbs the balance and violates the truth. As spirit and matter compose life's family of brother and sister, likewise joy and sorrow stand related. Neither can come to expression in consciousness apart from its tensional relation to the other. The quantity and character of the one determines the degree and quality of the other. The hero only finds his glorification by vanquishing the villain. Joy arises from the reflex of sorrow, and sorrow springs from the default of joy. The two are mythologized as twins because they are born together, each being the counterfoil of the other. Tears and laughter play hide and seek constantly with each other in this life. At any rate there is laughter, very likely equalling the quantity of tears. Grief and tragedy generate sweet compassion. We seldom stop to think how thoroughly relativity sets the seal of value upon all our feeling reactions and our mental determinations. Things take on moral tone and color by comparison. The heavy travail of pain is sweetened by the eventual cessation of it. The night shall be filled with sorrow, but joy cometh in the morning.

Certainly life teaches us and we learn to diminish the suffering and increase the delight. Knowledge comes and, though wisdom lingers, it arrives at last. Our school-days have their tensions and scant rewards; each day provides a problem and some home-work. Yet school-days are always remembered as happy days. India asks how maya, the unreal, can teach us. Answer is that it is not unreal in the first place, being just a particular form of the reality. But even if it were, its unreality would at every turn make us watchful not to be beguiled twice by the same illusion. A true thing teaches us by its truth, but a false thing teaches us by its falsity. Both

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prove profitable. India's philosophy is based on an assumption which is not true as fact. India asks for bliss, but demands it without paying its price in the tension that alone can bring it. Ecstasy comes as the consummation of tribulation, which etymologically means a rubbing. Life's fire of joy and sorrow is generated by friction between spirit and matter. India wants the baby of ananda, but without the marriage and intercourse of the father and mother of life. Her pessimism is unjustified, as it results from a false and unbalanced reading of the data of experience.

If life's path runs through a vale of tears and is a Via Dolorosa, its earthly setting and scenery is a veritable Paradise of beauty. Mountains tower in grandeur, rivers roll in majesty and waterfalls crash in thunder; the seasons yield delightful variety in their procession; the elements awe, delight and bless us; the good earth miraculously nourishes us, the sea and air make a track for our travel; wonder, mystery, charm and challenge greet us from the side of the earth itself. Friendship, love, comfort, home and family affection, the deep response of divine soul to brother divine soul even in affliction exalt the experience. There is poetry, there is art, music, the joy of creation. Man, God's own Son, learns to share the Father's supreme Lila. The great game grows ever more thrilling and we have its minor and its consummative orgasms of ecstasy. One has to wonder, as did Max Mueller, how all these affirmative values can leave the Hindu mind so wholly committed to the evil view of life. It is sheer blindness if not mental imbecility or dishonesty to assert only the painful side of life and build a lopsided philosophy on it. Both the grievous strain and the lightsome joy are the essential ingredients in life's immediate and ultimate beneficence.

If it is permissible to assume that what nature is doing is that which was planned, it seems legitimate to predicate that the teleological design foreordained by cosmic mind for both nature and man her child contemplated the growth of the conscious entity in the womb and on the bosom of its natural mother. Man owes his present status of conscious being to the nature that bore him and nurtured him from infancy. Is he now to throw over his mother heartlessly? Is he to accept her benignant offices and deny her even an affectionate acknowledgement and appreciation? Is her child to fling her off when he comes of age, heartlessly oblivious of her ten-

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der ministry through his helpless years? Is he to turn against her and assail her for having seduced him into life and ostracize her as the wanton harlot of the Scriptures? If there was vile seduction in the birth of souls, spirit,--which India exalts--was equally guilty with the matterhood. India looks at the prodigious effort which nature has made over billions of years to produce a material world in which souls could be born and reared to a maturity of bliss, and philosophically pronounces the whole colossal effort an abortion. God looked upon his material creation and pronounced it good. India disagrees; it is all a mistake. India regards her sonship from mother nature as illegitimate. She is willing to sell her natural birthright for a mess of spiritual pottage.

The Christian dogma of surrender of man's natural selfhood to God had its provenance from earlier Hindu theorization. India adjures man to do more than surrender his nature; she urges him to destroy it, so that the absolute nothingness can engulf him. Nowhere in all the literature of the primal wisdom is there the slightest intimation that higher beings, gods, archangels, surrender any of the powers they have won in evolution. On the contrary they are said to gather up and synthesize all powers in the focal point of their own self-conscious life. They become the embodiments and wielders of the thunderbolt, the fire, the solar energy. They become the coadjutors of the highest in the ongoing flux of creation. If what was in humanity on its way to evolve into self-directed rulership of life's forces is to fade out and vanish with the merging of the unit into the totality, it would turn back the direction toward the automatism from which it emerged in its incipiency, and so to say, unwind the creation. It would undo all the work of the individual selfhood that had been achieved up to the height of man's estate. India must answer the question why life would go immeasurably far toward the completion of the evolution of conscious life and then end the process by dissolving it back into the Be-ness which is neither Being nor Becoming. Also it must explain how the units bearing the consciousness can continue evolutionary growth if the unity of their individual selfhood is lost. It is surely possible for life to demonstrate a unity among individuals without the surrender or annihilation of their individuality. But India will permit no survival (Buddhism not even the existence) or perpetuation of the individual. He must lose himself in Nirvana by return to un-

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differentiation. Of a unit that is not to retain its individual integrity no growth can be predicated. It can have no history.

The universal legend of a perpetuity of heavenly bliss that has obsessed the consciousness of the human race can be shown to be a distorted popular rendition of what in better intelligence stands as something quite other. Life presents nowhere the analogue of an uninterrupted continuity of any state, least of all a state of measureless bliss. Life is not equipped to sustain a transport of transcendental ecstasy for more than a spasmodic moment, and then only at the apex of a cycle of intercourse between consciousness and its instrument. The energy that can raise the consciousness to the enchantment of bliss is generated always by the heat of friction. Hindu philosophy urges the severing of the relation of the two elements whose bruising of head and heel generates the friction. Life's gratuity, her opulent largesse of bliss, is, like all else in her range of bestowal, rhythmic, periodic, cyclic. The consummation of an outburst of bliss by detachment of the spirit from matter is something that life can not bestow. The functions of man's body, the natural round of phenomena, the tides of outgoing and ebbs of withdrawal are all synchronized to beat and measure. Philosophies that have divorced their tenets from relation to matter and nature take no account of these laws, which are the analogues of all truth, and offer indefeasible paralogues to enlighten the mind. The conception of an eternality of being in absoluteness after the soul has escaped from its painful durance in body is completely out of accord with the Hindu doctrine of the soul's many incarnations. The ideal of a final and eternal release from conditioned existence into absolute being must be taken as an ignorant presentment, not endorsed by profound Oriental knowledge. A sentence from a treatise on the Mimamsa system of Hindu philosophy (one of the six) puts out of court any positing of an everlasting surcease of tensional experience following graduation from earth's college. Saying that one Kalpa (4,320,000,000 years) follows another in due course, it reads: "This periodic rhythm of consciousness is without absolute beginning or final end." Each cycle has its beginning and end, but the run of cycles has no beginning or end. Each cycle takes life units through the two alternating arcs of conscious activity and unconscious rest.

The remarkably discerning system known as Kashmir Saivism

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"contends that there is only one reality, but it has two aspects; therefore the manifestation is real. This is based on the argument that the effect cannot be different from its cause. The world of matter is only another form of consciousness in the same way that the web of a spider is a part of its substance in another form."

That cause and effect, which Western thought has always distinguished so widely, are but two aspects of the same thing, is postulated in the six systems of Hindu philosophy, more especially in the first two, the Nyaya and the Vaisesika, but accepted by the others. Their identity is affirmed. But the cause is a force still unevolved, implicit in being; the effect is the same force when evolved into being. "Both are real." And again the endlessness of the process of involving and evolving is asserted. "According to the Sankhya system the eternal process of nature is without beginning or end."

The dependence of spirit (Purusha) on matter (Prakriti) is explicitly proclaimed:

"Purusha and Prakriti coexist and are separated only for the purpose of formal demonstration, for they do not have any separate existence. All manifestation is the interaction of these two principles. Neither has independent function. The formless Spirit (Purusha) cannot act by itself because it has no vehicle; the cosmic Substance (Prakriti) can have no urge to action because it is inanimate; therefore it is only by the union of Spirit and Matter that existence can manifest. They are dependent upon one another and come into existence by the inseparable attribute of one another. Both are eternal realities, unmanifest, without beginning or end, all-pervading and omnipotent."

If Hindus and the rest of humanity could have settled upon this simple statement of practically self-evident truth, endless quibbling over questions that are eventually groundless could have been avoided, to the enhanced happiness of mankind. "The senses and their objects must come into existence at the same time," because they are the two wings, so to say, of the bird of self-conscious existence. In this light it can be seen how senseless is the preachment that the spirit of man can detach itself from involvement in all concrete life and action in the world of objectivity. Life must swing alternately between meditation and action; meditation in eternal inactivity is not life's modus. A life must achieve its end and goal through action, as a seed fulfils itself through growth.

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Bernard, dissertating on the Mimamsa system says that no amount of contemplation will enable man to arrive at the ultimate goal of human destiny; "therefore the emphasis is on the ethical side rather than on the philosophical." Action in the milieu of the world, not fugitive detachment from the world, is the spiritual prerequisite of life. And if right action is alone productive of true growth, how preposterous the preachment that the mind, the intellect, even the emotions and the senses, are to be deadened and dissolved! The determinant of right action is always the sharp and subtle intellect.

The Mimamsa system emphasizes a difference between salvation and liberation. The first is to be won through the finished evolution of all man's powers, saving him from the wretched consequences of his ignorance, giving him mastery of the forces he must control. But liberation is alleged to come through the suppression or destruction of all his faculties. It conveys the possibility of victory without working through to it. The liberation idea too often aims at the release from the tensions and pressures necessary for salvation. In the battle for salvation there will be tidal surges lifting consciousness to heights of beatitude; but there will be no pull out of the polarity, it will but confuse and delay the progression. Heaven itself can bless no soul with ecstasies the foundations of which have not been laid on earth. A vast quantum of Indian philosophy virtually builds on the thesis that the journey to heaven will be summarily achieved without further ado if we destroy the ladder of ascent. It alleges that it is the ladder that is holding us down.

Egregiously the fatuity of slandering the intellect as the thong and fetter of our bondage is demonstrated by the reflection that even if the soul (or whatever core is left to enjoy anything) attains its perfect liberty in the Nirvanic release, it must still have the intellect available to enable it to determine what use to make of its glorious liberty. In religious infatuation liberty comes to be regarded as the veritable substance of some exalted consciousness, itself an essence of felicity. It is of course only the opportunity to be, to do, to live. And always the intellect must be called in to determine what one should do with the freedom. Neither liberty nor bliss is capable of making decisions. Bliss, like intuition, is held to transcend the intelligence. Therefore in the enjoyment of bliss

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and liberty there would be no intelligence. A rejoinder to this would be that bliss "supersumes" the fulfillment of all intelligence, as love fulfils all law. But mystical theory demands the destruction of the faculty which implements the intelligence. Reason would seem to make necessary the sharpening and perfecting of the intelligence, not demand its destruction.

A sidelight on the attitude that India takes even in world politics is thrown on the discussion by comment of a newspaper writer in the New York Times of a late October date of 1953. The article deals with the criticism advanced against the United States position vis-à-vis India's passive neutralism in the free world's opposition to Communism, by no less a statesman than our philosopher, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Vice President of India. The commentator's remarks criticize the noted Hindu philosopher's advice to the United States that it should "turn the other cheek" of tolerance and forbearance to the Russian power on the ground that Communism will eventually democratize itself, and he says that "these sentiments to a Western observer seem to reflect the passive reliance of contemplative Indians on the eventual triumph of good over evil, as symbolized in all the great religious festivals of the Hindus. They are inclined to be impatient, sometimes contemptuously, sometimes indulgently, of United States preoccupation with the immediate."

The observation points to the Hindu lack of concern with the "outer world" and its affairs, in its absorption in the ideal, the subjective, the absolute and unconditioned aspect of being, from the mountain-top purview of which all merely mundane matters can be regarded as inconsequential. Also it can be seen how the darksome shadow of unreality hovers over the scene in the Hindu mind, diminishing the importance of world events as mere shadows flitting transiently across the cloudless sky of the ultimate pure being. The crucial outcome of the maya philosophy here involved seems to the Westerner something more solid and menacing than a passing shadow which will of itself dissolve in the eternal sunshine with a little demonstration of the non-resistance spirit. The Bhagavad Gita calls for action, and it looks as if the West was responding to that challenge of the great Hindu Scripture more vigorously than its Eastern champion. The "Bible of India" makes no light matter of the conflict that is sharpened to acute poignancy in the individ-

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ual and the world Armageddon between the two ends of the good-evil polarization, and it counsels eternal vigilance and a valiant resoluteness in the fight. The conflict could not offer its supremely glorious rewards in the exalted capacity for larger delight in life if the tension was not severe enough to bestir mortals out of non-creative passivity.

Relative to the maya doctrine, what the Kashmir Saivism posits seems extraordinarily clear among so much vague speculation of different Hindu cults. This system regards maya not as a separate reality, but as the power of being to give itself the experience of self-consciousness, and in this character calls it Maya-Sakti. It is the power which during the pralaya period of universal dissolution is rendered inactive and latent, being balanced out in the neutralization of the two forces. At no time is it non-existent, but in the pralaya it is non-active. It is eternal and unproduced, this Saivism asserts, but is periodically alternately active and dormant in the eternal rhythm. It is described as the "finitizing" principle, that which gives unpolarized absolute conscious potential the opportunity to advance upward through a gamut of ever expanding grades and degrees of actualized self-consciousness. It is thought of as sundering in twain the divine unity of the eternal Being and thus bringing into being the two polarized twins, mind and matter.

* * * * * * *

It seems desirable to round out the discussion by presenting some quite lucidly clarifying matter garnered from the latter half of Aurobindo's great work, The Life Divine. His own survey of the great organic frame of truth seemed to develop greater "synthetic unity of apperception" as he rounded out his conclusions. Some of his observations are supremely appropriate for examination in the finale of our study. His findings furnish additional strength to the general position of our work. As is inevitable in a summary, there will seem to be some repetition.

We have first his strong statement that worlds of a higher consciousness are not the only possible arena of blessed life for the perfected soul. This material world of ours contains the possibility of all other worlds in it, as yet unrealized, but ever realizable.

"Earth lapse is not a lapse into the mire of something undivine, vain and miserable, offered by some power to itself as a spectacle

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or to an embodied soul as a thing to be suffered and then cast away from it; it is the scene of the evolutionary unfolding of the being which moves toward the revelation of a supreme spiritual light and power and joy and oneness, but includes also the manifold diversity of the self-achieving Spirit."

This stands so directly in repudiation of the "fall of man" theology that it must be seen as an epochal utterance. Christian hierarchism must take note of this pronouncement, for it constitutes a grave challenge to all Western theology.

He follows this momentous declaration with the straight asseveration of the teleological doctrine:

"There is in all-seeing purpose in the terrestrial creation; a divine plan is working itself out through its contradictions and perplexities, which are a sign of the many-sided achievement towards which are being led the soul's growth and the endeavor of Nature."

If there is divine plan in this life, then all Hindu negativism in face of it is at once and forthwith disallowed and rendered nugatory. And the paragraph is climaxed with the robust conclusion that while it is true that the soul can ascend to celestial regions above the earth,

"it is also true that the power of these worlds, the power of a greater consciousness has to develop itself here; the embodiment of the soul is the means for that development . . . . An evolution of the Divine Existence; the spiritual reality in the apparent Inconscience of matter is the starting-point of evolution."

Here is the voice of true philosophy offering rational grounds for an acceptable explanation of our world experience, instead of the usual Hindu quirk of "explaining it away." Aurobindo's assertions nullify whole segments of India's traditional negative and pessimistic dialectic by reading cosmic purpose and beneficent function in the mundane existence.

This is followed by his elaboration of the development of all consciousness from beginnings in ignorance (p. 623):

"Obscurity and primitive inadequacy of the first perceptions do not detract from the value or the truth of this great quest of the human heart and mind, since all our seekings--including science itself--must start from an obscure and ignorant perception of hidden realities and proceed to the more and more luminous vision of truth which at first comes to us masked, draped, veiled by the mists of the ignorance."

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The full clear envisagement of this simple fundamentum, to be found in the Vedas and Upanishads, could have saved Indian thought untold misapprehension and speculative questing.

The initial governance, a necessary condition of the creation of new living beings, yields in time to knowledge; for in the process of growth the unity of God and nature cannot fail to manifest itself to the developing faculties; and what is found in the end is that it is the Absolute itself that is manifesting in the long run of the apparently meaningless phenomena.

Yielding to the omnipresent pressure of general pessimistic theory, Aurobindo faces squarely the great problem of the existence of ignorance, evil and wrong in our world. Yet he holds faithfully to a positive explanation and redeems the utility of the world experience, validating it as good. While it is hard to admit the necessity for the illusion and the falsehood, there must be some purpose in the appearance of "contrary phenomena," some meaning, some function fulfilled by it in the cosmic economy. For it is inadmissible that confusion or some "ugly contretemps for which the indwelling Spirit was not prepared, and of which it is the prisoner erring in a labyrinth with the utmost difficulty of escape," should be supposed to have befallen the plan of Divine Omniscience. Nor can it be a mere mystery of being, original and eternal, of which neither God nor man can render a logical account to intelligence. Behind the phenomenal show of events however apparently meaningless, there must be a significance of the All-Wisdom itself, some outworking design in the total operation.

A solid refutation of mayavic theory and a validation of our life experience is set forth by Aurobindo when he says (p. 650) that our true happiness lies in the true growth of our whole being, in a victory not only in the stilling of the lower forms of sense-consciousness, but in the development of every faculty in the total range of our life-power, both the inner and the outer potencies. Not some condition of static passivity, but forward-pressing mastery of new powers is the coefficient of true existence.

If this is true, there can be no real illusion in maya. For this reads into maya a positive character. And there can be no illusion, certainly no delusion, in an experience and a process that carries the unit ego steadily forward in a line of expanding dynamic, yielding enhanced values at every stage.

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In passages that have the savor of Neo-Platonic philosophy Aurobindo dissertates on the descent of the pure soul from on high into the murky smudgy atmosphere generated by the darkness of the avidya, or nescience with which the material nature beclouds the soul's vision. The ancient Egyptians used the symbol of the zodiacal Scorpion to depict the power of the sensual instinct to sting the soul of Ra into a coma or trance condition on earth. Aurobindo presents the same item but omits the illuminative feature of the Egyptian myth, that in his trance sleep on earth the great spiritual deity Ra is seduced to disclose his creative secret to Isis, the material nature. Soul migrates to earth not only to continue its evolution, but to communicate its divine nature to the animal orders next below it in the gradations. It is to be noted that the Hindu philosopher posits the descent of the soul as the cause of its immersion in avidya. He assents to it as bare fact, but still does not fit it in with a scheme of positive beneficence. Only grudgingly do Hindu minds admit the good purpose of life. And Aurobindo still uses the coma figure to impress upon us the dream-trance nature of our life here.

He does, however, absolve the absolute from perpetrating a senseless self-limitation in the mayavic creation. The absolute is not really limiting itself by developing a cosmos of phenomenal appearance. Such an enterprise is but a natural play (Lila) of its free being in delight of adventure. World creation is the infinite's natural mode of self-expression. The One is not limiting itself in such a manifestation, but is enjoying its free fling in creative activity. It might even be conceived that it can enjoy a more expanded sweep of energy release when projecting itself out into the many than when remaining the One. In this wide expression of its nature the innermost gist of the Lila is distilled at the heart of consciousness by the necessity of mastering the opposition of the material inertia. And the philosopher does approach a more competent dialectic in saying that Sachchidananda (Existence-Consciousness-Bliss) descends into material nescience "to find itself in the apparent opposites of his being and his nature." It deliberately puts on the ignorance as a garment, and having done so to make a new beginning, it wanders long unawakened to the knowledge of its true origin and true nature. But in this dark "underworld" it has to make a rediscovery of itself and in so doing achieve a transfor-

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mation of itself into far higher being, which was the purpose of its descent into the nescience. As the Scriptures so paradoxically say, to gain more life the entity must lose what at the end of one cycle it has, to begin a new growth. Aurobindo here goes beyond any admission of cosmic purpose in the travail on earth commonly met with in Hindu philosophy, in saying that the soul is here not merely to repeat a purposeless round in ignorance, but even to find its heaven of joy and delight in the very opposites between which its unity is torn. The joy and delight even in the struggle would then seem to be the true object of the birth of the soul in body and the necessary though quite separate term imposed by the universal energy on itself to generate the whole movement of manifestation. And this, he says, is not a blunder, not a fall, but a purposeful descent; not a curse, but a divine opportunity. To find and embody the delight of infinite being in an intense summary of its manifoldness, to achieve a possibility of the supreme Existence which could not be gained in less stressful conditions, to create out of matter a temple of the Divinity, would seem to be the task imposed on the spirit in coming to earth.

This fine analysis should not be passed without comment. It might almost be apostrophized as the first breath of philosophical healthy-mindedness let into the suffocating atmosphere of the negative-pessimistic Hindu thought-chamber. That the soul migrates to earth to achieve a purpose that could not be achieved in the Nirvana, the Moksha, the release into unconditioned absoluteness, is to negate at one stroke the whole mountain heap of dark and gloomy volumes of Indian lucubration on the joylessness of life. At last Indian thought seems to have fought its way out of its fog of pessimism to see that the soul has come to earth not through some sad fatality of error, but to forge a temple of strength, power and beauty in which it may worship the majesty of that divine nature of which it is the seed of a new birth.

The soul does indeed not come here initially as a soul already born, descending gratuitously from full-blown bliss into nescience and suffering. It has been an ingrained persuasion of most religionism that mere residence in "heaven" is the guarantee of perfection and bliss. But it would seem reasonable to assume that the gradations in growth and progress must hold there as elsewhere in the

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evolution, and that new young souls can not stand quite where older ones have climbed. It could well be that the cryptic meaning hinted at in the Christian creed when it describes the son-emanation of the Trinity as being "begotten, not created," is implicit in the situation envisaged here. The soul is but the seed-potential of soul when it first leaves the heavenly realm and must live in lower ground to be evolved into the full stature of soulhood. "Begotten before all worlds" would thus signify its primordial origin from cosmic mind. A man's thought of a house is "begotten" in his mind, but it is not a "created" house until it is materialized. So it is with the divine emanations, so also with the soul. Egypt put it in express terms: heaven conceived him; the Tuat (underworld, earth) gave him birth.

Not then in heaven but down on earth the soul has its birth into self-conscious reality in response to the stimuli that impinge upon it from without,--those very influences that Hindu philosophy has so sullenly decried. First sensation, then emotional reaction, then intellectual effort, lead the germ of soul onward in its grade-school of development. And this is a long slow process, requiring time for consummation,--an admission that directly flouts so much assertion of any quick release into the absolute timelessness. And Aurobindo adds that as against the claim that the conditioned world experience holds back the soul, it is on the contrary the essential instrumentation of that eventual emancipation. The soul is begotten in heaven, but it can not be born there. For birth it must come to earth.

Says Aurobindo definitely on this point:

"The means used is a contact with the world, and its forces and objects, like the rubbing of tinders, creates a spark of awareness; the response from within is that spark, leaping out into manifestation. But the surface nescience in receiving the response from an underlying source of knowledge, subdues and changes it into something obscure and incomplete. All that is unknown is met on the basis of what is known."

The last sentence, be it noted, fully validates the thesis advanced herein, that the Hermetic axiom must be worked in the direction from earth to heaven, and phrased "as below so above." And the philosopher corroborates the great principle expressed in sage ancient systems by the attribution of the name Maya to all the mothers of the Christly Messiahs and Sun-Gods, in saying:

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"It is evident in these conditions that Error is a necessary accompaniment, almost a necessary condition and instrumentalization, an indispensable step or stage in the slow evolution towards knowledge in a consciousness that begins with nescience and works into the stuff of a general nescience."

It must be registered as another advance toward sanity in Hindu thinking that souls begin their human evolution, so to say, ab initio. They start out on the road of evolution from the point from which all things that are to grow should start,--from the beginning. Like a child born into the world, the soul starts naked. If it is admitted that we start from initial ignorance, then it can more readily be conceded that we must at least linger in the sangsara long enough to consummate some substantial measure of the growth. But the heavy propensity of Hindu thought always prods in the direction of escaping the prescribed cycles of growth.

And refuting again any thesis that liberation is best achieved by disengaging the soul from its entangling relation with matter is Aurobindo's categorical statement that "observation is the first instrument of the mind." And that no part of the concrete universe can be held as unreal and invalid for the highest perfection of all, he reiterates that nothing in the creation is excluded from the being of Brahman. Nothing can be disqualified as true essence of being. The Isha Upanishad, he cites, insists on the unity and reality of all the manifestations of the absolute; it refuses to confine truth to any one aspect. Brahman is both the eternal and the temporal, the static and the mobile. It is both becoming and being, and becoming is the common mode of its being. It is the immanent and the transcendent. And even in its manifold manifestations it is not a rigid indeterminate oneness, not an infinitely vacant all. As absolute, it does not require that we think of it as a reality void of all relations and determinations, demanding that we deny the world and relativity as a falsehood of unreal being and by comparison hold it only as a fleeting and distorted half-truth. In fact the power to manifest its endless varieties of self-expression in multiplicity, seemingly violating its oneness, is the evidence of its infinite power. By this very infinitude of manifestation it demonstrates pragmatically its absoluteness. As the absolute, it can be bound neither to a succinct manifestation nor to abstain from manifestation. But sheer emptiness, the thinker says, a "vacant Absolute," "is no

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Absolute." "Our conception of a Void or Zero is only a conceptual sign of our mental inability to know or grasp it." There can be, therefore, no inherent logical necessity for our rejecting or dissolving the universe in the alembic of thought. And he scotches decisively the idea of an essentially unreal universe manifested somehow by an inexplicable power of illusion, of which we must divest ourselves if we would know the reality of being. Whether through our developing knowledge or our ignorance the real being of Brahman is manifesting itself; for, as Aurobindo says, That can manifest nothing other than itself.

He still leans to Hindu predilections when he says that we can distinguish between a "real reality" of the Absolute and the partial and misleading half-reality of the universe that is only relatively real. To possess knowledge of the first is real knowledge; knowledge of the other is still ignorance. Life progress should then take us away from the imperfect knowledge to the full truth. When half-gods go the whole gods should come. We must learn to reject the imperfections of the ignorance and work toward complete knowledge, even that of the gods. We can not forever dwell in ignorance; we must break the bonds of nature and stand free of its limitations. If our divinity slumbers too long unawakened in the cradle of the body, our sheer weariness of the dull tyranny of the unbroken uninspiring routine and our growing disappointment over life's rebuffs, must now and again cause us to turn in disgust from the unsatisfying to the more nourishing realizations. Yet there is no warrant for erecting the defeatist attitude into the sole ground of our philosophy. There is more to life than the defeat of our mundane hopes and plans. And it is out of the discipline of defeat and out of the friction of the inner potential divinity with these outer conditionings that the soul generates its sparks of the intuition of real being. If foolishly we give whole attention to the side of spirit and decry the material aspects, we close off our vision to one whole side of the truth. The knowledge of becoming is an indispensable part of full knowledge. The infinitude of the One distributes itself out in the infinity of the many.

The infinite multiplicity of the One and the eternal unity of the many are the two realities, or the two aspects of the one reality on which the manifestation is founded. The view that divorces matter and spirit and sets them over against each other, the one as real,

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the other as unreal, is unacceptable. Matter must be as real as spirit, since it is a form of spirit, and through matter spirit realizes its own nature.

For all practical purposes Aurobindo's statement in the final sentence sums up and closes out the entire debate. If, as says the Emerald Tablet of Hermes, "the kingdom of spirit has been embodied in my flesh," then all cry of the need of the soul to free itself from the fetters of the body and escape into unfettered being in Brahman proceeds from a baseless misconception. It is as completely in Brahman when here in the flesh as when released to Devachan or Nirvana. But units of consciousness that start from nescience must progress through a slow growth. Here once more we have Aurobindo uttering a sharp refutation of the claims that all ignorance may be ended merely by shifting the gears of consciousness in a moment from the time concept to the timeless.

It has been seen that the goal of Hindu negativism is the release of the ego from all connection with the Sangsaric run of conscious experience into unconditioned being. This possibility, if it were such, would, however, make all Sangsara meaningless. But, says our teacher, the explanation of things that deprives the cosmos or the microcosmic individual of all significance can not be explanation, can not be a solution of the issue.

Dissertating in a long passage (The Life Divine, p. 595) on the view which holds life to be "a mistake of the soul, or a delirium of the will, or error or ignorance which somehow overcasts the Absolute Reality," and therefore claims that the only truth is the supracosmic and the Absolute, the Parabrahman, he well digests this thesis in the conclusion that then the one wise and needful thing to do would be to get out of life, whether terrestrial or celestial (heaven being no better than earth), as soon and as best we can. The illusion does bind us as long as we think it real, and under that illusion all its fitful activities are "little better than a cosmic madhouse." As long as we remain in madness, we remain in the madhouse, and are subject to its rules. But with growing knowledge and as sparks of clearer awareness enlighten our darkness, we become cured of our insanity and step into greater truth and freedom. Nirvana is still our goal, but the road to it becomes more brightly illumined as insight opens. And wisely Aurobindo says that even the true progress is only possible if both aspects, the light and the dark "are interrelated realities."

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The idea of the total vanity of life is an inevitable consequence of the supracosmic or transcendental theory of existence. The mistake is to presuppose that the idea of the supernal life necessarily excludes the "satisfaction of the hedonistic element in our being, its delight in temporal existence," or our delight in the physical being.

But the philosopher still seems bound in the conception that the soul's goal is simply a return to the same aboriginal condition from which it emerged at the start of the cycle. If it ended up no better than it began, all philosophies of growth and evolution are forthwith and forever rendered null and void, hollow mockeries and delusions. In making residence in heaven synonymous with absolute perfection, the philosophy which does so precludes any postulation of evolutionary progress. All religion stands sorely in need of recognition of the great principle of ancient sagacity that the soul comes out of absolute being to be born on earth, as any infant comes into the world,--naked, unconscious and ignorant. But does it retire at the cycle's end back into the same destitution? Nothing in life or nature or logic supports so barren an outcome. It returns at day's end from its labor in the field bearing its sheaves of golden grain, rich nourishment to feed it forever. The sage Egyptian books tell how the soul rejoices in the delights of eating the barley-cakes and drinking the divine beer in the fields of Aarru, where it reaps the harvest of its mundane sowings. "We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves."

For the sake of its explicit affirmativeness the passage from Aurobindo (p. 648) should be seen in its entirety:

"If it is merely some part of ourselves, intellect, heart, will or vital desire-self which, dissatisfied with its own imperfection and with the world, strives to get away from it to a greater height of existence, content to leave the rest of the nature to take care of itself or to perish, then such a result of total transformation would not eventuate or at least not here. But this is not the integral trend of an existence; there is a labor of Nature in us to ascend with all ourself into a higher principle of being than it has yet evolved here; but it is not her whole will in this ascension to destroy herself in order that the higher principle may be exclusively affirmed by the rejection and extinction of nature."

There is enough in this last sentence to negative and rebuke the great bulk of Hindu philosophy. It stands in sharp contradiction of all the false implications of the maya doctrinism. It could inaugurate a new day in Hindu religion.

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Instead of crucifying a supposedly hostile and offensive lower nature in our constitution, our call, Aurobindo says, is to live on a new height in all our being, redeeming and exalting the lower by the power of the higher. We therefore are not to pull away from our natural part and attempt to live in a "blissful quiescence of the Spirit." This can be done, he avers; and elsewhere he intimates that it is just a matter of hypnotizing one's surface consciousness out of function. But this would be a miscarriage of life's intent, which is that not only the spiritual part of us should be exalted, but the whole of us. True exaltation of man includes a lifting up of lower elements into the nature of higher ones. The sensational, emotional and mental elements must be raised and spiritualized, so that they may have useful play upon a higher level than their natural one. That which most definitely is not to be done to them is to destroy them. Aurobindo, with something like a suggestion of sly irony hints that, just as divine principles are not less psychologically effective for being mentally understood, so are our vital, physical and mental grades of cognition none the less dynamically beneficent for being exalted and spiritualized. The irony is needed to drive home a recognition that, obvious enough to clear vision, has been so badly distorted that its truth has been lost sight of.

But (p. 659) he so far falls back into the inveterate negativism of the maya conception that he refers again to the ego in man as a "falsification of our true individuality by a limiting self-identification of it with this life, this mind, this body." It is a separation from other souls which shuts us up in our own limited personality and prevents us from living as the universal individual. It is a separation from God. To round out earlier discussion of the point, it need only be added that it is an asinine irrelevance--as well as an overt falsehood--to regard the ego-divinity in man as a falsification of our true being. For this would be to say that all life in the seed stage falsifies itself, is traitor to its own nature as that is to be manifested through development. This weird reasoning asserts that a child falsifies his potential manhood. The relative valuation here is not that of truth or falsification, but that of stage of evolution. It is logically unwarrantable to judge the two stages on the criterion of truth or falsity. A seed stage of growth is as true as a mature growth. If not, then all youth, all infancy, all inceptive development must be considered a distortion of true life. It can

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not be declared false if it is true to its nature at its stage. The ego in the individual is not yet a full god, but a god in the egg, in the seed, in the human. His rating is not commensurable with truth; it is commensurable only with growth. It is true divinity, but not yet come of age. The mistaken logic here has run throughout the whole area of religious thought and has wrought gigantic folly in theologies.

The dialectic of the soul's incarnation is upheld in a brief statement (p. 717) that such a vast system as nature operates, turning endless wheels of the existence of souls in ignorance, could not possibly be rationalized as without a purpose justifying the exertion. "If the soul enters into the ignorance, it must be because there is some higher principle or possibility of its being that has to be worked out through the ignorance." (Strictly speaking, however it is not legitimate to say that the soul enters into the ignorance. That is the mistaken premise that vitiates a vast segment of religious ideology. The "ignorance" is simply the absence of positive being before the individual unit of potential being begins its existence. Ignorance is the primal state out of which it emerges, not into which it enters. This clarification is of the utmost importance.) But what must be the massive significance of the historical fact that it has taken Indian thought almost two thousand years to arrive at so direct and simple a judgment as that there must be a justifiable cosmic purpose in the evolution of hosts of divine souls on this planet! What a pall of hallucination has evidently lain like a befogging mist over the Hindu mentality that it has required some twenty centuries to bring it to a conclusion which should have been the rudimentary lesson of man's philosophical mind in its first day in school! Now it comes forth as a great climactic feat of enlightened vision from India's greatest philosopher: the sublime recognition at last that if the All-Father projects the seed units of his divine nature into incubation in matter's womb, there must be some reason sufficient to justify the procedure. Perhaps it is true in this case that ages of the erudition of savants brings us at last to the wisdom of babes.

In line again with the twisted logic of considering the ego as a falsification of the perfection it is not yet competent to manifest, is Aurobindo's characterization of the body as an "impediment" to the soul's progress. This hampering obstacle of the body, its life

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and mind, "the heavy inertia and persistence of the body," its turbid passions, the dark obscurities of intelligence,--all this

"is an impediment so great and intolerable that the spiritual urge becomes impatient and tries rigourously to quell these opponents, to reject the life, to mortify the body, to silence the mind and achieve its own separate salvation by departing into the pure spirit and rejecting from it altogether an undivine and obscure nature."

This chants once more the theme-strain of Hindu philosophy: get out from under the burden of the life of the world. But this, as already shown, is to flee the battle of Kurukshetra in the Gita. If there is no battle, there will be no victory, no peace. What has with incredible stupidity been overlooked for centuries in India is the sober realization that the body, mind, passions, with all their inchoate confusion for a time, are the instruments the abandonment or destruction of which would end at once all possibility of eventual victory and mastery. The nescience will be transfigured into knowledge, but not if the soul flees the battle before the victory is won.

The conception of the body as impediment on the soul is the ground-base of all asceticism, the philosopher truly says. It is the logical assumption that if the flesh binds down the spirit to its low level of interests, it is the duty of intelligence to crush out of the way this obstacle to soul-freedom. "If Nature refuses admission to the emerging Spirit, then the soul must withdraw from her," is the characteristic Hindu conclusion. He states that the struggle can not end in a compromise, "but only by an entire spiritual victory, and the complete surrender of the lower nature." If that is impossible here, then indeed it must be achieved elsewhere, he insists.

Our work in the large has been the rebuttal of this "logic." But it might be added here than when he says that the soul can make no "compromise" with nature, he views the whole matter, as nearly all Hindu envisagement does, out of true focus and proper correlations. A "compromise" comes pretty close to being precisely what soul comes on earth to make with nature. For she not only makes a rapprochement with her, but ends by "marrying" her! The Sons of God fell enamored with the daughters of men and took unto themselves wives from them, and they reared up unto them great heroes and mighty men, is in essence the statement of the Scriptures. All life is propagated through the union of divine souls

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and animal-human bodies, and in time a complete atonement and yoga union is effected, from which new divinities are born. As indicated earlier, India's idea of yoga has been turned up into vacuity, where there is neither marriage (yoga) nor the capability of it, all being spirit there and no polarizing matter, when it should have been turned from spirit downward to matter, where the two can meet and effect a true yoga.

It would be an anomaly refuting all rudimentary logic if, as most Oriental thought conceives it, life's great felicity, or the most effective effort of egos to advance into it, was made when consciousness is asleep, and not when it is awake and active. If it were indeed so, our progress would be made through an unconscious automatism, and instead of developing into Lords of creation and destiny, we would be soulless puppets and automatons. This reflection comes close to presenting the nub and core of the entire case against the negative and ultra-subjective Indian schematism. It simply can not be thought that a run of experience obviously designed to increase immeasurably the growth of self-consciousness in numberless units is to be carried forward by those units in any state except their own developing self-awareness. Our dream states and conscious modes definitely demonstrate that. The element of moral responsibility is totally wanting in our dream experiences. But without that there can be no true build-up of the egoic consciousness. Without it there can not even be any morality. The gods, to whose royal height we shall rise in the future, can not handle gigantic creative forces irresponsibly. Our dependability can not be won or tested and certified in sleep. Not in the shadowy depths of inner abstraction and mystical dreaminess, but out on the surface of open consciousness must our gains be registered. The tree develops its fruit and seed not in the inner heart of its root or trunk, but out in the light and air of its utmost periphery. Nature can instruct us mightily in every facet of philosophical truth.

Aurobindo asserts that if the spirit could "dwell always securely on the superior heights and deal with a blank and virgin stuff of matter, a complete spiritual transformation might be rapid, even facile." The Indian bent of mind still tenaciously harbors the enticing possibility of our achieving the apotheosis at any time suddenly and easily. But, he reflects, the spirit must work with na-

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ture, and "nature is more difficult." Her movement is sluggish, slow, contorted. Her operations must scrupulously comprehend every part of her province. Her advancing steps are painfully labored. Spirit, then, however free it may be on its own superior level, must, for its operation in our realm of consciousness, wait on the slow gradual perfection of its instruments. The release of greater powers of electricity, greater speed in flight for bird or man, had to wait on the step by step elaboration of the physical agencies. The human body and brain, the physical organism, are the means by which spirit and energy deploy their powers in this world. India chooses to consider these instrumentalities as hindrances of the forces they implement. But that philosophy meets its crucial challenge and its verdict of error just here; for it is as absurd to take such a negative view of life's implementation as it would be for man to contend that his arms, feet and his five senses and his mind are limitations and obstacles.

A discerning observation is made by our philosopher (p. 812) in reminding us that if any voluminous torrent of the highest forces were suddenly released from above into our area of consciousness, "their contact may be too strong for the flawed and impure material of Nature, and its immediate fate may be that of the unbaked jar of the Veda which could not hold the divine Soma Wine." Our humble vessel may not be able to contain the fierce Jovian thunderbolts. Or, he ventures an alternative, the egoistic unwise lower mind may try to use the supernal forces for its own erratic aims, with wastage and injury. "The Ananda descending can not be held if there is too much sexual impurity creating an intoxicant or degrading mixture." The overmind and supermind powers are, he says, occultly involved in our nature, but they have, as yet, no organized formations on our accessible levels. So they remain subliminal, or perhaps better, supraliminal. They are superconscient to the level of our ignorance by appropriate mechanization within the range of our cognitive faculties. Thus their "descent is a sine qua non of the transaction" of our upliftment. Therefore it follows that the psychic and spiritual development must be far along before there can be any beginning of the consummative transformation. It is clear that a long and difficult stint of constant effort and disciplined austerities in the personal life must precede any sudden ele-

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vation to godhood. Till nature is ready the sublime force has to act indirectly.

The climactic utterance of the philosopher on this item, a pronouncement that jars to its heels the interminable claim of the transcendentalists that the divine consummation can be achieved at any moment by a plunge into timelessness and unconditioned being, is as follows (p. 829):

"The law of Nature's procedure brings in the necessity of a gradation in the last transitional process; a climbing by degrees, an unfolding of higher and higher states that lead us from the spiritualized mind to supermind,--a steep passage that could not be accomplished otherwise."

Spiritualization, he says, is a greater and more difficult integration. And this may take long to mature, "for the lower parts of the being have their own rights; and if they are to be truly transformed, they must be made to consent to their own transformation. This is difficult to bring about." It is in fact so difficult that it involves the whole "agon", as the Greeks called it, of the polarity conflict; it is the agony and the bloody sweat in the garden of the world; it is the great and continuing battle of Armageddon; it is the wrestling of Jacob with the angel, or of Horus with Sut; it is the struggle of the soul with sense, of spirit with the flesh. We must ascend a long winding stairway; it has many steps, "for it is an incessant gradation and there is no gap anywhere." Where ignorance is the first condition, all things must be achieved through a confusion, a complex intermixture of forces, the Hindu philosopher asserts. All this makes an epochal utterance, for it seems to be almost the first time that an Indian spokesman has conceded to the lower physical nature of man any right to maintain and express itself as against the spirit. To grant matter any rights of its own which spirit must respect has for centuries constituted the prime heresy against Hindu orthodoxy. The role of matter, the flesh and the world was that of the sacrificial lamb led to the slaughter for the glorification of spirit. At last the morning horizon shows the promise of a new day in Oriental thinking: India may finally be willing to admit that the world has some part to play in the cosmic scheme.

Indeed Aurobindo ventures to say that the evolutionary force has itself created the inertia of Nature "in order to prevent a too

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rapid transmutation, even when that transmutation is its own eventual intention in things." This is an over-generous concession on the part of the Hindu thought-habit, so impatient with the idea or the necessity of a slow march to spiritual glorification.

The supernal spark, leaping out from the sharp contact of mind with nature and flashing its new light, will impart a clearer perspective of all the lower body, heart, mind and vital perceptions and bring them to ever-clearer synthesization. Instead of crucifying the body consciousness, it must be developed to keener sentiency so as to be made a more viable track for the spiritual currents. On solid bases of nature, then, the powers of Overmind and spiritual consciousness can stabilize themselves securely, he admits. And nature's message of divine things in reflex could become more articulate and vocal to the understanding.

The body consciousness is indeed a patient servant and can become a dynamic instrument of the higher life. Purified and sensitized it can become the channel for a potent influx of divine force, which will inundate cell and tissue and effect a luminous "translucification" of itself in the very flesh, thus bringing the transfiguration.

And like a Sabbath benediction comes the last citation in our notebooks from the great Hindu thinker:

"All the movements of Nature would be pervaded by it [the Ananda] and all the actions and reactions of the life of the body; none can escape the law of the Ananda . . . . In the body it reveals itself as an ecstasy pouring into it from the heights of the Spirit, and the peace and bliss of a pure and spiritualized physical existence."

"The kingdom of spirit is embodied in my flesh," says the Emerald Tablet of Hermes. "In my flesh shall I see God," chants Job.

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