TRUE VOICE
A Critique of Oriental Philosophy
"My brethren, remain faithful to the
earth with all the force
of
your love! Let your great love and your knowledge be in
accord
with the meaning of the earth. Let not your virtue
fly
far from terrestrial things and beat its wings against the
eternal
walls. . . Bring back towards the earth the virtue
which
goes astray--yea, towards the flesh and towards
life;
that it may give a meaning to the earth, a human
meaning . . ."--Friedrich Nietzsche: Thus
Spake Zarathustra
Alvin Boyd Kuhn
* Electronically typed and edited by Juan Schoch for educational research purposes. This notice is not to be removed. I can be contacted at pc93@enlightenment-engine.net. I will be greatly indebted to the individual who can put me in touch with the Estate of Dr. Alvin Boyd Kuhn and/or any of the following: A. B. Kuhn’s graduation address at Chambersburg Academy "The Lyre of Orpheus", A. B. Kuhn’s unpublished autobiography, The Mighty Symbol of the Horizon, Nature as Symbol, The Rebellion of the Angels, The Ark and the Deluge, The True Meaning of Genesis, The Law of the Two Truths, At Sixes and Sevens, Adam Old and New, The Real and the Actual, Immortality: Yes—But How?, The Mummy Speaks at Last, Symbolism of the Four Elements, Rudolph Steiner's "Mystery of Golgotha", Krishnamurti and Theosophy.
I also would welcome any contact with someone who has any letters of Kuhn or has any personal knowledge of him. Thank you.
Recently (January 15, 2005) I was contacted by a 15 year old student of Upton High (state and city to be determined) who wanted to interview me in regards to the life of Sir Francis Bacon (Lord Verulam). The interview was conducted and this student asked me if there was anything else. This is what I relayed:
There is a nationally and worldwide known issue of a disabled person in my state (Florida) who is being subjected to attempted murder. Her name is Theresa Marie Schindler-Schiavo. The courts say that she is in a Persistent Vegetative State when in fact she is not, they lie. Videos were shown on CNN during a live feed that prove she is not comatose. She sits up in a chair. Her husband who lives with another woman for over 9 years and who has two children with this woman is trying to say that Theresa wants to die when in fact he has been denying her rehabilitation and therapy so that she can have her own voice and be back on to the road to her recovery. He has been with several women since he caused Theresa's incident and this is his latest live-in concubine who is in collusion with him to make Theresa dead. His attorneys are attempting to accomplish a heinous starvation/dehydration death on her for the third time. One of his attorneys wrote a book in which he talks about tearing out peoples feeding tubes and says he speaks to them by "soul speak" asking them if they want to die and they tell him along the lines "Yes, I want to die! Please kill me." The Hospice of the Florida Suncoast is holding her hostage for over 4 years. This feeding tube yanker attorney was chairman of the board of this hospice. This is the worst case of domestic terrorism happening in our country right now. While we are off in other countries helping helpless and disabled people the government has been remiss to save a human life from terrorism here in my state. There is a cover-up of mass proportions and I have the evidence on a CD to prove it. This message is to you and all of your classmates and teachers who may be reading this. Please contact others if you know of others who care to stop this murder. Perhaps you, or others, including activist friends, know people who have the power to stop what is happening here in my state or bring greater attention to what is going on. Contact me at pc93@enlightenment-engine.net or call me at 407-925-4141 and I will get whatever information you may need. Help me and others to stop the return of Nazi T4 days in Florida, the rest of the United States of America and the world. We must take a stand and make our voices heard.
Please join my Alvin Boyd Kuhn Yahoo!Group and Gnosis284! http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AlvinBoydKuhn/join : http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gnosis284/join
TO
ALL THOSE
WHO WOULD CHOOSE
KNOWLEDGE OF THE MEANING
OF LIFE IN PREFERENCE TO ITS
NEGATION
THIS
VOLUME IS
SINCERELY DEDICATED
PROLOGUE
One of the most widely disseminated
systems of Indian thought, Buddhism, grounds its basic view of life on its
thesis that the cause of all of man's wretchedness on the earth is his craving
for life. Somehow, it is asserted, there was generated in him the desire to
experience sensation and the feeling and consciousness of existence, to enjoy
the concrete sense of being. And it was this yearning after the awareness of
existence that direpted him out of a condition of absolute and unconditioned
being and precipitated him into the realm of limitation and painfully
conditioned experience.
The implication of this postulate is
unmistakably apparent: that like Adam and Eve in
The world of the middle twentieth
century is dangerously divided between the two great sectors of East and West.
At the moment of writing the schism is marked by a differentiation in the
philosophies of economics, government, politics and other elements in less conspicuous
degree. It is a challenging question, however, whether the fundamental cause of
cleavage between Orient and Occident is not still and always the difference in
the profoundest conceptions entertained in the realm of mental and spiritual
philosophy. Always in human history it has been the case that surface
conditions, physical, economic, material, stand conspicuously forward in the
public eye and appear to be the big issues pressing for solution. So they come
to be regarded as the prime factors of causation.
Generally, however, their ostensible
importance reflects a superficial and shallow envisagement of the actualities.
For, on deeper scrutiny, they will mostly be seen to be themselves only the
manifestations, the outcropping symptoms of more deeply underrunning strata of
ideological conceptions. Out of the heart--and it should be added--out of the
mind, are the issues of life. Thought is now recognized to be the primal
creative energy in the cosmos. Thought, mind, gives the initial propulsion, and
also sets the mold, as Plato so sagaciously set forth in his scheme of the
archetypal
v
ideaforms, for the shape of things
to come in the creation. Therefore, it is in all likelihood true that the great
wall of division between East and West is still constructed of the great stones
of philosophical ideality, with their psychological coefficients.
It seems hardly beyond dispute that
the preamble enunciated in the first paragraph of this Prologue, stating the
primary postulate of the Hindu philosophy, carves out in the sharpest possible
outlines the central, the basic and the critical difference between the thought
structure of Orient and Occident. And looking at that keystone proposition in
the philosophical edifice of Eastern reflection, it is a grave question whether
the West is not warranted in regarding it, from the standpoint of its own
generally affirmative evaluation of life, as a baleful menace and outright
peril to its future security and welfare.
The West postulates the supreme
value of the life lived here by units of conscious being in physical bodies:
the East denies it. It needs no particular depth or perspicacity of mind to
perceive in this situation the essential irreconcilability of the two views, or
modes of thought, and likewise to discern the precariousness in the impact of
the two ideologies, the sensitive rawness in the enterprise of furthering
coexistence or the interblending of the two. When two hemispheres of the world,
hitherto in long isolation from each other, are now suddenly thrown into close
association, the possibility of their harmonious reciprocation of differing
modes and codes of motivation for life conduct will inevitably be difficult in
proportion to the depth of the abyss between the contrary views. The meeting of
the East and West is one of the gigantic world phenomena of the present epoch
in human history, and it promises to become not only a most engaging problem
confronting the philosophic mind, but as well the most grimly challenging and
practically critical task for the world's statesmanship. It is indeed fraught
with the ominously intense and vital issues of historical destiny for the
entire world.
It sharply, then, behooves the
philosophical acumen of the West, in particular, to examine the principles, in
Greek terms, the fundamental archai, of the Eastern ideology, with a
view to evaluating it as sound and salutary in its impact on the West's own
affirmative emphasis on life's value, or as perilous to its way of thought and
life. The ideologies of the two hemispheres of the world are now
vi
and will be increasingly in clash.
Whether the conflict is to be controlled and directed with wisdom adequate to
softening the impact and effecting an eventual rapprochement toward
harminization and synthesis, is a question and a problem pregnant with the
portent of destiny.
The Orient,
Two influences are at work to delay
the recognition of the West's peril from the infusion of Eastern thought codes
into its psychic life. The first is the West's general obsession by the common
religious tradition or persuasion of the sanctity, amounting almost to immunity
from critique, of anything labeled and rated in the category of "spiritual."
Its own religious tradition has rendered it obsequiously deferential to the
name and psychic implications of "spirituality." The appellative
disarms suspicion or distrust. It becomes a freely accepted passport to any
interest or movement flaunting its shibboleth. However slow and reluctant the
average citizen of the West may be to accord welcome to Eastern ideas, he is
not likely to apprehend danger from systems whose chief characterization has
been broadcast as "spiritual."
The second is the want, so far, of
more studied acquaintance of Western people, both lay and academic, with the true
nature, bent and import, and therefore the real potential for harm, of the
Hindu philosophies. In spite of extensive delving into the East's religious
vii
literature, Western study has not
been penetrating enough to catch the full force of the realization of the
ultimate destructive potential lurking in its pervasive negativism. It is not
clearly seen that the final outcome of this philosophy is the destruction of
man. Since man's drive for existence is predicated as the cause of the misery
of existence, the logic of Eastern thought demands that he still his craving
for life and desperately strive to ceave to live. He is insistently urged to
break the chain of causation of life's woes and bring them to an end--by ending
himself. To live involves the conscious entity in dolorous and unending woes.
Therefore the constant burden of Hindu philosophical lucubration is a seeking
of ways to "kill out" with fell intensity of purpose, all the
manifestations of the consciousness of life possible to and through man's
organic equipment of body and brain, all his sensations, feelings, thoughts,
and hush their raucous cacophony of a consciousness dialectically rated as
false. The motive for such a crushing of the outward cognitions of existence is
asserted to be that the inner core of being of the unit life may relapse into
the condition of causeless and consciousless being, undisturbed by the outer
turmoil and strains of living. Thus in the final outcome of all its thinking,
the philosophy of
If, as the rest of the human family
has instinctively felt or been universally persuaded, this life has been
generated as a gift and boon of Infinite Being, ultimately if not at every
moment potentially dynamic for blessedness, then the negative posture of Hindu
ideation comes as near as anything could to being the cardinal sin against the
spirit of the creation. Never does Indian philosophy
viii
postulate bliss as either the
current experience or the end reward of an evolution of life toward it as a
goal. It is life itself that blocks us off from bliss; a lingering in the time
dimension inhibits the attainment of timelessness. Bliss can arise only from
the ceasing of life. The road to the consummation of ananda runs through
the land of denial, of negation. "Negative thinking is the highest form of
understanding," avers Jiddu Krishnamurti, true to the tradition of his
native country. God projected his creation, looked it over and pronounced it
good. As far as human participation in it is concerned,
Indian thought indeed has never
dreamed it an obligation of the human mind to rationalize man's life in the
world. It simply passed judgment on it, and that negative. Its droning monotone
of condemnation has bred only one spur to human action in the spirit of
aggression, and that has been the incitement toward exertion of effort to
escape. Transcending even the Christian cry of "salvation," its one
inspiring call to action has been the shibboleth of "liberation."
The Occident must take accurate
stock of this influence and estimate its possible deleterious effects on its
own life. Under a sort of initial glamor and the witchery of a novel and in
many ways enticing philosophy, the West has rather generously manifested a
cordial receptivity to the Oriental systems. Indeed in circles of mystical
occultism the philosophy has been welcomed, embraced and elevated to a place of
transcendence over all forms of Christian or Western tradition. What may be the
injurious effect at this critical juncture in world affairs of the injection of
the sedative and narcotic power of negativism, detachment, passivism and
ultra-subjectivism into the counsels of Western incentives to action, looms now
as a question of the utmost gravity for Western polity.
ix
Egyptian naturalistic religion,
Hebraic esoteric Kabalism, Greek rational and mystical philosophy emphasized as
the consummative achievement of human consciousness "the union of the
above and the below." But
x
homosexual abnormality. Spirit moves
down to earth to wed matter, not to scorn it, to crucify it, to flee its
embrace.
The potentialities for the virtual
reorientation and sanification of all human philosophy through the acceptance
of this ground-fact of all understanding must be overwhelmingly apparent.
It does not seem to have become a
postulate of thought that the life and consciousness of each unit or cell in
the body of the cosmos must be, however rudimentary, dim and shadowy, an
inceptive expression of what the total cosmic Being feels, desires, thinks and
wills. If each unit is the Total in seed potentiality, then the forms of its
push to outward expression of its life must be of the nature and pattern of its
cosmic Parent. Therefore what man, the creature, feels, thinks and wills, must
reflect the motivations of the Whole. This certifies the principle of the
ancient wisdom that the experience of the part, either tiny or stupendous, is
in and a part of the experience of the Total. If the part desires to live, it
is in that sphere and segment of its body the desire of the Supreme Life to
live. In and through each cell the universal Father seeks to experience the
Lila, the delight of conscious existence, and through the cells of his body he
gives himself that delight.
If presumptuously we begin to
attribute a mistaken and unworthy motive to the activities of the All-Power, we
simply throw down to Infinite Wisdom the gauntlet of our childish impertinence.
Each part, the tiniest, is a new-born seed potential of the All. But it is a
portion of the All, that All itself renewing itself in germ and ovo, and
destined in a time development to enjoy the infinite life of the All. It is a
new projection of the life of the All motivated, as Sri Aurobindo now so
positively expresses it, by the desire of the Infinite to multiply his
own consciousness by increase of Being. For one of these child growths to stand
on the philosophy that the yearning for life is the one basic cause of all
evil, is for it to throw up into the face of the Absolute Life the accusation
of acting contrary to good purpose. For in asserting that it is wrong for the
cell unit to exist, the privilege of life is denied to the Whole of which the
units are the constituent parts.
The right of Life to increase its capacity
for delight in existence must be both the first and the final ground and
postulate of all
xi
philosophy. The word Lila is
perhaps the greatest single word in the human lexicon--or the divine. It is the
ultimate answer to all inquiries of the speculative prying mind of man bent
irrepressibly on satisfying its hunger for knowledge of the why of
existence. Life exists; and we exist, because a Consciousness-Power that
originates, constitutes and consummates all that is and ever will be, wishes
and wills Lila, delight of life, for itself and for its numberless
creatures through whom it multiplies its being and increases its capacity for
delight. However falsely, inadequately, ignorantly the creature, man, in his
imperfect state misconceives and misapplies the phrase, it is true that the end
answer to the insistent why of all the universe is inescapably the cry
of the Church: it is the will of God. When the working of that will brings
eventualities that shock the human sense of right and goodness, our tiny minds
revolt from the acceptance of the idea that this is God's Lila or ours,
and we call it evil. Our thought refuses to be reconciled to the understanding
that God wills and creates evil. Yet all this abhorrence registers the failure
of our partial and immature potential of knowledge to comprehend the entirety,
the organic wholeness and synthetic unity of life in its vastness. We are as
yet unable to view the cosmic operation in its immensity, but see it only in
its minutiae and its particularity. Now we see in part and through a glass
darkly. We see things only in their immediate relativities. Our myopic vision,
limited to a short range of relationships, can not see things in larger
context. We see things out of proportion, out of focus, too near to discern how
in proper focus the "evil" elements blend into a synthesis that is
beautiful and good.
One Scriptural passage does not
establish any proposition as final truth. Nevertheless, with our universal
attribution of a divine wisdom to the sacred Scriptures (of the West), there
does stand in this volume of Holy Writ at least one positive and unequivocal
statement that God does create evil. In Isaiah (46:7) the text runs:
"I form the light and create darkness; I make peace and I create evil: I
the Lord do all these things." Two things must be held in mind in
evaluating a passage like this: first, that "evil" is a human concept
and thus is subject to a partial or erroneous conception of its true nature;
second, that as the result of our limited range of view, and our imperfect
powers of understanding, the necessities for stress and strain involved in the
polarized relation of consciousness
xii
and instrument are difficult for us
to comprehend. Polarity is the prime law of all manifest existence, and while it
has been envisaged in abstract theorization, it has not been accorded its vital
place in concrete thinking. Clearly recognized in the scientific field, it has
not been carried into the counsels of theology and philosophy. In his created
universe the Lord of Life has made objectively visible his intent and his
nature. If we would know him, and through him ourselves, his children and the
inheritors of his nature, indeed made in his image and likeness, we must brood
over his works. For the works reveal the worker.
India has persistently exhorted us
to deny the works, turn our eyes away from them and to seek peace and bliss in
detachment from the life in which they become manifest. The attitudes,
therefore, of East and West are almost diametrically at variance as to the
primary direction of human effort, as well as to its objectives. The clash of
the two movements of thought in the years ahead will bring into sharp focus the
crucial issues of human destiny.
In
It therefore becomes an enterprise
charged with the mightiest import for world life for ages in the future, that
the West should acquaint itself familiarly with the message of
xiii
CHAPTER ONE
THIS EVIL WORLD
The Biblical statement that God so
loved the world that he dispatched his only begotten Son into it, not to
condemn it, but to save it, silhouettes in sharp contrast the attitude of
religions, both Eastern and Western, which has been invariably a condemnation
and calumniation of the world. In the ideology of religion the world has been
constituted as the first member of the diabolical trinity of evil powers
malignantly conspiring to capture and subvert the divine soul of man,--the
world, the flesh and the devil. For centuries the priestly hierarchy has
exhorted its piously conditioned following to keep themselves unspotted from
the world. And for many centuries the religion bearing the name of Christianity
has so insistently accentuated this dour note of evil influence emanating from
the world that thousands upon thousands of its men abandoned life in the
cities, towns and villages of Europe to seek nepenthe from the world's foul
contact in isolated hermitage in the Arabian, Syrian, Egyptian or Numidian
deserts, living without benefit of cleanliness, comfort or companionship in caves
and hovels. Likewise the venerable religious systems of
1
bushel of mundane concerns and can
not glow brightly from the hilltop for all to see.
Considering the great power of
venerated Scriptures to set the norms for religious ideology, one is struck by
the trenchant verses of the seventeenth chapter of John's Gospel in the New
Testament, in which Jesus, so to say, sends in to his heavenly Father the
report on his cosmic mission which he at this time felt he had successfully
terminated. He precedes his report by asserting that he "came forth from
the Father, and am come into the world; again I leave the world, and go to the
Father." He had come into the world, only to have it receive him, not to
have in fact received crucifixion at its hands. He had reminded his people that
"in the world ye shall have tribulation; but be of good cheer; I have
overcome the world." He says that he has completed the work which his
Father gave him to do among the men of the world; he has glorified God in the
world in the sight of men, and is about to return to his true home in the
empyrean. "And now I am no more in the world, but these are in the
world." Then he prays the Father that he should not take these children
out of the world; "but that thou shouldst keep them from the evil,"
because in reality "they are not of the world, even as I am not of the
world." He asserts that he has communicated to them a radiance of the
Father's glory, which immunizes them from the deleterious impact of the world's
sordid interests. It is notable in passing that, while he holds the world to be
a possible evil influence upon the soul, yet he prays the Father not to take
the people out of it; rather to shield them while in it. All spiritual cultism
might well take a hint from this feature of Jesus' presentation.
On the basis of hundreds of
Scriptural and philosophical allusions to the world's malignant influence, religious
philosophy has taken its posture of hostility to "the world." Many
denominational groups still hold it a canon of sanctified living to forbid
participation in certain lighter activities of secular life, such as dancing,
games, amusements, diversions or recreation, even condemning modern mechanical
appliances easing physical labor as baneful to the soul. Not in the
engrossments in the world outside, but in the inner sanctuary of the spirit,
religion has contended that the true interests of the divine nature of man are
to be exercised, developed and glorified. The Quaker pattern of sitting in
silence, shutting out the world, until the inner voice of the spirit speaks out
of the eternal
2
depths of being, well illustrates
the general religious posture. Outside is the froth, the scum, the flotsam and
jetsam, the hurly-burly of chaotic meaningless activity; only within is to be
discovered the reality and the glory of transcendent being. Hence religion has
almost universally set the outer world at odds with the inner, and has erected
ideologically a great wall and a moat of separation between the two, seeking to
withdraw the unit of soul consciousness across the gulf, to lift the
communicating drawbridge and so to seclude the soul within the safe ramparts of
the spiritual castle of life. Thus to fend the soul off from the contamination
of the world in its spiritual ivory tower has been the ethical and spiritual
objective of most religion.
Yet, with trillions of other worlds
into which to send his beloved Son, God so loved this one that he commissioned
him to descend upon this minute speck of atomic dust in the cosmic universe.
And that tiny world which God so loved and refused to condemn, religion has
never ceased to hate and vilify.
And never has religious philosophy
disclosed the remotest intimation as to why God was moved to send his beloved
offspring into this low place of defilement, nor has it made an attempt to
account for the Creator's great love of it. This, the fundamental question that
the human mind must, now or eventually, answer, has been left wholly untouched.
To this question, when thrown in its face, religion has given an answer that is
no answer--that it is a blasphemy to question the inscrutable workings and
counsels of the divine mind. Yet, as psychology now demonstrates, a rational
answer to that insistent query is an indispensable element in human happiness
and the maintenance of the human mind in sanity. Said the great and
ever-memorable Dr. Robert W. Norwood, of St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church in
3
and "death" in it? That is
the prime question to which all instinctive human interest demands an answer.
Both religion and philosophy stand bankrupt until they come forth with a
rational answer to that irrepressible inquiry.
To be sure, religion has come
forward with a form of answer: our two first parents, given the choice of
enjoying eternal felicity in Paradise, the celestial garden of delight,
succumbed to temptation, chose to disobey God's command not to partake of the
fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil set apart in the garden, and in
consequence God had to exact punishment from them and all their future progeny,
by driving them out of the delectable garden and sending them down into this
wretched planet, this "sorrowful star," where toil and pain should be
the terms of their "Egyptian bondage" in the dark underworld. Then God,
in pity, sent his only Son as a sacrificial victim, led as a lamb to the
slaughter, to redeem his stupidly-blundering wayward children, to help them in
durance vile regain
That indeed is the answer of the
churches, the accredited and established exponents of religion. But it leaves
still unanswered the central query: why were God's innocent children, in the
very first moment of their infancy, fledgelings and untried and undeveloped, in
any legitimate procedure subjected to a temptation which they could only be expected
to have gained the wisdom to resist intelligently at the far completion and
perfection of their evolution, instead of at the innocent beginning, when no
life is wise. Never has the ecclesiastical hierarchy explained rationally why
such a temptation was necessary in the first place, with such an issue as the
possibility of a mistake entailing eternal consequences of dire fate hanging
upon the choice, in a universe presided over by omniscient Power and Love.
Never has it elucidated why an all-beneficent Father should set a
stumbling-block in the way of his infant children, sure to catch their feet and
cause their fall. Why God should set a baited trap in the pathway to ensnare
the very first steps of his progeny the churchly councils have never ventured
to tell us.
No child at the start of life knows
anything about either obeying or disobeying its parents. It is at that stage
neutral as to morality. Completely unmoral, it has no power or choice to be
moral or immoral. Children are at the animal stage and act from native
instinct. They are incapable of making ethical decisions. And any
4
parent who severely punishes his
child for failure to act on the principles which govern adult behavior stands
under the severest form of even human condemnation. Yet all Christianity has
based its high claims on the theological asseveration that God condemned his
children to eternal damnation for having committed a cardinal sin in the first
moment of their conscious existence.
Ringing down the centuries in all
the temples, cathedrals and synagogues of the religions has reverberated the
endless cry: "the world is very evil." Even
Testimony to this effect is found in
one of the celebrated Max Mueller's works, Theosophy or Psychological
Religion (page 68):
"So far as we can judge, a
large class of people in
5
it in the whole world, not even in
This work will be in the large an
intensive effort to subject that Hindu position to an exhaustive critique,
since it must be assumed that the world-wide consequences of the philosophical
indoctrination of a large portion of the globe, now both East and West, with
the belief that life is wholly evil and must be escaped, have been, are and
will continue to be colossally calamitous.
Along with the earth, the world,
came under condemnation also the thing called matter, and the human body
itself, as being composed of that vile substance that brought impurity and
defilement on the soul. The world and the flesh became the stock enemies of the
spirit. Never has religion ceased its thunder against the infernal trinity.
Endlessly the soul is exhorted to rise in its divine might and crush underfoot
these three agencies of the initial curse on man's life in the world. The
allegory of the soul's fall into sin, wrongly conceived, poses the question as
to how and why spirit units of God's own intelligence, sons of his own being,
came to be entangled in the inertia of matter, to suffer the hardships of a
material existence in a world denounced as wholly vile. Religion has failed to
give the answer which the human hunger for understanding resolutely demands.
That philosophy once held and can still render the answer it will be the effort
of this essay to establish.
In its rebound from the
stigmatization of earth and matter as the prime evils, all religion has swung
far over to the exaltation of "spirit." As matter and the bodily
flesh became the synonyms of evil, all good was identified with spirit. To be
good religiously was to be spiritual. And in all ages of more advanced
civilization there arose one cult after another, each promulgating some new
program by which the soul of man might better overcome the besetting thraldom
of matter and its world and rise out of bondage under what St. Paul calls
"the elements of the world" to freer communion with the spirit of
God.
In
6
vestures, the exploitation of
hypnotism under Quimby in
In practically every one of these
impulses the keynote was one and the same: deny and suppress the interests of
the world, the body, the flesh and matter, and exalt the spirit. Each asserted
the valuelessness of the things of the world, the deceptive nature of the
physical senses, the peril yielding to the appetencies of the animal body, the
delusive character even of the mind. Wholeness, peace, salvation and eventual
bliss were to be won only in the super-realm of the spirit. Redemption from the
incubus of mortal consciousness was to be achieved by denying all thought of
materiality and filling the area of consciousness with only the affirmation of
the sole existence and reality of spirit. With this went also the conception of
man as a being of pure spirit, his apparent materiality being the creation of a
false ideation. On the thesis that thought is the sole creative power, man
might readily become the creator of his own universe of being by merely
entertaining positive thought and denying all discord and imperfection. One
could lay the axe at the root of all evil by refusing to give it a birthright
in creative thought, must as one denies existence to a mosquito by covering the
stagnant marsh surface with a coating of oil. Spiritual thought was the
"oil of gladness" that denied existence to the germs of evil. Wrong
ideation has bred the evil entities; change wrong ideation to right, and the
evils will wilt and vanish. Values that are ignorantly associated with material
things and contingent upon them are fleeting and essentially false. They form a
veil of deception over our eyes. They shut us off from the vision of truth and
reality. As Browning says, the flesh is a wall that stands between us and
divinity, so that its heavy imperviousness must be dissolved or made
translucent to the passage of the divine light through to us below. We must
withdraw, if not physically, then in sublimated consciousness, from the noxious
atmosphere of the gross world and aspire to a pure and blessed life in spirit.
7
The streaming thousands of cenobites
who during some ten horrendous centuries fled the evil worldliness of
Since this vast movement from an
exterior focus of religious value to an inner realm took place in lands
dominated by Christianity, it is of great interest to locate the motivating
cause of the phenomenon, whether in the religion of Christianity itself or from
influences encroaching upon it. The hierarchy of that faith would rush forward
with an indignant denial of any accusation that it does not offer an adequate
spiritual philosophy and a spiritual culture. Yet despite this protestation it
is hardly to be denied that in reifying, personalizing and finally
historicizing the Christ principle in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the
Christian theology has diverted the direction of man's quest for the
blessedness of contact with deity away from the inner seat of that divinity in
man himself and outward to a man in history. It may talk volubly enough about
the immanent Christ along with the historical Jesus, but the latter, not the
former, has been the cornerstone of the faith; and with the masses always an
objectified and personalized incarnation of deity will dominate devotion and
allegiance and hold them move convincingly than any subjectively realized
mystical principle can ever do. Always the figure and the realistic conception
of the Galilean drew the eyes and minds across the sea and the centuries to the
living picture of the hypostatized Man of Sorrows, allegedly paying with his
own mangled body on the Golgathan cross-tree for our sins and our depravity. It
presents no difficult problem in psychology to discern that this centering of
all spiritual sancrosanctity upon the person of Jesus left far too large a
vacuum in the subjective life of the Christian masses. Christianity thus
inevitably drove its following into the worship of a deity remote in time and
place, when all
8
the while the deity accessible to
man is "closer than breathing, nearer than hands and feet." The
theology that sets the derivation of spiritual grace from one man in history
automatically makes the divinizing of the individual a matter of imitation of a
paragon, whereas it must always, at any rate finally, be the conquest of man's
own divinity. It is a simple statement of the conditions of the entire problem
to say that the divine nature that is to glorify man is a seminal essence of
Godhood potentially realizable within himself. Christianity directed its people
to the worship of a Christ in
This very situation in the life of
religion outlined itself clearly to the mind of perhaps the most eminent of
modern psychologists, Carl G. Jung and he gave expression to his perspicacious
discernment in the most forthright terms, which it were well we should heed:
"The Imitatio Christi will
forever have this disadvantage; we worship a man as a divine model, embodying
the perfect meaning of life, and then out of sheer imitation we forget to make
real the profound meaning present in ourselves.
If I accept the fact that a god is
absolute and beyond all human experience, he leaves me cold. I do not affect
him, nor does he affect me. But if I know, on the other hand, that God is a
mighty power within my own soul, at once I must concern myself with
him."
It can be safely affirmed that this
excerpt states with absolute conciseness the nub of the basic problem of
religion. Is man to be redeemed from animality by any volume of adoration of a
distant cosmic idealization, assumed in the case of Christianity to have been
embodied historically once for all in a given personality; or is he to rise in
the scale of being and expansion of consciousness by developing a seed of
potential divine perfection already implanted within his own constitution? The
future history of mankind hinges heavily on its sufficiently clear perception
of the realities of the evolutionary situation to make the proper choice of the
right one of these objectives.
9
The tremendous exodus out of
orthodox denominationalism into the ranks of the spiritual cult movements
enumerated some pages back is conspicuous evidence of a turn toward the second
alternative mentioned in the preceding paragraph. In no other way can the
emergence of so many sporadic movements toward the cultivation of the Christos
within, as distinct from the Jesus of history, be adequately accounted for. And
these movements, surging in nearly all cases out of the body of Christianity itself,
welled forth on the tide of an impulse generated as if by a fresh discovery of
the Christ principle in the human constitution, entirely separate from the life
of the man-Christ in
Oft quoted is the verse of Angelus
Silesius, a Christian mystic of late Medieval times:
Though Christ a thousand times in
But not within thyself, thy soul
will be forlorn;
The cross on
Unless within thyself it be set up
again.
Yea, if the Christ-love be not born
within the open consciousness of living mortals and become active as a leaven
in the lump of human society, not a thousand
10
It must be taken as a cynical
commentary on Christianity that periodically in its history one group after
another has come to the realization of the presence of the Christ nature
immediately in the constitution of man himself, and has been so galvanized into
newness of life by the recognition as to regard the discovery as something
outside the pale of Christianity. The Renaissance in
It can with full truth be said that
all human culture and refinement, all civilization in fact, springs from the
potentiality inherent in man of binding closer this communion between the two
natures in man's life, the developed animal and the, as yet, imperfectly developed
Christhood. For these two are, and are to be, copartners in the evolution of
humanity. Plato gives us this definition of man: "Through body it is an
animal; through intellect it is a god." Man, declared the ancient sages,
is a god inhabiting the body of an animal. All potential culture is grounded on
the possibility of taming the wildness of the animal by the loving-kindness of
the god. The deity must domesticate its beastly elemental. Nearly all religion
has been activated by the presumption that its function is to help the animal
rise up to the capabilities of an association with the god, whereby its
brutishness may be transfigured into seraphic love. But religion has been
almost completely guiltless of any recognition that on his side the god is on
earth in animal body, not only to tutor the animal into a more angelic
transformation of nature, but, in his own interest, to find through association
with its lower companion an outlet for the exploitation of his own latent
capacities in his upward progression to higher status. The nearly total failure
of religious philosophy to take into account this duality in the elemental
constitution of man, its failure to know man as a compound of god and animal,
the two mediated by the human entity which comes to birth on the borderline
between the two, has made of religion an ineffective, because unbalanced,
cultural enterprise in the psychological domain.
It will be well to recall a few
statements from the most eminent philosophers that the kernel of a divine nature
is latent in the constitution of man. The wise Socrates, facing the imminent
return of his soul to the invisible world, asks Cebes if it is not the certain
11
conclusion of all philosophical
reasoning "that the soul is in the very likeness of the divine and
intelligible and intellectual and uniform and indissoluble and
unchangeable" nature of the gods, and will at death rejoice to rejoin the
company of the immortal deities. Leading the splendid movement to revive the
great Platonic philosophy six and a half centuries after the master's day,
Plotinus speaks as follows:
"The wise man recognizes the
idea of the god within him. This he develops by withdrawal into the holy place
of his own soul. He who does not understand how the soul contains the beautiful
within itself seeks to realize beauty by laborious production. His aim should
rather be to concentrate and simplify and so to expand his being; instead of
going to the manifold, to forsake it for the One, and so to float upwards
toward the divine fount of being whose stream flows within him.
I am weary already of this
prison-house, the body, and calmly await the day when the divine nature within
me shall be set free from matter."
Epictetus, the Roman
slave-philosopher, adjures "never to say that you are alone, for . . . God
is within and your genius is within." Heraclitus, before Plato's time,
declared that "man's genius is a deity." Jacob Boehme,
shoemaker-mystic of the late sixteenth century, wrote:
"The holy and heavenly man,
hidden in the monstrous (external man) is as much in heaven as God, and heaven
is in him, and the heart or light of God is begotten and born in him. Thus is
God in him and he in God. God is nearer to him than his bestial body."
The voice of God speaketh within
man, he declares, "and if thou canst for a while cease from all thy
thinking and willing, thou shalt hear unspeakable words of God."
Coming to our own sagely reflecting
Emerson, we hear him reiterate the concept of the divine philosophy:
"Meantime within man is the
soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part
and particle is equally related; the eternal One. From within or from behind a
light shines through upon things . . . . When it breathes through his intellect,
it is genius; when it breathes through his will, it is virtue; when it flows
through his affection, it is love . . . . Of this pure nature every man is at
some time sensible . . . . It is indefinable, immeasurable, but we know that it
pervades and contains us. We know that all spiritual being is in man . . . .
Let man then learn . . . . that the sources of nature are in his own
mind."
12
But in the exuberance of his zest to
bespeak the immanence of divine grandeur at the heart of our being, the philosopher
did not pause here, as the utterances found in his essay on Nature indicate he
might have done, to remind us that, as the sources of nature are in the woven
fabric of our minds, so too is the pattern of our thought and understanding
already woven into the context of nature. This reciprocal counterpart of the
truth this essay will endeavor to elucidate.
Famous is Robert Browning's poetic
passage:
Truth is within ourselves; it takes
no rise
From outward things; whate'er you
may believe,
There is an inmost center in us all
Where truth abides in fulness; and
around
Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems
it in.
This perfect, clear
perception,--which is truth--
A baffling and perverting carnal
mesh
Binds it, and makes all error; and
to know
Rather consists in opening out a way
Whence the imprisoned splendor may
escape,
Than in effecting entry for a light
Supposed to be without.
Assenting fully to the fundamental
fact here expressed, in a strict analysis one might challenge the statement in
the first lines that truth takes no rise from outward things. If the truth in
our minds and the truth reflected in outer nature are the natural counterparts
of each other, are in effect two representations of the same thing, why should
not truth spring up to us from outward things? One must ask how Browning could
let this negative assertion escape him, when he must have known that the outer
world of natural things has been the most dynamic and prolific source of
inspiration for poetry itself. It is to nature herself--where else?--that
poetry and philosophy and art instinctively resort to tap the springs of
insight and afflation. Here Wordsworth:
One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach us more of man,
Of moral evil and of good
Than all the sages can.
And hark! How blithe the throstle
sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher;
Come forth into the light of things;
Let nature be your teacher.
13
Indeed the weight of all literary
authority is so diametrically the contrary to Browning's statement as to
constitute direct contradiction. For actually it is precisely from outward
things that truth does take its rise for man. It could take no rise out of a
vacuum. It takes its rise from man's immersion in nature and under the
influence of nature. The realization of truth is potential in man; but it
awaits the challenge of external objectivity to awaken and spur it on to its
deployment. To accentuate this aspect of the religious philosophy is an
integral part of the purpose of this work. For it is one of the essential
elements of truth that the subjective systems here examined have signally
failed to recognize.
Walt Whitman, lyric singer of the
inner godhood in our common human nature, asserts that no man "has begun
to think how divine he himself is." "Divine I am inside and out; and
I make holy whatever I touch." ". . . . and that there is no God any
more divine than yourself." This indeed strikes a common chord with the
statements of the ancient sages that man blasphemes both God and himself when
he worships any power outside himself.
Volumes could not contain the whole
of the literature testifying to the universal recognition of the presence of
potential divine transcendence of being in the dual constitution of man. Thus
indubitably established, the universal recognition will serve as our point of
departure for an exegesis that must go far to effect a quite drastic
reorientation of all understanding of "spiritual truth," and
institute a new and more balanced rationalization of the entire theme. Going
further than that, nothing less than a complete volte face in all
religious philosophy and attitude is implicit in the elucidations to be
presented in this discussion. As to the factuality of the presence or immanence
of a nuclear unit of divine being in the constitution of man there can be no
question or dispute. But from that point on it is to be demonstrated that
nearly all the theory and practique long prevalent and dominant in general
spiritual religionism as to the methodology of man's utilization of the divine
segment in his nature has been tragically misconceived and injuriously
mishandled.
14
CHAPTER TWO
THE IMPRISONED SPLENDOR
Yes, as Browning put it, the great
evolutionary task set for the creature man is to bring out a light of divine
glory of consciousness that is being slowly enkindled within him. Our path is
dark, the poet implies, until we are able to illuminate it with the rays of a
great spiritual refulgence for which we effect an outlet from hidden recesses
within ourselves. We do not seek to kindle that flame, all subjective spiritual
philosophy declares, by importing a light found outside ourselves to illumine
the inner darkness. On the contrary we discover a great light within our own
conscious depths, and by careful tending and skillful refueling, we learn to
increase its glow to ever-intensified brilliance.
It must be made clear that confusion
has been bred and expressed itself in Browning's passage and multitudinously
elsewhere through the phraseology used. The inner light is loosely spoken of as
either being made to shine within the depths of the individual consciousness,
or as being "brought out" to shine through and from the person who
has enkindled it. From one angle this distinction is of great moment; from a
broad point of view it is only a matter of the appropriateness of a figure. IT
is in consonance with the view advanced here that it is more fitting to speak
of our task of bringing out the light within, than to think merely of enkindling
the light in the interior depths, and, as if that were the final achievement,
letting it shine there. The terms employed in a debate or treatise can all too
easily lead to confusion if their connotations are not clearly predetermined.
What is to be understood basically in the situation is that an inner light of
perception that illumines the mind is brought to shining in the area of
consciousness and from that fount of generation shines out in the whole
expression of the individual life. It is made to shine out in the real sense
that the splendid character it brings to view in outward conduct does emerge
out of hitherto dark nescience in to the open light of conscious motivation.
The "out" direction can only refer to something describable in this fashion.
The "in-ness" of it so constantly cherished by devotees must refer to
the conscious effort to achieve it and the sense of having made it a real
possession. It is advanced here as a matter of ultimately great psychological
moment, whether one thinks of
15
the enlightenment process as working
inward or outward. In the simplest of words it is to be said that so much
unctuous "spiritual" literature speaks of "going within" to
find the light, in the belief that one must go within to get away from
distracting interests outside which will defeat the power to set the inner
light aglow. There is indeed a pertinent view of the process which makes it
akin to one's shutting oneself in the house in order to escape disturbing
noises outside. But in the case in question this analogue outreaches its
validity in that it fails to take into account that the noise outside is itself
an integral element of the total situation; in the one consideration that it is
in part at least to exercise the function of driving the consciousness within;
in another, that it serves as a challenge from outside to the soul within to
come forth and do something about the noise itself. It fails to recognize that
the external noise has a legitimate cosmic reason for being there, that it can
not therefore be simply condemned as evil and treated as a thing to be escaped.
As intimated vast psychological consequences flow from the attitude thus taken
as to the mere direction in which the process is channelled. It can obviously
be contended that one can not bring out what has not first been generated
within, and that is entirely valid on the side of the subjective direction so
strongly preached by the spiritual cults. But where that contention falls short
of validity is in its failure to recognize that the enkindling of the light
within can not be done in total disseverance of relationship and interplay with
the concerns located outside. The generation of the light can come only through
the intercommunion of the conscious energies exerted within and without. On the
basis of the wisest philosophies of the ages, that statement must stand as the
summation of the truth of the matter. And obviously the issue of enormous good
or evil hinges on the recognition of this truth. In the end it becomes a thing
of vital moment both to the individual and to the world whether one kindles the
inner light merely to bask deliciously in its glow, or uses it to enlighten
one's chart of active participation in the community of world life. When so
much of the spiritual philosophy is bent in the direction of introversion, it
is highly needful at the start to lay definite stress upon the extrovert
direction. Browning clearly intimates this right direction. If the supernal
beams are imprisoned within, it is the obvious psychological task of man to
open barred windows and let them stream out.
16
It is true that all life does build
and grow from inner germinal source-spring outward to conscious manifestation.
The Scriptural injunction is to "let your light shine," with
correlative caution against keeping it hidden or buried.
The first item in the indictment of
traditional or conventional philosophy of the "inner light" comes
from the notation that such view naively overlooks the consideration that
nowhere in the cosmos, physical or metaphysical, can it be supposed that light
can be generated, made to shine and be kept shining, without being fed by fuel.
And always the fuel for the fire which generates light, even as in the
superethereal elements that feed the solar fire, is of the essence of cruder
matter, as is seen in the wood-sticks on the hearth, the oil or coal in a
furnace, and the tallow beneath the candle flame, or indeed the physical food
that keeps alive the flame of life in our bodies. Never in hundreds of books on
the soul-light philosophy does one find the slightest notice of the necessity
of material fuel for the inner spiritual fire. It seems never to have occurred
to any theorist in this field. And as the bulky mass of this literature has
insistently urged that we pull our focus of interest ever more completely away
from outward things in the effort to fire up the soul in the inmost depths of
our subjective kingdom, the question and challenge as to how this great light
is to be supplied with fuel, when cult practice severs the energies of spirit
from contact with the coarser experiences of earth, which a balanced philosophy
recognizes to be the proper fuel for the burning, must be fully met.
Matter, lower in rank though equal
in importance with spirit, is always the base, the sustenance of spirit. But so
clamorously has matter been derogated as hostile to spirit that the dependence
of the higher principle upon it for sustenance and the instrumentalization of
its powers has been almost entirely left out of account. As surely as the
candle flame can not be kept alive without the fuel supplied by the coarser
tallow, which by its more potent chemical energies it can trasfigure into the
likeness of its own glorious body, as St. Paul says, so neither can this
radiance of spiritual light within the depths of conscious being be kept aglow
without being able to draw up and transmute into its own essence the physical
experience undergone by virtue of soul's interconnection with body. Spiritual
cult philosophy has seemingly taken if for granted that the inner God-light can
be generated and brought to white heat, so to say, in
17
a vacuum. For it expressly preludes
its prescription for the enkindling of that light with the instructions to
destroy all physical-sensual and intellectual forms of experience, the very
elements that must be the natural fuel for the spiritual flame. From the very
start it is to be deprived of the fuels which alone could serve to nourish it
into its brightness. It is true that the electric light-bulb does glow and last
longer in a vacuum, but,--lest this be seized upon as a natural confutation of
the thesis here expounded--it is not to be forgotten that the power that
generates the light in the vacuum is inducted into the bulb from outside, and
is itself the conversion of a "lower" or "coarser" energy
into light. It is the universal law of the cosmos that always
"higher" life feeds upon, consumes and converts, by sublimation
process, energies ranked as lower and grosser in essence. The lamp of the
spirit within must be fed with the sacrificial oil of the life of sense,
emotion and thought lived daily in the flesh. And, by analogy, soul science is
as unwise to rail against the iniquitous influences of the flesh as the
lamplight would be to express its repugnance to the oil under its wick. So
confused has been the interpretative effort in the Scriptural field that this
conspicuous connotation of the "oil" symbolism has not been clearly
brought through to understanding at all. The coming of the Christos into our
human nature is represented under the figure of the anointing of our heads with
oil, because the Christ-mind that is to apotheosize us is poetized as a divine
flame (cf. The tongues of fire touching the head of Jesus at the Jordan baptism
and those of the disciples at Pentecost) coming to its glorious burning in our
heads. And oil is the fuel for fire.
As the unfoldment of the case
against false assumptions and erroneous methodology in handling the conception
of the inner divine light will enunciate the ineptitude of all derogation of
the body, matter, the flesh, the senses and even the mind, as detrimental
instead of beneficial to the life of the spirit itself, the first hint in
support of our basic affirmations will be presented in the material composing
an advertisement-notice of the Vedanta Society, taken at random from a current
magazine. It aims to present a concise condensed statement of Vedanta religion.
A clause in one of the sentences makes it worth citation.
"Vedanta is chiefly a search
for the Spirit, the Real Being, and the purpose of the philosophy is to reveal
to man what he really is.
18
The body and mind are adjuncts, the
necessary means, to the achievement of the spiritual element; but beyond them
is the ever-shining light of man's consciousness; his 'I Am' self-consciousness
is God consciousness."
Here is advertised the all-dominant
motive of cultivating the divine spirit within. But there is that statement
which, in fairness to the truth of a more advanced conception, it was deemed
desirable to insert in the notice, that the body and the mind, so fiercely
assailed and calumniated as the arch enemies of the spirit, are necessary
adjuncts and indispensable means to the achievement of spirituality. This
single sentence at once hails into court before the bar of simple logic the
principle of the eternal condemnation of the flesh, the senses and the mind in
the philosophy of "spiritual" religion. For if it is conceded that
they are necessary adjuncts and the very means of spiritual evolution, their
derogation as alleged enemies of the spirit is immediately seen as insane
folly. If spirit itself is a glorious development, then it is asinine to berate
the means and accessories by which it is exalted to beauty and kingly power.
The physical body of man is obviously the instrument in, by and through which
the divine soul of the mortal is implemented to its rebirth, growth and final
divinization. What must have been the strange hypnotizing power of a persuasion
in religion that has disposed the minds of millions for centuries to revile the
body that performs so marvelous a function for the divine principle of goodness
in the mundane race! What warped mentality must have bent the counsels of
religion to deprecate as foul and vile, and even denounce as the source of
human depravity, the awesome marvel of our bodily organism and its noble
function as the mother, the nurse, the guardian of the infant soul born and
coming to its adulthood in the home of the flesh! So closely allied is this
fatal delusion with the concomitant persuasion of the "spiritual"
religions that the senses and the mind obstruct the path of the soul's advance
to perfection, that this issue must share the brunt of the present critique.
Of course the power that man must
utilize to lift himself in the scale of being is a power operative within his
own constitution. Christianity cut itself off from direct connection with this
dynamo of influence when it segregated the source of the power off in its
embodiment in one historical person only. Where else could have been localized
a power capable of divinizing lowly human nature than
19
in the corporate body of humanity
itself? Surely it could not have been placed outside the individual or the
collective organism in whose life it was to be a fermenting leaven. How could
man either save himself or be saved other than by the use of a power
susceptible of cultivation within his own life, or other than by the discovery,
exploitation, exercise and development of a power amenable to his own control?
Life never expands or evolves save by the unfoldment of powers germinally
innate in the organic being of its own creatures. The legend for which
Christianity notably is responsible, that the human race is to be saved by a
power sent down from heaven on one historical occasion and localized in the
sole body of one historical person, is of all fatuities of theological
obscurantism the one closest to a devastating irrationality.
This observation is thrown into
sharp accentuation when we recall a myth found in one of the Hindu Upanishads.
The story runs that the Lord called a council of the spiritual hierarchy of the
world and spoke of a new race that he was about to generate on the earth,
stating that he designed to place in its hands the creative power of the gods.
He called for opinions as to how the power might best be invested in the new
race, so as to safeguard it from misuse through the ignorance and waywardness
of the people untrained in wisdom. "Man is a curious creature and he will
surely discover the power and in his childishness misuse it to his injury.
Where can it be hidden so as to be secure from his prying?" One archangel
advised that it be placed on the top of the highest mountain peak. Another
suggested that it would be better hidden in the profoundest ocean depths. At
last the Lord bethought himself of a happy expedient: "I'll conceal it in
the inmost depths of man's own nature, the last place he will ever think of
looking for it."
Yes, the God-power is within us,
making us potentially co-creators of the universe with God himself. All too
slow have we been in discovering the presence or immanence of the mighty
potency in ourselves. Religion has too insistently directed our gaze to seek it
afar. Socrates told us plainly that each man harbored within him his
overshadowing daimon, his guardian angel, and we still wonder if perhaps
the Athenian philosopher was not entertaining a wraith of his own hallucinated
fancy and not a true angel. At any rate we take it as an item of curious Greek
speculation and hold it at arm's length, when truly the statement covers the
most important fact in our existence.
20
To be sure, our divinity is lodged
within us, deep down in the heart's core of our conscious being, but from the
start implanted there as the mere seed of a potential development. So far it is
possible to stand with the New Thought and spirit-cult philosophies. They are
right in placing paramount emphasis on the necessity--and the glorious
privilege--of recognizing that presence within us and living up to the highest
capabilities of a technique that will put us in more effective relation to it.
But from this point on, it is practically impossible to go along with the operational
theory and the active practique of the idealists. Their envisagement and
consequently their modus of operation of the forces in the case are all sadly
and disastrously askew. A rectification of their codes and modes in the matter
must be attempted.
The basic error of their procedure
is discerned to be their naïve belief that all one has to do is to penetrate a
little deeper than the surface level of daily consciousness and there will be
found the god, fully matured and ready to exercise the entire repertoire of his
divine power and majesty, only needing to be recognized and hailed. The common
cult idea is that to awaken the inner deity to the full exercise of his
godliness in and through us it is only necessary to call loudly enough upon him
and he will forthwith arise and come forth. It is widely circulated as an open
sesame technique that the practice of yoga breathing, sitting in certain
postures, deep concentration--but more often the complete emptying--of the
mind, will greatly facilitate the process or conduce to its effective working.
Prayer and deep meditation are urged as aids to success. The methodology is
predicated on the idea that the god is immanent in all his power, strength and
glory, awaiting only to be summoned forth. All that is needed is that one
should recognize him, or, as Christian phraseology has it, believe on him, and
all his wealth of bounteous being will be immediately released for man to use
to his advantage.
It is important to note that along
with this ground assumption there went always the concomitant persuasion that a
practically indispensable adjunct to successful courting of the indwelling
deity was the operation of completely emptying the mind, or the total area of
consciousness, of all ordinary forms of feeling and of thought, to make the
field a complete blank, so that the god could then have unobstructed access to
the entity below, or the latter have clear approach to the god. The method was
to clear
21
away all rubbish of daily thought
from the mind, and hold it steady as a clean slate on which the deity might
better inscribe his own higher apperceptions of being. Emptying the mind of all
its contents, deadening the senses, stilling all emotion, one might with much
hope of reward sit and wait for the higher genius of the inner self to deliver
its edifying messages. In the silence and the mental void suddenly the forms,
apparitions, the ghosts and wraiths of divine truth could be expected to
appear. Glowing in supernal light will shape themselves the outlines and
figures of eternal reality. And the sitter will have consummated his yoga and
met his god. He will have linked himself with the divine and himself become
divine. He will have completed his earthly evolution and won the glorious crown
of immortal life with the gods.
It is granted that of course a first
step toward true theurgy is the individual's arriving at the certain knowledge,
beyond mere speculation, that potential divinity is resident within him and
awaits cultivation. But while this recognition is basic primarily, it is a
mistake to expect the operation of magic or a perfected accomplishment from
this one step alone. It merely puts one in line to begin the process of
cultivating one's divinity. Just as a child entering primary school needs more than
one recognition of the awakening of his slumbering divine genius than mere
recognition of its presence within. The task calls for the perfect development
and full functioning of every normal capability and faculty of the entire
complement of powers engendered by evolution on the lower human side.
The most hurtful mistake is the
too-simple assumption that the divine entity is in man in any other form than,
from the first, potentially; except in so far as it has in the case of any
individual been brought along to an advanced stage of development. It is at any
rate, at any stage always potential of greater unfoldment in the progression
ahead of it. The great and central item of theology that seems to have dropped
almost into complete desuetude in current religion is the fact that the divine
nature was implanted in man's constitution in the beginning as a seed. How
can any potency be implanted in any organic development except as a seed? The
one universal law of manifest life is growth. There can not be growth unless it
is started from seed or shoot. The task of man is
22
not to discover the all-perfect God
in full stature, a finished entity, within himself. His labor is to recognize
his gardener's husbandry in the tending, cultivation and maturing of a seedling
seminally implanted in the physical garden-bed of his body and his life. It is
there from the start only potentially. The Christ within is a child, first to
be brought from gestation to birth at the Christmastide of man's own awakening
to the recognition of his parenthood of the august infant, and then to be
reared, trained, educated to the brilliance of its full divinity. The Christmas
note of jubilation should be, not the barren celebration of the birth of a babe
in far
23
CHAPTER THREE
HEAVEN WOOS EARTH
But what is the technique of his
education? How are we to awaken his latent divinity? This is both the immediate
and the ultimate question.
First we must realize that he has
been sent down here to go to school, to attend the seminary of earth, whose
head master is experience. The particular seat he has to occupy in the
schoolroom is his own body and its environment. In his body and the place it
occupies in the world he will have his instruction. The body and its needs for
sustenance and health will be his lesson assigners and his taskmasters. He will
learn only as he meets and masters the daily run of events and extracts their
lessons for the weaving of the patterns of wisdom in his consciousness. His
education was arranged in the divine government of the worlds to be his
tutelage on this planet, because here was a schoolroom in which every
appurtenance, every ornament, every pedagogical provision was itself an
eloquent, if mute oracle of the goodness, the beauty and the truth of being, a
knowledge and experience of which were to be the sum and crown of the
achievement of his education. For this world had been created aforetime by his
omnipotent Father, and created to be an embodiment and expression of the
attributes of its Author's own supernal nature and being, which are the
perfections of goodness, beauty and truth. All its living objects and its
continuing events reflect and dramatize the laws and principles of the Father's
nature, for the earth is a unit cell of the universe and that universe is his
body. The physical worlds are instinct and vibrant with the pulsating life and
the idea-patterns of the Creator Mind. The world is full of gods, as Thales
said in ancient
All this mighty revelation is to be
absorbed, inwoven into the substance and texture of the young god's own being
as he dwells life after life in the midst of this gigantic cinema of his
Father's epiphany of glory. For a long period of his childhood he will drink in
unconsciously, unreflectively, the potent influences impacting him in his
earthly home. He will instinctively feel the ministering benignance of the
nature in whose lap he has been laid. Nature is his cherishing mother, his
sustainer and guardian. Later, as his self-
24
awareness and his powers of
conscious perception and reflection begin to unfold, he will learn to watch,
observe and moralize upon the form and then the meaning of all the moving
scenario that passes in the yearly round of nature's cycles. He will gradually
register in the depth of consciousness an ever keener realization of the order
and integral unity of the world panorama. As he moves on from instinctive sense
of nature's providential goodness to speculative philosophy at the mental
level, he will come at last to a rational understanding that he and the nature
that encompasses his life are one and the same expression of creative mind, the
one at the physical level, the other in the rarefied air of consciousness. He
will discern that the world has been framed over the design of his Father's
thought, in the image and likeness of which design his own mind is to frame the
pattern of its creative work at his lower station. This recognition carries in
all its import the power of redeeming his life from aimless drifting with the
natural stream of the all-embracing cosmic life and empowers him to assume the
conscious intelligent direction of the onward flow of his own evolution. It
evokes from latency into conscious activity his soul faculties as the impact of
his experience with the world without challenges dormant powers to come awake.
Mainly through his very body the birth of self-consciousness and the evolvement
of untried capabilities take place. His body and the world do exactly for him
what the sun, the soil, the heart and moisture do for the seed in the garden.
They evoke slumbering power in the unplumbed depths of his being. If he was not
immersed in the ground-bed of the world and his body, he would remain an
unplanted seed. These give him his birth and nourish him to maturity. Every
birth must emanate from its mother's womb, and for the soul unit, the physical
body is that womb. Said Jesus in a beautiful analogy, "unless a grain of
wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it
bringeth forth much fruit." Not for twenty centuries has it been known
that the ancient sages who indited the Bibles of divine wisdom referred to the
long dormant condition of the soul when it was lodged in earthly body as its "death."
But without this "death," as Jesus declares, it could have no rebirth
and therefore no further growth. It would remain forever in the dormancy of
purely celestial life. To rise higher in the scale of conscious being it has to
endure the recurrent pangs of birth forever renewed. The philosophy that urges
25
escape from the world and the body
would simply deny the soul its natural chance to be reborn at a higher level.
Probably the most succinct and
positive declaration of the dialectical necessity of the central doctrine of
all religion, the incarnation, has come from the pen of Plotinus, who must be
ranked high in the roll of the world philosophers. He was the inheritor of the
great Platonic wisdom, which had flashed out in brilliance over half a millennium
before, but had gone into eclipse under philosophical obscurantism in the
second century and needed a renaissance. The paragraph quoted from his Enneads
is regarded in our purview as one of the most notable passages in all
philosophy:
"Thus, although the soul have a
divine nature, or being, though she originate in the intelligible world, she
enters into a body. Being the lower divine, she descends here below by a
voluntary inclination, for the purpose of developing her powers and to adorn
what is below her. If she flee promptly from here below, she does not need to
regret having become acquainted with evil and knowing the nature of vice, nor
having had the opportunity of manifesting her faculties and to manifest her
activities and deeds. Indeed the faculties of the soul would be useless if they
slumbered continuously in incorporeal being without ever becoming actualized.
The soul herself would remain ignorant of what she possesses if her faculties
did not manifest by procession; for everywhere it is the actualization that
manifests the potentiality. Otherwise the latter would be completely hidden and
obscured; or rather it would not really exist, and would not possess any
reality. It is the variety of sense-effects which brings to light the greatness
of the intelligible principle, whose nature publishes itself by the beauty of
its works."
A little father on he pens a
sentence which adds tremendous dialectical force to the truth of his
pronunciamento given above:
"Likewise it was not sufficient
for souls (merely) to exist; they also had to reveal what they were capable of
begetting."
And, the logic implies, they could
not beget if they remained aloft in worlds of ethereality. This repeats in the
dress of Greek systematism what Jesus says, that the unplanted seed can
bear no fruit. That this enunciation and the principle back of it have not been
acknowledged throughout the history of Christendom as the basic fundamental of
all doctrinism bespeaks the loss that was suffered when narrow bigotry closed
the Platonic academies in the fifth century.
26
And if the passage stands as a sharp
rebuke to much rigid dogmatism of orthodox Christianity, it even more sharply
negatives most of the warped predications of the spiritual cult philosophy. So
drastically does it reverse the "spiritual" preachments, that it
locates the hub of life values right here in the flesh, the very place where
those preachments proclaim that values should be shunned. It makes the life in
the flesh the seat of destiny. While the cult philosophy denies reality to the
things and the experience of this life, it avers that only here is reality to
be found. And while cult philosophy stigmatizes the senses as the purveyors of
falsehood, it asserts that only through the variety of sense-effects is the
grandeur of the "intelligible principle" made manifest to
consciousness. It indicts the spiritual religionism on many charges of gross
violation of cardinal truth.
The luminous philosophy of ancient
"the Sun is the father, the
Moon -- or earth -- is its mother, the Wind carries it in its belly, its nurse
is the Earth. This is the father of all perfection, or consummation of the
whole world. Its power is integrating; if it be turned into earth. It
ascends from earth to heaven and descends again to earth, and receives the
power of the superiors and the inferiors. So thou hast the glory of the whole
world. This is the strong force of all forces, overcoming every subtle and penetrating
every solid thing. So the world was created. Hence were all wonderful
adaptations, of which this is the manner."
And three especially of the ten
statements of "the truth about the self" laid down by Hermes are too
magnificent to be omitted from quotation:
"Filled with understanding of
its perfect law, I am guided moment by moment along the path of liberation.
"In all things great and small
I see the beauty of the divine expression.
"The kingdom of spirit is
embodied in my flesh."
27
"In my flesh shall I see
God," cries Job. And no less positively another Scriptural passage
runs: "The glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it
together." It is time that those who heap up denunciation on the world and
the flesh know how ignorantly they revile the very temple of the spirit. The
philosophies that proclaim the desirability of escape from the body stand
sternly rebuked by the greatest wisdom ever given to humanity, that of Hermes,
Thrice-Greatest.
In the books of this sage Hermetic
philosophy the divine soul, making its entry upon the earth, utters the
declaration of its purpose and mission in migrating from the dreamy
blissfulness of the spirit world to this land of a more realistic grade of
consciousness: "Lo, I come that I may feed upon the bread of Seb, of the
food of earth." Seb, his name carrying the cryptic significance of the
creative number seven, is the god of the earth. Therefore, the
"bread of Seb" is, like the manna of the Old Testament, that
nutriment which the soul abstracts from the very ground of earthly experience.
Also he says that he comes in order that he may bathe in the pool beneath the
two divine sycamore trees of heaven and earth. As in the case of the divine
nucleus represented by Jesus in the Christian allegory, the unit of potential
Christ consciousness had to come down out of heaven and be immersed in the
waters of the earthly baptism, which waters, be it known at last, are just the
blood of physical human bodies. The immersion is dramatically administered by a
forerunner called "the Baptist." For this body blood is indeed that
"
By now it should be evident how
great an error is committed in promulgating a philosophy that advises the human
entity to turn away from contact with the earth and its influences, designed of
a certainty to be salutary, and to negate psychologically the validity of all
mundane experience. Such an attitude gains no sanction from the tomes of the
great Sages of the early time. It is the spurious product of shallow
understanding and gullible pietism.
What has been overlooked entirely is
that to turn the mind away from the actualities of the world experience, with
the expectation of finding more stable and enduring satisfactions in the depths
of consciousness, is only to meet with a disappointing futility. For
28
that is only to plunge the mind into
the vacuity of an empty cavern. It is quite the same as pulling the babe away
from feeding upon the natural food from its mother's breasts, and expecting it
to draw its nourishment from the sterile air. If one turns the mind from
concrete objectivity to bask atop the hills of an inner divine subjectivity,
the rueful upshot will be the fruitless groping of a mind in a void.
It is right here that spiritual cult
theory and practice have perpetrated their most harmful blunder and most
positively committed themselves to error. The divine power is within, and is to
be implemented from within. But all procedure that aims to exalt it by
nullifying the outer mind and seeking the soul's gold in the vacuum of an
alleged inner consciousness of greater reality is marked decidedly as vain and
nugatory. So positively is it untrue to predicate the soul's divinization
through withdrawal from contact with the outer world, that the exact reverse of
this theory is the truth which mans needs to follow. Perhaps an enlightened
philosophy is soon to proclaim, as the long-lost truth of a sound soul-science,
that the true cultus of the divine intelligence is man consists not in
severing the links of conscious relation to the actualities of the earthly
experience and retreating within the secluded depths of detached consciousness.
Precisely on the contrary, that true soul-science is cultivated and perfected
by going outside and establishing a living psychic relation with the
external world. That this flies directly in the face of the vast literature of
New Thought and the admonitions of the self-realization preachments denouncing
the external world, is only too apparent. That it is the demonstrable truth is
nevertheless maintained.
The difference in direction--going
without instead of going within--is the difference between focusing the soul's
energies upon blankness in the one case and upon the precise and mutely
articulate images of reality in the other. Contrary to all the claims of
religious theory, the forms and paradigms of real being are not found
residing ethereally in the higher rarefied areas of human consciousness. They
are not lying there in a superior world, merely awaiting the time when
the mind will stop shutting off the soul's access to them. That interior domain
is a blank, a void, until such time as the outer mind, learning to build up the
images of supernal truth from its sublimation, or subjectification of the
phenomenal
29
objects seen in the concrete world,
supplies the upper region with the figured elements of real conceptions. Only
then does the void begin to have content. Not inside, but outside in the
world, has the creator mind placed the crystallized forms of the divine
ideation for man's behoof. To preach the cult of discovering them by
withdrawing the consciousness from the outer world into the vacant abyss of
inner subjectivity is to direct our search for them precisely to the region
where they are not to be found. They lie constantly out in the world under our
eyes; and what egregious folly it is then to direct the mind away from them to
stare fruitlessly into vacancy! Philosophy must recover the balance and sanity
to point the search for truth toward the ground where it is found to lie,
renouncing the fatuous seeking of them in a vacuous fairyland hypothecated by
the tortured processes of unsound philosophical lucubration.
For, as said, nature is the body of
God and the laws of nature are the automatic workings of his subconscious mind.
In gazing out upon nature, the eye and then the mind will be observing the
first creative or archetypal thoughts of the divine ideation, rendered solid
and stable for human reflection and study. The objects and phenomena of nature
are the operations of the cosmic intelligence made concrete and objective. They
reveal the cosmic rationale of the great Noumenon. It could be poetically said
that nature caught God's thoughts on the wing as they were projected from his
mind and froze them into substantial form in matter. It has indeed been written
that the forms of nature are the congealed thoughts of God. How decisively we
are learning now that matter is divine force, divine spirit, petrified!
Herein comes to view a needed
correction in the position of general academic philosophy upon a point kindred
to the one under discussion. One reads endlessly that what the senses and the
mind perceive in nature is not the reality, but the "mere" appearance
of a reality that lies "behind." It seems necessary to take direct
issue with this idea and especially with the phrase used,--mere "appearance."
The view makes of concrete objectivity a mere shadow world, a false pretense at
real being. The material object-form of a thing is not the reality of the
thing, but an unreal image of it, the real thing being all the while an
idea-form in the creative mind.
Our quarrel is with the wrong
connotation this view assigns to the word "appearance" and its
unwarranted accentuation by the
30
adjective "mere." The
contention is that the concrete material object is the real appearance and in
no sense a false representation of a real thing hiding behind it. It is the
positive, most substantial and actual appearance to human view of an ideal
conception that was invisible to us until it made its appearance physically and
stood out there concreted in form of substance that made it perceptible to our
senses. The appearance is in no wise a phantom of a reality haunting us, but
the actual coming to view of what was only noumenal and as such imperceptible
as long as it remained a subjective mind-form in creative thought. The use of
"appearance" in the sense of only a seeming-to-be of something not
really present is here vigorously disputed. And there is no warrant in truth
for accompanying it by the adjective "mere". If a thing positively appears
out of invisibility into visibility, like an actor appearing on a stage from
behind the curtain, by what warrant is it referred to as a "mere"
appearance? Would one say that at his proper cue the actor merely appeared?
Why is the hint of unreality injected into the statement of the fact that in
the phenomenal world of objectivity the ideal forms of God's thoughts appear,
or make their appearance to our view, when previously they had been
imperceptible! What is "mere" about it, when it is the very
solidification before our eyes of what was until then only a thought form of
cosmic mind? The objective world is surely not a "mere appearance" of
true being, but that true being itself, having appeared in our world out of the
heavens of divine ideation. It was hardened into concrete objectivity and
placed here to be seen.
What becomes clear on the postulates
of the greatest wisdom attained by the human mind, or the wisdom vouchsafed to
early humanity by high exponents of the divine mind, is that there must be a
complete reversal of direction in the quest for spiritual illumination and the
consummation of the mystical apotheosis of consciousness. Not in the vacuity of
the inner mind, but out in the world of living forms are to be found the
monographs of God's prescience. The world he has created is the world
that reveals the thought-pattern over which he designed that which came to be.
There visibly are displayed the noumena which turned into phenomena in our
world of dense substance. We have in utter folly termed the phenomena unreal
and the noumena alone real. This makes a house that is only pictured in an
architect's mind, or drawn
31
in blueprint, the real house, and
the same house later standing fully created in wood, stone, brick or concrete,
the unreal house, the ghost or "mere" shadow of the real house. Do we
not only have to ask which one would accommodate real living? Determined from
the standpoint of life in this world, surely the material house is the real
one. From the standpoint of God's view, he being the thinker and creator, both
the purely noumenal and the congealed actual house are real, since one has no
warrant for pronouncing either thoughts or things unreal. Gerald Massey,
profound student of ancient Egyptology, points out the odd closeness of the
words "think" and "thing." And it seems to be clear that
both derive from the Egyptian hieroglyph which is the symbol and the word for life,
the great ankh cross. (The nk spelling did become ng in
Greek.) In the cosmic creative process God's "thinks" became
"things."
This whole question of reality or
unreality has been involved in endless and needless confusion for the rather
simple reason that the discussion has never specified which world is being
considered as the home of reality. Life and its productions exist in two
worlds, or, as philosophers might insist, they subsist in the noumenal
world and exist in the physical. Life, if it is to become manifest to
itself and its creatures--which are modes of itself--breaks apart into the two
phases or aspects of consciousness and matter. Its creations are generated in
consciousness, or noumenally conceived. Then by a process analogous to a
reduction of temperature, which "freezes" them into
"solidity," they are concreted in matter, which, now we know, is simply
pure energy made static. That which is to be a material thing when
"staticized" is first a formation in the energy waves of thought. How
can there be any question of its reality in either phase of its being?
It is first real as a thought, or as a real thought; later it is real as an
object, a real thought objectified, and therefore a real object. It was
a real thought; now it is a real object. Reality is a categorical attribute of
things that are. What folly to maintain that they are real when in one world or
in one form, and unreal when in another world or form! The philosophical
maneuver of denying reality to the objects of God's creation when they have
become substantially objectified to his own and to our consciousness, must some
day be seen to be a weird misconception born of a most singular quirk of the
human thinking process.
All these considerations bear
strongly upon the matter of the
32
culture of the divinity in human
nature. But the bases of a still more rigorous criticism are yet to be
outlined. Perhaps the most flagrant mistake or omission in spiritual cult
philosophy is its total failure to include in its rationale the place and
function of the great law of polarity, absolutely basic for all manifestation,
and therefore basic as a predicate for reality either noumenal or phenomenal.
If this universal principle is left out, no competent rationalization of living
experience is possible at all. A philosophy formulated without it is no
philosophy. And it must be said in respect to this item that the
"spiritual" philosophies miss the mark of true conception by a long
mile. Because, in preaching at us the withdrawal of our conscious effort from
objective reality in order to gain contact with an allegedly truer reality in
subjectivity, they actually ask us to tear ourselves apart, to rend our being
in twain, to rip ourselves asunder. They ask us to dismantle our integrity, to
destroy the unity of our selfhood. In the first place, this is something that can
not be done. In the second place the effort based on the false
presupposition that it can be done and is desirable will entail disaster.
For life here, or anywhere it
becomes manifest, is and must be polarized. The cryptic meaning of that great
old Egyptian symbol, the ankh, is that life is the result of
polarization, for it conjoins the two symbols of spirit and matter. Neither
consciousness nor material existence is possible without it. No consciousness
is possible to a completely unitary being. Unity must be broken apart into
duality, if consciousness is to arise. For consciousness must be segregated
from objectivity and then be confronted with something to be conscious of. This
necessitates the existence of matter, body and the world. Spirit can have no
birth or growth if it is not kept in the relation of polar opposition to
matter. All values are born out of the tensional relation between spirit and
matter. If spirit is, or could be, torn away from its connection with matter,
the tension is dissolved and the worlds and consciousness both disappear. The
universe is sustained in being on a web of force that stretches from spirit at
the "top" to matter at the "bottom" of the scale, and that
tensional force is the warp and woof of all existence. It is that dynamism
which Einstein and now Hlavaty (recently declared to have proved Einstein's
theory) have found to be the essence and the ground of all world appearance. It
is the preaching of ignorance, the counsel of folly, to base man's divinization
on the presumption
33
that it can be achieved or furthered
by the attempt to pull the spirit away from its close and essential association
with matter and body. It is asking both spirit and matter to renounce and
dissolve their kinship, which is a twinship. The wisdom of ancient
We have here at last the meaning of
the allegory of the wheat and the tares in the Christian Gospels. True enough
it is that the two can not be separated until the harvest. If you pull up the
tares when they are growing close beside the wheat, you uproot the wheat along
with them. If evil were taken out of the world, there would be no fulcrum
against which to anchor the leverage for good. In the harvest at the cycle's
end both relapse back into their primordial unity, and disappear as separate
entities.
On the solid rock of this principle
of universal polarity the preachment of the philosophy of spiritual detachment
breaks in wreckage. It is seen to be little better than mystical moonshine. It
ammounts to semi-pious intellectual fol-de-rol and is misleading and far from
innocuous psychologically. The effort to abstract the consciousness from world
objectivity--doomed to certain failure factually--can lead a mind so far from
contact with reality as to rob all experience of its designed salutary
pedagogical value. One can reify a dreamy persuasion until it is turned from
fantasy into a hallucination of verity. The possibility of self-hypnotization
is always a potential menace to balance and sanity. If we can escape actuality
by relapsing into dream, it is certified that we can miss reality by dwelling
continually in the dream fantasy. The soul is on earth to receive the full
impact of actuality, without which its divine capability could never be brought
out to conscious mastery. To sink back while on earth into the dreaminess to escape
which it fled from heaven, is to counter the motive and reverse the procedure
which life is pursuing in its drive for its own aggrandizement.
If the god-power is within the
constitution of man it must be evident that the human body is the laboratory in
which all the seed latency of future power and divine genius is to be evolved
to full expression. The body, says
34
How far askew is that posture of
mind which teaches the evil character of the body! For some ten or more
centuries Christianity held it in contempt and tried to mortify it, imitating
Indian philosophy, which aimed to kill it. Christianity based much of its
condemnation of Paganism on the latter's wholesome reverence for the body, and
Paganism is still berated for its alleged revel in the grossness of bodily
sensuality. It is not at all realized now that it takes a far profounder and
more sanely balanced philosophy to allocate the flesh to its proper place and
function in a universal economy of good than merely to decry it as the low
enemy of spirit and revile it accordingly.
The shortsightedness of the negative
view of the world and our life in it is accentuated again by the reflection,
apparently little pondered in religious circles, that the mental posture of
earthly detachment and effort at absorption in a heavenly consciousness runs
counter to the simple logic of the incarnational situation, when it is known
that these souls of humans had been long enough in the heaven state of
consciousness to have grown weary of its inactivity and inanity, and
voluntarily (as says Plotinus) came here to exchange it for the more real sense
of existence and the chance to exercise untried powers which heaven could never
cultivate. If the disembodied soul consciousness is so blessed and blissful, so
rhapsodically preferable to the drab real-sense experiences here, it is a
legitimate question to ask why they did not stay up there. What prevailed upon
them to leave that delectable homeland that now they are said to yearn so
longingly to regain?
That, be it declared with great
pointedness, is the question that the escapist philosophies have apparently
never seriously asked, much less have ever competently answered.
35
CHAPTER FOUR
WEDDING IN THE
Until an answer is given to the
insistent query as to why the souls of men are on the earth no philosophy
pertaining to the mundane life is possible. The codes of escapism are
exhortations to man to jump out of reality and land in a vacuum.
It comes as the unconscionable
upshot of such a creed that if there is a legitimate ground for the withdrawal
tactic, then earth life for the hosts of celestial souls immersed in it is an
inadvertence, a mistake, an unjustifiable hardship inflicted on all caught in
its current, a blundering miscarriage of some creative design. Cult ideology
shades its eyes against the strong searching light of the ineluctable fact of
the divine economy, in whose strategic moves earth life is no mistake, is
entirely necessary and beneficent from every angle, for the one and
all-sufficient reason that gods can not be born, bred and reared in heaven.
Conceived they can be there, in the depths of the cosmic mind; but not there
born or raised to maturity. For heaven can provide for their birthing no matter
to be their mother. Planted on earth they must be. So to presume to tear them
loose from their rootage in the soil-bed of human nature is dialectically
equivalent to the folly of pulling up a garden plant out of the ground to
hasten its growth. To expect a soul to grow without letting its roots hold
deeply in the ground of earthly body is the same as to expect a candle to glow
without its tallow, or the fire to burn without its wood. Again sage
Just as in winter we long for the
summer warmth and in summer we equally yearn for the coolness of winter, so it
is that when we are here on earth we long for the vividly imagined bliss of
heaven and bend our philosophies to accord with the yearning. But the other
phase of the situation is not thought of or given weight in religious
philosophy. Yet it must be true that when the soul has had its sufficiency of
rest in the dreamy unreality of subjective consciousness in worlds above, it
must long to be again where the contact with veridical sense experience gives
to existence an engaging charm and zest. It must long for escape then from the
inane passivity and enforced inactivity that can become morbid. It must yearn
36
to arise from sleep, throw off dull
sloth and give play to the powers that else would remain in unwholesome
stagnation. This, the positive aspect of the philosophy of life, seen only in
the light of the knowledge of the dual and polarized state of being in
manifestation, finds scarcely a single note of emphasis in whole libraries of
cult literature. It is reasonable to assert that a philosophy which wholly
ignores this balance of forces that stabilizes the world of life must be a
blind and dangerous guide.
The legendary "rebellion of the
angels," for which they were cast out of heaven to suffer hardship on earth
in the Miltonian tradition, has been frightfully mangled in popular conception.
It is commonly represented as an evil movement of hostility to the powers of
God himself, a revolt against the divine rulership of the cosmos. A more
recondite scrutiny of the allegory discloses that it was in reality simply a
revolt against the gossamer vacuousness of the celestial life, against the
ennui, prolixity and dreary tedium of the heavenly existence, motivated by
eager longing for the more vivid experience of sense and the novel adventure of
the ego-consciousness, all of which was impossible apart from union with
physical body on a planet. It is not perhaps a rash surmise to suggest that
this is the significance of the statement in Revelation that one sweep
of the dragon's tail brushed out one third of the angels of heaven. The dragon,
who is identical with "Satan, that old serpent that deceiveth the whole
world," is the ancient allegorical figure typifying the lower sense nature
in man, and it is indeed the strong sweep of this element which springs up and
assails the soul from the side of body, that draws down the hosts of angels for
a more actualized sense of being than heaven can give. Against the background
of this determination of earthly motive for the descent of the angels, the
systems of cult teaching emphasizing the evil of earth and exhorting escape by
tugging and pushing the soul back up to heaven before the efficacious
influences of earth can have accomplished their beneficent offices, are most
clearly seen in all the flagrancy of their ineptitude.
As it was this yearning for sensuous
self-consciousness that lured the angels down to earth, and earth and body gave
them the freedom to revel in the luxury of physical existence, where their own
fledgeling powers could be put to the trial, the sense of physical enjoyment
became the polar opposite of the life of the spirit. And
37
because it was the opposite node to
spirit, popular ignorance in the end misconceived it and set it up as the opponent,
the adversary of the spirit. Hence it was this impulse to revel in the
delight of free action in their own right that came to be denominated the
"sin," the "carnal sin" of our first angelic parents. St.
Paul makes this overwhelmingly clear when (in Romans 7) he makes the
remarkable statement that when "the command" (wrongly translated
"commandment" in most versions, corrected in the Moffatt translation)
came home to him, sin sprang to life and he "died," the command
(meaning the heavenly mandate to incarnate) that gave him earthly life proving
to be a veritable "death" to his soul--precisely as Greek theosophies
had always represented it. Just ahead of this he had said that the law of sin
and death has power over a man "only so long as he liveth." All this
strongly certifies that we have here at last the right approach to the true
comprehension of the original theological connotation of the redoubtable thing
called "sin." At base and stripped of all weird misconception of
morbid pietism, it is just the soul's delight in its freedom to revel here on
earth in a fling of its creative power in a little universe of its own, its
physical body and its circle of mundane activity. It must be a shock and rebuke
to somber pietism that Paul himself in this same chapter asks if the soul's
revel in sense life is evil, and thunders out the negative answer, "God
forbid." And he ends by pronouncing the whole "fall of the
angels" "holy, just and for our good." He urges us in fact to
"make use of this good thing."
In Plato's Timaeus is reported
verbatim the speech made by the Creator Logos, the Greek Demiurgus, or Jupiter,
to the legions of angels assembled to hear their commission of creational duty
on earth. They are expressly told that they are being despatched to the earth
to supervise the creation of "three races" who are necessary to the
completion of the divine work on the earth. They are told to "convert
yourselves according to your nature to the fabrication of animals [animate
beings], using in their creation the powers which I used in your
generation." For this creation the mundane animal evolution would provide
the physical bodies; the cosmic Lord says that of the part of these dual beings
which will be indestructible and immortal, he himself "will furnish the
seed and the beginning," meaning the divine nucleus of soul energy. Then
he concludes by commanding these angels to go down to earth, enter
38
the prepared animal bodies and
"weave together mortal and immortal natures." "The underworld
awaits your coming" is a statement made to these angels in another
Scripture. This is the celestial assignment of the soul to its great
evolutionary task, which entails its descent to earth, the uniting of its
spiritual potential with the bodily forces of the highest animal races ready to
receive and house such a heavenly visitant, and then the consummating the great
achievement of effecting a final harmonization and union of the two natures,
the animals' and its own, in "one new man, so making peace," as St.
Paul delineates it.
How then, let spiritual cultism
answer, can the soul effectuate this mighty consummation if it abandons the
body, flees from it as a loathsome thing, renounces or ignorantly shuns all
natural association with it, and battles to return to heaven before the great
aeonial labor has been accomplished? This is the philosophy of truancy from the
school of life. In this phase indeed is perhaps best expressed the gist of all
the philosophies which negate all positive value to life and recommend
psychological escape from it: they rebel against the complete course of
education in life's school and exhort all pupils to truancy.
This, and not the angelic rebellion
in heaven, must be accounted the real revolt against the authority of God. If
God sends us out to school--since we can not learn by staying at home--it is
the simple sum of our duty that, all instruction and discipline being arduous,
onerous and to a degree painful--albeit also zestful and rewarding--we should
attend faithfully, heed our great instructor, experience, and stick to the
assignment until the commission is fulfilled. Of course human nature, if left
to its own predilection, would prefer dreamy idleness and mystic musing to the
tedious task of self-development and learning. But even common human judgment
decides that this is not the way of the valiant spirit, not the true path up
the scale of being. The philosophies counseling short cuts back to heaven will
have to bend to acceptance of the tutelage of earth. The road to the mountain
top, shining in the distance, runs through the valleys of lowly earth.
39
nally stressed. The Buddhistic and
other religious philosophies of the Hindu people assert that the soul is on
earth because of its ignorance. But instead of following the natural course of
logic to the conclusion that, because it is in childish ignorance, the soul
should diligently apply itself to the tutelage of earthy experience and learn
to supplant ignorance with intelligence, Indian thought can only seem to
discern that the remedy is for the soul to flee the assignment and escape. It
seems never to have been able to achieve the logical goal of understanding that
the soul is sent here precisely to overcome that aboriginal ignorance, and that
the victory when attained amply compensates for all strain and suffering
endured in the process. This inability of the Hindu mind to accept the mundane
existence as salutary stems, as intimated before, from failure to include in
its philosophical systemology any rational accounting for the condition of
ignorance in the first place. The dearth of this specific knowledge, a grasp of
which could illumine this dark lacuna in Indian ideology, is definitely
testified to by Max Mueller, eminent scholar already cited. He writes:
"The question how nescience
laid hold of the human soul and made it imagine that it could live or move or
have its true being anywhere but in Brahman, remains as unanswerable in Hindu
philosophy as, in Christianity, the question how sin first came into the
world."
The crux of all dialectic of
"spiritual" and escapist philosophy is centered at the point where
the desire for liberation is seen in conflict with the necessity for the
incarnation of soul in the first place. A philosophy which simply drives its
devotees to seek release for their bondage--if truly it is such--is as
unbalanced and hence likely to be as irrational as is the medical practice
which hurries to treat the surface symptoms of disease without discovering and
removing the cause. Also it is as egregiously marked by folly and ignorance as
would be the school boy's unremitting effort to escape the "durance
vile" of the school and its tasks, in total failure to recognize the good
purposes which induce his parents and the state to subject him to his days and
years of "imprisonment" at hard labor. Further it is unassailable
logic to declare that if the pupil in life's academy centers his whole effort
intensively on the business of effecting his
40
escape, he will miss the total
instruction for which attendance at the school was instituted. To his sorrow he
will later learn that all he escapes is honor, promotion and the joy of
eventual graduation summa cum laude. He will but prolong, with a worse
accentuation of its hardships, his tenure of tutelage. Again citing
The bent to erect into a competent
religious philosophy the soul's natural desire to escape the hard travail on
earth and revert to the delicious ease of Devachan, or the unconsciousness of
Nirvana, must be interpreted as simply the exaltation of desire, unrelated in
any balanced way to the other arcs and phases of the cycle of incarnation and
release. It is by analogy simply the natural desire of unenlightened and
unheroic man to be freed from the arduous and spiritless dragging on of his
life in an ill-conditioned body, without balancing it against the evolutionary
gains which are both the justification and the vindication of the incarnation.
Torn out of its niche in the ever-recurrent rounds and viewed out of relation
to the total beneficence of the whole involvement, the failure of zest for the
experience and the longing for surcease of its woes in the more ethereal realms
are elevated into the dominant principles of a religious philosophy. It is thus
condemned by its shortsightedness and unbalance.
But the final verdict on its utter
incompetence is rendered to logic in the realization that in sheer dialectic it
is evident that if the motive of escapism can be edified into a sound
defensible philosophy of life, there can not be found anywhere just grounds on
which to base either the necessity or the beneficence of the soul's migration
to earth in the first place or at all. If life is an unrequited evil and
hardship gratuitously imposed on the soul, then there can be no philosophy
formulated that either explains or validates it. If it can not be explained as
a scheme of demonstrable good, no philosophy is possible in connection with it.
In the last blunt words that can express it, if the drive to escape it is the
supreme recommendation of the best thought the human mind can entertain about
it, then it can not be deemed good. The only justification of escapist
philosophy is that the experience here is not good but wholly evil. And if
evil, then the question confronts man as to how he is to rationalize his being
tossed about from heaven to earth by the power of some demoniac force that puts
him periodically in a direful im-
41
prisonment, from which his noblest
aspiration is the yearning to make his escape.
The Buddhist system, in analysing
the so-called chain of the causation of suffering, lays all to the desire of
the soul for the enjoyment of the sense and feeling of life. The hunger for the
objects of desire causes the soul to be born again and again, and each birth
prolongs the sorrow and suffering. Therefore if the soul is to be rid of the
cause of continual sorrow and suffering, it must root out of its heart the
craving for the sense of life. The life instinct must be overcome and
destroyed. This further deepens and darkens the negative, self-annihilating
philosophy of the Hindu mentality. The doleful upshot of such a philosophy,
which fastens the tag of evil on the life experience, is that in fact it leaves
life without a philosophy. As intimated earlier, in strict truth a thing which
is pronounced an unrelieved evil can not properly have a philosophy covering
it. By basic derivation philosophy means a love of wisdom. But does not a
philosophy which proclaims life an unmitigated evil renounce or forfeit all
claim to wisdom? The human mind can not be expected to love a thing categorized
as evil. The negative philosophy of
If the soul hungers for life, it
also hungers for knowledge. And ultimately the basic knowledge that the human
mind demands and must have is some rational answer to the question why man as a
conscious entity is on this planet. The "sacred" Scriptures can be
truly holy to earth citizens if they tell us why the creator-power,
intelligence, sent these souls, its sons, out from what they also describe as
the glory palace of blessed life to undergo a quite strenuous existence on this
rolling globe. A philosophy should not claim the high name until it answers
that question, straight, fair and true. One school of religion asserts that it
is veritable blasphemy for the child-soul to demand an answer to the great
question or to pry curiously into the affairs of the Father's ordering. Another
evades the answer on the ground that we do not possess the faculties by which
42
to comprehend the answer if it was
given us. Another affirms that we were summarily despatched to earth by an
angered Father to penalize us for an initial infraction of an arbitrary
restriction on our freedom.
When properly interpreted, the
sacred Scriptures enlighten us with the profound knowledge that we were sent
out here, in one of the beautiful gardens of delight (
All the while we can read as clear
and concise a statement of the great answer as could well be condensed in a few
short sentences, and if we can muster the intelligence to comprehend the words,
we indeed can register again that elevated satisfaction and joy that our minds
experience when they can digest the substance of truth. Plotinus strove to
rekindle the fires of understanding that were so fast sinking down to dead
embers and cold ashes, and to him we stand indebted forever for this mastery
formulation of the positive answer to the dark riddle of our existence, an
answer that repudiates all the gruesome imputation that life here is an evil
mischance, and makes clear the grounds of our faith in its beneficence. The
reader has already noted his ringing asseveration that but for its contact with
and mastery of the evil in the world, the soul would never come to know the
power of its mighty wings.
Here stands the answer of
43
the Hellenic world with the spread
of the persuasion that life is only an unredeemed evil to be annulled and
escaped. The famous phrase coined by Sir Gilbert Murray, eminent English
scholar in the field of Greek philosophy, "the loss of nerve" in the
Hellenic world, vividly expresses the incidence to the intellectual blight that
was so far advanced in Plotinus' day of the second century. Under the benignant
influence of a philosophy that rated and rationalized life as wholly good, and
its hard experience salutary, the human spirit could face the mundane task with
a resolute valor born of inner certitude. The soul in the human could front
life's challenge with cheer, with courage, with fortitude.
But with the invasion of the popular
thought by the dour gospel of the evil of life, the springs of zest and
"nerve" for the adventure of soul in body were drained dry, and the battle
for life was transformed early into a desperate abandon and a struggle to win
back the rhapsodies of heaven. The "bread of Seb," or food of earth,
to partake of which the soul, in Egypt's great Bible, had so eagerly set out
from heaven, was turned "moldy," and the divine "beer"
which it had come down to drink had turned "sour". And by what! By
the injection in the living essence of human thought of a poisonous tincture of
the philosophy of the evil of life. The impact of this untoward idea is naturally
such that it chills and kills the mind's instinctive glow of eager adventure,
of hope, of zest for the experience.
The aim under this persuasion being
consciously to stifle and quench the fires of worldly interest which seek
outward expression, there must result a smothering and dampening of all life's
outgoing energies. The effort to subdue the vigor of extrovert tendency must
bear fruit of a bitter taste. The law of the circulation of the blood testifies
by unfailing analogy that corruption and disease follow upon any checking of
the free flow of the streams that carry life's impulses outward. For the
voluminous tragedy of human ill that has stricken the society of mortals in
Western history since the decay of the robust healthy Greek philosophy of the
Platonic era, let the religions crying the negation of all values in the earth
life bear the heavy onus of responsibility. If there is now any sincere desire
to lift modern life out of its deep-grained corruptions to a level of dynamic
vigor and health, to restore to it a more valiant spirit that will quicken
again the pulse-stroke of the heart of our
44
existence, the most direct move as
means to that end is to establish again the Greek academies that were closed by
Justinian in the fifth century.
Stupidly and blindly the orthodoxies
of our day will cry out against the "return to Paganism." The rebuke
to this folly is that the great light did shine in Pagan times, and under
Christianity we have had the Medieval "Dark Ages," during which the
light obscured in Christian lands was kept burning in Mohammedan and Jewish
academies and cloisters. The Italian Renaissance was a glorious upflash of its
light from the smoldering embers. The Protestant Reformation carried its spirit
some way into religion. But for the full free upflow again of the heroic
nerve-pulse generated by the knowledge of the good purposes of the soul's
periodic visits to earth we still must wait. Likewise we wait for a
civilization that manifested the beauty, grace, sanity and wholesomeness of
life such as flourished when the Platonic wisdom was cultivated. Much of the
moral of this essay would be lost also if there is failure to note that the
great truth enunciated in Plotinus' gratifying citation gives the coup de
grace to all the spiritual-cult philosophy that emphasizes the withdrawal
of the soul as far as possible from the flesh. The Greek philosophy inspired a
healthy life because it was animated by the foundation truth that the soul was
on earth to make common cause with the body in the evolutionary interests of
both, neither to flee, escape nor crush the body, but indeed to woo, win and
wed it, for the mutual parentage of the god in man.
The dialectical dilemma facing the
spirit-cultists is drawn in sharp lines with the reflection that if spiritual
life disengaged from body is the ideal of consummate good for the soul, what
then is soul doing on earth at all? If its best interests are subserved when it
is free of the flesh, by what misdirection of cosmic policy, or by what dire
necessity, is it drawn down out of celestial felicity at all? If the
untrammeled life of the soul in spirit existence is the all-perfect environment
for it, why does life not permit it to remain there in beatific tranquility
forever?
To this key question spiritual and
mayavic philosophy has no answer. For that we have to go to the old Egyptian
and the later Greek Wisdom. If heaven life is completely adequate for the
soul's blessedness, there can be no justification of the enforced migration of
souls to earth. And if we dare not assume that earth life decreed
45
for the soul is entirely good and to
be lived to the full without distrust of its beneficent ends, then we are
forbidden to postulate that the universe is under the rule of an omniscient
Power in every way benevolent. And if we are not permitted to lay down this
postulate, religion itself is not possible.
Some form of spiritual exaltation to
the ineffable heights of conscious felicity is indicated for the soul in the
apotheosis of its nature at the end of the cycle. But the unconscionable error
of spiritual philosophy has been in thinking that the flesh stood as a barrier
in the way of that consummation, and that it was only necessary to crush down
the flesh for the soul to step unobstructed into its heaven. This presumption
aligned the flesh in the ranks of opposition to the soul as its enemy, when the
truth is that the soul can attain its
"God lent the house of a beast
to the soul of the man;
And the man said 'Am I your debtor?'
And God said, 'Make it as clean as
you can,
And then I will send you a
better.'"
And beyond all estimation must be
the total psychological consequences for the worlds of both East and West of
the depressant influence of these systems that negate the value of our life,
berate and crucify the body and urge escape as the prime blessedness. The
natural atmosphere in which the conscious ego of man can flourish and develop
in happy and healthy state is that of positive and affirmative attitudes toward
the experience now being undergone. It is not mere poetic figurism to say that
such a psychic posture of perennial affirmation is as vital to the soul's life
as is sunshine to the plant. Deprived of it the spirit languishes and may
wither. The gratuitous imposition on the mind of the inculcation that all that
we behold of this fair earth and our existence in the midst of its garden of
beauty is not real, is maya, illusion, a deception that we must evade by a
constant negation of its registered influences, can spell nothing but a
pernicious corruption of the soul's energetic effort to relate itself to
reality. It must amount in the
46
end to a partial palsy and paralysis
of its evolutionary impulse, or involve it in "shoals and quicksands"
of frustration and confusion. If this does not come close to rating as a crime
against the holy ghost, the divine spirit of life, it would be hard to find
anything closer.
Life flows by turns outward and
inward in its periodic cyclic impulses. For the soul of man its migration from
heaven to earth is its outward movement. The outward expression of its energies
in this fashion is an integral part of the processes of its evolutionary
advance. Its highest good is to be attained by carrying the outward sweep to
its farthest limits as the pendulum swings on that arc. Anything that checks or
interferes with the movement must be accounted harmful, potentially dangerous.
Surely a philosophy that aims to reverse the direction of the flow in the sweep
of the outgoing manifestation must risk involving the entity in being crushed
by the onrushing current. Also the attempt to throw the outward cycle back into
the inward direction before the former has completed its work, will in the same
way invite calamity. In fact there is in occult literature the tradition of
those groups of angels who, being ordered to incarnate on earth in animal bodies
suitable as vehicles for the expression of their faculties, refused and in
consequence were "punished" by being forced down at a later time into
less suitable bodies. Indian literature has called them the "unwilling
Nirvanees." Those conceptions which naively assume that the high interests
of spirit are without question to be furthered by lifting the soul as far out
of relation to the body as possible--as in some Hindu systems to master the
technique of entrancing it entirely-suffer from ignorance of what the soul is
intended to effectuate in its conjunction with body. The philosophy of life
must be solidly grounded on the rationale of the incarnation. Spirit-cultism
seems to think it can ignore this central axis of the situation entirely. The
plan of life in the progressive arc of its cycle is generated by throwing the
mind into the spirit of the movement outward toward the periphery. Anything
that thwarts that outgoing swing is productive of disorder in the movement. To
affirm in the very midst of the outgoing sweep that only the opposite direction
is good is again to tune the movement to discord. This would be equivalent to
urging the rising sap of the tree in the spring to turn back and retreat unto
the root and ground where it hibernated in the winter.
47
CHAPTER FIVE
THE GARDEN OF THE WORLD
It must be considered a matter of
great moment in the history of world philosophy when a Hindu philosopher, and
one rated as perhaps the greatest seer and thinker in the modern period, takes
a stand on the dialectics of the spiritual life that comes close to reversing
the age-long traditional attitude of Indian thought on the pivotal
philosophical questions with which this essay is dealing. It is a definitely
unique event when a Hindu expositor accords to the life of the body, its senses
and feelings, and to the mind a place of equal value with the postulated
intuitions of the transcendental consciousness and the supermind. This epochal
phenomenon is, however, what one finds in the books of Sri Aurobindo Ghose, particularly
as set down in perhaps his chief work, The Life Divine. It is most
refreshing to note a Hindu treatment of maya doctrine that regards this
recondite and abstruse conception as an integral attribute of the cosmic
Brahman from all eternity, and not as something introduced surreptitiously and
as if by some inadvertence of deity or delinquency of man, adventitiously. And
similarly it is cheering to find the great sage drawing, as it were, the sting
of deception from the head of this doctrine that has beclouded the minds of so
many millions of earth's citizenry.
For maya, he asserts, is the web
which omnipotent deity weaves to give itself the experience of enjoying the
work of its creation. Maya is that mode of being into which deity casts itself
to generate the consciousness through which the delight which it seeks in
world-building can come home to it. It is, so to say, part of its repertoire, a
device it utilizes to accomplish what it desires.
Historians tell us that Christianity
swept in on the crest of a wave of credulity that rode westward to Syria and
Judea from its point of initial impulse in India. Its general Hindu character
was manifest in its strong bent to deprecate the values of mundane existence
and experience, to taint it with the imputation of hostility and detriment to
the interests of the soul and to besmirch it with the obloquy of evil nature.
In consequence religious interest tended to switch its focus and arena from the
world of nature and the life in body over to the hypothecated glories of the
supermind and the celestial coefficient of consciousness. The hope of miracle
and
48
spiritual magic supplanted the
confidence in natural law and the day-to-day beneficence of world experience.
"Great pan was dead," the early Christians shouted, fiercely exulting
in the belief that a fanatical zealotry and paroxysms of pietistic
supernaturalism would open the gates of Paradise on their entranced vision and
obviate for them the necessity of progressing over the long road of evolution
to divinity under nature's rigid ordinances. The old dispensation of the
severity of law and exact justice was abrogated, they proclaimed, and all old
things were to be swept away and a new heaven and a new earth would burst upon
their gaze as the great surge of the love of Christ and the mercy of God
renewed all hearts. When earth, the body and its interests became as filthy
rags in the sight of God, heaven became the cynosure of all enraptured eyes,
till not even the lion's gory claws could dim those ecstatic visions of the
beatific glory in the skies.
If the vile body and the deceptive
interests of the world blocked off the soul's approach to this celestial
blessedness, the lion's rending paw was a welcome opener of the door to Eden
regained. And ever since, both in East and West, the fundamental idea of the
conception of sainthood has been a withdrawal of all interest in secular events
and world life and a burying of the soul in a life of abstraction and
introversion. Experience gained through the ordinary means of the ego's contact
with the external fringe is a contamination of the spirit. Only within the
deeper recesses of the soul, and these only capable of being discovered when
the gaze is lifted from the world, are the enduring treasures of the divine mind
to be found. Deep within man's consciousness lay the enchanted kingdom of
heaven, where omniscient knowledge, light and bliss bathed the soul in
felicity. And, said modern and much ancient spiritual science, this state of
blessedness was to be induced by the practice of closing off the consciousness
from the world without and concentrating it upon the vacancy within, until the
forms of truth and the ecstasies of seraphic beatitude supervene from out the
inner holy of holies. Not out in the world, but in the silence of the inner
temple of consciousness could man hear the divine voice. So the resurgent sweep
of the Oriental philosophy gave us a new edition of the "voice of the
silence." And a flood of manuals detailing the formulas for engaging in meditation
has poured over the Western world, with thousands sitting in postures
calculated to ease the
49
body into tranquility, the better to
permit the consciousness to clear its slate of all distracting elements from
the side of the senses and the body. The Biblical injunctions, "be still
and know that I am God," was echoed as the key shibboleth of every cult
regimen, with the tacit implication that God could never be known in his world,
in his work, in the music of the spheres, the ripple of brooks, the thunder tones
of his storms, the crashing of his waves or the sighing of the wind in his
pines. The physical universe was tabbed the enemy of the spirit and had to be
shut out, the soul detached from its contacts, if cosmic benignance was to be
experienced.
With all this came a definition, new
to the Occident, of the self of the individual. Our true ego is not the complex
of body, feelings, mind and spirit that gave the Westerner the proper
conception of his being. It is the spirit alone. And to arrive at a true envisagement
of his real egoity, the individual must learn to conceive of himself as that
pure unit of radiance detached from all association with these lower and
inferior appurtenances. He must achieve the concept of himself as a unit of
spirit in the abstract, subsistent in vacuo. An extreme elaboration of
the ideology even went so far as to deplore the fact that pure spirit debased
and defiled itself the moment it made conjunction with putrid matter. The
"malignancy of matter" took its place as a fundamental of the yoga
science. And from this unbalanced view arose that theological aberration of
intellectual sanity which has steeped the Western mind in morbid moronism, the
fall of man from Paradise and its affiliate, the pall of sin consciousness. The
real ego, then, is not the body, its sensations, its brain's ideas, or its
modes of consciousness at all. It is the core of consciousness that is left
when it has detached itself from the clinging spider's web of all these outer
appendages. The ego is its real self when, having divested itself of all these
obstructing trappings, it stands alone in the void and the silence.
What more need be said in refutation
of these elements of a conjured "spiritual science" than that they
are out of place, are a total missing of the mark and an utter impertinence
when urged as a philosophy to be utilized for final good in the outward-moving
arc of the cycle, when soul moves outward and "downward" to unite its
energies with the universal atomic power to be found only in matter and the
flesh? They have no relevance, no truth, nor are they practicable, except
detrimentally, ruinously, to life in its cycle of mani-
50
festation in physical forms. They
stand in direct contravention to evolution in this phase of its
operation. Not withdrawal, detachment and soul isolation, but attachment, even
to the point of union with matter in a final orgiastic rapture, is the way to
authentic blessedness for the spirit-unit of man's divine sonship while it is
on the earth. As Egypt has said, the soul migrates here (Paul says "we are
a colony of heaven" settled on earth) to exchange the too ethereal
ambrosia and nectar of heaven for "the bread of Seb," a more
substantial nutriment for the rigors of adventure in matter's realm.
All that spiritual philosophy
strains to achieve by detachment and sublimation of consciousness here on earth
is completely out of harmony with the cosmic motive of the downward move to
incarnation, because these objectives are set for the second and reverse phase
of the round. All that the "occult" aspiration seeks to realize here
by withdrawal from outward focus of life interest will be naturally achieved
toward the later stages of the movement back to the empyrean. Then the raucous
voices of the senses, the feelings, even at last the mind, will be stilled
without any of the unnatural repressions imposed by misguided zealotry on the
natural self. The arrant persuasion of mystic religionism that the soul's
highest interests are to be served by forcefully detaching it from those
connections it came here for the very purpose of effecting and profiting by,
ends by turning the quest and the cultus of spiritual truth quite upside down.
Soul came, or was sent here, in quest of earthly values which it could not get
in heaven. To preach down, to deny and to vilify those values and the
instrumentalities of their realization is to defeat the ends of the incarnation
itself. The surcease from mortal pain, the release from the domination of
consciousness by outer sense, the attainment of the peace that passeth
understanding, come without strain as the migrant soul approaches the
completion of its cycle. To inject these motives into the midst of the fleshly
arc of the cycle when the purposes of the mundane pilgrimage are not to be
fulfilled by detachment but by positive union with the physical forces, is a
miscarriage of practical philosophy repugnant to the spirit of life and hostile
to its prime interest.
If the general voice of Indian
philosophy has consistently sounded the theme of detachment and negation over
so many centuries, this in itself is to be scrutinized as a strange and
portentous
51
circumstance, because, as it now
transpires under more critical scrutiny, this note was not at all in harmony
with the tenor of the venerable Vedic scripts of the divine wisdom. These hoary
texts did not decry and denounce the world, nature and matter. On the
contrary, they rated them as the other half, or opposite pole, of the spiritual
energies and accorded them as the other half, or opposite pole, of the
spiritual energies and accorded them equality of rank and importance with the
spiritual. So positive was this evaluation that Radhakrishnan, eminent Hindu
philosopher-statesman of present day India, in his great work on Indian
Philosophy, sums up the exposition of this aspect of the Upanishad systems
by saying that, according to the Vedic wisdom, for the human "to deny
the world without is to destroy the god within." This single
affirmation, if given the weight it legitimately should exert, would instigate
a complete reversal of most Hindu spiritual bent and shift the main focus of
Oriental philosophy from mystical heavens back to mother earth. The orientation
of emphasis and relocation of value which it makes necessary could inaugurate a
new and happier epoch in all world religion.
The view expressed by the sentence
was grounded on the consideration of the great law of polarity which places the
soul in affirmative relation to the negative force of matter and the body. Its
coming into body to stand as the positive pole of the balance between itself
and body made it entirely dependent upon its partner in the twinship for the
actualization of its living potential. Its own highest faculties were, as
Plotinus has so clearly demonstrated, to be brought to manifestation only out
of the tension which life ever establishes between the pole-ends of spirit and
matter. To attempt to eliminate or reduce the strength of the pull from either
end could only result in a defeat of the purpose cosmically envisaged in the
relation.
If this affirmation of the factual
beneficence of the incarnation voiced in the primeval Indian philosophy is
found to be substantiated, it is now receiving, after endless reiteration of an
opposing view negative to earth experience, strong endorsement and a
renaissance of its influence through the exposition of Radhakrishnan's
illustrious compeer in philosophy, Sri Aurobindo. In his great work referred
to, The Life Divine, he reiterates the pronouncements of India's
Upanishadic wisdom, asserting the positive value of the earth experience, of
nature and of matter. "Matter, too, is Brah-
52
man," he quotes from the
Upanishads. The testimony of the senses is, equally with the voice of the
spirit, a valid ingredient in the being of the universal Atman. Some of the
trenchant sentences from his pen must be introduced to demonstrate how
decisively the affirmation of the value of the world life is asserted in the
writings of a most eminent Hindu thinker. The massive verdict of what he
announces is virtually to declare that the philosophies urging man to seek the
forms of truth within the depths of his own inner area of abstraction is to
seek for them just where they will not be found.
It is to be made clear that sitting
in quiet and reflecting deeply upon the problems with which life confronts the
mind is not to be overtly condemned an necessarily a false or futile practice.
Reflection in the silence which deep thinking requires is virtually a
prerequisite for any philosophic enterprise and an essential form of exercise
for spiritual culture. Profound thought in meditative silence is not the object
of any attack in this connection. What is under critique is the body of
theoretical correlatives that have been made accessory to the dialectic of the
yoga cult practice, especially in popularized Hindu conceptions, chiefly the
presumption that the outer world must be shut out of consciousness because it
is alleged to be a hindrance to the apprehension of truths as to which its
sensual testimony speaks always a false message. The position here to be
reasserted with the strong support of Aurobindo's incisive dialectic is that,
while silence is a proper and propitious adjunct, an influence favorable to
profound realizations, the silence itself is not to be considered a magic-land
in which the forms of truth lie in a darkness that is to be pierced by the
light shining in an emptied mind. That is to say that silence itself is not a
voice of truth, or a magical agent of its revelation. It is simply an aid to contemplation,
not itself an utterer of verity. Indeed unless the mind of the contemplative
brings into its cloistered retreat the elements for the fruitful exercise of
faculty, it is as likely as not to leave thought as blank as its own emptiness.
The true magic-worker in the case is not the silence, but the power which the
ancient seers always termed the great "magician," the power of mind.
The negative spiritual ideology would still the very power by which the ego
might work the magic of its divinization.
And silence is by no means certified
as the only or even the best external condition or agency for the soul's
exaltations. Music
53
is not silence, and music can lift
the ego-consciousness to sublime heights, when silence would leave it stolid
and inert. Many an individual would testify that music has bathed his soul in
an aura of cathartic afflation which no other mode of spiritual stimulus could
yield it. The shrilling song of a meadow-lark on a May morning can do for a
receptive spirit what silent brooding could never do. The morning threnody of
the winter wind outside the house or the murmuring breeze in the boughs of a
pine tree speak a magic language that silence could never utter. Mind is a
faculty of consciousness that can perform its function only when it has factual
data to work upon. The cult theory is that it is a hindrance because it blocks
the path to a higher mode of consciousness. It is difficult to understand how
that faculty which enables a living entity to safeguard its own safety, to make
its choice of good action over evil, to follow the dictates of wisdom and
reject those of folly, to grow intelligent instead of remaining ignorant, can
be in any way an obstacle to the soul's highest good. If there is to be
developed a conscious power higher than that of the mind, it must come forth to
function only after all "lower" faculties have been evolved to the
limit of their capabilities, and not through the reaching down of a higher to
"kill" the ones below it. Powers developed at all levels are to
subsist and function beside each other in a harmony, and the deployment of the
last power is to gather up and synthesize all preceding it as the perfected
chord of the cycle's whole gamut of tones. Only in the sense that the earliest
and lowest modes of conscious being are finally assimilated into the
consummative blending of all tones in an ultimate harmony can it be said that
an evolving ego uses a higher power to kill a lower.
For the mind to gain proficiency in
the power to focus its point of consciousness upon one thing, it must have some
one thing to fix it upon. It can not focus on vacancy, although even this
extreme of futile practice has at times been urged in Hindu systems. For the
most part, only vacancy of mind has been the net result of the great cult
effort to make the mind one-pointed. When abstraction is carried to its utmost
limit, nothing is left to meditate upon.
Aurobindo states all this so clearly
that henceforth there will be no excuse for further exploitation of untenable
views in the case.
"Our mind works best and with a
firm confidence when it is given a substance to work on, or at least to use as
a base for its
54
operation, or when it can handle a
cosmic Force of which it has acquired knowledge . . . It is sure of its place
when it has to deal with actualities; this rule of dealing with objective or
discovered actualities and proceeding from them for creation is the reason for
the enormous success of physical science."
And who shall say nay to the
correlative assertion that the small success of passive in-pointed meditation
is due to the fact that the effort is made to have the mind work on fantasy or
in vacancy, with nothing to serve as the point of focus? So here the great modern
Hindu sage takes a stand against the claim that the mind blocks the outflow of
a more dynamic inner mode of consciousness. He is party to the opposite
assertion that to close off the mind from outer actuality and to go within for
the discovery of forms of eternal truth, is to go precisely away from where
those forms are to be found. For, says this profound thinker, in turning the
mind from the outer into the inner, the movement goes from the world of form
and structure into a world of the formless and the indeterminate. The external
world provides for contemplation the actual forms of created reality, which
must speak the truth of the cosmic mind. In the inner subjective area there are
only such forms as the human at the stage of his present development can
project there. And there is no guarantee that the forms he is capable of
projecting at the moment owe their origin to anything other than wayward fancy,
feeble and erroneous human thinking, or even emotional hysteria or abnormal
morbidity. They may or may not match the true forms of being already existent
in the world outside. In stepping out of the existent world into that of purely
subjective consciousness, one goes away from a world that is part of the cosmos
of the divine creation, the world of law and order, and plunges into one that
is really no world, but a limbo of every sort of disordered human aberrancy.
Yet in it the cult thesis promises us that we shall find reality, as the world
of divine creation here can not show it to us.
In going within we go from the world
of the many-sided epiphany of deity back toward the world of unity; and the
divinity only reveals his glorious nature in the outer many, never in the inner
oneness. He can build nothing with but one stone; he must have unlimited smaller
stones to enable him to construct his infinitely varied designs. We go
from the manifest creation, where the hidden
55
nature of true being is put on
display for our instruction and edification, back into the dark void of the
unmanifest. In unity of being all is blank uniformity. The mind has nothing, as
Aurobindo says, to take hold of, to base any reflection upon. Thought
stagnates, as does the body, when it has nothing to supply it with stimulus and
nourishment. In going within, we go from things to no-thing.
If truth be told, it is quite likely
that this outcome is the experience of practically all, especially in the
Occident, who have studiously endeavored to follow Oriental prescription for
the practice of meditation in the silence. Many trying it have found this to be
the case and give it up, and thenceforth resolved to set their minds to work on
specific matters and problems connected with, or suggested by, the actualities
of the life in this world,--and found a stable satisfaction from that time
onward.
The power which pure subjectivism
can exert to derationalize human mentation can be seen as terribly subtle and
insidious when it is noted that philosophy of this strain asserts in its
extreme application not only that for liberation the mind, in the wake of the
senses and the emotions, must be killed out, but that the individual self, too,
must be destroyed. We are asked or adjured to abolish ourselves as entities. It
is interesting to see what our eminent Hindu philosopher has to say as to that:
"Yet it is in the mind and its
form of life and body that we exist on earth; and, if we must abolish the
consciousness of mind, life and body in order to reach the One Existence,
consciousness and bliss, then a divine life here is impossible."
If a modern Hindu voice utters a
refreshing message of sanity on this score, so has a voice of the
"Biblical times" that we call ancient, one that has gained a world
hearing in the pages of canonized Scriptures. St. Paul beautifully states that "God,
who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to
give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God . . . But we have
this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may
be of God, and not of us." What God has put in earthen vessels can be
relied upon; what we attempt to embody in our thought structures
can claim no such certitude. Paul's statement is a much-needed reminder to us
that we are humans on earth and not wispy seraphim in heaven. His declaration
can be of service in
56
jolting idealist visionaries out of
their trance and bringing them back into this world, where divine love has
placed them for their education. Always their ideology strains after the heaven
state, for the attainment of which naturally they have to predicate and preach
the destruction of every vestige of the earth consciousness. But the soul is on
earth for express purposes under the ordinances of the cosmic intelligence; to
defeat these ends by nullifying the modes of cognition essential to their
achievement is to flout and defy the will of the eternal Providence.
Virginia Moore, in her charming
survey of the varied attitudes of many peoples toward death, Ho For Heaven, summarizes
the sharp contrast between the views of the Greeks and the Hindus as to the
dead in two epigrammatic sentences:
"The Hindus despised the body,
living or dead. The Greeks loved the body and despised it dead, only because it
could no longer support that all-important present consciousness."
This says that the Greeks were in
love with life here; the Hindus, on the contrary, hated life in body and bore
up with it only under stern, sullen philosophical sufferance. We might search
through whole libraries and not find so sententious a statement in support of
the position taken in this essay as that penned by Miss Moore. Here is
disclosed with perfect frankness the ground and root cause of all of India's
earth-hating ideologies. It may be disputed; the characterization may be
alleged to be too sweeping, too dogmatic; reservations would diminish the
sharpness. Nevertheless this is the conclusion to which a singularly discerning
student, along with numberless others, has been led by extensive reading. Her
utterance is made not as a personal opinion, but as an accepted fact in the
academic world.
As India conceived a shuddering
repugnance to the body, the Greeks, says Miss Moore, "had a fundamental
horror of living apart from the body." The Greek would rather be a lowly
one on earth than a king in the realm of the dead. The moments of life here
were precious jewels that could be made to sparkle with the sunny glint of
joyous realizations of the magnitude and majesty of being.
If earth life be not arbitrarily
ruled out as a fulcrum on which to base the lever for the uplifting of living
values, and heaven alone be elected to that function, it is pertinent to
institute a comparison
57
which would speak in almost shouting
tones of the historical demonstration of the salutary influence of the Greek
love of life and body, in contrast to the less wholesome result of the Hindu
distaste for the life here. It is indeed seldom that history comes out with so
unequivocal an object lesson on the theme that a people's philosophical
attitudes and traditions set the stamp of their character on the life of whole
nations or civilizations.
The Greeks loved life in the body
and therefore loved the body that kept that life aglow and the earth that
sustained the body. Therefore they are the nation acclaimed in world history as
the people who brought the human body to its highest point of health and
beauty, as the outward and visible evidence of the spirit's inward joyousness.
The Hindus despised life and body and the earth which supported both. In
consequence life was so burdensome that the mind developed a veritable loathing
of it. The body suffered neglect, if not overt crucifixion, and speaking at
large, lacked beauty. The world and the flesh lay under a cloud of constant
mental disapprobation, while a despised and neglected earth barely sustained
life in the millions of bodies even in a tropical land. Philosophical truths or
errors can thus become matters verily of life or death to whole civilizations.
58
CHAPTER SIX
THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT
The wholesome influences that the
soul seeks in incarnation are here on earth, else she would not have been sent
here to receive the baptism of their benignant unction. To come here to obtain
them, and then through fallacious persuasions to turn away from them and shut
them out, is to pursue a jungle by-path to folly and disaster. To miss the
influences of earth in their realistic form is to miss the fostering
ministrations of the soul's true mother. Because of the nearly universal plague
of religious doctrinism scorning earth and the body, we have lived for
centuries in the shell of a negative tradition so solidly encrusted around us
that we have never been able to receive or recognize the benign and salutary
impact of nature's gracious forces. We have isolated ourselves from nature and
so have broken the line of current of health that would have flowed from her
dynamic springs for our life's renewal. In being sent here from on high, we
have been thrust into our earth-mother's lap to partake of just such nutriment.
We have been inserted, so to say, between the pages of the book of living
reality in whose sentences have been inscribed the reading lessons of eternal
verity, and we have not yet learned how to read the script. Out in the open
field of nature, and not in the hazy and misty recesses of the brooding mind,
stand the great letters of the primer of life instruction.
It may be timely to answer the
prospective question as to how souls came here. If their presence here is a
supportable fact, it will be wondered why the rationale of this prime item of
truth has not been the quest of universal inquiry. The reason for its being
kept so deep in shadow is that the great literature which had embalmed the
clues to the secret, the mythologies, the Mystery rituals, the esoteric
instruction in the Academies, the books of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus,
Iamblichus, Proclus, Plutarch, the Kabalah, the Hermetic writings, the Orphic
Hymns, The Chaldean Oracles, The Book of Nabothean Agriculture, the Golden
Verses of Pythagoras, the Talmud and the Bible had never been read with either
the keys or the power to discern their true cryptic purport. The blind violence
of the Christianized Roman powers that closed the Platonic Academies in the
Hellenic world, threw away the keys that might have unlocked their inner casket
of mystery. The Italian Renaissance
59
pried open the lock and raised the
lid, but not far enough to give a full clear view of the precious treasure.
How did the forms of truth come to
be out there in nature? The answer is simple: the divine mind conceived them
and put them there. They are there because they are the precipitated end
products of its thinking. They are the physical echo of the uttered words of
God's voice, his divine Word, his Logos, frozen in solid matter. The ringing
tones of his voice carried the form of his divine ideas outward and ended their
course in the arms of matter. His archetypal ideas were snagged by the inertia
of matter and held bound in the world of visible tangible forms; and here they
stand before us.
Yet these utterances of eternal
truth are the very things that the errant spiritual cult votaries have for
centuries been calling the deceptive husks of illusion. These things, they keep
harping, give us a false message. Our senses and minds are the agencies of
deception; they convey to us an untrue report on verity. India has built up her
philosophies on the claimed necessity of our blotting them out. Greece, on the
other hand, in the wake of hoary Egyptian sagacity, has more rationally
declared that we must see the ideal truth which they adumbrate and be
instructed thereby. Now the Hindu Aurobindo swings from the Indian tradition
and agrees with the Greeks. This can have propitious repercussions for all the
world.
If the mind of God created the world
by its thinking, the world and its constituent forms embody his thoughts, his
intellectual designs, his mental formulation of the cosmos to be. It must be
accounted a tragic circumstance that in all the centuries of spiritual endeavor
the chief forces of religion have urged us to look not at the visible work that
openly reveals his mind-forms, but away from them in the dark purlieus of the
humanly incompetent mind. Odd it must be considered that religious science has
never directed the human thought energies to study God's handiwork. It could
always have been presumed that from inspection of his finished production could
be divined the nature of the mind that created it.
Yet is has been loudly proclaimed as
almost the central principle of the many "new-thought" movements that
"thought is creative." Man creates himself and his personal world
over the pattern of what he thinks. Yet this and kindred movements failed
60
to point out what should have been
the most immediate practical outcome of their philosophy: that God's created
works must then reflect the order of his mind. They should have proclaimed that
the Logos of creation lay before us in the open book of nature and that we must
learn there to read what God has written.
Unsound religious theory, however,
made the mistake of confusing the two worlds being created, the macrocosm, or
God's world, and the human's little world, the microcosm. It leaped far ahead
to the egregious and unwarranted conclusion that if thought is the creative
force, then man by his thought could alter the universe, that is, the
macrocosm, and so remake the world over his thought pattern. It did not reflect
that the thought which created and recreates the world is God's thought, and
therefore is not subject to change by man's puny intellection. The universe over
which a man's thought is creative is the little universe compressed within the
confines of his physical body and its immediate environment. In that world his
mind can wield the magical wands of creative power. The universe is God's body
and in and over it the divine mind wields the formative power. It is hardly
man's prerogative to complicate the natural forces by injecting his mental
decrees into their ordained regularity. But God grants full right to his sons
to create their own universes, although he has distinctly told them that their
creation must be over the pattern of his and employ the same principles he has
used in his world building. And in order that they may have full and
unrestricted opportunity to learn the configuration of his creation, as a model
for their own lesser one, he has set them in the midst of his world, in which,
if they will but note it, every operation bespeaks the thought that generated
it, and in which every brook, tree and insect announces a principle of God's
work. Even man himself will find that he is embraced in the orbit of the
worlds. God is sovereign Lord over his domain; we are to imitate his work, as
Plato said, but in our subordinate kingdom. "My mind to me my kingdom
is," can be man's shibboleth; but my mind is not the lord in God's greater
kingdom. We are cells in his immense body, it is true; but our rulership is over
our cell, with a limited influence reaching out to touch other cells close
to us. We do not dominate God's cosmic body.
Had our intelligence been equal to
the task of rightly interpreting the Scriptures that were designed to be our
guiding light,
61
we could long ago have been
instructed where to look for the patterns over which we are to model our minor
creations. For in those Scriptures the Lord orders us to build up a tabernacle
in which he may be raised up,--since he had buried his creative seed
deep in matter in our constitution, and therefore to us he must look to be
raised in these cells of his being. And in building this house not made with hands
we are instructed to "see that thou build it after the pattern that I have
shown thee in the mount, the pattern of the heavens." The heavens
are not in this passage the skies above our heads; they are the worlds of
noumenal supernal consciousness, the heavens of divine thought. But, says God,
I have shown thee the reflected image and pattern of this divine thought in
the mount. And where and what is that mount? Stupid literalism
grossly took it to be a hill in the triangle between Egypt and Arabia,--Mount
Sinai. A more discerning interpretation locates it in the heights of illumined
cosmic consciousness. But it has just been indicated that those are the
"heavens." So the "mount" must be somewhere else. And, sure
enough, to the blank astonishment of purblind exegetists, it transpires at last
that the Biblical "mount" is just our lowly earth itself. The
temptation, the divine sermon, the transfiguration, the crucifixion and the
ascension, all of which are enacted in the flesh, take place "on the
mount." The ark landed on Mount Ararat, and Ararat is from the Hebrew arets,
the word for earth itself. The Latin word for world is mundus, the
mound, the mount, earth.
So here on earth God has shown us
the pattern-design of his creation, and by misreading his Scriptural
instructions we have turned our gaze into the heavens, straining to read there
the messages of the cosmic thought, when the pattern of it was all the while
revealed to us in the world we were led to scorn and eschew. God has set the
forms of his thought before us in the world, and we have sat with eyes closed,
shutting out the very model that we were instructed to copy. All we need to do
is to observe, study, meditate upon the visible nature, and the soul, the meaning
and the glory of God's creative Logos will shine out to us in ever clearer
tones of beauty.
Not hanging in the attic of our
inner astral or supramental consciousness are those forms of the divine
noumenon, but out there in nature, waiting to deliver their grand message when
we have
62
learned to read their hieroglyphs.
God in the Old Testament says that he will inscribe his laws in our hearts and
in our minds will he write them. But how? He can not well write anything in a
vacuum. He confronts our very eyes with these forms and those operations which
reflect his laws, and from what our eyes can behold our minds and hearts can
transfer the imprint onto their inner tablets of rationalization and memory.
Divine ideas are not ghost pictures haunting people's auras. They are the
actual physical and material realities into the midst of which our lives have
been thrown, so that by constant contact we must eventually conform our
ideation to the pattern held before us in the mount of earth. By daily
association with them it is inevitable that sooner or later our intelligence
will absorb their significance, will awaken to the realization that the world
shows us the design of God's eternal law. For every physical object in this
world there exists in the cosmic noumenal world a spiritual truth or law
corresponding to it. The world is a mirror of God's mind. Spiritual law is the
natural law, operating at a higher level.
Emerson tells us that "man
stands midway betwixt the inner spirit and the outer matter. He sees that the
one reflects the other, that the world is a mirror of the soul; and he becomes
a priest and interpreter of nature thereby." Shakespeare reminds us that
there are
Tongues in trees, sermons in stones,
Books in running brooks, and God in
everything.
Not alone the burning bush in the
Moses story, but every common shrub is aflame with God. "God is present in
all his parts in every moss and cobweb," repeats Emerson. St. Paul writes
that
"that which may be known of God
is manifest; for the invisible things of him from the foundation of the world
are clearly seen, being understood from those things which are made, even his
eternal power and Godhood."
Hardly a century ago Henry Drummond
gave us his The Natural Law in the Spiritual World, which should have
introduced an era of enlightenment in all religion, but has now sunk back into
desuetude and oblivion. But the most direct and potent of all intimations on
this score has stood unnoticed in the Talmud of the Jews for many centuries: "If
thou wilt know the invisible, open wide
63
thine eyes on the visible." We have noted Hermes' great pronouncement
that that which is below is a copy of that which is above. And in this
connection it is imperative to correct the errant conception which has inspired
a wrong approach to the handling of this truth of ancient sagacity. Cult
philosophy has fatuously striven to work the procedure of extracting the
educative value from the formula by starting the mental movement from heaven to
earth. But this is taking it in the wrong direction. It has prescribed the
going within, or above, where nothing is visible, to discover the clues to the
meaning of what is already visible. This is folly; it is impossible. We must
proceed from the known to learn about the unknown, the invisible. From the
objects and processes that can be observed and studied on earth we shall be
able by analogy to formulate the principles of the divine order of being in the
noumenal world above. Surely ancient sagacity did not ask us to gauge the
visible from looking at the invisible. Paul says that these "invisible
things of God" are clearly seen. Surely not where they are invisible!
Where then! In the visible creation that his hands have made, which consists of
those invisible things made visible.
For nearly a century the modern
resurrectors of the archaic wisdom have been mouthing the shibboleth of this
truth in the form of "as above so below." There is no question of its
truth as thus stated; but there is a very serious question of its applicability
and its usefulness in this form. From the point of view of man on earth it is
practically meaningful and workable only when put in the reverse form: as below
so above. Surely if one thing is like a second, the second must be like the
first. But if one is visible and the other invisible, it is workable for actual
enlightenment only if the procedure is from the one seen to the other unseen.
At one stroke the reversal of the
direction in which the comparison is handled brings all religion back to earth
for its meanings. The reoriented view shows that the pathway to heaven runs
through the valley of earth. The Jacob's ladder by which soul-angels ascend and
descend between heaven and earth rests its base on the earth.
Paul enjoins us to let that same mind
be in us which was in the Christ principle. Man is made in the image and
likeness of his Father creator, and therefore man's mind must reflect the same
ideation as the intellect of its parent. But where has that ideation
64
already been manifested, put on
view? In the forms and phenomena of nature. If we would see them where they
are, we must look for them in the open field of the visible creation. It needs
only that we put on the spectacles of the proper clarity and mental focus and
we shall see the glory and the majesty of the supernal light of truth that
nature reflects. God has expressed and therefore revealed himself in nature,
his handiwork. He has put his soul into his work. Look there and one can greet
that soul. The vision will transfigure the beholder. As St. Paul beautifully
puts it:
"And we all, with unveiled
face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the
same image, from glory unto glory."
He who can feel God's presence only
in a temple may be uplifted on a Sabbath; he who can discern him in nature can
be transfigured every day in the week.
It registered as one of the most
engaging truths the mind could ever come to apprehend when it came clear that
our so-called laws of nature are the fixed activities of God's subconscious
mind. This can be grasped as obvious truth if we reflect that the memory
capability of mind is simply the strengthening of an impression or thought
through repetition. God's primal conscious thoughts became permanently
impressed on primordial matter through repetition or steady holding. Thoughts,
like actions, become automatic by repetition. That is, they reproduce
themselves without further attention from conscious mind. Life always subsists
where a unit of consciousness functions in a body which polarizes and supports
and instrumentalizes it. As the body is the product of the mind that it feeds,
the result is that life everywhere imposes its modes and forms of thought upon
the body. By repetition it causes the body to express and carry out what it
aims to do and to be. So the fixed lines of thought become the fixed laws, the
habitudes of the body. The body becomes the mind's kingdom of expression, its
showground of epiphany. So those laws of life and mind which God says he will
write upon his children's hearts and minds are his own creative archetypal
ideas, now solidly materialized in nature. Having repeated them often enough,
he turns them over permanently to the care of his automatic memory, his
subconscious. He transmits them to the care and keeping of the body, which
faithfully
65
executes them. Thus the body becomes
the soul's avenue of its urge to express itself in the outer worlds. When the
body picks them up and runs on with them, the higher conscious mind is freed to
do new thinking for its future planning.
So that it becomes man's task simply
to match in his consciousness and constitution the mind of God. This was the
gist of Paul's admonition to us. And not inside the void that stretches above
the range of our natural faculty, but outside in the world of the concrete
actual, are found these forms of divine ideation to which man is to conform the
pattern of his creative effort. Man is the child of God and never does this
child go inside his own head for guidance and education; always he receives
instruction from outside, from an authority and a wisdom above his own. As a
child he starts in ignorance. His mind is an unwritten slate until from his
tutelage based on study of what he finds external to him in the world, or from
the transmitted wisdom of teachers before him, he begins to do his own writing
of acquired and self-tested knowledge upon his tablet of understanding. Never
can he go inside, sit placidly in expectation and look for the blank slate, so
to say, to write itself full of supernal truth. He can not write out of a
background of ignorance and vacuity. On his slate he will come in time to write
those things which has been discerned in nature and from her abstracted by the
mind's power to trace analogies. For there is scarcely any concept, spiritual
recognition or cosmic principle, no matter how abstruse and abstract, that is
not found expressed through the semantic intermediacy of some natural analogue
in the external world. Whatever the human consciousness writes on its slate
will be found at base to match, or be matched by, some fact in the world
outside. It is impossible that it could match its ideas with those of the
cosmic mind in the complete blankness and emptiness of its own initial states.
Man must fill the void of his
intelligence with those things that will reproduce in himself a cosmos matching
a larger one already formed. Let us hear our Hindu philosopher on this point:
"For always mind must be identical with Supermind." He has said that
our mind works best when given something substantial to work on. He says again
and again that mind must deal with real being. But by a queer misturn of
philosophical dialectic and specious logic the world of real being has been
declared to be, not the actual world
66
outside, but that potential inner
world subsistent in the unfathomable depths or rarefied heights of inner
consciousness, which cult theory makes so tenuous that it must almost be
described as inner unconsciousness. It in fact, on the presuppositions of cult
theory itself, becomes not a world at all, but a void. Real being persists
wherever there is a consciousness that can register its actualities. But when
man essays to follow it beyond the range of his capabilities he loses touch
with it and roams homeless in a barren desert. It can only become for him a
world of real being when he can respond consciously to its tempo of vibration.
There are untold areas of real being stretching out above man's present reach,
but into which he can not roam with profit.
If by the world of real being
reference had been unequivocally directed to the objective cosmos outside in
nature, the sad wreckage of high philosophy would not have supervened, and we
would have known all along where to look for instruction. Yes, the mind must build
not in vacuity but in real being. It can not build its own cosmos arbitrarily
or without regard to the cosmos to whose frame and design its own must conform.
To do otherwise would be for it to step out of its own groove of being, its own
line of evolution; in fact to undo itself, wreck and destroy itself. Its great
work is to reproduce in itself the cosmos that is. So it must study the
cosmos that is, observe its modes, habits, laws, catch its spirit and thus
reproduce itself in its likeness.
In somewhat more technical language
Aurobindo asserts this same positive fact. If, he says, we strive to lift
ourselves out of the present realm of actuality into the unity of the Supreme
Consciousness, we find ourselves in a world of indeterminables. In the absolute
being there is, and can be, no specific character to anything. It is the world
of no-thingness, because it is the world of unity. No part of it is different
from any other part; it is homogeneous throughout. It is what the philosophers
have called "the Boundless." Aurobindo remarks: "To be shut up
in a featureless consciousness of unity, in ignorance of the manifested
Brahman, is described also as a blind darkness." It is into this blind
darkness that the most lauded forms of spiritual meditation will take one, the
more certainly if the aim is to consciously abstract the mind from the actual
world of real being into an alleged world of an hypothecated more real being,
which turns out to be sheer emptiness.
67
At any rate all meditation must
start from and be based on an actual world. It must build with the materials
and on the premises furnished by the actual world lying outside. It can not be
otherwise, when the soul comes fresh from the point of creation by its Father
and has had as yet no experience by which any knowledge, truth or science of
being could have been acquired. It starts out from the infancy of
consciousness. It has not knowledge, but only the potential knowledge. As
Aurobindo observes, it will not have material with which to build until it
gathers it from the world outside. And if that world is treated with mental
disdain and let go unnoticed, the soul will gather no building materials from
it. It is in fact sent here in order to get the building blocks which are units
of reality, so that it may be able to construct its miniature universe in
harmony with the cosmic plan. It is from outside itself that it will obtain the
forms and the pattern of the basic elements which it can ratiocinate into the
principles of understanding. The pattern and the forms lie without, though the
power that can rate them for meaning is latent within.
This sharp differentiation can chart
a new path for culture to follow out of misty vagueness of "spiritual
philosophy" into a true soul science. It will for the first time since
Aristotle give to the religious effort its proper form and direction. It will
save that effort from dissipating its energy out into vacuity. It will enable
it to carry its enterprise of grasping real being forward to a far more vivid
and realistic sense of accomplishment.
Aurobindo says that the objects of
the world, our sense images, are representations of the constructive, creative
ideas of God's Mind. They are therefore symbols, as he says, "of a truth
which our lives are trying to express." It is a purblind philosophy that
ignores them, holds them in contempt and denounces them as testifying falsely
to us, when they are the symbols of the truths we were sent here to master,
symbols indeed of the laws of our own being. But because India has originated
the specious canard that a symbol is not a true thing because it is not the
reality of the thing it symbolizes, the thing-in-itself, a world teeming with
symbols of truth and reality has been scorned as a world of unreality and
untruth. Even if the shallow view can be considered the truth--which it can not
be, since the world objects are the things-in-themselves embodied in
matter--it would be a slander on real objectivity, be-
68
cause it is unfair to condemn a
thing for not being something that it makes no pretense at being, something
other than what it is. A world object is a symbol, and it is unjust to condemn
a symbol for not being the thing its symbolizes. This would be to denounce a
portrait of a man for not being the man himself. Aurobindo confutes attitude
when he says that our sense-images are "completely valid," because they
represent not fiction or falsity, but real being. This pronouncement is so
directly contradictory to the general cry of the invalidity of our sense
experience that it merits the rating of epochal. When the function of an image
is to represent something which can not be apprehended by sensible perception,
it should not be charged with falsity and deception for failing to do more than
represent. Its function is faithfully fulfilled in representing. The only fair
criterion is whether it does faithfully represent what it stands for. And on
this basis the objects of nature fully meet the test of validity.
The fault of so much negative
preachment is found in its failure to know that the outer world does with
absolute fidelity mirror the inner. It fails to know that nature symbols speak
a true language, not a false one; that they are not to be spoken of as
"mere" symbols, but symbols of something, and that something a
true essence of being. There has been a fatal loss of primal knowledge that the
outer and inner worlds are but the two facets of one and the same reality. The
science of semantics has passed into desuetude because this inseparable
identity of the two phases of reality had been lost sight of. The accepted
definition of a sacrament should long ago have awakened the recognition of the
verity of nature symbolism: it is an outward and visible sign of an inward and
spiritual grace. How is man's mind to conceive the form and meaning of things
noumenal and invisible except it receive intimations of their nature from their
representatives in the visible area? Human minds are to be populated with ideal
forms conceived over the pattern of things presented to experience.
The cult religions of the sort
referred to have insistently emphasized mystical exaltation in the inner
spheres of consciousness as being the short, sometimes allegedly instantaneous,
road to human deification. The slogan has always been "spiritual mysticism,"
by which the individual unit of consciousness arrives at a realization of the
presence of God or of its own identity with the be-
69
ing of God. Through an ineffable
mystical afflation the soul rises to an enraptured state, a sublimation of
feeling and knowing that floods the self with illumination.
But this fails to discriminate
between a mysticism that can be good, fine, real and truly supernal to ordinary
human grades of consciousness, and one that can in fact prove to be untrue to
verity and miss the mark of genuine upliftment entirely. Mystical experiences
can be baneful, senseless, erratic, destructive; they can be delusive,
misleading and injurious. Modern psychology says they can often be "pure
fantasy," founded on no basis of reality at all. Mysticism of the sort can
lead to "seeing things" that are not in any way related to reality,
but are phantoms of an unbridled imagination. It can indeed even lead to mental
disorder, dementia, insanity, which in the main is just the matter of seeing
things that are dissociated from reality and mistaking them for actual things.
And all this irrational mysticism
comes from the courting of fanciful images in "meditation" in the
empty halls of the mind, where there is nothing related to reality by which to
gauge their authenticity for consciousness. It would be seen and made
authoritative in the science of mind that a mysticism that carries its own
credentials of divine sanction is always one that is grounded directly upon an
actual base in natural reality. A large segment of the affectional life in
humans is and must be of the mystical sort. Whatever affects us emotionally and
aesthetically is of mystical order. The distinction as to whether the exalted
feelings are wholesome and salutary, or the opposite, is to be discovered by
noting whether they spring from baseless fancy, of purely subjective origin, or
from the experience with actualities. Such forms of mysticism as the moving
power of music, the emotion of friendship, the love of beauty, romantic
passion, love of nature, feelings generated by the awesomeness of natural
phenomena, the highest transports of delight, joy, wonder, awe, the noblest
elevations of feelings, our divinest upliftments,--all these are forms of a
mysticism that draws its genuineness from sources undeniably real. Music,
nature, a loved person, an object's beauty, nobility of character, warmth of
devotion are solid realities, components of the environment that is meant to
generate wholesome influences in the human psyche. In such high mystical
moments the living nature retains its regulative hold on the mounts of the mind
by keeping them tied to reality. If the
70
introvert method, as it aims
deliberately to do, cuts its tie with its bases in reality, it risks drifting
or darting off into by-paths of errant fancy, which all too readily
hypostatizes its creations as realities. The heroic aspiration of the noble
human spirit is to march "in tune with the infinite." It might be
said that a humbler and more practical ambition would be to keep the human life
"in tune with the actual." To be sound and truly cathartic, mysticism
must maintain its direct connection with the verities of the earth and the
objective nature. As long as this link is maintained the influences flowing
from the original precipitation of the divine ideas into embodied forms will be
beneficent. But if the currents from the actual creation be cut off, if the
psyche be uprooted from its supporting ground-bed in nature, the fruit of the
psychological tree of life will be hybrid at best and unnourishing. To be
maintained in health, minds must be kept rooted in the actual world. For this
they migrated to earth. Here they behold God's thoughts actualized. And if it
be remembered that one's own mentation, if it be wayward, can hypnotize one,
with the dire result of making an imagined fiction world turn into a real world
for the subject, the danger of tragic mental aberrancy looms large.
It becomes increasingly evident that
the great prevalence of psychic neurosis in the present world can be traced
largely to the gross and massive tendencies in the religious culture to exalt
the spirit and disparage matter, the world and the body, which thus destroy the
healthful relation between the two ends of the polarity in the individual's
life. It is true enough for restatement that millions of people have wrecked
their lives by accepting the religious infatuation that nature and life itself
are hostile to the interests of their immortal souls.
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CHAPTER SEVEN
MAYA AND LILA
One of the most marked phenomena of
twentieth century history undoubtedly is the rapprochement now taking place
between the religious philosophies of the Orient and Occident. It is to be
questioned whether an adequate study of this event has been undertaken in the
field of psychology. A full survey of the incursion of Hindu spiritual systems
into the Western world has been made by Mr. Wendell Thomas in his Columbia
University degree dissertation, Hinduism Invades America, to be cited
later. In an edition of an ancient Chinese classic called The Secret of the
Golden Flower, published some years ago, some pertinent comment appears in
a Foreward by Dr. Richard Wilhelm, which it is desirable to quote:
"The relation of the West to
Eastern thought is a highly paradoxical and confusing one. On one side, as Jung
points out, the East creeps in among us by the back door of the unconscious,
and strongly influences us in perverted forms; and, on the other, we repel it
with violent prejudice as concerned with a fine-spun metaphysics that is
poisonous to the scientific mind.
If any one is in doubt as to how far
the East influences us in secret ways, let him but briefly investigate the
fields covered today by what is called 'occult thought.' Millions of people are
included in these movements and Eastern ideas dominate them all. Since there is
nowhere any sign of a psychological understanding of the phenomena on which the
ideas are based, they undergo a complete twisting and are a real menace in our
world.
A partial realization of what is
going on in this direction, together with the Westerner's native ignorance and
mistrust of the world of inner experience, build up the prejudice against the
reality of Eastern wisdom . . . . Mastery of the inner world, with a relative
contempt for the outer, must inevitably lead to great catastrophe. Mastery of
the outer world, to the exclusion of the inner, delivers us over to the daemonic
forces of the latter, and keeps us barbaric despite all outward forms of
culture. The solution can not be found either in deriding Eastern spirituality
as impotent, or by mistrusting science as a destroyer of humanity. We have to
see that the spirit must lean on science as its guide in the world of reality,
and that science must turn to spirit for the meaning of life . . . .
The reshaping of values in progress
today forces the modern mind out of a nursery world of collective traditions
into an adult's world of individual choice. He knows that his choice and his
fate now turn upon his understanding of himself. Much has been taught him in
recent years about the hitherto unsuspected elements in his psyche, but the
emphasis is all too often on the static side alone."
72
The view presented here certainly
can not be considered unbalanced; it points to the high value of Oriental
spirituality. Yet it characterizes the sweep of Hindu ideologies into the West
as fraught with grave menace. It intimates in its last words what is perhaps
the weightiest charge against the Eastern philosophies, that they strain to
abstract the consciousness of humanity out of the flow of its evolution in a
time process and fix it in a static immobility, making bliss synonymous with motionlessness
and the destruction of time.
Deep in the heart of the Eastern
spiritual systemology is the great doctrine of maya, a word practically
synonymous with illusion. If, as Dr. Wilhelm avers, the Oriental thought
contains an element poisonous to the scientific mind, it streams forth mainly
from this element in the Eastern dogmatism. Since this doctrine, which received
its most authoritative exposition and promulgation in the system of the sage
Sankaracharya, has set the character of nearly all Hindu systematism, it is
purposed here to subject it to as searching a scrutiny as possible, in as much
as its influence weighs heavily in determining vital issues for the future of
world life. It will enter deeply into a large portion of the discussion throughout.
As an example of how it has been
employed in the formulation of the dogmas of various cult systems, we may
present Mr. Wendell Thomas's condensed summarization of the teachings of the
modern Swami Vivekananda:
"Reduced to clear outline the
argument runs as follows: God is the only reality. The world is quite separate
from God. Hence the world is unreal. Now the function of religion is to give
men true escape from the world into God."
He follows this shortly with the
statement:
"There is not an orthodox Hindu
cult that does not regard the world as the result of an undesirable
causal cycle, and reality as the realm of painless bliss. The highest
good, then, is obviously some kind of escape from the world into bliss . . .
the advaita or acosmic pantheism of Sankara gives the simplest and most
uncompromising presentation of this ideal."
He also cites another of those
Swamis who have brought Hinduism to America, Yogananda, as holding that
"there is no value in the finite, in life itself."
73
Speaking of maya, Aurobindo writes:
"If maya creates its forms, yet
erects a superstructure which has nothing to do with reality, is not true, or
potential in reality . . . it makes things that are not possible, or in
accordance with it."
This restates the idea enunciated
above. If in our use of the gift of fancy our mind constructs forms that have
no basis in actual verity, it creates impossible things, spurious creatures.
Such illegitimate formations, such hybrid products, should be seen as the real
illusion. And it is an illusion that can go on into delusion. The mind that
attempts this sort of creation of its own world, having as a preliminary
emptied itself of all forms derived from experience with the outer world, will
build over no pattern related to reality, will build without substantial
bricks, and will end by building monstrosities and chimeras. The folly of
perpetrating such a miscarriage when God, the cosmic mind, has revealed to us
the pattern of his living truth in the forms he has created in the world, must
be evident.
The great and basic question now
arises: why has philosophy so universally pronounced our life here an illusion?
By what warrant does it call our life here maya? For directly negating this
position in philosophy stands the universal verdict of human experience that
all the show of things in the world is entirely real. It is by no means a naive
belief that our life here is our chance to gain whatever glory life in the
large has to offer its creatures. Yet philosophy has insisted that the consciousness
that life develops in us is unreal, is deceptive, an illusion. Our limited
sensory and mental equipment it avers, shuts us off from the real world. They
are an obstruction to our perceiving and knowing the real world. Our life here
is a dream, not a reality, and our paraphernalia for contacting the physical
creation about us, in which our lives are cast, prevents our waking out of the
dream. We are like somnambulists, acting our parts in a dream.
So India, in primis, asks us
to be rid of the equipment of sense, of emotion and of mind, all of which keeps
us in the dream. It would persuade us that if we can throw these off, inhibit
their inhibitions, we may stand free from the delusion of the dream.
But Aurobindo asks (as every sane
mind must ask) why and how did unreality come to be a product of the operation
of the cos-
74
mic mind? The question confronts
thought again with the old, old problem of the origin of evil, how it got
inwoven into the texture of eternal good. And Aurobindo answers:
"Even the illusionist must
admit that Maya, the power of self-illusion in Brahman, is potentially eternal
in potential being; and then the sole question is its manifestation or
non-manifestation."
Then he says that we have to assume
that the power of Supreme Being imposes this life as an experience of illusion
on itself!
And why should it do such a thing,
which seems to intimate it is attempting to indulge its freedom of action by
imposing a delusion on itself? Does not philosophy run out into fantastic
nonsense in presenting such a solution seriously? Can we rationally conceive of
life entertaining the purpose of hypnotizing itself, casting over its own eyes
a veil through which all its experience here would appear in the unreal forms
and colors of a dream? Certainly it must be assumed to be rational to think
that the experience here would not be one that deludes, but one that would
yield reality and true satisfactions.
Well, then, can philosophy supply
the answer to the alternative question: why would the eternal consciousness
subject itself to the illusory play? And Aurobindo answers it; as the German
philosopher Fichte answered it; as ancient philosophy answered it: life
indulges in this creative play because it gives it delight, because it yields enjoyment
to the consciousness disporting itself in the play. Agreeing with all archaic
wisdom, Aurobindo says that life's motive in creation is Lila, translated
as the play, the sport, the joy, the recreation of God. The eternal
Consciousness-Force (as Aurobindo terms it) is free to do what it pleases. And,
says the philosopher, as part of its play, it pleases to put its seed units, by
which it eternally renews its sense of self-existence, under limitation,--in
effect to put chains on itself.
Again we have to ask why. And again
the final, the only competent answer comes: for Lila, for delight. The
Hindu thinker sums it up:
"If, then, being free to move
or stand still, to throw itself into forms or to retain the forms in itself, it
indulges its power of movement and formation, it can only be for one
reason,--for Delight."
And he elucidates:
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"The world, then, is the play
of the mother of things, moved to cast herself forever into infinite forms and
avid of eternal outpouring experiences. If we look at World-Existence, rather
in the relation of the self-delight of eternally existent Being, we may regard,
describe and realize it as Lila, the play, the child's play, the poet's joy,
the actor's joy, the mechanician's joy, of the Soul of things, eternally young,
perpetually inexhaustible, creating and recreating himself in himself for the
sheer bliss of self-creation; of that self-representation, of God himself at
play, himself the play, himself the player, himself the playground."
Here at last, in the most forthright
terms, is the answer to the great riddle of existence, and it is stated by one
of the most astute minds of the modern age and in full agreement with ancient
seership. Yet the answer, to naive mentation, appears irrational, arbitrary,
even whimsical and fantastic, particularly in view of the realization, never
very far out of mind, that this experience which gives the gods delight entails
suffering, even for the young god-units that undergo it. So that the eternal
question retains the dilemma which it forever presents to human thinking, for
the answer given by philosophy sets up an obvious clash between a motive of
delight and an experience of suffering, virtually arguing that life extracts
delight out of suffering. If for play God imposes suffering upon himself or
even upon his children, then somehow suffering must yield delight or itself be
of the essence of delight.
But this word suffering needs
a better analysis and definition, as it is found used in theologies. From the
Latin sub-(suf)fero, it means to carry on under limitation,
or simply to undergo experience. It need not necessarily involve the unit of
experience in what the word suffering commonly connotes, the experience
of pain and distress. The ancient understanding puts it in clearer and far more
acceptable light. It means simply that the unit of potential divine life, which
we call a soul, is and remains only potential until it unfolds latent
capabilities into actual faculties and powers, which can only accrue to it as
the result of an experience that subjects it to a tension and a pressure
between the two poles into which its original unity is split apart, the only
condition that implements the conversion of its potential into actually
conscious being.
This is philosophy's final and adequate
answer to any and all questions challenging the logic of "suffering"
in a scheme of total good. If life's original unity is not broken apart into
the duality of
76
consciousness and object, it will
remain unconscious of itself. It will do or be nothing. It will remain forever
static; will never enjoy the delight of feeling, seeing itself grow, never know
the joy of living, conquering, expanding in power. It would remain eternally
asleep. On the contrary, its law, under which it binds itself, requires
it to alternate perpetually between periods of sleep and periods of waking,
periods of activity and periods of rest. By such a rhythm it accentuates to its
consciousness the realistic experience of each node by way of contrast with its
opposite. Each phase gives to the other its sense of actuality, the source of
the creative delight--Lila.
Says Aurobindo on this: "The
world-existence is the ecstatic dance of Shiva, which multiplies the body of
God numberlessly to the view." If God is to give himself the delight of
further growth, he must do so by multiplying the number of fragments into which
from the first two and the three, he subdivides his being to endless
multiplicity and multiformity. From his unity he projects numberless seeds of
himself and gives to each the potential of infinite growth. The multiplication
and growth of the countless units of his body infinitely increase the
dimensions of his own life, his glory and magnitude. But, for each unit to
grow, to have birth and growth, it must undergo (etymologically suffer)
the experience which is necessary to awaken its latent capacities into
self-conscious becoming. And, says Aurobindo, "the only being is
becoming." Polarity is the sole awakening power, the ineluctable way
for being to actualize becoming. The human mind can philosophize truly and to
sound conclusions only when this principle is integrated in the premise of
thought. Once it is grasped and given due weight, the sole remaining source of
wonder is why this experience of becoming should ever have been, in philosophy,
tabbed with the name of "illusion." For if the experience can not be
categorized as real, we can then have no experience of reality,
since this is all the chance at life we have. To get rid of this grade of
existence, in order to gain a truer reality, now appears to stand out in all
the glaring crudity of its folly. To throw away what we have, with nothing to
replace it but an empty void, seems too illogical to be even debated.
And Aurobindo comes forward here
with the statement that this world experience, which cult religion so bitterly
denounces, is positively part of the eternal Brahman itself, and is therefore a
part of eternal reality. God's own experience with matter, shared
77
through our experience with it, is
part of the reality of ever-existent being. It is not separate from it and
contrary and hostile to it. Brahman projects his self-being out into these many
forms of expression, not that he may have less abundance of life, but
surely that he may have more. You can not multiply an ear of corn unless you
plant its many grains. And this world is the
Through his seed units God undergoes
this experience so that he may convert more and ever more of his latent unknown
and untried potential of life and being into actualized self-knowledge. And
although the ordeal of birth and growth of these cells in his body is
necessarily attended with a certain stress and strain--as their
birth-throes--still the joy of feeling the emergence of his powers and
faculties is the rich reward of delight that arises from the experience. In
this view the "ordeal of life" takes on the vivid hues of thrilling
adventure, as every step is haloed with the joyous surprise of unexpected
discovery of new genius. The only intrinsic source of lasting joy is the sense
of mastery over new powers. As the process moves onward, the expectation of
further revelations and ampler satisfactions generates a zest that then
enhances and quickens the drama to heightened tempo. This goes on until, as
India so clearly indicates, the soul undergoing the experience approaches as an
end goal, a state of transcendent bliss,--ananda.
But the unbalanced handling of the
maya philosophy errs in its presumption that this bliss is to be won simply by
annulling, killing out, suffocating the run of physical experience, on the
presupposition that if these "less real" modes of consciousness were
pushed out of the way, the divine bliss would at once supervene in fulness. It
is Aurobindo who makes the correction of this false assumption, in according to
lower grades of active sense-life their full validity, indeed their
indispensable utility in the scheme of progression. Not through its
invalidation by an unwarranted dialectic, and crying for its eradication to
release into consciousness a more radiant dynamism, but by "making use of
this good thing," using Paul's words, is the road of evolutionary advance
to be traversed.
With the Indian philosopher's
masterly diagnosis we can per-
78
haps now see better what this maya
in reality is, catching the corrected view that it is not in any way an
experience of deception. He says that it is potential eternally in Brahman, so
that Brahman can resort to its use at any time. The derivation of the word illusion
becomes all-important here. It stems from the Latin word meaning to
play, ludo, with the past tenses formed on the stem lus-. Illusion
is the play activity, the play-exercise of God's mind in creation. It is the
joyous thrill of trying his hand at creation. We, made in his image, derive our
most genuine delight, pleasure and satisfaction from the labors of
construction. The topmost joy in human life is the gratification we feel in
having accomplished something masterfully, to have unfolded a new power. So
Brahman uses its freedom to throw its energies into the tensional relation
between positive and negative polarity, so that out of the exertion his
potential being may evolve through becoming. In this, as observed, is the solid
answer to the baffling question of philosophy. Seldom, if ever, has it been set
forth so lucidly as we saw it in the passage quoted from Plotinus.
Confuting whole volumes of Hindu
philosophical exposition, Aurobindo says that while the pure existent is a fact
of the universal reality, that is, being detached from all circumscription by
matter, "the movement of pure being down into matter for the purposes of
becoming is also a fact." This straightforward assertion flatly
contradicts the asseverations of its non-reality, which also imply its
non-factuality. Aurobindo's thesis is that if the experience is integrally in
Brahman, as he declares it is, its reality can not be impugned. And whatever it
may be to higher creatures, gods, solar logoi, thrones, principalities, powers,
archangels of the hierarchy, it is certainly real to us. The completely
naive approach to the problem would seem to warrant our saying that if it is
not real to the being undergoing it, it can hardly be rated as an experience.
And for whom else would it be real? It would appear unthinkable that the entire
mass-volume of human experience here should be an experience of unreality. If
by any quirk of logic it might be held to be so, then it must be postulated
that evolution has planned that we are to grow and unfold divinity through an
experience of unreality. That elevates unreality to a place of grand utility in
the cosmos. This dialectical strait is the predicament in which this negative
philosophy of maya-illusion has involved itself. Can evolu-
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tion be conceived as having employed
falsehood and deception to promote life's conquest of reality? This is what the
maya doctrine asks the mind to accept.
There are, however, several senses
in which the word "play" can be considered, and it is not too easily
determined which one is foremost in the ancient sages' use of the word.
Aurobindo has gone straight with the ordinary meaning of play as recreation,
sport, free active exercise. Perhaps also the meaning which would describe the
creation as the play of the motions of God's mind, as we speak of the play of
lights and shadows on a scene, is implicit. This would be a legitimate
rendering of the word in its ancient usage. But it seems possible to read into
it also the play of God, in the sense of his playing a part, acting a
character, representing through his acting some deep true elements or aspects
of reality which his outer show merely dramatizes. If the meaning of
"play" is taken in this sense, there is at least a specious
figurative warrant for philosophical thought to regard the outer creation as a
mayavic curtain hiding a more real being behind it. But it goes no farther than
to permit one to say that the outer show of phenomena is only relatively unreal.
And that in the end concedes nothing to the maya doctrine, since to everything
below the absolute truth and reality are only relatively true and real, as well
as relatively untrue and unreal.
What is certainly important to
notice is that this play of Brahman's mental creative activity carries no
connotation of deception. Illusion, in the properly balanced sense of
the term, it may possibly be, as granted in the preceding paragraph. But delusion
it assuredly is not. Shallow handling of the concept in philosophy has taken
illusion to be equivalent to delusion. This is a glaring blunder. The
implications of the profound ancient philosophy have pointed the direct way to
a capable understanding of the term maya. This word, beginning with the
M that is found in all names of characters representing the motherhood of life,
is the name of nearly all the mothers of the many Christ-figures in national
religions: Maya, Maia, Mary, Moira, Myra, Myrrha, Miriam, May. This stands as a
robust datum that challenges the philosophical denunciation of the world,
matter, the body, the flesh. For, whether it be rated as a deception or a
reality; it is clear that in the philosophy behind mythology it is considered
that the experience of reality in the body on earth brings the Christhood in
humanity to its birth.
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If the voice of a recondite ancient
seership speaks truly in this depiction, then it is decisively proclaimed that,
so far from being a delusion of the soul, the maya illusion is actually the maieutic,
(how fittingly the word falls in here!) or mid-wife principle that
brings our Christ nature to its birth! All diatribe and abuse of the matter
element of the duality meets its rebuff and refutation in this item of the
sagas of old-time wisdom. And the item establishes the truth that, if it is
still in any way permissible to characterize the mundane experience as an
illusion, then illusion again must be considered as wholly beneficent.
Mythology furnishes the conclusive testimony that maya is the prolific alma
mater of our Christhood! Let those who take their beliefs from priesthood
without critical examination know that the despised berated evil element of
matter is what they worship when they pay adoration to the Holy Mother and
recite their "Hail Mary" salutations.
Pious indoctrinated belief and maya
cult philosophy never stop to reckon the disastrous psychological consequences
of their illusion and detachment ideologies upon human society. Whether it
segregates the individuals devoted to it physically from the world, as in the
migration of thousands into the Eastern deserts in the early centuries of
Christianity, or merely results in the abstraction of mental interests from the
life of the world, it in any case takes its devotees out of the world.
Aurobindo points directly to this danger. He is speaking of those who have
claimed to find liberation from all worldly interests:
"If his inexorable removal
through the very act of illumination is the law, then the world is condemned to
remain eternally the scene of unredeemed darkness, death and suffering."
This is to point to the observation
that if the grandiose exaltation of the spiritual consciousness amounts in the
end to the sainted individual grasping his own salvation, letting the devil
take the hindmost of those still mired in the pit of earth, there will never be
a reclamation of the world out of its low wretchedness. Each human, as he
graduates into sanctification, would abandon the world to its own evil. How
would the world ever be lifted up?
Also Aurobindo observes that if we
detach our life from the life and plan of the world, we will be able to make no
integration of world meaning. When we take ourselves out of the context of
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world life, which in the divine plan
is the nursery ground of our spiritual growth, we are in no position to learn
life's meaning, to make a correlation of the elements of its experience. The
significance of the world and of life can not emerge out of events when either
spirit or matter is detached from each other's influences. They bear meaning
only when in interrelation. "The harmony of the two tendencies is the
condition of all life that aims to be really divine," affirms our
philosopher. And he rebukes the Indian philosophies that ignore the presence of
God in nature and in the world. We can with confidence seek God in nature; we
can find nature embodying God's thoughts, because he says:
"Prakriti [nature] turns back
to perceive Purusha [spirit]. The world seeks after the Self; God having
entirely become Nature, Nature seeks to become progressively God."
Again:
"For Life, these things that
seem to deny God, to be the opposite of Satchitananda
[Existence-Consciousness-Bliss] are real, even if they turn out to be
temporary. They are the very material of her [Life's] workings."
And let a dark and lugubrious
theology take note of his next statement:
"These [evils] are not the
punishment for a fall, but the condition of a progress. They are the
first elements of the world he has to fulfill; the price he has to pay for the
crown which he hopes to win; the narrow way by which nature escapes out of
matter into consciousness; they are at once her ransom and her stock . . . .
for out of these false relations and by their aid the true view is to be
found."
By the ignorance we have to cross
over death, he has said.
"It would be, then, not when he
has excised the evil in Nature out of herself by an act of moral surgery, or
parted with life by an abhorrent recoil, but when he has turned it into a more
perfect life, lifted the small things of human limitation into the great things
of the divine vastness, transformed suffering into beatitude, converted evil
into its proper good, translated error and falsehood into the secret truth,
that the sacrifice will be accomplished, the journey done, and heaven and
earth, equalized, join hands in the bliss of the Supreme."
Here we have the voice of a true
philosopher, an oracle uttering sage wisdom that has disastrously been
beclouded for an aeon of history. In the light that these words cast on the
scene of human
82
life we can see only too clearly
what would happen if, by some hallucinatory mind-magic, we were able to
lift or abstract ourselves out of the experience which is ours on this plane,
at this stage of our peregrination through the long cycles that will carry us
on to the heights of ineffable being. And what will be the disappointment of
those who urge us to cast off the fetters that bind us to the life of body and
of sense and of mind! "In getting rid of the ignorance of the Ego and its
resultant limitations we do indeed eliminate the dualities; but we eliminate
along with them our own existence in the cosmic movement."
The challenge to an irrational
excess of subjective monistic persuasion, the rebuke to unjustified claims for
the benefits of a spiritual detachment from the physical life, is here voiced
for a welcome sanification of the general religious mind. Duality, we have seen
from the first verse of Genesis on through the venerable Egyptian and
the later Greek systems, is the essential condition for the birth and evolution
of consciousness in creature life. The ultra spiritual-subjective philosophies
aim to dissolve the duality, and so to release the ego-spirit that is, at one
end, tied in with the non-egoic matter. Fatuously this thought looks simply to
the release of the spirit bound--injuriously, as it claims--under the heavy
darkness of matter and the flesh. What a sagacious philosopher unfolds to the
holder of this view is that the only possible outcome of the presumptive
liberation of the spirit nucleus from its "bondage" in matter would
be the extinction of the unit of consciousness that is supposed to be
liberated. It is in a fair degree of analogical exactness comparable to the
action of a person imprisoned in a house, who decided that he can free himself
by blasting that house with a charge of dynamite: he goes out of existence with
the house. True enough, as the thinker states it, we succeed in eliminating the
dualities, we nullify the tension of opposites, but only at the cost of our
own annihilation. Consciousness has arisen out of the tension generated in
the duality; eliminate the tension and consciousness goes out like a lamp with
it. Such an elimination of our sense of existence would be rationally desirable
only if the consciousness was left to enjoy the release from the strain. But
with the destruction of the tension, what is left is a blank. The philosophies
here brought under critique come close to announcing their preference for a
blanking out of all existence-consciousness, the annihilation of any life at
all.
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Existence is declared an evil, its
burden a suffering. The only good of a creature caught in its meshes is to
destroy the sense of it; and this destruction is so welcome to the earth-hater
as to be acceptable even if it involves the annihilation of the entity desiring
it. What good its destruction would be when no entity would be left to
recognize its absence, logic seems incompetent to tell us.
The negation philosophies appear to
have no stomach, no patience for the long, slow and in some part necessarily
painful march of human progress from the beast level through the human arc up
to the divine. It is bent wholly and solely on annihilation of the
consciousness that arises out of the tension of polarity. And who can gauge the
fatuity of the philosophy which aims at supernal felicity by destroying the
grade of consciousness through which presumably the felicity could alone be
enjoyed? The rebuttal of this logic would be in saying that the aim is not to
destroy the consciousness by which the bliss may be enjoyed, but to destroy a
lower form of consciousness which is blocking the way to the more blessed
realization. A rational expectation would be that in due course of evolution a
lower and more inhibiting grade of consciousness may be transcended by the emergence
of a higher and more joyous grade. But this sane formulation of the process is
just what the Hindu negativist systems and the maya philosophies expressly
reject. They clamor for the destruction of those modes of consciousness--sense,
emotion, thought--the full and perfected development of which are the means,
and the indispensable ones, by which such true advance to higher state could be
achieved. These present capabilities of our consciousness are not seen as
useful adjuncts, or wayside stations along the road of progress, but are all
discredited and spurned as anti-utilitarian enemies of the spirit, imprisoners
of the self, and constitute a maya-illusion in their totality. They are
accorded no function of usefulness in a scheme of growth to enhanced being, but
are declared to be the enemies of the spirit.
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CHAPTER EIGHT
THE VEIL OF THE ABSOLUTE
The liberation philosophy contends
that all our experience is unreal because it is only relative to a larger and
truer reality, the true reality. In a proper balance of the conception
no one disputes this. No wise thinker would claim that our mode of
consciousness, or our grade of experience here, is in any sense the experience
of absolute reality, certainly not in its form of absolute finality. No one asserts
that our life in the present is the be-all and end-all of potential being. To
do so would destroy all the meaning that goes with the word
"evolution." It would cut us off from prospect of a future in any way
grander than our present.
Yet that our form of life is an
essential element in the conscious evolution of reality for both the Brahman
and for his creatures is certified by Aurobindo in unmistakable terms:
"The movement, on the contrary,
is the field of the relative, and yet by the very definition of the relative
all things in the movement contain, are contained in, and are the
Absolute."
At the extreme opposite of the claim
that all our experience is an unreality, a dream, an illusion, he declares that
it is the heart's core of reality.
"The movement in time, the
movement in space, is real. Space and time are real. What is, is the eternal
invisible succession of time, carrying on its stream a progressive movement of
consciousness, also invisible. Duration, then, eternal succession of movement
and change in time, is the sole Absolute. Becoming is the only being."
It is the old debate between
Heraclitus and Parmenides over again. And the modern Hindu gives the palm to
Heraclitus: the life that is moving is the true being, not the life bound in
eternal motionlessness. As Dr. Wilhelm said, the Oriental philosophy has put
too much emphasis on the static side alone. Life not only wishes to be, but to
express itself, and this it can not do if it is bound in eternal silence and
immobility. As Plotinus said, it is not enough for souls merely to exist; they
must show what they are capable of begetting. Life must be free to act. Its
values come to its creatures on the wing. The joy is in the sweep and swing of
the movement up hill and down dale.
85
The mind hugging its maya belief can
not endure the thought that any self-limitation of the free spirit of life can
be salutary for soul's progress, or a necessary instrumentality for it.
Progress out of limitation toward wider liberty does not satisfy it; it wants
immediate release from the tension implicit and indispensable in becoming. It
is impatient with the slow ascent of the ladder, or the keyboard, of existence
and believes that the long treadmill of gradual progression is unnecessary. It
thinks that the grand apotheosis of ecstatic consciousness can be consummated
in one fell rush upon the citadel of divine glory. It can not tolerate the idea
of life's taking one step at a time.
But hear Aurobindo:
"And first, if there were not
this factor of the successions of Time, there would be no change or
progress; a perfect harmony would be perpetually manifest [would this not
rather be unmanifest?] coeval with other harmonies in a sort of eternal moment,
not successive to them, in a movement from past to future. We have instead the
constant succession of a developing form in which one strain rises out of
another that preceded it, and conceals in itself that which it has
replaced" [and the promise of the one to follow it].
Here is the point-blank refutation
of the philosophies that would eliminate time and evolution out of the cosmic
procedure in the unfoldment of life. Also again, hitting the claims that the
experience here is not of real being, but a maya, Aurobindo says:
"Those forms have been created
not outside, but in the divine existence, Spirit-Force and Bliss; not outside,
but in and as a part of the working of the divine Real-Idea. There is therefore
no reason to suppose that there can not be any real play of the higher divine consciousness
in a world of forms, or that forms and their immediate support, mental
consciousness, energy-vital Force and formal substance, must necessarily
distort that which they represent. It is possible, even probable, that mind,
body and life are to be found in their pure forms in the divine truth itself;
and there in fact as subordinate activities of this consciousness, and part of
the complete instrumentation by which the Supreme Force always works. Mind,
life and body must be capable of divinity."
"This earthly life need not
necessarily by forever a wheel of half-joyous, half agonized effort; attainment
may also be intended and the glory and joy of the Lord made manifest on
earth."
If mind, life and body also hold the
capability of divinity, it is time that the droning dirge of their
imperfection, their transitoriness, their illusory and evil character give
place to a joy-song ex-
86
pressing appreciation of the
gracious service they render in the evolutionary economy. That which the
philosopher puts forth here suggestively as a high probability, and almost in
an apologetic tentative voice,--even at that exceptional for a Hindu mind--was
stated with unabashed positiveness by the ancient sages. Surely attainment of
the highest grades of conscious being and joyous life is intended in the scheme
of organic process; its very stresses promise that. And the glory of the Lord
of Creation is to be made manifest on earth. The philosophies of old prescribed
the definitive laws of life and the discipline of consciousness by which humans
might grow toward divine estate without impaling themselves constantly on the
spikes of suffering.
And Aurobindo depicts vividly the
illogicality and final futility of the maya philosophy when he summons our
thought to the inescapable fact that
"even when it knows that they
[world objects] are not things in themselves, it is obliged to deal with
them as if they were things in themselves. Otherwise it could not subject
them to its own characteristic activities."
Here, it would seem, the mayavic
creed and claims receive their knock-out blow. In a world wherein the elan
vital is manifesting positive values this code of ideas asks its believers to
take a mental pose of negation and denial toward the things which all the while
their very existence requires that they accept as real. What must be the chaos
inbred in a mind which daily asserts the non-reality of houses, bread and milk,
yet finds it is every day dependent upon these things for very existence! And
what the folly of denying the real being of one's own body!
The actual and veridical being of
the material world is forthrightly asserted by Aurobindo:
"And, as we have already
discovered that matter is only substance-form of Force, so we shall discover
that material Force is only energy-form. Material Force is in fact a
sub-conscious operation of Will . . . We may say, therefore, that it is a
sub-conscious Mind, or Intelligence, which, manifesting Force as its driving
power, its executive Nature, its Prakriti, has created this material
world."
Here is corroboration of our
elucidation that the laws of nature are the operations of the sub-conscious
mind of the universal creator.
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If this is so, it at once and in
finality negates all philosophies that draw sharp lines of separation between
the ideal world of real being and the asserted unreal world of spurious
material objectivity. This conclusion is certified by the fact that the
activities of the subconscious mind are simply the previous activities of the
divine conscious mind made automatic by repetition. This is what Aurobindo
implies when he says that the things of the world that seem to deny God and the
Supermind are nevertheless also in the Brahman, a part of real being. So he
says that material force, creating material things, is a sub-conscious
operation of Will. This is a timely discernment that can be brought in to guide
thought to correct conclusions in its attempt to rationalize the earthly life.
The philosopher himself asks, what,
then, is Life? And what relation does it bear to the Supermind? By what
necessity does it come into being? And he recalls that there has come ringing
down the centuries the ancient cry that life is a delusion, a delirium, an
insanity, from which we have been incessantly exhorted to flee by posting our
minds in an attitude of total negation of the life here. Why, he asks, has the
Eternal wantonly inflicted this evil? Why has he brought into being this
terrible all-deluding maya? His answer may sound unrealistic and a little-over
wordy and pedantic to most. Nevertheless it deals with the factuality of the
case as clearly as it is possible for the human understanding to grasp and
rephrase it:
"And, however brute and void of
sense it seems to us, it is yet, to the secret experience of consciousness
hidden within it, delight of being, offering itself to this secret
consciousness as subjects of sense in order to tempt that hidden godhood out of
its secrecy. Being manifest as substance, force-in-being cast into form, into a
figured self-representation of the secret self-consciousness, delight offering
itself to its own consciousness as an object,--what is this to Sat-chit-ananda?
Matter is Sat-chit-ananda represented to his own mental experience as a formal
basis of objective knowledge, action and Delight of existence."
Then he uses a figure of
representation which is singularly in accord with a dramatization employed in
the Old Testament. Saying that the Overmind sends matter as a
"delegate" to the ignorance manifested at the lower grade, he
pictures matter as a sort of protective screen thrown over the consciousness of
that grade, permitting it to enjoy the universal light in a moderate subdued
de-
88
gree, when it could not receive the
full force of the blinding light of the Sun of divine glory. This poetically
limns what is as correct a way of thinking about it as any we can conceive. A
similar figurism is obviously behind the trope used in the Psalms (84),
"the Lord God is a sun and a shield." Also it seems to be the thought
in the allegory in the Scripture in which the Eternal tells Moses, the type of
man, that he will hide him in a cleft of the rock, and, as the Eternal's
"glory" passes by, he will place his hand over man's eyes so
that the human sight will not be blinded by the blazing effulgence of the
undimmed divine light. The divine hand will be removed when the glory has
passed. It needs little ingenuity in symbolism to correlate the
"hand" emblem with matter. Matter is the "eternal
feminine," life's universal mother; and hand is found to be of the
feminine gender in nearly all, if not all languages. But the main earthly
symbol of matter is water, the actual mother of the biological chain of life on
the globe. And so the figurism of the Old Testament not only mitigates the overpowering
brilliance of the divine glory by the coverage of God's hand over man's eyes,
but also encloses man in a cloud of vapor (water), when God comes down to
commune with his children on Mount Sinai, definitely a glyph of ancient usage
for the earth itself. Matter is definitely that "shield" which the
cosmic mind-fire providentially interposes between its pure and unmitigated
energy and the consciousness that can as yet function only in the lower and
dimmer chambers of existence. So Aurobindo's depiction of matter as deity's
"delegate" to a lower grade that can not apperceive pure spirit-forms
and must therefore have such forms represented in concrete objectivity, is
entirely, if poetically, valid.
Swinging over to a different figure
he refers to Purusha (spirit) and Prakriti (matter) as respectively the soul
and the executive force of nature; they together produce a harmony, as they are
the two balancing energies of one and the same power. This being so, he says
"there can be no disequilibrium or predominance of one over the
other."
Here are words of such vital import
to man's sane balance of mind in his effort at rationalization of his life
experience that their full realization would have salvaged humanity from
centuries of misguided religious fanaticism, bigotry and superstition, and from
today could inaugurate a brighter and less horrendous era in world
89
life. Had their sound message been
purveyed, grasped and applied in philosophical thought in the past centuries,
this cry that Aurobindo catches ringing down the ages, "the world is very
evil," would have been silenced from the beginning, and the insensate
denial of the world's good would have been supplanted by a just and happy
appreciation of its present and its ultimate beneficence. There can be no
refutation of the assertion that in that case human life would have been both
happier and nobler.
In lack of this understanding of the
equilibration of the two forces of spirit and matter, the major effort in world
religion has been almost totally a blind attempt to disrupt the eternal, or
aeonial, polarity, to disengage the positive pole, spirit, from its tension
with its negative, matter. All the while the ends of the entire evolutionary
scheme are to be subserved by keeping the two in the polar relation "until
the harvest." Only perhaps in the light of this scientific approach to the
situation will the folly of exalting and straining to effectualize the one by
attempting mistakenly and perforce vainly to crush down and silence the other,
be realized at last. Happily for the future of religious significations,
Aurobindo comes forward with the resounding assertion that there can be no
disturbing or relaxing the polar balance between the heavenly and the earthly.
And perhaps now in the spirit of Tennyson's "ring out the old, ring in the
new," the old bleating cry of the evil of the world may now be drowned out
by the clarion carol of the world's high function of good.
The discerning philosopher
elucidates that the "many," which it has been the habit of a dour
theology to berate because they stand at variance with the eternal unity, are
just the one, which has broken itself up into multitude for the cosmic purpose of
giving to each unit seed-portion of itself the chance to grow up through a
self-realizing experience under the birth-strains of polarity. Only thus can it
multiply its own being, for thus it can bring more hosts of its own units from
ignorance and initial powerlessness up to the consummation of the divine
Sat-chit-ananda, or the ultimate trinity of being,
existence-consciousness-bliss. It superficially gives the appearance of
existence plunging into an apparent non-existence; consciousness going into an
apparent unconsciousness; delight of being sinking down into a cosmic
insensibility and "deadness," from which a diviner ray has to rescue
it. (It has been the inveterate
90
propensity of shallow theologization
to mistake this apparent downward plunge for a real fall of soul into
darkness.) Over the centuries the feeble efforts of the human mind to explain
this seeming calamity to life have become crystallized in the unfortunate and
inept theological doctrine of the "fall into sin." Never with
adequate conciseness was it recognized that the split of primal life energy
into duality was in no true sense a "fall into matter," to be viewed
as a dire miscarriage and catastrophe, but that it was the precipitation of the
conditions necessary for the soul units' adventure for the birth and
self-discovery of their divinity. The bifurcation and polarization were
necessary because under cosmic law a good quality can emerge only out of the
repercussion of wrestling with its opposite, evil.
Hence all the systems that decry the
evil nature of matter, sense, the world and the flesh are now, in a rectified
view, to be seen as unbalanced and naively childish presuppositions. The
positive truth is that these elements are the base of our life and the source
of our power to grow. We climb ill, Aurobindo courageously asserts, if in our
advance from cruder levels to more ethereal and radiant heights "we forget
our base." His words are so notable that full quotation is warranted:
"Life, in its self-unfolding
must also rise to ever new provinces of its own being. But if in passing from
one domain to another, we renounce what has already been given us, from
eagerness for our new attainment, if in reaching the mental life we cast away
or belittle the physical life which is our basis, or if we reject the mental
and physical in our attraction to the spiritual, we do not fulfil God
integrally nor satisfy the conditions of his self-manifestation. We do not
become perfect, but only shift the field of our imperfection, or at most attain
a limited altitude. However high we may climb, even though it be to the
Non-Being itself, we climb ill if we forget our base. Not to abandon the
lower to itself, but to transfigure it in the light of the higher to which we
have attained, is true divinity in nature. Brahman is integral and unifies many
stages of consciousness at a time; we also, manifesting the nature of Brahman,
should become integral and all-embracing."
A further amplification of the
central idea here expressed in such forthright terms is also quite worth
citing:
"The integral view of the
nature of Brahman avoids these consequences. Just as we need not give up the
bodily life to attain to the mental and spiritual, so we can arrive at a point
of view where
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the observation of the individual
activities is no longer inconsistent with our comprehension of the cosmic
consciousness or our attainment of the transcendent and supracosmic. For the
world transcendence embraces the universe, is one with it and does not exclude
it, even as the universe is one with it and does not exclude it, even as the
universe embraces the individual, is one with him and does not exclude him. The
individual is a center of the whole universe; the universe is a form and
definition which is occupied by the entire immanence of the formless and
Indefinable."
Since our mentality refuses to
attribute anything in the order of life and nature to an arbitrary or whimsical
fiat of fate, we are forced to see in the oppositions of spirit and matter,
which we so quickly and glibly pronounce evil, the beneficent conditions and
provisions for our slow and strenuous progress. So our philosopher elucidates
it: "Whatever is created must be of the substance of the utterly Real, and
must be Real." This being so, "a vast baseless negation of reality can
not be the outcome of eternal truth or the Infinite Existence." But both
directly and by implication the maya doctrine asserts a negation of real being.
And hardly less than sharply rebuking to these negative postulates is his
statement that "all that a timeless eternity of self-awareness sees in
itself as truth of being, the conscious power of its being manifests in
Time-Reality." Here finally the perpetual cry of the negativists that the
human mind will look in vain in the particulars of the time process to discover
the great truth of being is bluntly refuted and denied. And against the
insistent preachment decrying the value of the world "below," the
philosopher launches this positive rebuttal: "It is not denial; it is one
term, one formula, of the Infinite and Eternal Existence." Again he
confutes the opposing ideas with the statement: "Moreover the experience
of soul and Nature as dual is true." The maya cultism has inveterately
declared it to be false.
Logical explication of the duality
is given in the following:
"An apparent duality is created
in order that there may be a free action of Nature working itself out with the
support of the spirit; and again a free and masterful action of the spirit,
controlling and working out Nature."
Nature here is a limited expression
of the cosmic Super-Nature above. And the supreme pronouncement of a virtually
conclusive verdict of error in the philosophies denouncing the world and nature
is a statement that "what Nature does is really done by spirit."
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However slowly and mutely rendered,
it is ever the voice and the message of the spirit, Purusha, which nature,
Prakriti, repeats on earth. The heavens speak and earth echoes the tones.
"The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork."
The maya doctrine affirms that we
are to destroy our conscious connection with this world by "killing
out" the senses, the emotions and the mind, by all of which our conscious
attachment to the world is maintained. Shallow thinking has always missed noting
the consequences of this prescription. But Aurobindo sees it and points it out.
"If we withdraw back from her
workings, then all can fall into quiescence and we can enter into the silence,
because she consents to cease from her dynamic activity; but it is in her
quiescence and silence that we are quiescent and cease. If we would
realize a higher formation or status of being, then it is still through her,
through the divine Sakti, the consciousness-Force of the spirit, that it has to
be done; our surrender must be to the Divine Being through the Divine
Mother."
Here again is wisdom uttering
momentous pronouncements of oracular truth, and the world that they can bless
has waited only too long to hear them. Religion, in its overweening persuasion
that boundless "glory, laud and honor" were to be rendered to mortals
to the Supreme Spirit alone, has exalted the Father in heaven, while slapping
our equally divine and holy Mother of Life on earth rudely in the face!
"The original status is that of
the Reality, Timeless and Spaceless; Space and Time would be the same Reality
self-extended to contain the development of what was within it."
Stoutly he affirms that at all times
the alleged "evils" have their persistent reality and importance in
our present phase of the manifestation, nor can they be a mere mistake of the
divine consciousness, happenings without any meaning in the supernal wisdom,
without any purpose of the divine joy, power and knowledge to justify their
existence.
These citations bring us face to
face with the inadequacy of the escapist philosophy to meet the realities of
the world situation and to account for them in a rational scheme of exegesis.
It all reveals to us the patent fact that escapist philosophy is such just
because it
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can not rationalize apparent evils.
If life can be rationalized in a scheme of good, no escapist philosophy is
necessary or justified. Failing an insight that would render a wholly rational
explication of the world life in full consonance with a conception of good,
mayavic postulates are driven to resort to the disingenuous ruse of
disqualifying the reality of the experience which seems to present evil
aspects, along with the instrumental sources of our evidences of that
experience, our senses and our mind. Unable to justify the world experience as
good, the negative philosophy ends the debate by virtually throwing the
experience itself bodily out of court as insufficient ground for the trial of
the case at all. It impugns the evidence as all false. Always its plea is that
man is not legitimately qualified to pass judgment on his experience or to
determine its true rationale, because his equipment for assessing its real
value is inadequate and defective. So the dialectical ruse of asserting that
our experience is only to be evaluated through the lens of a higher and more
perfect power of consciousness appertaining to a higher world is subtly
utilized with considerable speciousness. For centuries this thin
"logic" has been put forth by one school of thought after another,
without its inherent illogicality being detected. If man needs for his balance
and happiness a rationalization of the live problems of existence, he needs
them at his own level and in the terms of his own grade of mind power, within
the reach of his own comprehension, not in the supposititious or predicated
terms of some hypothecated higher consciousness. What archangels and gods may
understand far beyond man's capabilities should not be made the standard of
judgment or appraisal in man's rationalization of his world. It is his world
that he has to rationalize, not that of the gods. Man must be the judge in the
court of trial of the values of his mundane experience. And he must render
judgment in the terms of his own codes of understanding.
It is, not at any rate directly, no
rational elucidation of man's dialectical problems to summon down the
Super-conscious mind of the cosmic Logos to supply a supra-rational exegesis,
disqualifying man's own faculties. He must have a solution acceptable and satisfying
to him at this level. When it is a matter of the poise and mental balance of
our life here, philosophy must not put off our answer by referring us to
another world of understanding, which we may, if at all, cognize only by
cutting off all our conscious connection with
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the actualities of our present state
and mode of being. Aurobindo insists on this, positively asserting the validity
of our experience with world objectivity in the formation of our value
judgments. The more surely is this to be taken as irrefutable in view of the
fact that, as he has pointedly observed, it is impossible that we should
attempt to disqualify our own report on our experience at the sense-and-mind
level as invalid for judgment. However unreal we may argue and protest our
experience to be, we must, as he notes, act as if it is real. So that all
sublimated philosophical attitude toward the world as an unreality can be
maintained only by means of an artificially superinduced pose much in the
nature of a hypnotization. This last word virtually describes in general the
philosophical posture of mind generated by negative cult postulates. They can
only wield a sway over minds by gaining control of them through the mysterious
force of dogmatic mesmerism. This force has long been denominated
"auto-suggestion." It had better be called plainly
self-hypnotization.
But a philosophy that alone can
yield to man its salutary integrating influences must be one that he can grasp
with the sharp edge of his normal endowment and through his own keenly awakened
faculties. Being a Hindu of deep proficiency in every reach of mental acumen,
Aurobindo is aware of this fatal propensity of the human consciousness to charm
and hallucinate itself by mental magic, and he warns against confusion and
delusion from this source. It can be bluntly affirmed that in a broad sense
hundreds of cult movements in the run of history have swept large groups into
one great mass hypnotization after another. Under the siren power of emotional
surges any scheme of specious rationalization can be accepted as real. If, as
the maya cults assert, the truth of life is only to be recognized or realized
by a process of abstracting consciousness wholly out of the world which
factually presents itself to us, and viewing and judging it from the
vantage-point of a transcendental world, it is indeed necessary, as it is not
denied, for man to destroy himself as man, in a predicated effort to reorient
himself as a being divine and absolute. The outcome, then, of the cult
teachings is the destruction of man.
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CHAPTER NINE
THE MOTHER OF REALITY
Philosophy has signally failed in
its high function if it has not been able to assure the cultured world-mind
that life is capable of being lived, not only in the hypothetical "eternal
now" of a timeless super-mind consciousness, but in the flowing stream of
the temporal now, in the full, if relative and imperfect, sense of its
effective reality. If life, as it unfolds its potential at the given moment, is
not real, then thought and mind would have to be forever postponing the moment
of reality to some distant epoch or climactic denouement of our evolution, and
the living experience would indeed be robbed of its realized and realizing
power by the false and superficial posture of mind set to denial. As Aurobindo
so strongly asserts, the present experience with an objectivity that can be
characterized as relatively unreal, is all a part of the whole movement
of life in the Conscious-Force of Brahman. It is no negative criterion of
reality that an ordered manifestation of life in the being of eternal reality
finds it necessary to appear in a vast range of differentiated modes of
realization to creatures of endless grades of evolved, or unevolved, conscious
powers. It is no criterion of reality that is grasped in different ways by
different people in different worlds, or by different people in the same world;
that it can be apprehended with a fuller and more vivid sense of its true
nature by higher creatures than by lower. Reality is wherever and however it
appears to the creature experiencing it, although one's reality is not
another's. Reality is not to be dismissed as unreality simply because it can
not be made absolutely uniform throughout the universe. In effect that is what
the absolutist and monistic theorizations predicate as desirable, necessary
and--possible.
In relation to the questions
examined here the voice of another outstanding Hindu philosopher may be
listened to with much profit. In his magnificent two-volume work on Indian
Philosophy the eminent philosopher-statesman, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, has
outlined the whole structure of Hindu religious thought with a view to its
clarification for Western minds in particular. The great question of maya is
handled most perspicaciously. "Maya is not a human construction. It is
prior to our intellect and independent of it." (Then certainly our
philosophy could affect it little.) He
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equates it with Prakriti, the
manifest universe. If maya is prior to and independent of our intellect, it
must be objective to our intellect. It is not born out of our intellect, as an
illusion would be. Therefore it would seem that maya can not be of the nature
of illusion, but is a part of the enginry of reality itself. Being prior to our
intellect, it can not be a product of our intellect. This conclusion
shakes to their foundations such theorizations as those of Christian Science
and kindred idealistic systems which make our own minds the creators of
whatever reality encompasses us, whether objective or subjective. It is also
the decisive answer to the thesis in philosophy that man's mind is the creator
of illusion. The illusion--if such it indeed be--was here before the human
mind. In this light Radhakrishnan's declaration that maya is not a human
production, being prior to our intellect, takes on especial force and
importance. If it divests the doctrine of maya of its humanly generated
illusory character, it marks an epoch in the history of religious philosophy.
Maya is Prakriti, the world of
becoming, and to this the philosopher adds that "the world of becoming is
the supreme reality and that therefore anything that interrupts it is to be
rated in the category of unreality, if not of evil. It is closely in accord
with Indian thought to rate becoming as evil, for in its processes the life on
earth, deprecated by Eastern philosophy as a breach in the continuity of
absolute good, is generated. The Indian mind dislikes to think of pure being as
suffering any interruption of its static beatitude. If it occurs it is a
calamity. The prime aim of Hindu speculative philosophy is to liberate
consciousness from the throes of becoming and restore it to its primal state of
pure and undisturbed being. In sharp contrast with this view we may now see how
far Aurobindo has traveled to arrive at a point where he could say "the
only being is becoming." It makes him almost a revolutionary against all
previous Indian philosophy.
But do we not face a sharp and
crucial clash between the expressed views of the two great philosophers?
Aurobindo flies far away from the static aspect of being to say that the only
being is becoming; Radhakrishnan now says that the world of becoming is an
interruption of being. By unimpeachable logic the two statements would add up
to saying that the only being is an interrup-
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tion of being. Becoming is true
being, but becoming interrupts true being. If both philosophers speak truth,
then in this case truth clashes with truth, truth destroys itself.
But it is possible that the clash
may be found reconcilable if we consider the word "interrupt." It is
possible that an entity or a process can interrupt itself without destroying
itself. The issue hinges on the particular sense in which the word was used in
Radhakrishnan's dialectic. As employed by him it does seem to intimate the
negation of being and reality, in fact their destruction. But so drastic a
meaning may not need to be assigned to it here. Interruption of being would not
necessarily connote destruction, or even opposition to being. It could well and
legitimately mean temporary alteration of the mode of being. And this is
obviously what it does mean, and this rendering permits the two apparently
self-destructive statements to stand. For truly enough it can be affirmed that
becoming interrupts being in precisely the same sense in which we would say
that waking activity interrupts sleep. The analogy seems adequate and valid on
every side, since becoming is to being what waking activity is to sleep. And
this relation of becoming to being at the same time opens out a clearer vista
into the meaning of the maya conception. It helps us see that maya is the
disposition, the posture, the mode into which absolute being projects itself as
it awakens out of its sleep condition, called in India pralaya, to
undergo the long process of pushing itself from unconsciousness to the
unlimited heights of glorious self-consciousness. Maya is the condition of the
becoming operation and becoming is true being, again by irrefutable logic maya
is the conscious coefficient of true being. This deduction is in sum pretty
much what this essay is aimed to establish.
Maya is what the absolute being
precipitates itself into when Purusha commits itself to Prakriti for the very
sake of achieving for itself new birth and infinite growth of its dormant or
unawakened potential. The false presumption of so much "spiritual"
philosophy as of religious conception in the large, is that the unit
soul-consciousness is forced out of an Elysium of perfect bliss of full being
to plunge into a lower limbo of Prakriti and maya, and wander almost like a
lost soul through aeons of an unreal experience symbolized by every type of
darkness, non-being and forlornness, its
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one hope of felicity being to find
some way of escape back to the Paradise lost. The change of habitat is
doubtless true, but every philosophical implication as to its purpose and its
rationale in the designs of cosmic mind seems to have been distorted most
outrageously awry. The truth is evident that the direful necessity that forces
potential god-souls out of Paradise,--in which, contrary to most religious
belief, they do not share or enjoy the felicity of all-perfect being,
not yet even having entered the stream of becoming--is in its ultimate evaluation
neither calamitous nor dire; no more so, at any rate than the necessity which
requires an acorn in October to fall from its parent oak down into the damp
ground at its base. Souls in the empyrean in their incipient stage, generated
by the Father's powers of self-reproduction, are not participants in the
bliss of pure being, as naive religious minds have been misled to believe.
Their descent to earth does not tear them ruthlessly away from celestial
blessedness; it in fact simply initiates the run of experience that will unfold
their capability to actualize such felicity. They are but the seeds of
life and love and glory in heaven; they must fall into the ground of earth if
they are to grow. As it has been fittingly expressed, they emerge at the start
out of pure be-ness, to proceed through a long course of becoming to
attain unto true being. Religion generally has mistaken the primal
be-ness for the perfected being. True being is never an unearned gratuity; if
it were so it would be worthless. It must be labored for and won, and all its
values spring from the exertion and the winning. True being is what life wins
at the end of the process of becoming, not what it is before the process
begins. Aurobindo is right: becoming is the only being. And in the proper
understanding of the terms, Radhakrishnan is right: life interrupts the being
it has attained at any stage in order to attain a greater being. So far is
soul's "expulsion" from Paradise not a calamity and a
"fall," that it is in truth its cosmic opportunity to enter the
stream of becoming. In the simplest possible form of statement, it is their
glorious chance to be. India still regards it as dire calamity.
In a stricter use of the words,
however, it is important to consider the possible error in Radhakrishnan's
position. For the creatures concerned, being can not be interrupted, because it
is not yet a going reality. A thing that is not yet running can not be
interrupted. And when being is attained, it never will be interrupted,
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except to produce finer modes of
being. Being is the distant objective at which the infant souls aim. In falling
from Paradise to earth souls do not fall out of true being, with the sad
necessity of climbing back to the happy region whence they fell. They do not so
much have to regain Paradise as to gain it for the first time. It was in the
ultimate sense not a Paradise lost, because it had not yet been won. It was
only the leaving of the parent's home to go out to a distant school where a
rigorous education would generate the power to build Paradise of its own as the
rich fruitage of sacrifice. Maya is the valley of becoming.
The misconception just elucidated
involves Radhakrishnan in the impassable bogs of deeper questions, for it
drives him to a negative answer and to a confession of inability to rationalize
the "fall" of the soul by the analogy of the planting of the
soul-seeds on the earth. He writes (Indian Philosophy, Vol. I, p. 86):
"Philosophy tells us that so
long as we are bound by intellect and are lost in the world of the many, we
shall not seek in vain to get back to the simplicity of the one. If we ask the
reason why there is avidya, or maya, bringing about a fall from vidya,
from being, the question can not be answered. [Italics ours].
Philosophy as logic has here the negative function of explaining the inadequacy
of all intellectual categories, pointing out how the objects of the world are
relative to the mind that thinks them and possess no independent existence . .
. . It can not help us directly to the attainment of reality . . . . The
supporters of pure monism recognize a higher form than abstract intellect,
which enables us to feel the push of reality. We have to sink ourselves in the
universal consciousness and make ourselves coextensive with all that is. We do
not then so much think reality as live it, do not so much know
it as become it."
This passage is most important
because it so clearly delineates the basic position of Hindu dialectic in all
religious systematism. If a competent critique of it can be instituted, that,
too, would be important. Two items involving great principles are here to be
scrutinized: the asserted impossibility of answering the question as to why the
soul on earth has "fallen" into avidya, ignorance; and the
constantly reiterated incompetence of the intellect to acquaint us with
reality. The two items are quite definitely related to each other.
Taking up the first, it is odd that
Oriental thought has forever bleated its inability to answer the question of
the "fall," which is
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essentially the question as to why
souls are on the earth. Most singular it must seem also that India has
continued to render this negative answer, when ancient Egypt and Greece, the
inheritor of Kamite wisdom, have fully and competently answered the great
question. The answer, already specifically outlined in this work, could be
elaborated at great length. It may perhaps bear review and new accentuation,
briefly.
In the Plotinus passage quoted
previously we are told that souls come to earth "by a voluntary
inclination, to develop their powers and to adorn what is below them."
They are not sent here to suffer the loss, or "sacrifice" of anything
precious. They are infant soul units, so named in ancient systems in various
ways: in India called Kumaras, "virgin youths," "celibate young
men;" in Egypt spoken of as "the younglings in the egg,"
"the younglings of Shu," the children of Osiris; in the New Testament
allegorism denominated them "the Innocents" whom "Herod"
tried to destroy in their infancy; in the Greek mythology they are typified by
divine heroes in their youth, such as the infant Hercules strangling the two
great serpents in his cradle. In the Egyptian allegory the soul itself,
personified, states that it takes its position "on the horizon," the
borderline between heaven and earth, where spirit and matter are exactly
balanced, which equilibration is found only in the body of man. Here it says
that it comes to bathe in the divine pool beneath the two divine
"sycamores" of heaven and earth, the Pool of the North and the Pool
of the South, the Pool of Natron and the Pool of Salt, the Pool of the Sun and
the Pool of the Moon, "in order that I may purify this soul of mine in the
most high degree." Here is set up the great balance in which all souls are
weighed, for elsewhere the divine pool is called "the lake of equipoise
and propitiation." This place of equilibration between the two natures
which must ever be united in polarity if life is to be existent, is the great
balance, the Libra of the zodiac. Repeating that it comes to feed upon the
bread of Seb, or the food of the earth, it adds that it has many rebirths in
the flesh: "I die, and I am born again, and I renew myself, and I grow
young each day." And again it says: "I am Horus, who steppeth onward
through eternity." "The name of my boat is Millions of Years."
"My name is eternity and everlastingness."
It appears worthy of noting how the
philosophy of Egypt and Greece rings with the tone of positive value in its
view of life, in
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the sharpest possible contrast to
the sour negative attitude expressive of India's thought. Inasmuch as
historians have traced the provenance and the character tone of the religions
that have preponderated in the West in the period since Plato's day to the
influx and influence of the Hindu philosophy upon the earlier Egypto-Greek
systems expressing the positive view of life, this contrast and vast
discrepancy must be seen to be a thing of momentous significance in the last
twenty-five hundred years of history.
The other item of Radhakrishnan's
analysis is the incompetency of the intellect to give man knowledge of reality.
India has forever asserted that if the human is to have experience of reality,
he must interdict the activity of the intellect and utilize a
"higher" power of consciousness, which Radhakrishnan here describes
as a feeling of the push of reality, a recognition higher than knowing
and which he calls a "living of reality," and finally a
"becoming it," so that we contact reality by being it ourselves.
Philosophy has wrestled endlessly with this question. It looks very much as if
it were all a matter of more precise and specific definition of the term
"intellect," as well also of the term "reality." In the
Hindu position as stated, the intellect seems to be spoken of as a mental power
limited to the work of logic and formal relation of propositions under strict
methodological rules, such as those governing mathematics. It seems to be
restricted to only a very limited area of the total possible range of mind
faculty.
It may be allowed that under this
strict definition the intellect is neither a name nor a faculty capable of
covering the range of mind-function as a whole. The mind may justly be claimed
to have other functions or forms of cognition transcending its purely
ratiocinative power. Also the debate continues indecisive probably because the
intellect is being condemned or subjected to a critique of incompetence on the
ground of failure to fulfill an office which is not properly within its sphere
of function, and which it should not be asked or expected to discharge. The
specific task of the mind is to give us knowledge of the world of life, to
interpret the data of knowledge into terms of value, to give us understanding
and that grasp of the relation of things and states of consciousness which we
call meaning. These offices are assigned to it for the obvious purpose of
enabling us to establish the right relation of our lives to the world, to
promote most harmoniously the ends of cosmic intent.
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Perhaps, then, philosophy,
especially Eastern, may have been quite "out of bounds" in its demand
that intellect give us the full experience of reality. It certainly has been
evolved, and is qualified, to contribute an indispensable element in the sum
total of our power to experience reality. Perhaps it may be granted that the
function of the intellect is not to give us, at any rate directly, the experience
of reality. Feeling, rather than knowing, may be the mode of our contact
with being. The function of the intellect is not, in this narrow sense, to feel
life; but it certainly is to judge life, appraise it, evaluate it and interpret
it in the terms of understanding. Its business is to know, and to interpret the
data of knowledge, for the purpose of determining all life action as good or
otherwise. Life itself furnishes us with a body of experience, and life has
developed the faculty of intellect so that we may know how best to guide the
current of our lives in the proper channels. To ask this function to give us
the total or ultimate experience is to ask it something lying beyond the
boundary of its province, something it is not equipped to give. It is only the
judge of action and experience, and must wait until these are brought before it
to receive its judgment. A thousand judgments of its intelligence may be the
necessary condition precedent to one moment of exalted insight or rapturous
communion with whole being in the mystical consciousness so highly extolled by
spiritual romanticists.
When, therefore, Oriental or other
philosophy rates the intellect as incompetent to afford us the experience of
reality, it is simply bringing in an exhibit as evidence which is not denied as
sheer fact, but which is wholly immaterial and irrelevant to the argument and
has no legitimate place in it. Incidentally it operates to institute a
prejudice against the "defendant" by being introduced at all. The
possible failure of intellect would consist, not in its failing to give us
experience of reality, but in giving us faulty judgment on possibly
insufficient data. It must be remembered, too, that in this function the
intellect is like a mill,--its business is to grind out judgments from the data
fed into its hopper. And it must look to experience for its adequate supply of proper
data. Much of the maya creedology seems to assume that the intellect can
gather the data for its circumspection and evaluation from the metaphysical
world rather than from the physical, for always it disdains the material world.
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In its contempt of the intellect the
Hindu thought has bent its effort in a quite practical way toward the
exploitation of means of cognition which it regards as "higher" than
the powers of the mind, such as the intuitions, grades of mystical exaltation,
states of trance, dream fantasies, abstracted consciousness and the ecstasies
of samadhi, which it superinduces by various practices of steady
contemplation and fixity of mind. The often vivid character of such experiences
give the impression that they bring consciousness closer to the apprehension of
reality than does the intellect.
But the obvious fact that life can
use other faculties beside and "beyond" the intellect to bring
experience to its conscious units should establish no adverse judgment against
the intellect, when it is not asked to overstep its proper function. These do
not debase the intellect by comparison, for they are not its function, either
to equal or excel. And in the end, no matter how far they may
"transcend" the intellect, they must themselves still be brought
before its court for judgment as to their legitimacy, their right or wrong
character, their good or evil influence. They do not condemn it to low or
incompetent rating. It has final judgment over them, and may in proper case
disallow their claim to render a service higher than its own.
Even with this exemption from the
false judgment of an unjust condemnation, the adverse critique of the intellect
seems quite unwarranted on more direct grounds. If it is not the faculty by
which experience is gained (though certainly it is itself an integral element
of the experience), its function of judgment and appraisal of experience value
enters so vitally into the context of all experience, and its function of
judgment is so powerful an agent of psychological determination, that it stands
almost always as the dominant element in the final mode and character of
experience itself. It is what the intellect does with or about the experience
that determines the final deposit of influence which the experience makes in
the bank of life. Certainly without the intellect to assess the final value of
experience, all living would be more or less valueless, senseless and indeed
chaotic. It is only when it presides over the sum total of events and supplies
the principles of relationship by which they are bound together in meaning,
that the experience takes on the character of event in the soul's evolution.
All experience only rises out of chaos into the category of history for the
individual when the
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intellect steps in to provide an
integration which alone yields both meaning and zest and value to the run of
history.
We have seen all this too well
authenticated in the high philosophies of two, among others, of our great
philosophers, Spinoza and Kant, to need fresh elaboration here. Spinoza won the
appellative of "the God-intoxicated philosopher," and yet it was he
who established the intellect as the faculty instrumental in the highest
rhapsodies of the human spirit. The divine mania was not achieved in regions
above and beyond the intellect, but through its own direct capabilities. He it
was who coined the expressive phrase, "the intellectual love of God."
And endless folios of history can be scanned to confirm the verdict that the
so-highly exalted principle of love can run into paths of unwisdom, and
generate tragedy if not held in line by the mind. At any rate in the purview of
such an enlightenment as Spinoza caused to shine in the minds of his readers,
the highest raptures of our introvert adventuring would not yield their
consummate joyousness without the guidance and supervision of the intellect.
Likewise we have Kant testifying in
much the same way to the play of the intellect in the highest ascensions of
consciousness into the peaks of spiritual realization. The highest attainable
reach of the human consciousness was attained, he found, in the comprehensive
summation of all cognitive faculty in what he called the "synthetic unity
of apperception." The philosopher saw that it was not alone the conscious
events that constituted the reality of human experience, but the final
synthesis of these events in an integrated vision of their meaning; and this
was the work of the intellect.
It can not be without positive
significance also that in the great works of the Neo-Platonic philosophers the
highest grades of conscious beings in the cosmic hierarchy, the gods, are not
termed "spiritual," but "intellectual and intelligible"
grades. The intelligible world is rated highest and the intellectual world next
below it. In his notable passage, already quoted, Plotinus begins with the
statement that the soul had its divine birth or origin in the
"intelligible world."
It is notable also that a modern
writer whose books on the exaltations of Oriental mystical practice have been
enjoyed by a large reading public, Mr. Paul Brunton, reviewing his experiences
in the science of yoga, gives his conclusions in his volume, The Hid-
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den Teachings Beyond Yoga. Earlier in his career, enraptured with the
mystical subjectivism and introversions of Hindu practice, and extolling them
highly, he later came to see that they should, as this essay contends, rank
always below, and be held in subordination to, intellectual philosophy. He saw
that the habitual practice of the meditative exercises under the yoga system
left the devotee standing apart from his world, becoming a moral and spiritual
Sybarite, a self-centered hedonist, a mystical Epicurean. Several of his
statements are so trenchant that they merit citation here:
"I did not know, when I first
landed on India's surf-sprayed shores, that I had embarked on a quest which
would ultimately carry me even beyond the boundaries of mysticism and the
practice of meditation itself, which for so long I had deemed the highest life
open to man . . . . I did not know that I had thrown dice with Destiny and that
the game was not to be concluded in the manner I had been led to expect, that
is, by settling down to an existence which made physical and mental
withdrawness in profound contemplation its highest goal and sublimated
fulfilment. Yet when the intermittent satisfactions of mental peace entered
into conflict with an innate ever-inquiring rationalization, tremendous
questions slowly became insistent. I perceived that although the little pool of
light in which I walked had indeed grown wider, the area of darkness beyond it
was as impenetrable as ever."
"Meditation, to oneself, was a
necessary and admirable pursuit, but it did not constitute the entire activity
which life was constantly asking of man. For the efflux of time had shown me
the limitations of mystics, and more time showed that those limitations were
accountable by the one-sidedness of their outlook and the incompleteness of
their experience. The more I associated with them in every part of the world
the more I began to observe that their defects arose out of sheer shriveled
complacency, the hidden superiority complex and the holier-than-thou attitude
which they had unjustifiably adopted toward the rest of the world, and also out
of the premature assumption of total knowledge of truth, when what they had
attained was only partial knowledge. The question was finally forced on me that
the perfection of human wisdom would never develop out of any mystical
hermitage, and only a synthetic complete culture could offer any hope for its
unfoldment . . . The instructive episodes of daily living confronted me with
deeper disillusionment; with the limitations and deficiencies of mysticism and
the intolerance and defects of mystics . . . I saw that intuition must be put
in its proper place and not to be expected to perform miracles. Both had been
tested and found wanting. I became acutely aware that mysticism was not enough by
itself, to transform or even discipline human character or to exalt its
ethical standards towards
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a satisfactory ideal. It was unable
to link itself thoroughly to life in the world. This gap was too serious to be
ignored. Even the emotional exaltations of mystical ecstasy--wonderfully
satisfying though they be--were fleeting, both in experience and effect, and
they proved insufficient to ennoble man permanently. The disdain for practical
action and the disinclination to accept personal responsibility which marks the
character of real mystics prevented them from testing the truth of their
knowledge as well as the worth of their attainments, and left them suspended in
mid-air, as it were. Without the healthy opposition of active participation in
the world's affairs, they had no means of knowing whether they were living in a
world of sterilized self-hallucination or not."
This candid expose of the failure of
mysticism by a competent investigator should serve as corrective of so much
sycophantic worship paid to India's reputed "spiritual" systems by
impressionable but uncritical and inexperienced Westerners. Mr. Brunton's
further analysis of the theme presents so much of our own feelings and
conclusions with regard to it that another lengthy quotation is not
objectionable:
"Meditation, apart from
experience was inevitably empty; experience without meditation was mere tumult.
A monastic mysticism which scorned the life and responsibilities of the busy
world would frequently waste itself in ineffectual beating of the air. The
truth obtained by contemplation needed to be tried and tested, not by pious
talk, but by active expression; a so-called higher knowledge which failed to
appear in homely deeds was badly learnt, and might be nothing more than vacuous
vagary. The true sage could be no anemic dreamer, but would incessantly transform
the seeds of his wisdom into visible and tangible plants of acts well done.
Emotional exaltations won through religious devotion, indeed personal
satisfactions, might become dangerous illusions when they failed to find a
proper external balance . . . The spiritual dreamer . . . needed to change his
attitude toward the despised world of activity, to stand intermittently aside
from his dangerous ascetic pride and to broaden and balance his outlook by intellectual
culture. A more integral culture was needed, one which could be perfectly
rounded by reason, and which could survive the test of every experience.
Such a culture could come only from facing the fact that man was here to live
actively no less than to meditate passively. The field of his activity was
inevitably out there in the external world, not here in the trance world."
It would be difficult to find
anywhere a more succinct reduction of the situation here under discussion to
its simplest elements of
107
truth. Here is expressed the central
axis of all the rationale of understanding of the philosophy of our life. Here
is the incontestable refutation of the introvert philosophies which advocate
and exalt as man's highest good an escape from the life of the world into the
alleged glories of rhapsodic superconsciousness experienced in what virtually
are trance states. Not to be missed, too, is the positive testimony that to
belittle and deprecate the intellect leads to disaster.
"The practice of meditation did
not lead him to self-sufficiency. This was because the external world was
always confronting him on his return with the silent demand that it also be
thoroughly known and properly understood. Unless, therefore, he inquire deeply
into its real nature and unite the resulting knowledge with his mystical
perception, he would remain in the twilight and not in the full morning sun, as
the entranced mystic thought himself to be. Most mystics in attempting to know
themselves metaphorically shut their eyes to the profounder enigmas of the
surrounding world, but that act did not lead to its dismissal."
No, the world is not to be dismissed
or dissolved by a mere blotting it out of mental vision, and it were time that
idealists, mayavists, monists and spiritists recognize it. Mystics miscalculate
the pressure of life's drive to give itself, through its creature units, the
tensional stress that will evolve its higher potencies, when they think they
can evade the necessities involved in the incarnational and evolutionary
process. Life will not accomplish its ends through an inane passivity or anemic
inactivity on the physical side of its expression. In coming to earth it left
dream and fantasy behind, since it was in fact surfeited with that phase of
consciousness, and from reaction to it roused itself to come forth and enjoy
the fresh relief of facing actuality in the field of self-consciousness. One
does not magically disenchant the world's power by mere contemplative
intensity. As the Bhagavad Gita proclaims in its figurative drama, the
soul, Arjuna, must not stand aloof from the battle, though in weaker mood it
would shrink from the ordeal.
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CHAPTER TEN
THE LENS OF THE MIND
If the soul, once on earth, attempts
through mistaken persuasions to annul the outer world's experience and withdraw
into the inner subjective sanctuary, it renounces a degree of its lordship over
its consciousness and lays itself open to the haunting by the same phantoms it
was beset with in the mystic heavens. Out of his own experience Mr. Brunton
testifies to this. Speaking of meditation, he writes:
"When wrongly done or when
carried to excess, it becomes a hindrance to philosophical activity, breeding
fresh evils, whims and fancies which will need to be overcome."
Then he registers a strong point in
the argument:
"The philosophical aim is
definitely different from that of mysticism. In the latter the neophyte rises
in the scale by repressing thought; here he rises by exerting thought.
The one teaches inertia, emptying of the mind, whilst the other teaches
activity, the expansion of the mind . . . . The mystic stills the mind in order
to get thought control, but once the control is attained, he should begin to
think vigorously. Thus he should kill thoughts only to use them better later.
Meditation practice must in this more advanced stage be set behind the
study of philosophy; the correct order now is to begin with the one and finish
with the other."
This is all most apt to a sane view,
and might perhaps be summed up by saying that the mistake in the mystic view
lies in the aim to gain thought control only to kill thought forever. The
mystic does not really aim at thought control, but at thought suppression.
Essentially this is the thing reduced to its terms of ribald illogicality, when
carried to its ultimate exploitation. It is as if the student were to master
all the knowledge and skills of his profession so as never to practice it any
more. The practical mind of the non-mystic would seek thought power in order to
put it to great use in the interests of progress. But the mystic strives after
thought control to end all thought.
Then this author reaches the height
of sagacity in saying that when one passes beyond mysticism to the study of
philosophy, in which the mind will be called upon to exercise its supreme power
to discern the forms of truth,
109
"whereas before he suppressed
thought, now he should seek to examine and direct it. Henceforth he will be
alert to Nature and note her workings, where before he dismissed her and cared
only to turn within."
Here indeed is fine grist for the
mill that grinds out this essay. Precisely as this effort has already
elucidated, the true sage goes deep within himself to learn the use of that
miraculous lens of truth discernment, his developed instrument, the mind, and
then turns it, not further into profound vacuity, but outward upon the world
where the supermind of the cosmos has already written the characters of the
creative ideation in the forms of Nature.
And in another passage he utters a
truth of such transcendent import that it is impossible to stress it too
heavily, when he exposes the terrible danger from the sweep of powerful feeling
unregulated by the intellect:
"Strong gusts of emotionalism
therefore provide a barricade against which the attacks of reason are futile. Emotion
unchecked by reason is one of the great betrayers of mankind."
He adds that the philosophical
student can not afford such emotional luxuries, since he knows that when
feeling dominates the consciousness it inhibits the intellect. And as the mind
is (says Brunton, in the face of all mystical doctrine) his chief instrument
for gaining truth, he must by no means crush it out, but sharpen it to
keenest edge, so that it may be the surest instrument to serve him in his
conflict between reason on the one side and indulgence in emotion and passion
on the other.
Then Brunton brings out another
reflection of great astuteness and certainly of critical significance in the
debate. Considering the so-highly-extolled flights of mystical ecstasies, he
sets forth the truth that throws back in abject defeat the great argument,
rather the sheer protestation, that the exalted afflations of the ego-consciousness
are something high above thought, beyond the province of the intellect, and are
things to which the intellect can not introduce man. He says:
"They, too, are really nothing
more than thoughts, however unusual in character they may otherwise be.
Hence there is no difference between the word spiritual and the word mental.
All conscious life is thought life. The most spiritual man lives in
thoughts as much as the most materialistic man . . . The riddle of life can be
solved with man's present resources."
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Here is corroboration for our
earlier contention that man must engineer his successful progress with the
resources provided for his use by life at the level where he stands, and must
not be expected to call down from the empyrean the agencies of life at levels
far transcending his own.
Of course in the dictionary sense it
is not quite allowable to say that there is no difference between the meanings
of spiritual and mental. But in the broad use of the terms in
yoga, the statement is warranted. The real dialectical issue here is that the
difference is not that one province of consciousness, the mind, is mental, and
a higher province, the soul, is spiritual. Both sorts of conscious activity,
says Brunton, are mental; they both have to do with mind, are exercised through
mind. But in common ideation, the alleged higher state of soul consciousness,
called spiritual, is so designated in reference to a marked difference in the
nature and contents of the ideas and feelings reflected upon the mind. Brunton
would doubtless allow this as a traditional differentiation, but probably did
not note it because he felt it was minor and inconsequential. Surely he is
right in asserting that all these ranges of the power of mind and intuition are
in the province of the mind. It must be permissible to say that many of the
realizations of mystical uplift are in the higher reaches or regions of the
mind's gamut of activity. But even that can be objected to as a gratuitous
concession to tendencies of common uncritical thinking and indoctrination.
Brunton's last sentence just quoted
is so directly a refutation of the "orthodox" position in mayavic
philosophy that it becomes indeed a notable utterance. If the riddle of life
can not be solved with man's present resources, God is then asking of
his children something that he has given them no fit tools to accomplish. How
silly it would be if life, evolution, expected man to achieve given tasks for
which the required tools were not placed in his hands! It is the egregious folly
of all these philosophies negating man's competence to achieve his destiny,
that they not only proclaim the inadequacy of the ordinary range of faculty,
the intellect in particular, but aver that if man is to escape the direful
consequences of this inadequacy, he must destroy them altogether. This is put
forth on the theory that if they are not left to clutter up and obscure the
area of consciousness, then completely competent divine faculty will have a
chance to deploy into action, and perform blissfully what the imperfect
inferior faculties failed to do.
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But must it not be seen as insensate
folly to act on the idea that if life's instrumentalities at a given stage of
evolution seem inadequate to attain the end goal, the "logical" thing
to do is to crush them out? Would not common instinct, instead, dictate the
desirability of improving them? Would a carpenter or machinist, hampered by
poor tools, act on the presumption that all he has to do is to throw away the
imperfect ones he has and a geni out of heaven will automatically supply
perfect ones? What assurance has man ever picked up from his contact with life
and nature that if he casts away his present endowment of faculties and powers,
a perfect repertoire of instrumentalities will automatically supervene? Always
the ideological absurdity remains in any claim that man must, or can, achieve
an evolutionary task for which he has not the present equipment. He can not be
expected to work with what he has not. If his present resources are not adequate
to what life demands of him, the blunt truth is that he is lost. He can not
look to the heavens to send magic raining down upon him for his salvation if he
disdains to use or destroys the equipment life gave him.
It must not be overlooked, too, as
an argument of some weight, that if yoga practices or meditative intensities can
in any way superinduce states of consciousness transcending the purely
intellectual characterization, these capabilities must themselves be considered
to lie within the range of the human mental capability, even though, in common
usage, they be not denominated as of the mind, but rather of the spirit. This
is the point which Brunton emphasized, in claiming a greater breadth for the
term mental. And it is a legitimate claim. Why, then, go on urging us to
effectuate a transcendence of the mind and intellect, when the powers we would
use in making the transcendence are themselves still mental? Is it not
infinitely more sensible to urge us to use the mind in the whole great range of
its powers? Much more must be said on this theme when discussion touches the
claims put forth for the intuition, as distinct from mind.
It is not, of course, to be claimed
that the riddle of life can be solved in all its final completeness with what
man has to use at present. The view that looks for a solution of life's
great enigma as a matter of the successful achievement of a stated specific
task of definite limited magnitude, like the completion of a course in college,
is a faulty one. The accomplishment of absolutes, finalities
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and ultimates is hardly in the
province of man's life or in the reach of his accoutrement. Life goes on and
on; solution of a lower-grade or simpler problem qualifies him to labor at a
more complex one. But what can be positively asserted in the discussion is that
the capabilities for solving the present phase of a problem in his
evolution must be adequate for that task, his present resources must include
those capabilities. Else his progress could not continue. This would seem to
dispose of another of those baseless and specious arguments of the mystical
schools of thought.
But again it is a sane and true
observation of Brunton's, and one of prime importance, when he says that the
quest of truth and reality, unaided by philosophy, can run riot in sheer
emotionalism and lead a soul to disaster. He asserts that the qualities of
reason, critical balance of judgment, thoughtful relation of feeling to the
reality of the world, are conspicuously wanting among mystics. And he also notes
that if the realm of supramental truth is open to mystical discovery and
experience, there ought to be fair unanimity in the reports which mystics bring
of the enraptured wonders of that Beulah land. On the contrary, he avers,
mystics betray by word and deed that they have found or achieved no such
uniformity, no identity of experience. Their exaltations are recorded as
utterly individual, and carry certainty only to the individual experiencing
them. Neither do men of vision or men of faith agree, says Brunton. And we must
ask with him what is the guarantee that can assure us that what they see and
feel is the real truth, or truth at all? Their testimony may carry no more
acceptable warrant of truth than the reports of sensitives, spiritists and
psychics in the realm of psychology generally. Goethe he cites as saying that
mysticism was the "scholastic of the heart and the dialectic of the
feelings." The experience is almost purely one of feeling, and feeling is
hardly amenable to fixed laws by which its truth or falsity can be gauged,
whereas thought does come under this category. Brunton even asks why an
extraordinary inward peace should be sufficient title to certify the authority
of a truth held concomitantly with it. It must be clear that even the highest,
most rhapsodic elevations of mystical feeling can not qualify to stand as
criteria of truth, beyond the certitude which they bring to the individual
himself. Such criteria, if there be any, must be supplied by the laws of
thought and the principles of truth, which philosophy must be challenged to
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furnish. Ammonias in his school at
Alexandria taught mysticism, but always in correlation with philosophy, Brunton
advises. Plotinus, his famous pupil, rated as one of the world's great mystics,
certainly built his profound system upon the basic principles of philosophy.
This testimony from a Westerner who
has ascended to the heights and plumbed the depths of Hindu yoga should count
weightily in the critique of the dominant philosophies of the Orient. Measured
at least by his own experience and the normal standards of valuation, he came
to see that its highest afflations of mystical uplift, possessing as they
naturally would a certain unique and challenging appeal to our deepest
susceptibilities, nevertheless fell short of supplying adequate answers--if any
answers at all--to those fundamental questions which the human mind ever
demands for its stability and its more valiant waging of the battle of life. He
found that such mysticism did but temporize with the deepest soul of man,
supplying not the everlasting peace and poise of enraptured communion with the
eternal unconditioned unity of being, but only the enticing diversion of
ephemeral transports. They could be taken up and pursued for a time in the
fashion of any sensationally engaging new interest, and they brought certain
realizations well worth the knowledge, no doubt. But they could not last at any
high and perennially fresh pitch of zest and piquancy, for man's ecstasies
are never permanent or steadily persistent. A high moment sweeps in upon
us, delivers its message and is gone, leaving us the richer for its largesse of
exalted insight. But the unction is preserved not in its living poignancy of
feeling,--which the organism can not sustain beyond the moment--but in the
memory and in the thinking principle it outlined in momentary grand light. Rom
Landau, in his God Is My Adventure, has well said that a brilliant
illumination of the psyche or a new revelation of truth that lifts one to the
heights, if it only touch the emotions without affecting the intellect, simply
can not last. He does not disqualify its good service, but declares it can not
persist in its original power. Not all commitments even to the intellect endure
with steady permanency. But they are stored at least subconsciously in the
memory of their value for all later cogitation in the bank of the mind. So that
in spite of all the protestations of the mystics, and
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the enraptured eulogies of
transcendental experiences of the sort, it remains true, as Mr. Brunton in his
sincere "confession" has set forth, that those more enduring and
ultimately more soul-nourishing satisfactions which the ego seeks under the
divine push of inward being, are to be absorbed and treasured in the intellect.
Emotion and feeling are not to be
decried outright. They have their proper function and it is a high one. Feeling
is in fact one of the four component tones in the song of conscious life. If it
were left out the harmony would never be complete. The four notes are sounded,
one each in or through the four grades of consciousness, sensation, emotion,
thought and spiritual intuition. A new element or influence in consciousness,
to be inwoven into the texture of the life, must send its radiation through all
four of the levels or planes of the individual life. If it is a new sensation,
it must then impinge on the feelings, then sweep up into the mind and finally
affect the spirit. If it is an emotion, it must induce a new sensation below
it, a new idea and a new spiritual recognition above it. If it is a thought it
must touch the feelings and the body sense below and reach up to the soul. And
if it is a soul's awakening to new wholeness of understanding or rapture, it
will assuredly flood down upon the mind, the feeling and the sense. In this way
only does man become an integral unit of the life energy, or maintain the
integrity of his life. This is the necessary integration that psychology
insists upon for the completeness and stability of the individual.
Emotion, then, is one of the four
ingredients essential to the wholeness of our experience. It is not to be
decried. It is to be steadied, purified, ennobled. Neither, then, is intellect
to be decried. Neither is sensation, nor mystical elations. Each has its place
in composing the full chord, which would be defective if any one was lacking.
And what is of great moment in the survey is the fact that, if any one is
missing, the final force released by any high realization is not likely to come
through to consciousness in its richest and purest tonicity. The chord must
ring out all the four tones in harmony. Mystical philosophies here under
critique have insisted that only the top note of the chord must be sounded by
the highest tonal instrument, mystical feeling, demanding at the same time that
the three lower vibrations be entirely silenced. The evident truth is that the
supreme beauty and most penetrating sweetness of the conscious realization are
only produced by the unison of
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the four, not by the one top note
alone. If analogy could speak with force on the point, the harmony of the four
voices conjoined is a truer and more beautiful rendition than the soprano
alone, sweet as that may be.
Speaking of the number four,
Plutarch (Morals III, 110) says:
"Of this number the soul of man
is composed; of mind, knowledge, opinion and sense are the four that complete
the soul; from which all sciences, all arts, all rational faculty derive
themselves. For what our mind perceives, it perceives after the manner of a
thing that is one, the soul itself being a unity."
That all four ingredients of man's
conscious life are indispensable to his well being and successful on-going is
made clear by B. A. G. Fuller, dissertating on Greek philosophy in his splendid
History of Philosophy:
"To the Hellenic mind man was
primarily a natural fact, allotted, along with other facts, his specific nature
and place in the universe, and enabled by the world process which had produced
him to live happily and completely within the bounds imposed by that place and
nature. Supernatural sanctions to a supernatural destiny were not necessary to
right living and well being. Nor, on the other hand, was there any conflict between
an essentially lower and an essentially higher nature to oppose a fundamental
obstacle to self-fulfillment and happiness. Man had a single, though composite,
character. Nothing with which nature had endowed him was alien to his best
interests or a stumbling-block to his perfection. His good lay in as complete
and as generous as possible an adjustment of the claims of all his various
instincts and desires and interests. All were entitled to contribute their due
part to his happiness and to receive their due share in it.
"Since, then, all right action
and its reward in happiness was, for the Greeks, a matter of a purely
intellectual determination of the exact measure and proportion in which the
four grades of consciousness were intermixed in actual living, the dialectic
irrefutably placed mind action--not spiritual illumination--as the center and
base of all determination of life, character and destiny. No matter how high
and blissful its rapture, it had to ask the mind to determine what were best
for the earthly domicile it inhabited. And those raptures themselves depended
largely upon the proper regimes of bodily discipline and habit, which it was
the function of the mind to regulate."
Mystical theory has gone on
interminably decrying the intellect, even declaring it an obstacle in the path.
The greatest phil-
116
osophers, fortunately, have put
themselves on record as to this item. We have lightly touched upon Spinoza's
contribution to this feature of the discussion. More extended quotations could
be made from his Ethics to very great advantage. What is brought out is
that, not only can the intellect not be dispensed with, scorned, silenced in
the hope of evoking the magical spiritual realizations and raptures, but the
true exaltations of consciousness to the thrilling rapports and insights and
visions can not supervene unless and until the intellect has exercised
itself to the near-perfect mastery of its powers. In very truth the highest
of the afflations are nothing other than the work of the intellect itself,
performing its proper function with such alacrity and clarity that its swift
motions appear to come as the play of some higher faculty, which has
commonly been accorded the name of intuition. In the lightning flash of its
mercurial activity one does see truth as if it lay outlined under the eye; and
that is the meaning of intuition, from the Latin in-tueor, "to
look upon" directly. Intuition differs from the apprehension of truth by
the reason that by it one sees truth by direct looking, whereas by
reason one arrives at it through a process of logical deductions from
antecedent propositions. What is seen by immediate observation needs no proof
by reason or logic. On this basis intuition has always been rated a higher
faculty than the intellectual processes.
But let us hear what some of the
great philosophers, who lifted their minds to the lucid vision of integrated
truth, have had to say about the processes by which they attained to the
heights of illuminated vision.
In his exegesis of the great Aristotle's
philosophical system, our historian of philosophy, B. A. G. Fuller expounds the
prime function of the intellect as "the task of fitting the pieces
together." The pieces are the phenomena and events in the run of world
experience. This indeed is the only way in which a creature that finds itself
launched on the moving stream of life could hold its place in the line of
march, or even secure its safety. Without an instrument to perform this
function there would be no chance to seek anything higher than sheer physical
existence. Without such intelligence the entity would be but a floating chip,
powerless to orient his position in line with the free movement of the current.
In altiloquent terms the mystic
proponents laud and magnify the proclaimed inundation of mind, first emptied of
banal earthly
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contents, by the flash and sweep of
the beatific vision, the ecstatic realization and the supramental knowledge.
This, as has been seen, is on their claim a downflow from the empyrean of
supernal consciousness, and descends when the lower human mentality has been
stilled. It is, they assert, in no way dependent upon the exercise of the
brain-mind, which, so far from being a preparatory stage to the outcropping of
the inner power, is actually the chief obstacle that stands in its way and must
therefore be by-passed. In Fuller's words we have Aristotle's dictum on this
matter, and implicit in his luminous view as now presented is a veritable
overturn of all the cult philosophy in vogue:
"Now, before the truth can
'flash' upon the intellect in such wise that we cry triumphantly 'I have it,'
'I know,' our minds have to go through all this preparatory pother of
synthetic judgment, trains of thought and so-called 'discursive reasoning.' We
have to puzzle, argue, knit our brows and rack our brains before we see all at
once how the pieces fit, or get sudden inspiration as to how the picture as a
whole, or some portion of it, hangs together. Human reasoning, then, is
a process; a means toward an end; an actualization of the potential; not an end
in itself containing its own reward."
Here is forceful and straight rebuke
to the unfounded asseverations of the mystics. To their vauntings that
intuition gains nothing from the prior use and training of the intellect, and indeed
flashes best when the mind is in abeyance, the answer can be given in Fuller's
strong sentence: "He who will scorn the mind will never know the sweep
of intuition." Here is the dynamic truth that will jar and jolt an
ignorant cult of folly-ridden introvert ideology out of its fatuous dream of
floating aloft in roseate Edens of mystical bliss by ignoring and flouting the
mind. What the votaries of such ideologies will get out of their straining
aspirations, instead of true visions of reality, will be chimerical phantoms of
sensual hedonism.
Leaping from Aristotle to Spinoza,
we hear Fuller expounding the latter's view of intuition:
"The final form of knowledge
Spinoza calls intuition. By this we are not to understand some new faculty
superseding reason, by which we are fused with an indescribable Reality
transcending the categories of logical thought. Spinoza's intuition is not the
mystical ecstasy of Plotinus, or Erigena or Master Eckhardt. Nor is it the sort
of pious 'hunch' with which some modern intuitionists think to evade reason as
a final authority, when the results of reason wound
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their feelings, upset their
preconceived notions or run counter to their desires . . . . It is an intellectual
vision, attained by reason alone, of a reality that is through
and through intelligible . . . . it sums up and sees in a single glance the
whole system of ideas and truths logically implied by the nature of reality . .
. . The thing, the thought, the emotion, the feeling, the love, the thrill of
ecstasy, the starry heavens and the moral law, are no less present, no less
living, no less poetic, no less charged with value, no less sublime, for
being understood."
It is a question if mystical
philosophy does not receive its most deadly thrust from the sublime but cutting
sarcasm of these last words of Fuller's. For it shows them guilty, in their
disdaining the intellect, of acting on the predication that the highest
attainments of human consciousness are hindered by understanding, are the
better for not being understood. Here at all events we have a source of
accepted high authority positively and categorically throwing straight
contradiction into the face of the endlessly reiterated asseverations of the
mystic claimants. The intellect, the reason, which their philosophy berates and
decries, is here declared to be the foundation and pillar of the whole
possibility of the intuition which they place so far above the intellect.
"On the contrary, to the
happiness that comes from experiencing them is added the new . . . . supreme
happiness of knowing their causes and their necessary place in the
infinite being of God."
And then follows the clear
pronouncement of the climactic truth about this item in philosophic discussion
that should enable all parties to comprehend the true status of the problem at
last. Fuller says that this is a description of intuition that is not a denial
of reason, but its sublimation.
In this last word is to be found the
resolute of all debate, all partisan and partial views. The error perpetually
committed by the mystical claimants, especially of the Orient, has been to
regard and treat intuition as a faculty or level or grade of consciousness
entirely separate from and independent of the mind, even a power with which the
mind was at enmity, or to which it was an obstacle needing to be removed. The
Spinozistic view regards intuition, not at all as a faculty independent of the
mind, so that when it functions we can drop the use of the mind, inhibit its
working and substitute the intuition in its place. In his view intuition is
simply the con-
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summation and perfection of the
mind's own function. This is
implied in Fuller's use of the word "sublimation." Intuition is the
intellect sublimated, subtilized, apotheosized at its supreme level of
perfection in a higher dimensional grade of consciousness. Intuition can be
said to be the divine efflorescence of the intellect at the summit of its
perfected powers. This must be so, since in the gamut of life's stages and
tones of expression each higher faculty or reach of consciousness grows out of
the perfection of the faculty generated by the grade below it. As the vegetable
grows out of the refinement of the mineral, the animal out of the vegetable,
the human out of the animal, so this intuitional vision, man's near approach to
the divine estate above him, grows out of the intellect when that flowers out
in its perfection.
A direct statement that corroborates
this view is found in a work, The Christian Answer, by George F. Thomas.
"The faculty of reason is not superseded, but raised to a higher level of
vision under the influence of the divine inspiration." Christianity, he
says, is opposed to the modern humanistic belief in the autonomy of reason in
so far as that belief flatters the pretensions of men to discover the nature
and purpose of God without the aid of revelation.
"But it insists that the
deepest truths about God and his purpose are revealed to men in and through all
their faculties of reason, imagination, conscience and feeling."
Again he eulogizes reason as
"the candle of the Lord lighted by God and lighting men to God." The
eminent psychologist, Jung, writes that "the soul is fructified by the
intellect."
In his Ethics Spinoza gives
the intellect its high and indispensable rating in the economy of the unfolding
life:
"It is therefore extremely
useful in life to perfect as much as we can the intellect or reason, and in
this alone does the supreme happiness or blessedness of man consist; for
blessedness is nothing else than the satisfaction of mind which arises from the
intuitive knowledge of God . . . . Wherefore the ultimate aim of a man who is
guided by reason, that is his greatest desire by which he endeavors to moderate
all others, is that by which he is brought to conceive of his intelligence . .
. . To know adequately the things which are within the power of the mind is to
know God."
Again he discourses in similar
strain:
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"Inasmuch as the intellect is
the better part of us, it is certain that, if we wish to seek what is truly
profitable to us, we should try above all things, to perfect it as far as we
can. Our highest good indeed should consist in intellectual perfection."
Plato in his Laws allocates
to the mind the highest function in the rulership of life:
"If there were any man so
sufficient by nature, being by divine Fortune happily engendered and born, that
he could comprehend this, he would have no need of laws to command him. For
there is not any law or ordinance more worthy and powerful than knowledge; nor
is it fitting that mind, provided it be truly and really free by Nature, should
be a subject or slave to any one, but it ought to command all."
Greek philosophy defined the divine
coefficient of man's conscious life as a "pure fire infused with
reason."
From Anaxagoras we find the high
function of the intellect set forth in a way that should end all petty
disposition of mystics to belittle mind's supreme service in the life of man:
"All things were confused one among another; but Mind divided and reduced
them to order." As Mr. Brunton states, the enraptured mystic does not
concern himself with any ordered systematism of the relation or the meaning of
the elements of world existence. It is enough for him that he sits bathed in
complacency and titillated with his inward "phantoms of delight."
In exactly similar vein the Greek
philosophy makes intelligence the cause of the order that exists in the soul,
and as far as it has it, in the world. According to Plato intelligent soul is
thus placed in the world to be the cause of the proportional structure and
stable order of the universe. The great principle announced by the Platonic
school, that the order of the world is sustained by the cosmic mind, is thus
seen to be the logical base for the postulation of a mental power behind the
phenomenal universe. Without the operation of such a cosmic intellect, there
would be no possibility and no ground for the prevalence of the exact measure
and proportion in which all multitudinous things in the world are sustained and
stabilized. A universe running without the supervision of mind could be only a
chaos. Intimations of beauty spring from our perception of this exactitude in
the measure and proportion and balance with which all things are mingled in the
world, after the primal
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unity of being has divided itself
into infinite multiplicity, which sets for it the stupendous task of
commingling the multitudinous elements in that due balance which insures the
beneficent orderliness of the manifest existence.
Water being the symbol of the body
in which soul has to live in incarnation, Heraclitus, great Greek philosopher
before Plato, expresses the soul's "natural propensity for the downward
way," meaning its cosmic urge to incarnation, in his terse statement that
"souls like to get wet." And, once here in body, divulsed from the
higher dimensional consciousness of the upper spheres, and immersed in the
surging waves of sense and emotion sweeping in on it from the side of the body,
the soul would be subject, as the Greek philosophy has so capably established,
to a life of chaos, unless man developed some power to distinguish between the
diverse elements of his experience and could by it order his life with
judicious judgment. That potential saving power is the reason. The soul would
be overwhelmed in the flux of unrelated events if it did not develop a faculty
by which it can guide its way safely through the surging waters of sense. So
Heraclitus says: "The senses reflect the flux alone, but the reason sees
through the flux to the Logos."
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CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE REAL AND THE ACTUAL
We have ancient wisdom speaking to
us volubly and in beautiful figure in Plutarch's dissertation (Morals III,
573):
"All of which Plato endeavors
to illustrate by a similitude of the chariot horses of the soul, the one
whereof being more unruly, not only kicks and flings at him that is more gentle
and tractable, but also thereby so troubles and disorders the driver himself,
that he is forced sometimes to hold him hard in and sometimes again to give him
his head,
'Lest from his hands the purple
reins should slip,' as Simonides speaks."
And a sanity all too wanting in
philosophies bent to crush the "lower" passions in the fell rush to
take the kingdom of heaven by storm, is found in Plutarch's Morals (Vol.
III, 490), the sober good sense of which is recommended to all cults preaching
the spiritual aim of religion, in disparagement of the physical life.
"Of all which things man does
in some measure participate . . . . For he is contained by habit and nourished
by Nature; he makes use of reason and understanding; he wants not his share of
the irrational soul; he has also in him a native source and inbred principle of
the passions, not as adventitious but necessary to him [italics ours],
which ought not therefore to be utterly rooted out, but only pruned and
cultivated. For it is not the method and custom of reason . . . . to destroy
and tear up all the passions and affections indifferently, good and bad, useful
and hurtful together; but rather--like some kind and careful Deity who has a
tender regard to the growth and improvement of fruit trees and plants--to cut
away and clip off that which grows wild and rank, and to dress and manage the
rest that it may serve for use and profit. For neither do they who fear any
violent commotion of their passions go about utterly to destroy and eradicate,
but rather wisely to temper and moderate them. And as they who use to break
horses and oxen do not go about to take away their goings, or to render them
unfit for labor and service, but only strive to cure them of their unluckiness
and flinging by their heels, and to bring them to be patient of the bit and
yoke, so as to become useful; after the same manner reason makes very good use of
the passions after they are well subdued and made gentle, without either
tearing in pieces or over-much weakening that part of the soul which was made
to be obedient to her. But much more useful than these in their several kinds
are the whole brood of passions, when they become attendants to reason,
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and when, being assistant and
obedient to virtue, they give life and vigor to it."
Here is wisdom which, all things
seem to warrant the saying, Greece possessed and India lacked. Greece saw the
beneficent use of the lower nature in its relation to the higher; India could
only think of crushing down and extinguishing the life of the senses and even
of the mind. As far as the outward expression of the two philosophies goes,
Plutarch's lucid illustration of the function of the passional nature stands as
direct contradiction of the major body of Hindu yoga doctrine.
In another passage (Morals III,
91) Plutarch elucidates how God uses the body of man to make himself known both
to others and to himself. Each higher principle of the cosmic consciousness, he
says, employs a lower essence as its instrument, and through the lower power,
though it limits and compresses the diviner potential, brings its hidden
capacities to view. His statement is notable and of such majestic dignity as to
be worthy of citation:
"It is true, whilst man, in
that little part of him, his soul, lies struggling and scattered in the vast
womb of the universe, he is an obscure and unknown being; but, when once he
gets hither into this world and puts a body on, he grows illustrious and from
an obscure becomes a conspicuous being; from a hidden an apparent one . . . .
For the birth or generation of individuals gives not any being to them which
they had not before, but brings that individual into view."
In our humble view it seems time
that wisdom such as this should, like the obscure being of man which it
descants upon, be brought from dark recesses of ancient sapiency out into the
view of modern man. For here is wisdom that would resolve a thousand points of
confusion in modern thought and rebuke a thousand cult teachings of warped
truth which in the folly of ignorance turn the mind to enmity against the world
of life.
Here can be caught a deeper meaning
to the commonplace sense of the doctrine of manifestation in theology.
The physical worlds are in reality God himself in manifestation, bringing his
hidden nature forth to view both to himself and those of his creatures on the
scene. Plutarch says that the sun, taken to be Apollo, was called Delius
(conspicuous) and Pythius (known) because it was in open view of all. But the
ruler of the lower invisible kingdom was
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called Hades (invisible). The basic
fact underlying all philosophy is the knowledge that the great life of the
universe alternately brings itself from the state of non-existence or
unmanifestation out to existence and becoming. All negation attaches to the
first state, and all positive being to the second. It is to be assumed that
each condition is most delightful to the conscious mind operating the cycles of
its life as the one succeeds the other. But it would certainly stand approved
by reason that a philosophy which puts all rich positive value in the cycle of
non-existence, decrying and denying all value to existence, is unbalanced and
illogical, or worse. If it be submitted to the naive common judgment of all
thinking people, the decision must be that something is better than nothing,
that existence is better than non-existence. Life must enhance itself by its
own positive attitudes; it can not advance on negation. India comes
perilously close to affirming in her philosophy that Hamlet's question, to be
or not to be, is best answered in the negative. Existence has no rewards
sufficiently compensatory for its strains and ills. Life is best crushed before
it begins.
It is true the Greeks associated the
idea and the very term of "death" with the life in the body. They
even defined matter as "privation." Spirit was accorded the highest
rank in the order of value; matter was the essence of non-being. Yet the
utterly real being arose, they held, from the alternate rotation and the
commingling of the two, never inhered in the one alone, in detachment from the
other.
There is a subtle, yet very definite
difference between the words real and actual. They are in general
usage taken pretty much as synonyms. In philosophical parlance, however, there
subsists a distinction that should be clearly apprehended for the better
understanding of basic problems. It can be assumed that all being is real,
whether it is inactive in the non-manifest arc of its cycles, or active and
conscious in the manifest arc; just as man is real whether he be asleep or
awake. So the cycles introduce no distinction in the status of being as to its
reality or non-reality. But they do introduce a distinction between the reality
of being and its actuality. As sharply as man can analyze this
distinction, the cycles of manifestation precipitate the conscious essence of
being from a condition of sheer potentiality out into a condition of
self-conscious actualization of its unborn potential. Manifestation, as
Plutarch
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says, does not add to being anything
that it lacked before; it only made its unknown reality actual to itself. Actuality,
it was noted, is the key word in the luminous passage earlier quoted from
Plotinus. Souls, he said, could not know what their prospective possessions of
faculty were until they were actualized in the objective, the self-conscious,
form of reality, inferring that they would have remained unknown if
retained forever in the purely subjective state of reality. Only the
objectified reality is the actually real, it might be put. There are infinite
grades of reality in the cosmos; only the tiny segment of that infinite gamut
of which the creature can be self-conscious can be said to be his reality, only
the part that he has actualized. Infinite reaches of higher reality stretch
beyond him, which he has not yet actualized. To him only that is real which he
has actualized, made himself conscious of and acquainted with.
Hindus gave supreme reality only to
the subjective potential, and denied it to the objective actual. The resolution
of endless debate in philosophy could have been achieved if this distinction
had been clearly accentuated in the past. The worlds and the divine life
manifesting in them oscillate forever between the two ends of the gamut lying
between the positive state and privation. Also, what seems indicated and has
not been brought out in the exposition, is that each swing of the pendulum from
positive to negative state, from active to inert, likewise changes the polarity
in the sense that to whatever consciousness life possesses in each arc, that
grade would seem to be the positive and its opposite the negative. This would
make it possible to say that to heavenly inhabitants their sort of
consciousness would seem to be real and earth consciousness a want of reality.
But to us on earth this experience seems real and we think that death will
abolish its reality.
What the great Aristotle contributed
to this clarification is too charged with clear understanding to be passed
over. His analysis starts from the consideration of change in the living order
of the universe. Nothing remains what it now is; all things are in process of
change or transition from what they are to something else. On this observation
has been based largely the accusation of the idealist and monistic schools in
philosophy that all things here are unreal, and that reality is to be found
only in the states of consciousness assumed to have play in the unmanifest
cycles, where change is frozen to immobility in static inertia.
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But Aristotle resolves this too
simple analysis with more recondite particularity. Says he, change passes
always from one state to another under definite ordained procedures, and it is
the entire structure pattern drawn out by the total sweep of the movement of
change that constitutes the reality, which is not to be found in any one static
moment of the process. The oak sapling is not what the giant tree will be; the
boy is not what he will be as a man. The full revelation of what each created
thing will be only comes to view in the final stages of growth in the cycle or
cycles. Life reveals itself in the cycle's end, or only then in complete fulness.
The Greek word for end being telos, he named his theory entelechy,
the idea that the end stage actualizes the potential implicit in the
beginning. Change, he says, passes always to or from a climax, it is either
anabolic or katabolic, growth or decay. A potential thing is realized at its
climax, becomes fully entitled to the designation of real, when it becomes
actualized in its consummation of growth. It may be, in one sense, real when it
is yet only potential; but it is not actually real until it has brought out all
its inner life to fruitage. At stages of advance toward its entelechy it
is actual as far as it has gone, but still only potential in the ground it has
yet to traverse. Its actuality is always a mixture of hule (hyle),
substance, and an intellectually preconceived form in the ideal or noumenal
world. The two ingredients in the mixture are matter, which holds the
potentiality, and form, which, when manifested in the concrete, is the
actuality which comes to view in the entelechy. The two are purely
relative to each other, and can have no existence apart from each other. When
their polarized relation is dissolved (and Indian philosophy insistently urges
its dissolution), the being that was coming to its entelechy ceases its
becoming and relapses back into sheer be-ness, retaining only its potentiality
for later becoming. Aristotle in his De Generatione et Corruptione (Concerning
Generation and Decay) says: "Although there is a matter of the
perceptible bodies, a matter of which the so-called 'elements' come to be, it
has no separate existence, but is always bound up with a contrariety."
Those who deny the existence or reality of matter are denying to God's creative
ideas and purposes the opportunity and the reality of their actualization in
the worlds.
The mystics who presume to eliminate
time and evolution from their interpretative scheme, are undermining the
conditions
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necessary for the realization of the
entelechy, and would by obviating these "limitations" on the
free spirit lift consciousness in one ecstatic leap into the realm of
unconditioned being. This is folly, for they do not realize that, as has been
said, "time is the moving image of eternity." If philosophy is so
avid to postulate the experience of climactic exaltations and apotheosizations
without giving the process time to unfold the pattern of the forms, it puts
itself arbitrarily and artificially out of harmony with the ordained processes
of universal life. Such philosophy answers no questions about the meaning of life;
it declares life evil and counsels escape from it.
Nature, so lavishly reviled by
idealistic theory, could be looked upon with something more than mere poetic
appreciations of its beauty, if Aristotle's enlightened view of it was
generally reflected upon. The world of nature, he says, is that realm of
existence in which we have for the first time form and matter mixed. It is the
first scene on which the idea-forms of the creation appear to a sensible
creature.
As nature is a composite of
matter-potential and ideal reality in life's first and hence rudimentary
conjunction of the two, nature, as manifesting matter more conspicuously than
the mind-forms hidden in it, came through dearth of profounder understanding,
under the condemnation of religious ideology. Matter became the devil, the evil
genius of the world, and has had to bear the brunt of religion's eternal
obloquy and vilification for centuries. Canon Farrar, in his Lives of the
Fathers (Vol. II, 217) gives so lucid and graphic a picture of this attitude
that it is well to hear it:
"The causes that led to
asceticism were manifold; but the deepest cause which, heretical as it is,
exercised a strong, though half-unconscious, influence over many Christians in
the early centuries was the Zoroastrian, Dualistic, Manichean and Gnostic
conception of the inherent corruption and malignancy of matter. The body, which
the gift of the Indwelling Spirit had elevated into a temple of the Holy Ghost,
was regarded as a polluting tomb. It was treated as the source of all evils;
and because it is a duty to subdue the appetites of the flesh, it was most
erroneously regarded as meritorious to crush the body in which they
originate."
Here is the declaration of one of
the great modern lights of the Church that it is a great error to crush the
body, which he also declares to be the temple of the soul, following the
Christian founder, St. Paul. If he is right in his statement, then Christianity
for a long
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ten centuries acted out an erroneous
policy, since the crushing of the body was a dominant motive of its activity
from about the fifth to the fifteenth century. The long and tragic story of
this impulse to crucify the flesh, a hallucination which under false
austerities ground down both the souls and bodies of millions of Christians,
has never been written in all its glaring luridness. It is quite closely allied
with the mysticism here discussed, as regimes of self-denial were instituted
with the idea of profiting by Porphyry's expressive phrase, "to cause the
body to sit as lightly as possible about the soul." Fasting in particular
was practiced to render the nervous system and the psychic faculties more
sensitive to the conditions which would bring spiritual visions and phenomena
of occult character. The Essenes in their monastic colonies in the Jordan
Valley and Syria were perhaps the most amazingly successful practitioners of
these ascetic measures in the religious field.
Stanley Romaine Hopper (The
Crisis of Faith, 107) speaks of a mysticism which turned the spirit inward
upon its own impotence. What else could the spirit find within itself, if it
had once torn out of its inner citadel all the contents of the feelings and the
mind from which it might have drawn support and strength? A doctrine that urges
it to invite or entice downward into its cognizance the divine apocalypse by
first denuding itself of all its incentives to growth through knowledge of the
creation which it can acquire only from the world, must be adjudged an
illogical teaching. Hopper goes on to arraign this age-old self-deification,
which he says results from the withdrawal of the self from the objective world,
in the fatuous attempt of the meditator to elevate himself to super-human
estate, in which the self is lost in the pursuit of beatific goals predicated
upon the insatiable longing of the self for the infinite.
Commenting upon Amiel's reference to
mystical afflations as "this bedazzlement with the infinite," Hopper
agrees with him that it is a snare and a delusion. And Friedrich Schlegel (The
Philosophy of Life, 40) says that "the Henosis of Plotinus intoxicates
me like a philtre," until, as Hopper adds, "extinction overtakes him
and the colored air-bubble has burst in the infinite space and the misery of
thought has sunk to rest in the changeless repose of an all-embracing
nothing." Hopper speaks of the mystical practices as tending to induce
narcissism. The spirit of man, he says, may relate itself either to existences
outside itself and depersonalize itself as it identi-
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fies itself with its object; or it
may also be possible to relate itself to objects no less real for being reified
in the imagination, created by subjective fantasy, which have neither
tangibility nor substance, and are pure figments of the mind. An incalculable
quantity of the objects of religious devotion are undoubtedly of this sort. It
should in every sphere of man's life be his object to hitch his mind to
reality. Religion has gone so far in the contrary direction as to tie the mind
to an infinite variety of bogies and chimeras.
The French Pascal speaks in most
uncompromising terms upon the false premises of mysticism (in Pensees, 464):
"All philosophers have said in vain, 'Retire within yourselves, you will
find your god there.' We do not believe them, and those who believe them are
the most empty and the most foolish." And again (Pensees 430):
"It is in vain, O men, that you seek within yourselves the remedy for your
ills. All your light can only reach the knowledge that not in yourselves will
you find truth or good." This, however, needs the qualification that man
will find truth, light, knowledge and overshadowing peace within himself (how
could he get these outside himself?) when through continuing experience he
brings out the potential within himself, not by casting out the fruits of his
mundane living, but by relating his innate divine genius properly with the
forms of truth impinging upon his life from the external world.
Canon Farrar's work, Lives of the
Fathers, goes into elaborate detail to narrate the fantastic extravagances
of subjective visionings, entrancings, alleged visitations of the spirits of
ancient dead, and volumes of the same abound in the mystical literature of
Christianity, from Augustine and Martin down to the present. The scientific
secular psychopathic approach to the investigation of such phenomena today
divests this chapter of religious abnormality of most of its unctuous spiritual
glamor and reduces its authority as a credential of divine influence
drastically. The hallowed saints as well narrate assaults upon them by demons
and devils as visitations by angels. Much of early mystical afflatus was
generated by gazing in rigid concentration on the bones of earlier Christian
saints, in the fashion of Hindus staring at their navel. So that the Emperor
Julian was constrained to dub the Roman Christians "Bone
Worshippers."
There is little profit in pursuing
this line further, but as a true
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historical demonstration of the
lengths of unbalance to which the religious abhorrence of matter and the flesh
can carry humans, the following passage from Farrar's "Fathers" is
worthy of notice:
"A strong glimpse of the
irregularities of the fourth century may be derived from the enchantments of
the Council of Gangra. The date of this Council is uncertain, but it was
probably held about 379 A. D., and was intended to check the errors and
extravagances of the followers of Eustathius of Sebaste. We learn from its
canons that there were some who not only blamed marriage, but said that a woman
living with her husband cannot be saved; that others separated themselves from
the communion of married priests and refused to partake of elements which they
consecrated; that they embraced a life of virginity from horror of the married
state; and that they insulted married persons. We also find anathemas against
women who, under the pretence of religion, wore men's clothing, cut off their
hair and forsook their children. These canons are undoubtedly genuine and are
contained in the codes of the Greek and Latin Churches."
The length to which the story of
such reactions under the influence of combined mysticism and asceticism has
gone is close to incredible.
Beatrice M. Hinkle, in her fine
work, The Integration of the Individual (449), speaking of psychoanalysis
and its advantages over religion, in that religion gives the promise of
felicity in a future life, while psychoanalysis offers not faith in a future,
but self-knowledge by which the individual can steer his course most directly
toward felicity here and now, by finding the transforming power within himself,
does not fail to remind us that in using those very powers of the psyche which
make possible our elevation to higher states of being, we can be most easily
tricked and deceived "in this tragic play of hide and seek with
ourselves." Mystic philosophy has reversed the true and fixed order of
beneficent economy as between man and his world: it adjures man to turn away
from the forms of the physical creation outside him as having no meaning or message,
or a lying one, and to go within the unconditioned depths of his own
consciousness to find truth and light. This reverses the true direction. He
finds, as many of the psychologists are now saying, his inner world, in so far
as he has not filled it with the truths reflected from their prototypal images
in the external world, to be either an empty hall or peopled with some truths,
some half-truths
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and numberless phantoms and fancies
born of his unintelligence and spontaneous run of free imagination, not organized
on any rational basis and unrelated to reality. This is no less than
devastating to the psyche.
While Christian and Hindu
asceticism, bred from the concept of this diabolical "malignancy of
matter," went on for centuries stifling, mutilating the body, Greece
brought that body to its highest point of strength and beauty. Greek philosophy
well understood the limitations which the flesh imposed upon soul; indeed it
referred to the body under the cryptic symbolism of the soul's prison-house,
grave, tomb, as the Egyptians had called it the mummy-case and the bird-cage of
the soul. The soul resided in the body in analogically the same conditions as a
bird in its cage. In the body the soul lay, till awakened and resurrected, in
"death."
Nevertheless the Greeks never
understood the soul's imprisonment in body in the bald literal and realistic
sense in which the Christians took it. Greek philosophical perspicacity saw
through the recondite esotericism to the positive meaning behind it. The body
might be poetized as a prison, a tomb; but competent sagacity discerned that it
was at the same time the window which life had opened out upon the sunlight of
reality. Prison it might be thought, but still it was known to be a whole
miniature world in itself, a microcosm of the total world, a universe over
which the infant deity implanted at its heart could have real practice in the
exercise of sovereignty for the evolution of his kingship over all the
elements. Death-house it might be called; but it was a mortuary whose doors
would in the anastasis, or resurrection, open wide to let the
imperishable "mummy," like Lazarus, arise and come forth in Easter
radiance to life eternal. The body, lowly animal as it is, was still the
faithful beast on whose back the divinity in man would ride up to and through
the gates of the holy Jerusalem of celestial glory, with hosannas resounding
through the skies. The erudite Greeks knew the mighty temptation soul had to
undergo from the side of body; but they knew that without such wrestling with
the seductions of the flesh, soul would waste away in inanition. No disastrous
negativism or condemnation, therefore, motivated their attitude toward the
body. With a balanced understanding dictating their posture toward it, they
sought to impose upon it the exact measure and proportion of due restraint of
its fierce lusts and passions, while
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developing to the full its
magnificent mechanism of power and its natural charm.
Dean Milman, author of perhaps the
finest History of Christianity (p. 26), pays the Greeks a high tribute,
lauding their religion, which, he says, had so elevated the popular mind with
salutary philosophy that it brought the human bodily development to its highest
peak of perfection.
S. R. Hopper, already quoted, says that
the lofty humanism of the Greeks
"attained a view of man that
was sane, balanced and 'human.' This wholeness and health of the Greek
perspective was grounded in wonder and in wisdom. The wonder of the modern
world, said Chesterton, is that the wonder of the world has gone out of
it."
Quoting Heraclitus' terse statement
that "man is kindled and put out like a light in the nighttime,"
Hopper says that "with sure intuition the Greek mind turned to this
element of permanence which forever transcends the flux, or founds it, and
established there its wisdom." "For all human laws are fed by one
thing, the divine," he had been assured by this same Heraclitus.
What John Addington Symonds says
about the influence of the revival of study of the Greek classics upon the
great Italian Renaissance of the fourteenth century in Europe will be
enlightening to all modern readers.
"The study of Greek implied the
birth of criticism, comparison, research. Systems based on ignorance and
superstition were destined to give way before it. The study of Greek opened
philosophical horizons far beyond the dream-world of the Churchmen and the
monks; it stimulated the germs of science . . . . and indirectly led to the
discovery of America. The study of Greek resuscitated a sense of the beautiful
in art and literature. It subjected the creeds of Christianity, the language of
the Gospels, the doctrines of St. Paul to analysis, and commenced a new era for
Biblical inquiry . . . . Since the reawakening faith in human reason,
reawakening belief in the dignity of man, the desire for beauty, the audacity
and passion of the Renaissance received from Greek studies their strongest and
most vital impulse."
These are words loaded with fateful
challenge to a decadent world blindly now seeking a secure path through its
darkness. It would seem that when a tribute of such splendid character and such
benignant influence in world history can be accorded a nation of
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people, the philosophy which both
expressed their greatness and made them great above other nations, should be
closely studied by the world for its present behoof. Writers assure us that
early Christianity would have died out in a generation if its fervors and
fanatical zealotry had not been tempered and rationalized by the introduction of
elements of the sage Greek philosophy, largely through that master of the Greek
Mystery religions, St. Paul.
Some idea of that balance of
philosophical acumen which saved the Greeks from sinking down, with India and
with Christianity, to abject self-mortification under false conceptions of the
body's "enmity" to soul may be gleaned from Fuller's analysis of
Greek thought in the Introduction to his History of Philosophy. The
Greeks aspired and longed to win the state of freedom and deathlessness enjoyed
by the gods; but they entertained no overweening fatuous notions that they
could magically overcome human mortality and rise to godhood by some simple
contemplative broodings, and the mental denial of the reality of the life here.
Referring to man, Fuller writes:
"For him to aspire to the
blessed and deathless life of the gods was to seek to usurp the divine
prerogative and was insolence of the worst sort. 'Seek not to become
Zeus; mortal things befit a mortal.'"
Again the Greeks balance and sanity
are shown in what follows this sentence. Fuller says he will in a moment have
to refer to another voice in Greek religion that defies this admonition, by
telling man that he is really divine and bidding him regain his Edenic status.
"But underlying the concept of
Pindar's--the idea that nature has called each form of being to a particular
station in which it must be contained, and has set upon it bounds which it must
respect if it would not go wrong and meet with retribution--is dominant in
Greek religious thought and fundamental in Greek ethics."
Here the Greek mind recognized that
if there was to be order and harmony in the universe, each creature had to be
held, though with freedom in its own allotted measure of self-initiated action,
to its own assigned sphere, which formed one unit in a greater cosmic
structure, the smooth working of the whole depending upon the steady action of
each component element in its proper place and
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function. If, so to say, any unit
along the line, in eager haste to reach the goal "toward which the whole
creation moves," stepped out of its place and rushed in reckless
impetuosity toward the head of the column, it was clear that chaos would be
precipitated in the world order. The over-avid unit would not only disorder the
whole progression, but would wreck itself in the mad endeavor. In the eternal
balance of things a wise restraint even on the most laudable motives was as
virtuous as the divine urge for the good life. What the Greeks sought always
was that golden mean between the excess and the deficiency of any good quality.
This is the stanchest principle of practical wisdom in the ethical code of
mankind. So again it is to the intellect that resort must be had when it is a
matter of deciding where lies that median point between too much and too little
of any element in a problem.
Rated high among earth's coterie of
greatest minds is the German poet-philosopher Goethe. He, too, and probably
from Greek sources, had caught the sane view of man's allotment among the
orders of created beings, and the necessity under which he labored to fulfil
his evolutionary task assigned by Fate. And in a beautiful poetic expression
he, too, warns against our striving and straining to "become Zeus" or
assail the kingdom of heaven by violence.
There is enough to know about the
earthly sphere;
The Beyond from sight forever is
debarred!
A man's a fool to grope with
blinking eyes,
Dreaming in clouds above his fellow
men.
Let him stand firmly here and look
around,
To the capable the world is never
dumb!
Why must he ramble through eternity?
First let him gain and utilize the
known!
Roam down the pathway of his earthly
days;
When spirits haunt him, let him go
his way,
Though at the moment still
unsatisfied,
Find joy or torment striding to his
goal!
And we have already heard Mr.
Brunton speak in derogatory terms of those socially useless contemplatives,
bent on reaching the bliss of Devanchan and the surcease of Nirvana "with
blinking eyes, dreaming in clouds above their fellow men."
An odd but logical way of stating
the ethical principle of the golden mean is given by the Jewish Medieval
scholar Maimonides:
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"If there is any one who is, in
regard to principle, in equal distance from two extremes in all his doings, he
is called a wise man, a physician of the soul, because he restores her to
health and keeps her in the right course."
The great "weighing in the
balance," that equilibration of spirit and matter which ancient wisdom
declared to be the necessary basis of all progression, is well substantiated by
Fuller's exposition of the philosophy of Plotinus:
"The way of redemption is long
and gradual. It may take aeons of incarnation to traverse it, and there are no
short cuts in the long windings of its ascent. Sudden conversions,
shortcuttings such as seemed to be promised by the Mystery Religions,
irrelevant and premature ecstasies, reunions with the One in outbursts of
irrational emotion, have no place in the system. In the end, to be sure, the
soul will be wrapped away and united with the divine in an indescribable
ecstasy; but she must first pledge herself for that last flight by a long and
rigorous discipline, not only moral but intellectual. Without this long and
careful training she would not be strong enough to attain the heights upon
which redemption dwells, or to bear the splendors of the beatific vision these
revealed to her."
When one reads the literature of
nearly all the modern cults announcing and promising the rhapsodies of mystical
communion and the consummate genius of seership as the reward of a proffered
course of study covering a few months, one realizes how the venerable
philosophy of the ancient initiates and semi-divine teachers has been traduced
to banality. It has been travestied and caricatured into something matching the
modern run of magical mechanical gadgets that substitute inventive ingenuity
for real exertion. The rewards of steady devotion and achievement in the field
of spiritual progress are hardly to be overlauded. But the cults present an
unbalanced and an untrue picture of the possibilities in the case, deceiving
their followers with the prospects of quick results, which can hardly come save
in the course of many journeys of the soul through the incarnate valley.
Some of the more rabid schools of
cult indoctrination simply ignore the time element altogether, promising
climactic fulfilment and evolutionary consummation on the condition of
sufficient intensity of resolute determination, alleged to be achievable at any
instant the heroic will to its attainment can be mustered. This boldness
springs from the presumption that a quantitative experience
136
requiring longer time can be equated
by a heightened qualitative one, almost eliminating the time element as a
factor necessary for growth. It is a commonplace expression among devotees of
yoga philosophy that one can hasten one's evolution. If this means that
intensive effort, spurred by a fervent zeal for truth and light, and directed
by sound intelligence, can lead one most directly, without undue wasting of
time and opportunity, on to the steps ahead, it can be accepted as a rational
proposition. But if, as it so generally does, it expresses the belief that a
short period of practice of some prescribed run of meditations and yoga
exercises will obviate the necessity of the full development of every occult
potentiality and quickly elevate one to arhatship and Nirvanic consciousness,
it is of all follies the most treacherous and baseless.
The wise admonition of Plotinus
should be nailed on the walls of those cult temples to give their votaries a
sobering sense of their vaunting presumptions in this mighty science of the
spirit, which is infinitely more recondite and searching than they are ready to
believe. Most of them essay to reach the loftiest heavens without offering the
most elementary requirements on the intellectual side, which Plotinus, seconded
by Aristotle and Spinoza in particular, affirms are indispensable. The legend
has gained wide vogue that forces of consciousness asserted to transcend the
intellect will achieve in a trice what the imperfect intellect could not arrive
at in ages. Perhaps it could be agreed that of course the imperfect intellect
could not achieve consummative spiritual states, certainly not as long as it is
kept--imperfect. But the intellect can be perfected to high efficiency. And so
the semi-hysterical prodding of the spirit goes on in these groups, with
results that are really the proper subject of study in a psychiatric clinic.
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CHAPTER TWELVE
INTELLECTUAL LOVE OF GOD
Integrally related to the last
excerpt quoted from Fuller's work is a further exposition of Plotinus' thought,
which again dialectically relates the evolution of the soul to its mundane
environment and experience. It is profoundly true and basic for understanding:
"Furthermore, man has a body
and senses, and a sensible experience crowded with individual data, and it is
through perception that he gets his first contacts with the external world and
his first incentive to think. His intellectual processes are not
self-initiating and self-supporting. Sensible experience pushes the button that
sets the active parts of the intellect to work realizing the truth it
potentially contains. This operation consists in abstracting their common and
universal characteristics--in other words their forms."
This stands as one of the most
concise and compact statements of how soul grows from its contact with the
earthly realities in the midst of which it lives.
And an answer and rebuttal which
Fuller supplies to the arrant claims that the intellect is not of prime utility
in the redemptive process is quite noteworthy:
"If the will, then, were
enlightened by an accurate knowledge of the true good, it would spontaneously,
necessarily and freely prefer, choose and pursue it."
It has forever been contended that
knowledge is not in any case a guarantee of virtuous conduct, that we
continually do evil, knowing better. The alcoholic, for instance, knows full
well he ought not to drink, yet continues to do so. The spirit is willing, but
the flesh is weak, we say. But it is to be noted what Fuller precisely says
here: "if the will were enlightened by an accurate knowledge of the
true good." One may have knowledge, but still lack the rich possession of
an enlightened will. It is perhaps not so much true that the spirit is willing
and the flesh weak, as that the spirit, that is, resolute will made dynamic by
enlightened intelligence, is weak and the flesh willing. Nothing will stop the
human soul that is truly enlightened and its spirit fired with resolution!
For this reason and under such
condition, it may be conceded,
138
perhaps, that mere intellectual
knowledge may not galvanize the will into robust rulership of the desires,
impulses and passions, and it is unreasonable to expect that mental
acquaintance with a fact should work miracles of moral regeneration at one
stroke. The experience which time brings is always the final educator of the
will. It takes the play of all the four elements of consciousness in mutual
interaction over sufficiently long periods to settle a moral gain securely in
character.
But one thing is sure, and Fuller's
comment is right: the will will not spontaneously or automatically choose and
pursue the good until it has been enlightened by accurate knowledge. Or, more
surely still, it will not pursue the good, either freely or under evolutionary
pressures, unless it is enlightened. The most excellent aspect of fine
character is the dependable stabilized motive and sincere desire to do good.
But, as touched on before, the determination of what the good thing is brings
the problem ever back to the door of the intellect. A survey of the exalted
Greek philosophy would readjust the lost relation of values generally held to
prevail between good motive and the intellect in the field of ethical
philosophy today. All emphasis is placed on the disposition to do good, the
will to the good, the common assumption being that if one avows such excellent
disposition, it will insure a constant right choice of action. The intellect,
the knowledge which alone will determine what is the good thing, is only
incidentally taken into account. In the Greek analysis of the factors involved
in the life of goodness and virtue the intellect is virtually the sole, at any
rate the determining influence from first to last. Good intent and virtuous
disposition are a feeble and wobbly foundation for goodness, standing alone.
Good will is better than evil mind, it goes without saying. Nevertheless
goodness unshepherded by keen intelligence possesses no guarantee against blind
and erroneous action, unwitting blunder. Much of history's foulest inhumanity
has been perpetrated by people and parties ignorantly inspired by unintelligent
motives that were by them interpreted as good. Unintelligent "good"
purposes have splattered all the pages of history with lurid stains of blood. Goodness
is never safe from inflicting injury until it is also intelligent. The unctuous
proclivity of spiritual sects to slander the intellect has undoubtedly been
productive of immense evil in all ages of the world.
139
This matter is one of such general
and practical interest and concern and the subject of so much discussion and
Sabbath-school homiletics that it seems good to present what Fuller has further
to say in its elucidation. The world-soul, he says, is naturally predisposed,
or by evolutionary stress turned, toward the achievement of the good. He says:
"Descending now to man, we find
that he, too, is self-determined to the good. How contrary this is to religion,
which asseverates that man is by nature incurably evil! He can not choose or
will any course of action that he does not think, at the moment, will attain a
desired end and satisfy a want. But, unfortunately, the human will, unlike the
divine, is not enlightened and determined by an accurate knowledge of what the
truly desirable end and the deepest wants really are. Because of his material
nature and his attachments to the physical and temporal world, man has no clear
vision and no undivided love of the sovereign good. His eye is caught on every
side by the relative and contingent goods, satisfactions of the moment,
gratification of the senses, worldly success and the like, which divide the
life of which God is the proper object, and scatter it in a thousand
conflicting drives upon as many different satisfactions."
Commenting on the doctrinism of the
great Aquinas, Fuller says in the same vein:
"Since we have only an indirect
knowledge of its nature, gained by reason and revelation, our choices must
often miss the mark and lead us away from God rather than toward him."
And he gives the ultimate conclusion
of the ethical problem as Greek Platonism worked it out: "An evil choice
is simply a mistaken choice." Perhaps this must ever seem to us to be too
thin and abstract an analysis to be the truth. But this is because we see wrong
decisions acted out under the drive of such massive emotional impulsions that
we regard the motive as the gross evil rather than the principle involved in
the act. But after all, the wrong thing done was a decision or a choice made by
the intellect, or in default of it. The passion, the greed or the subtle desire
was only the force driving the intellect on to make its good or evil choice.
What was done ill was perpetrated by a miscalculation of the intellect. Sin
is therefore an error of the intellect. If intellect, better intellect, is
needed to correct those errors, how imbecile the philosophy which urges its
extinction that truth may flow in!
140
In the end, then, the mistake in
wrong action is much the same at base as the mistake in solving a mathematical
problem. And the attainment of proficiency in bringing off true good comes
ultimately through the cultivation of skill in the mental determinations of
right action. The modern mind needs badly to recover this insight of the Greek
wisdom.
An exceedingly sound view of the
need of philosophy in the counsels of the present, but by no means inapt to all
epochs of the historical period, is found in Romaine Hopper's The Crisis of
Faith, previously quoted:
"Scheler holds that the problem
of a philosophical anthropology stands today at the midpoint of all the
philosophical problems. Berdyaev goes farther and asserts simply that
philosophy is primarily the doctrine of man. It is easy to see that ethics
depends upon our understanding of the nature of man, and that the civilization
of any particular period is largely determined by it . . . . We are searching
today for a new humanism--for the recovery of an understanding of man in his
wholeness and completeness. In this larger and more intimate sense we need
desperately to be humanized."
He then laments the prevalence today
of an academic philosophy that in effect does not philosophize in the true
sense of the term, or in a way to affect our society beneficently.
"Philosophy as it has been
practiced has been one of the best ways of avoiding the issue. Philosophy also
has aimed at 'objective' truth. Philosophers have ceased to be lovers of wisdom
in the ancient sense, and in so far have stinted their true work in the
world through diminishing wisdom to science, their work has become esoteric and
detached. It touches the surfaces of life as little as possible, rebounding
into the speculative the moment it does so, like a toy balloon. Life is severed
from thought, and philosophers become specialists, men of science, men of one
knowledge. Philosophy has become what Nietzsche said it was--thought husbandry
(Denkwirklichschaft), a trade in thought."
Perhaps this is a little indefinite,
and provided thought be sound and good, one must hesitate to condemn
"trade in thought." Speculation need not be decried either, if it be
discerning and sifts out the chaff. Neither is esotericism to be outlawed. But
it is true that "life has been severed from thought;" perhaps rather
that thought has been severed from life. That, indeed, is largely what
141
this work is aiming to show in the
case of Indian philosophy: it virtually abstracts thought so far away from the
life in the world that it professedly seeks to destroy that life altogether.
At what tremendous risk the
intellect would be left out of the conscious life of individuals and society
can be graphically seen in the light of the two following statements, the first
from Susanne K. Langer's Philosophy in a New Key, the second quoted by
Alfred Korzybski from a work of Charles S. Pierce.
"For a single higher conception
can be a marvelous leaven in the heavy amorphous mass of human thought."
"It is terrible to see how a
single unclear idea, a single formula without meaning, lurking in a young man's
head, will sometimes act like an obstruction of inert matter in an artery,
hindering the nutrition of the brain, and condemning its victim to pine away in
the fulness of his intellectual vigor and in the midst of intellectual
plenty."
Imagination might be brought in to
aid us to realize that in fact, from the knowledge side, we enter life
practically blind, and live only vegetatively, by impulsive instinctual
reaction to experience, until the intellect begins to give us knowledge of
things, then of relationships to each other and to ourselves. These insights
that together go on to increase understanding may be thought of indeed as the
first windows which we are able to open out into the light of things, and at
the same time let light enter our house of consciousness, enabling us to walk
both within and without the house more safely and happily, without stumbling
and injury. Truly, as the Greeks and the Egyptians stated, we walk in a dark
cave until the light of rational understanding is generated by the glow of the
innate germinal divine mind within us. To decry the full development of the
intellect is to proclaim, hail and perpetuate the reign of darkness.
In his The Philosophy of Spinoza Richard
McKeon expounds the Dutch philosopher to the effect that "the real evils
of the world are not poverty, neglect, pain or any of the unavoidable accidents
of life, but the perturbations of the mind." As the whole science of
psychiatry, an enormous area of medical practice today, is grounded on
"perturbations of the mind," the significance of Spinoza's thesis can
be readily assented to.
That knowledge is essential to order
and happiness in life is
142
again testified to by another
eminent thinker, the philosopher-educator John Dewey.
"The construction of ideals in
general and their sentimental glorification are easy; the responsibilities both
of studious thought and of action are shirked. The affections, desires,
purposes, choices are going to endure as long as man is man; therefore, as long
as man is man there are going to be ideas, judgments, beliefs about values . .
. . But these expressions of our nature need direction, and direction is
possible only through knowledge. When they are informed by knowledge they
themselves constitute in their directed activity intelligence in operation.
A notable excerpt from McKeon's "Spinoza"
is quite apropos of the discussion.
"To act according to one's
nature and essence is virtue, but that is to act only in terms of adequate
ideas; therefore to act absolutely according to virtue is to act under the
guidance of reason. Virtue then is understanding, [This completely
accords with the Greek philosophy] and the endeavor to understand is in turn
referred to as the first and only basis of virtue, since it is identical with
the endeavor to preserve oneself."
This dialectic, already a most
telling refutation of mystical claims that ignore the intellectual function in
achieving blessedness, is grandly climaxed by a further development of its
implications:
"Virtue is to act according to
the laws of one's own nature; such action will further one's own power to act,
and the sign of that increased power is pleasure. Clearly virtue and pleasure
will be achieved most certainly if the mind acts always according to adequate
ideas. If one is to act best, all the difficulties of knowing the truth must be
faced . . . . To understand, then, is the absolute virtue of the mind."
All emotion, all passion, therefore,
comes from inadequate knowledge. Do we need any stronger peg on which to hang
our educational pleas? The Wisdom of Solomon (8:17) says that "to
be allied with wisdom is immortality. By means of her I shall obtain
immortality, and leave behind me an everlasting memorial to them that come
after me." Would any partisans of the mystic way argue that wisdom can
come otherwise than by mind? Could wisdom come if the mind was abolished,--as
India urges us to do?
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A point-blank denial of the mystics'
claim that supreme ecstasies and cognitions are open to man through a faculty
transcending the mind and functioning when mind is entirely put away, is found
in a statement by Dalton L. Scudder, in a work reviewing Tenent's theological
philosophy:
"Lastly, both intuitional and
mystical theology appeal to a specific cognitive faculty by means of which the
religious object is perceived. Analytic and genetic psychology does not find
any such unique faculty in the case of the milder type of religious experience;
and in the case of mysticism it is unable to distinguish this higher faculty of
cognition from the subliminal functions of the mind. Anaesthetics and happiness
both produce the cosmic consciousness and metaphysical revelations. No
antecedent reason is available to distinguish the latter revelations as
illusory and the former as veridical. Certainly no weight can be given to the
assertions of special faculty."
This stands as a forthright rebuttal
of the unfounded postulation that the intuitive faculty is a specifically
distinct power of consciousness above the intellect. As our argument has
expounded it earlier, what has been hypostatized by mystical enthusiasts as
such a super-faculty is only the more mercurial operation of the mind's own
power. In exalting supermind, they are exalting mind itself.
In dealing with the relation of
science and religion in his fine work, Religion in an Age of Science, Edwin
A. Burtt consummates his exposition with the following sententious declaration:
"Both have their being in the
human mind. Like quarrelsome brothers they must be brought to sit at the same
table; they can not be permanently insulated in separate rooms. Mysticism takes
one away from social life, takes thought away from earthly things and attaches
it to things beyond the temporary world. The ideal of flight into another world
of values than this of ordinary sense experience cannot really maintain itself
unpoisoned."
Here again the presuppositions of
mystical theory are met with a straightforward contradiction. And this rebuke
to such theory receives remarkable corroboration from Spinoza himself (Theo.
Pol. VI, iii, 85):
"But on the contrary, when we
know all things to be ordained and ratified by God, and the operations of
nature to follow from God's essence, and the laws of nature to be eternal
decrees and voli-
144
tions of God, we must perforce
conclude that we know God better and the will of God, in the degree that we
know natural things better and understand more clearly in what manner they
operate according to the eternal laws of nature."
Here once more the direction in
which our understanding must go to find the indices of God's nature and being
is exactly reversed from that in which the mystics would have us go. For the
philosopher says we will become the better acquainted with God's thought the
more we observe and reflect on natural objects.
Fuller dissertates on Plato's ideal
archetypal forms which are the projections of God's creative thought, giving
the great Academician's views that those forms existed in their pure and
perfect essence in the celestial or noumenal realms, and that earthly objects
distort and disfigure their pristine form and beauty. Aristotle veered somewhat
away from his master's view, asserting that the mundane objects were the
concrete embodiments of the primordial forms. Fuller says that the latter view
has gained against the Platonic. He says that some eminent scholars
"regard the forms not as metaphysical principles existing in and for
themselves apart from the sensible world, but as logical essences which are
enacted nowhere save in the particular objects exemplifying them."
He instances gravitation as such a
principle, saying that apart from the gravitating objects it has no enacted
existence.
"Nevertheless in spite of its
independence, in one sense, of its material embodiments, the Idea gets all its
punch and substantial being from the bodies that incorporate and enact
it."
This surely brings the concept of
reality back to earth in a form that can not be challenged. Apart from the
physical order ideal reality is an unrealized value. It can mean something to
creature consciousness only in its particular manifestations.
If we apply these considerations to
the relation of the Platonic Ideas to the sensible world, we find ourselves not
in a three-story but in a one-story universe. The only really liveable floor is
the ground floor. What we took to be an elevation of the house above the first
floor is only the extended plan of the first and only story. Fuller reports
Aristotle insisting that nowhere save in the material, sensible house has the
form and true being of the house positive existence. "The plan of the
whole house can be realized only in the material of which the house is built .
. . . The forms are no less true,
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no less valuable, no less the goals
of scientific and moral activity for being realizable only in material stuff of
the sensible universe." "The Forms are only the script of the play;
the presentations of them are only given on the plane of the flux of
sense."
Fulfilment of the highest longing
for love, then, is not to be attained by abstracting oneself from the world,
but in bringing the relations of love down into this enacted consciousness.
The direct statement that the ground
floor of the universe, the plane of physical embodiment of the noumenal types,
is the first and only story uncompromisingly blasts the inflated protestations
of the mystics that all true values and reality itself are to be caught only
when we have destroyed the ground floor and still somehow can manage to
maintain ourselves, sans sense, feeling and mind, in the ethereal tower above
all lower floors. It is permitted to ask them how they expect to uphold the
upper stories of their house after they have destroyed the lower ones. An upper
becomes such only by virtue of its resting upon a lower.
If the Forms of divine thought are
only the script of the play, the divine Architect's ideal conception of his
universe-to-be, and the physical objects are themselves those Forms now
hardened to concretion in our world, then what Susanne K. Langer says about the
function of our senses, so anathematized by spiritual cultism, has ringing
import for us:
"The senses, long despised and
attributed to the interesting but improper domain of the devil, were recognized
as man's most valuable servants, and were rescued from their classical disgrace
to wait on him in his new venture. They were so efficient that they not only
supplied the human mind with an incredible amount of food for thought, but
seemed presently to have transacted most of its cognitive business in handling
the knowledge that sensory experience was deemed the only knowledge that
carried any affidavit of truth; for truth became identified, for all vigorous
minds, with empirical fact."
What does this tell us but that in
following the illusive mystifications of supramental doctrines we turn away
from the only authentic roots of true ideas to seek them in the realm in which
their certification rests upon no sounder foundation than human fantasy and
unreliable sense of hedonism? The truth found shadowed in nature carries the
authentication of divine mind, since its objects are divine thoughts in
material form. But on what standard of
146
certification are the multifarious
and random visions and seizures of mystic introversion to be judged for truth?
Precisely because these sporadic emotions can not be subjected to empirical
judgment of the senses, they forever lack authority to command man's mental
allegiance. Not only do they thus lack the credentials as data for knowledge,
but they have been found to border closely on the phenomena of self-deception,
illusion and downright hallucination. Their chief credentials seem to be
hedonistic, they "prove" themselves in the feelings of pleasure they
yield. But from the Epicureans down to the present it has been debated whether
pleasure can claim the function of a true umpire in the moral battle. For there
are pleasures high and pleasures low, and in between; and when and whether the
reaction of pleasure can be safely relied upon is itself a moot question. Pleasures
of lofty tone and quality may be in the bright stars calling us upward; others
less noble may be the siren lure leading us down the primrose path to wreckage.
As between the created objects of
the cosmic intelligence confronting us outwardly and the unaccountable,
eccentric and precarious configurations that form themselves in the realm of
the human subjective area of consciousness, to affirm that the latter
constitute man's most authentic revelation of God and reality rather than the
former, would seem to be of all things most erroneous. And a belief that
categorizes the senses as our constant deceivers instead of recognizing them as
our faithful and most amazing servants, would likewise appear to be the product
of unconscionable folly.
Fuller, discussing Plato's solution
of this problem of a hedonistic criterion of our psychic experience, says that
to determine what pleasures are preferable and in harmony with the purpose of
evolution, we must appeal to something beyond their immediate pleasurableness;
and, he tells us, this something Plato finds in wisdom and reason, not in
feeling.
In corroboration of our assertion
that the precipitations of hysteria and strained asceticism are as likely as
not to be apparitions of fancy, Fuller gives the following:
"The untutored mind is naive
and soft-headed. In its operations it scarcely distinguishes fact from fancy,
dreaming from waking. It swallows everything it is told. Hence it is forever
shying at shadows, growling at reflections, pursuing will-o'-the-wisps and
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clinging to phantoms. Now and then
it may happen to lay hold of a truth, but it does so at random, on irrational
grounds and with no sense of the difference between the real and the
illusory."
If the area of consciousness in
which the enraptured mystical experiences are to be generated is to such degree
subject to hallucinations, it would again appear conclusive that it is the last
ground on which either religion or philosophy should venture in their quest for
real experience.
Plato attributed ultimate reality to
the Forms of divine thought; Aristotle held that they were real only in their
earthly subsistence. This difference, which is most germane to the present
discussion, is well stated by Edwin A. Burtt, in his Types of Religious
Philosophy (p. 51):
"The first major difference
between Plato and Aristotle . . . . is that for the latter the world of sense
experience may not be impugned as deceitful and shadowy; it is real and
substantial as such. The changes which obviously go on in it are to be
seriously accepted and adequately explained, rather than, as in a large measure
with Plato, branded as evil and unreal. The changeless Forms, in his view, are
not to be contemplated instead of the changing entities of perception, as the
true reality behind the flux; they are to be conceived as immanent principles
guiding the changes that transpire and as providing an explanation of their
occurrence. And this causal efficacy of form in accounting for change is the
second major difference.
"Plato, at least in some of his
assertions about the forms, portrays them as patterns existing in a
transcendent realm separate from the objects of sense experience. These objects
more or less vainly imitate the forms, but that participation is not a temporal
process--still less is it identical with the observable changes which take
place in all objects--and hence the forms do not account for those changes.
Aristotle allows no such dualism of two separate realms in the universe, one
real but impotent, the other unreal, but undergoing interesting alterations. He
thinks of the forms as embedded in the experienced objects and actively
controlling the changes which can be observed in them.
"Corresponding to these
differences in Aristotle's general conception of the world is an equally
important difference in his theory of knowledge. His ideal of science, to be
sure, is determined mainly by the Greek mathematicians who had been a profound
influence in his master's [Plato's] thinking; it is the systematic
demonstration of detailed truths about the world as flowing from the first
principles whose truth has already been apprehended. But Aristotle held, in
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opposition to Plato, that the first
steps toward knowledge are not to be taken by turning away from sense
perception, in disquiet at the instability of its disclosures. Knowledge is
won, rather by building upon perception itself. This humble activity, aided by
memory and by what Aristotle calls the 'common sense,' produces experience
which already partly reveals the embedded forms, at least as habitual rules of
action which we follow in dealing with objects that have become familiar as a
result of these processes. Experience, thus won, provides a necessary
foundation for the activity of reason. This faculty grasps the universal
principle exhibited in any case of repeated change, and thus carries the quest
for knowledge to perfection. Aristotle gives the name 'induction' to such
operations as those when they cooperate in eliciting clear apprehensions of
truth which may later be used as principles of scientific demonstration.
Induction is not itself a part of science, but since it starts from the
material of sense perception and keeps in intimate touch with the changes which
the latter undergoes, the principles established permit the explanation of
change rather than, as with Plato, requiring denial of it as unreal."
This long excerpt has been included
because it states the crucial and highly momentous difference between these two
great and influential thinkers, difference which the failure of European
philosophy to resolve in balanced understanding cost Western history
incalculable consequences in the determination of the idealistic or ideological
systems of thought which dominated the Christian civilization over some twenty
centuries. As, according to Plato, ideas rule the world, the rulership of
Christian Europe could have brought happier eventualities than its history
records, in religious bigotry, superstition, misuse of power, wars and
persecution, had Aristotle's more competent exegesis of the "Forms",
as expressing their reality here on earth, rather than in the heavens of divine
noumena, been generally accepted. A few items of Burtt's exposition deserve
some elaboration for added clarification of important principles.
It is of great moment that Aristotle
takes his stand, confirming the position of this essay, that the world objects
are not to be impugned as deceitful and shadowy. In his famous
"cave allegory" Plato represents the forms as being perceived here
only as shadows. The real forms are, he analogizes, outside the cave opening,
and man, bound in the cave with his back to the entrance of the light and
unable to turn around to see them directly outside the cave mouth, can see only
the shadows cast by the forms on the wall in
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front of him. Thus, infers Plato,
man can not ever see the forms themselves, but only their shadows on the wall.
Hence they are blurred, indistinct, their outlines confused, their expression
untrue to reality.
As poetic figure, perhaps, the analogy
is legitimate, but, as Aristotle saw, analogy here as elsewhere, can not be
taken in too absolute literalness. Aristotle, we think, translates the allegory
in truer form. He rebels against the imputation of imperfection, and certainly
of evil character, to the shadows. With him they are not shadows in any true
sense, but the solid precipitations of something that in human estimation must
be held the less substantial of the two, the divine ideas. Indeed, from the
human point of view, Aristotle's approach to the interpretation would
completely reverse Plato's dramatization. It would consider the original
noumenal Forms outside the cave mouth as invisible to man (for he can not see a
thought, even if he could turn around to behold them out there in the light).
After all it is the darkness of the cave that helps to make the shadow visible!
Plato's imposition on man of the inability to turn around to behold them
directly is no doubt to typify our limitation of cognitive dimension in our
cave. From Aristotle's point of view, since man can not see the invisible Forms
in their noumenal state, it has been necessary for the creative thought to
arrange their presentation to his limited faculties in a form of materialized
substantiality, if they are to become objects of perception at all. A paramount
question which philosophy should long ago have asked and answered is as to what
warrant the human mind has ever had for presuming to deny to the Forms in this
condition the authentic title to reality. From every naive point of view, the
objects here are not the shadows but the real things themselves, so that
we can look at them and exclaim "See what God hath wrought!" And
Plato's "Ideas" are not the realities but the shadows. How can it
ever be supposed that man can bring himself to think that what is forever
invisible and intangible to him is to be considered the utterly real, while the
perceptible things of his world are only wraiths? And again on the naive view
he might be justified in asking how it was that Plato expected us to believe
that a mere thought-structure can cast a shadow. To frame a real answer
to that query would definitely demand a knowledge of something in the science
of atomic physics as to which we can only surmise as yet,
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though we do have now the bases for
a pertinent answer that only a few years ago would have been laughed out of
court. Verily the question how God's ideas became the forms of this world is
standing at the door of the human mind, knocking.
What Aristotle stands on, of course,
is that the reality ascribed to Plato's divine noumena is not lost, but fully
retained, when by creative operation the cosmic thought-forms take on matter
and body, and stand revealed to us in our world. He means that while they may
be allowed to be poetized as shadows in the sense that no merely physical
object can adequately speak the language of thought, still their outline and
the patterns of their changing processes bespeak to a thinking mind, with its
capability of reason from analogy, their full cognitive message. This is the
nub of the great Stagirite's philosophy and its point of departure from his
master's system. It launched the division between the two main schools of
philosophical exegesis ever since. For presumably the issue eternally arraying
two leading systems of thought against each other in religion and philosophy is
whether the real essence of being, for which man searches with unremitting
persistence, is the objective reality of things perceptible to his senses, or
the subjective reality of consciousness. Plato posited this reality as inherent
in the subjective world; Aristotle located it here on earth.
Idealists have in the main held with
Plato; positivists have veered to Aristotle's position. But at bottom it is
only a contention over whether a thing, a world, is more real in its original
mental conception than it is when the conception has hardened in material form.
Is it real in its noumenal beginning or in its phenomenal end! It all amounts
to asking whether truth hidden in a thought is more real than when disclosed in
concrete manifestation. It becomes in the finale a choice of the relative value
of the answers to the two questions: What hath God thought? And what hath God
wrought? Since what he hath wrought is what he first thought, the eternal
debate would seem to be ended by the merging of the two in a common identity.
He who at the flip of a coin chooses heads, gets the tails also, for the two
sides equally appertain to the coin. Hermes Trismegistus, reputed author of old
Egypt's amazing wisdom, really announced the grounds for reconciliation of the
great debate on his famous Emerald Tablet:
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"True without falsehood,
certain and most true, that which is above is as that which is below, and that
which is below is as that which is above, for the perfection of the miracle of
the One Thing."
It is the aeonial task of evolving
man to consummate the discernment of this identity. For in the final stages of
the process of enlightenment, man discerns also that he himself is identical
with the God mind that thought and the object that God wrought. India herself
stood originally on this recognition, for it is affirmed in the epigrammatic
phrase believed to summarize the gist of Hindu philosophy, tat tvam asi, "Thou
art That." But Hindu philosophy itself proved faithless to the high
commitment entrusted to it in the beginning, and tragically and with direful
consequences to itself and the world, severed the link of connection between
the soul and the world and has ever since endeavored to detach the spirit
entirely from the beneficent influences of its world, precluding thus the
possibility of its finding itself in harmony with its cognate counterpart That.
The next point of difference between
the two Greek philosophers is in Aristotle's rebuttal of Plato's argument that
world objects are not to be taken as real because they are in a constant flux
of change. A thing can not be real, if it can not remain the same, or maintain
its identity with itself. It can not be real if it is constantly turning into
something other than itself. It looks like a formidable argument. How did
Heraclitus, and after him Aristotle meet it? So far was the phenomenon of
change from failure to reveal the reality of things that it was precisely this
change process, these philosophers showed, that transcribed the reality for man
to read. A changeless thing, they affirmed, was as dead. It could tell no story
about itself. But in changing from state to state it disclosed the "plot;"
it gave out the meaning behind its existence. The Ideas existent in the
noumenal creation may be stabilized in their spiritual home "above;"
but down here their raison d'etre is unfolded in a temporal and
progressive order and sequence. The ideal Forms may be held in their composite
unity in the mind of God, but to man's limited purview they must be presented
as in a cinerama, one stage after another. Not the thing as seen at any one
moment--a mere cross section of it--but the thing that takes a whole moving drama
of changing scenes to reveal its continuity and true form, is the thing in its
wholeness. As Browning put it: "In heaven the
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rounded circle; on earth the broken
arc." But give the earthly arcs the time--which mystics never like
to allow--to connect their fragments in full circle, and finally the whole
reality of the thing runs its course to completion.
Hence all the stigma and dialectical
besmirching that the shallow philosophies have cast upon the element of change,
is along with the calumniation of matter and the senses, repudiated by
Aristotle, in divergence from Plato. Change is not to be impugned as the mark
and evidence of either unreality or evil. How can it be held to be evil when it
is the very revelator of the reality of the world that would without it remain
undisclosed? Aristotle's view, then, grounds in wisdom the recommendation that
we should seek the forms of truth as they are imaged right here in our concrete
world, and rendered legible in the changing phenomena of nature, rather than
attempt to visualize those forms in the noumenal state, obviously a blind and
foredoomed futility.
It is obvious also that Aristotle
has a quarrel with the phrase which the idealists use by ingrained habit
"the reality behind the flux." This seems to rest on the idea that
the patent visible physical manifestation is only a false front, a blank dead
opaque unreality, and that the true reality is an idea or set of ideas hiding
behind the outer objective facade, and for the matter of that, not only not revealed
by the material front, but concealed, obscured, marred and even destroyed by
it. Aristotle would locate the true reality not behind, but in the
flux; not distorted and muddied by it, but clearly revealed by it to a
competent intelligence and a keen analogical genius. It would admittedly not be
revealed to a bumpkin or a dunderhead; nor would it be readily perceptible even
to a philosopher who gazed at nature's cinematograph with an eye made opaque by
a mind darkened with the fixed curtain of belief that nature and the world
misrepresented and maligned the truth. Only a mind quickened to intensive
clarity of apprehension by the assurance that every object and procedure of the
outer creation is mutely but faithfully oracular of truth is qualified and primed
to read the open book of the world and glean its enchanting story. The noumenal
forms are not to be found behind, but in the phenomena. The latter are the
noumena transfixed for our scrutiny. As Aristotle inferred, the Forms are no
less real for being found down here instead of in heaven.
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As Fuller brings out, these forms
coming to view in earthly phenomena, though open to our sensual perception, are
nevertheless not "seen" by the senses. Mere sensual agency is not
adequate to bring the Forms to view. The senses fully perform their function in
simply presenting to our view the objects dramatizing the forms. It is not the
eye but the mind that must "see" the Forms haloing the objects. The
mind must interpret what the eye observes. This process is rationalization, and
is itself sufficiently mystical. To bring this faculty, this skill, this
technique to its highest proficiency is the prime and central function of the
great power of mind, the function and power of the intellect,--the faculty and
power mystical cultism cries against and marks for destruction.
So Fuller sums up by saying
"these forms and formulae are not perceived by the senses; they are
apprehended by the intellect." Though we can not discern the forms by the
senses, he yet affirms that there is no other source than the senses through
which we can contact them,--that there is no other source for any experience
whatever. Instead, then, of deriding and condemning the senses, we have to
depend on them as the ground-spring of any conscious realization at all.
Fuller enlarges upon the specific
mental science needed to enable us to discover the forms embodied in objective
phenomena. We must, he says, develop the "knack" or the genius of
thinking through the sense images to the eternal truths they adumbrate. From
the modes of activity and the patterns of change the mind can prefigure the
shape of truth constructs. And finally an alert mind can so clearly discern the
links and threads of relationship subsisting between the various elements of the
structure that it can bring all knowledge to a synthesis and unity.
"Before we can be really said
to know, we must bind into a single organized whole the different forms and
laws discovered by thinking through and understanding the phenomena. Only on such
a unified vision of Reality can the aspiration toward knowledge and truth come
to rest."
This task calls for the
resuscitation of a great lost arcane science, that of the true semantics of
analogy and symbolism. It is simply the science of reading the ideas
embodied in phenomena by the power of a constructive imagination, which can be
cultivated to amazing proficiency by proper knowledge and the possession of
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certain archaic keys to the science.
Every worldly fact mirrors, because it embodies, a noumenal causal idea; by
intensive looking and profound reflection the heavenly idea may be
reconstructed from its mundane embodiment.
The final crown of the mind's work
upon the data which the world furnishes it is that of organic interrelation and
integration of all the data in a comprehensive view, or synthesis. This is the
synthetic unity of apperception of Kant's system. By this effort, as Fuller
says, the mind passes from the forms to the first principle of the whole. The
mind's enterprise in this task is what the Greeks meant by
"philosophy." And this is the kingly function of the intellect,
despised by mystical propensity.
The
world of ideas, Fuller explains, is itself a many-in-one, the forms including
or implying each other. This would have to be so if it is true that every
object represents a divine ideaform. When we correlate objects we are really
correlating ideal forms. As the multifarious objects together constitute the
world whole, so the individual ideas together round out the unit pattern. But
the Aristotle concept asserted that the ideaform had no real being "unless
it is concretely enacted in particular objects." If this be true, then
God's thoughts are not real until they have found embodiment in the concrete
world. This would elevate positive philosophy to the seat of universal
authority in the human thought domain. But it would not abolish the relative
reality of the ideas as ideas. It would reserve the final award of reality to
the completion of the process of manifestation, when, as Hermes said, both
aspects of the reality united to achieve the miracle of the One. Herein is the
rationalization of the world, the possibility of all understanding. St. Paul
illustrates the truth in his analogy of the body and its many parts: the
meaning only comes to view in the action of all the parts as a unit. A
principle of truth is thus a formula which includes and summarizes the diverse
parts and functions of an organism in one final end purpose. Real being is a
synthesis of interrelated forms which fulfils the mind's demand for clear
understanding. Things can have no real meaning in isolation; only in relation
to other things in the complex and finally to the integrated whole can the real
nature of anything be envisaged. Real being, Aristotle asserted, was not to be
sought in abstract universals and monistic predications. It is localized and
can be discovered only in the particular objects,--the
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very place where idealist theory
proclaims it can never be found. Real being is here, in our world (among
others), in the particular, the individual and the concrete. Otherwise how
could the creature life, immersed in these worlds, participate in real being?
Negative philosophy persists in asseverating that we will open the door to
reality only by annihilating the world of particulars.
A summarization of the truth of the
discussion Aristotle embodied in his dictum: "No Form without matter; no
matter without Form,"--so far at least as the sensible world is concerned.
Perhaps he drew too rigid a line between the two states of the existence of a
divine idea. It perhaps goes too far to say that an idea has no existence
unless it turns to rock, so to say. What he obviously means to convey, however,
is true, that the idea-products of God's mind do not come to their form of real
being, finished being, until they stand hardened in matter, objectified to
consciousness.
In all this discussion is involved
the great question posed and examined by Kant as to the innate ideas, whether
the forms of truth and the archai of reason were inherent in the nature
of the mind itself or were imprinted on the mind by the impact of external
forms and processes upon it; whether true ideas were universal and necessary,
or fortuitous and contingent; or, as Kant put it, a priori or a posteriori;
prior to experience or consequent upon it. A large segment of philosophical
thought, reasoning from the assumed basic predication that universal ideas
could not be derived from the flux of changing sense objects, which reported
truth not truthfully, but all in distortion,--the shadow not the reality--held
that the divine ideaforms were, like the spider's filament, spun out of the
essence of the mind itself, as a function of the rational soul, independent of
sense and outer experience. It was this position that Aristotle disputed,
asserting that the soul, though it might possess an aptitude for the eternal
forms of truth, being the child of a Parent whose thoughts were those truths,
nevertheless came to experience with an open, clean and unconditioned mind, and
was destined to form its mental pictures over the patterns it discerned in the
world in which it found itself.
Out of this debate came the
formulation of the thesis that would have closely matched Aristotle's
conclusions: that the logical order and connection of ideas is a counterpart of
the actual order and connection of things. The inner subjective logicality of
reason
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was exactly correspondent to the
preconceived logicality of the relations of existing things. Obviously if the
external creation is the noumenal precipitated to earth, this correspondence
must be perfect. Certainly the two aspects of the same thing must match.
The German poet Schiller refers to
the correspondence between mind and the world order in saying that he was long
in coming to comprehend nature at first hand; he "had but learned to
admire her image reflected in the understanding and put in order by
rules."
So Aristotle turns the mind back
upon the panorama of the world, as the objectified body of living truth itself,
which truth must necessarily be discerned and meditated upon through the
initial efforts of the reprobated sense perceptions. It is directly from the
norms, the habitual roles and rules and laws of the operating creation that the
ideal archai, or primordial principles of the cosmic order are to be
grasped. When man develops sufficient genius to rationalize the phenomena of
the changing world, he will not have to resort to the intellectually
disingenuous ruse of excusing his ignorance by denying reality to the
phenomena. The world is the ground-base of our experience and to negate its
real existence is to cut the very ground from under our mental capability of
ever attaining understanding. And idealists will have to learn that the mere
action of the human mind will not dissolve the real being of things.
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CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE EPIPHANY OF NATURE
Aristotle's view that reality
emerges only when the mind has achieved a synthetic vision is authenticated by
a sententious statement of Dr. William E. Hocking, former head of the
philosophy department of Harvard University, in his Science and the Idea of
God (p. 42): "There is no cure for mental disease without consulting
the total meaning of the world." And again he states:
"But whether we use the word or
not, the emotional basis of Humanism takes us beyond the human scene
altogether, and requires us to concern ourselves with the nature of the cosmos
. . . . Man is made for the infinite, with all that is surveyable and enclosed,
his fervors are finite and burn down to an ash. The infinite restores him to
himself."
"Society dare forget nothing of
that total in which its destiny is entangled."
And Fuller sums up the gist of Greek
philosophy in saying that "we can not decide what the end of life should
be."
To any thinking person it becomes
immediately and glaringly obvious that in all human endeavor the effort to
engage in activity without knowing what it will eventuate in spells in the
first place gross irrationality, and then inevitable confusion, waste exertion,
failure and loss. So the spectacle of the whole race rather lackadaisically
expending its energies daily in occupations and engrossments that virtually
only serve to keep it going, but with no sense of specific direction, with no
goal in sight that would seem to justify the living ordeal,--all this impresses
the reflective mind as anomalous and irrational indeed. It pretty much makes
humans squirrels in a revolving cage. The unphilosophical mind sees life as a
treadmill with no escape save in death, and no purpose that carries beyond that
event.
All that the general unreflective
mind consoles itself with are the common traditional maxims and shibboleths of
orthodox religion. It is massively believed that life is lived here with
tolerable rectitude, a future of psychic happiness will requite the soul for
hardships endured. There is a vague confidence that our egos somehow, somewhere
survive and will not be burdened with the
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strains suffered on earth. But
assured knowledge that the life here is an integral arc of a universal and
continuous experience whose successive stages will elevate the soul to a
condition of blissful super-existence has pretty nearly vanished from general
intelligence. The divine genius in man has not been cultivated to enable him to
read the script of truth written by nature in symbolic language. He has not
been adept enough to extract from life and its world their message to his
intelligence. The gigantic polymorph of world existence remains an insoluble
riddle, and history can not articulate its oracular message.
In this benighted condition the
peoples have grasped at what has been termed revelation, the same being
a quantum of venerable and venerated literature of ostensibly superhuman
provenance allegedly vouchsafed to very early mankind by beings of our own
perfected evolution, or graduates of a former cycle on other planets, known as
gods or demigods. Indubitably the sacred Scriptures of ancient civilizations
emanated from some indisputably high source of transcendent wisdom, for they
have won an approval and solid homage from the best intelligence of all races
from remote antiquity to the present, and high minds recognize in them a grasp
of truth transcending the best purely human capability. They still have power
to elevate the intellect and cheer the spirit of man by their piercing insight
and their promised guerdon of blessedness for virtue.
But tragically either the generality
of mankind has drifted far away from an original receptivity to their message,
or it has not yet emerged from a state of childhood nescience and become mature
enough to apprehend the dynamic force of those vital Scriptures, for it has to
be sadly recorded that the great wisdom of that body of "holy writ"
has never been clearly and lucidly perceived by the race as a whole or indeed
by any interpreters however learned. The Bibles of old, though conned with
incredible assiduity and virtually worshipped as tomes of infallible truth, remain
still sealed treasure chests of unknown purport. They still await the discovery
of the lost keys to their intricate symbolic lock mechanisms. In the meantime
the blundering efforts to render their cryptic significations at the level of
ignorant amateurism and gross stupidity have fixated the mass consciousness of
millions over the centuries with arrant misconceptions so crassly alien to
truth that the common mentality
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of the world, both East and West,
has suffered a veritable derationalization that has immeasurably darkened earth
life.
It is not even known to the present
day how those hoary volumes of sapient literature aimed to present their
oracles of lofty truth and recondite wisdom so that man in his evolutionary
development might apply his intelligence to discern and translate their
meaning. Their mode of portraying truths, the outcome of a certain knowledge in
the possession of their authors, in reality was the mechanism of a science
which comprehended the grasp of truth in all its aspects. This science rested
on the basic principle that the outer world was cosmic truth in visible
representation. To portray truth then it was only necessary to employ natural
forms to illustrate the ideas and the principles. Abstract concepts were
presented in the form of their physical analogues. From observing the physical
outlines of ideas in objects and processes in the living world, the sluggish
intellect of early man would come to apprehend the essential nature of the
ideas themselves. By constant association with the natural world the human mind
would come to familiarity with the spiritual reality that world adumbrated.
Certainly the mind, the purpose, the form of God's intent must show out in that
which he has created.
The Christian theology has held that
God revealed his nature only in his Son, the man Jesus. It is necessary to
understand this in the full range of its truth. By failure to enlarge the scope
of its import Christianity has imposed upon its quantum of power a fatal
limitation, the confinement of the divine Sonship to one man of flesh in
history. It did well in identifying the Son with the Logos; but the Logos is
just this cosmic mind projecting itself out into the creation, and giving form
to the universe. This reads a new meaning into the term and the concept of
"Son," making it cosmic and universal in its range instead of local
and humanly personal. God has revealed himself in his Son, the logical
structure of creation. It is not too crass a way of stating it to say that the
universe created by God's mind is the Son. It imposed a fatal blight on
human thought to restrict the conception to one personality in human form and
at the human level.
If, then, God has revealed himself
in the Logos, his Son, and that Logos-Son is the created universe, it is to that
world that we must look to study the creative mind of God. And this is
definitely
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the motive that dictated the
methodology employed in the composition of the Scriptures. The clear purpose
and the method it prescribed were to match spiritual, moral and intellectual
forms of truth with their natural analogues. If the forms of truth expressed in
literature, in drama, myth and allegory, rune and ritual, were sensed by man,
the learner, to reflect a constant harmony, nay an identity, with the reality of
the external world life, they would commend themselves to his intelligence and
take root in his psychic constitution, thus aligning his life with the pattern
and order of the cosmic ideation. To instill in his mind or stamp on his
consciousness the principia of eternal veritude by daily contact with their
daily tangible manifestation was one of the reasons why God's sons were sent
into the world. It follows, then, that the whole process of the unfoldment of
the human power to apprehend truth would be implemented through the gradual
development of a propensity into the stature of a faculty for sensing
analogies. By the perfecting of this faculty the human mind would come in
the end to the exercise of its divine genius in the habit of discerning the
primal creative archetypes in every natural fact. Wherever he looked he would
descry the laws and the forms of truth mutely instructing him. In the
continuation of the practice mortal mind would find itself aglow with an inner
illumination, a veritable aurora of understanding, which is that
apotheosization of the human intellect which Plotinus, Aristotle and Spinoza
have extolled as the climactic product of all human mental activity.
Not by shutting out the visible
world to find the divine forms of truth in the inner void, but by taking into
its heart the forms that it finds already under its eye does the mind of the
creature rise to its deification. With this realization centuries of that
mind's obscuration will pass into the history of tragedy, and a new sunrise of
human intelligence will break on the world. Mystic presumptions allied with
ignorance have for long millennia severed the cord of the benignant relation of
man's mind with the universe in which he is immersed, depriving it of the
natural food for its healthy activity. His mind, like any flower in the garden,
must imbibe the substance for its growth from the soil in which it is rooted.
Mystical hallucinations take no reckoning of the fact that divine soul is
rooted in a natural garden, and this obstinacy holds in the face of the
Scriptural statement that God placed his human family in the Garden of
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Eden. As the road of the soul to its
beatitude swings down through the valley of earth, so the road of understanding
in philosophy must run down through the physical foundation of the soul's life,
the world of nature. We can understand spirit only as we understand matter and
its operations in nature. Philosophy of the mystical propensity has, on the
contrary, strained to lift up its towers of higher consciousness while
undermining the very foundations on which they must rest.
The modern discovery of the
structure and potency of the atom bears the happy augury of forcibly divulsing
the dogged human mind at last from the postures of traditional errancy in which
religion has fixed it over too many dolorous centuries. It will achieve this
felicitous outcome by focusing that errant mind all afresh on the domain of
matter and nature, as the source-springs of the truth it has been seeking in
misinterpreted Scriptural revelation and in destructive religious mysticism
that despised and flouted nature. The enforced return of the mind of humanity
to nature will mark the return of world intelligence to the primal foundations
of all possible enlightenment. If religion and its potentially true and
beneficent exaltations in mystical experience are to wield their ennobling
influence in world life, they will have to link themselves anew with the
dynamic currents of inspiration that can flow only from the realm of nature.
Nature must henceforth be the great
theme of human study. No mightier subject can be found, for nature is the
physical body of God. In our fixated beliefs we have hugged to our souls the
persuasion that it was our religious duty and our most exalted virtue to try to
fathom the mind of God, while holding it almost too indecorous, if not too
sinful, to look at his body. His spirit was worshipped, his body demeaned. This
can now be seen to be a folly and a missing of the mark. But we have hardly
known that it was God's body we were looking at when we gazed upon the world.
Surely we would treat it with deeper reverence if we knew this as a fact.
Christianity has boasted in a
gloating manner that its influence has brought an epochal blessing to the world
by putting an end to Pagan naturalism and supplanting it with ecclesiastical
theologies accentuating the spirit of God. The Pagans, forsooth, could not rise
above animistic and materialistic conceptions because they could not conceive
of divinity as spiritual, but clung to it as the
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natural order. Christianity
broadcast the cry, Great Pan is dead! The advent of the knowledge that Christ
had come to supplant Pan was and is yet the claim of Christianity. And this
knowledge, it was asserted, would lift humanity out of heathen blindness and
enlighten it with the gift of the Christ spirit. Disastrously mistaken as this
belief was, it achieved only the complete severance of the mind from its ground
of supernal intelligence in which the Pagan philosophy had striven to keep it
firmly rooted. With its roots torn out of the earth, the mental genius of man
perforce languished and wilted, having nothing but the food of emotionalism and
sickly fantasy to draw on for its logical sustenance. Nature was scorned and
its illuminating power lay unused. If the human mind is not supposed to glean
the meaning of the world from observing and studying it, of what use can his
divinely ordained experience in the world be to him, or what purpose can his
mission to earth subserve in the cosmic economy? To answer this central
question in all human inquiry the Oriental mystic philosophy has never uttered
a single word for elucidation. If we want an answer we must turn to Greece and
Egypt. The evidence of the close association of the Greek people with nature
has been presented. As to the Egyptians the only excerpt available bearing
directly on the point has been found in a brief statement from the great modern
Egyptologist, William H. Breasted, in his History of Egypt (p. 89), but
it should be sufficiently authoritative to establish the item: "The
Egyptian was passionately fond of nature and of outdoor life." John Dewey,
in his The Quest for Certainty (p. 51), adds his testimony to that
already noticed as to the Greek fellowship with nature:
"Greek thought never made a
sharp separation between the rational and perfect realm and the natural world.
The latter was indeed inferior and infected with non-being and privation. But
it did not stand in any sharp dualism to the higher and perfect reality. Greek
thinking accepted the senses, the body and nature with natural piety and found
in nature a hierarchy of forms, leading degree by degree to the divine. The
soul was the realized actuality of the body, as reason was the transcendent
realization of the intimation of ideal forms contained in the soul. The senses
included within themselves forms which needed only to be stripped of their
material accretions to be true stepping-stones to higher knowledge."
Dewey's last sentence here confirms
the view expressed throughout this essay that the world objects are the
archetypal
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forms embodied in matter. The mind
needs but to exercise and train its divine faculty of imagination to render the
material vesture translucent and so to find itself gazing at the truth-forms in
themselves.
The discussion should by no means
leave unnoticed the extremely pertinent point that a life of close daily
association with nature, in the case of the Greeks and the Egyptians, did not
in the least degree cripple the wings of the soul so as to prevent it soaring
aloft in the higher spiritual flights. It assuredly did not bind it down to
earth, as Orientalism and ascetic Christianity asserted it would. On this issue
we hear the voice of our eminent modern psychologist, C. G. Jung in a notable
utterance. He is speaking of the cults of early Christianity and Mithraism, and
says that they aimed to impose a moral restraint on the animal impulses, to
effectuate which they labored to make a transformation of the natural sexual
forces into a sublimated religious engrossment,--which the psychologist pauses
to say is a "sentimental and ethically worthless pose." He says that
this transformation of libidinous interest was in great measure due to the
Mithraic worship, "which was a nature religion in the best sense of the
word." He subjoins in a note that the passing out of Mithraism was due
largely to its emphasis on nature worship, "because the eyes of that time
were blinded to the beauty of nature." Jung cites Augustine as writing:
"These men were themselves undone through love of her [creation]; while
the primitive Christians exhibited throughout an antagonistic attitude to the
beauties of this world." Augustine has expressed himself strongly to the
effect that the only true Christliness was a love of the divine nature within
the heart, and he scores the love of natural beauty as sinful.
It was a perception of the
analogically mutual relation between nature and the idea-world that inspired
the writing of Henry Drummond's work that had its fairly brilliant day of
general popularity some sixty years ago, The Natural Law in the Spiritual
World. It is a discerning survey of prominent aspects of this parallelism
and it had the potentiality of an epochal upheaval in religious thought. That
it flashed for a period and then passed into oblivion is voluble testimony to
the still lingering dusk of the Medieval Dark Ages. In spite of the
transcendent marvels of our physical science we are still theologically,
intellectually, philosophically in the murks of
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those Dark Ages. Nothing will lift
us out of the shadows onto the peaks of light but our eventual recognition of
the allegorical composition of the still dominating Scriptures and the
reconstitution of the basic science of analogy, the true semantics.
It could hardly be argued rationally
that it will detract from the sanctifying power of spiritual conceptions if one
can see also their perfectly mirrored reflection in the objects and phenomena
on the earth. The Greeks, Fuller intimates, instead of losing the vividness and
effective power of mystical truths by looking downward toward the earth, had
their grasp of spiritual realities doubly strengthened by finding them equally
authenticated in the two worlds. As Wordsworth sings:
The pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat.
When Thales declared that the world
is full of Gods he testified to the Greeks' possession of a piercing insight
into the logical structure of the natural world. It was the Greeks, not we, who
could look upon nature with the x-ray vision and see into her interior heart,
to discern there the forms of the Logoic mind in the phenomena she presented.
To them nature was the handiwork of the gods, whom they rated as the
subordinate powers of the infinite God himself. And the close physical
association with her and, even more, their mental affinity with her procedures,
enabled the Greeks to draw into themselves, body and soul, the salutary
influences which she imparts.
It is pertinent to recall for a
moment Fuller's observation that we will be able to recapture the Greek
intimacy with nature only by harking back to our childhood. For it has been a
truly epochal achievement of Jung, the psychologist of our day, to have arrived
at the characterization of the divine seed potential in humanity as "the
child." At Christmas what is commemorated is the birth of the divine child.
Likewise the glamor of Wordsworth's masterpiece of philosophical
allegorism, his Ode on the Intimations of Immortality. From Recollections of
Early Childhood, lingers appealingly in the cultural consciousness of our
time, yet fails to awaken us to the effective realizations of its flashing
purport. The child-mind, he poetizes, still retaining some glow of the heavenly
light out of which it came to earth, sees all nature irradiated by this light
as it shim-
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mers over the face of nature. So he
apostrophizes the child at play as the open-eyed Seer among his elders:
Thou whose exterior semblance doth
belie
Thy soul's immensity;
Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost
keep
Thy heritage, thou Eye among the
blind,
That deaf and silent, read'st the
eternal deep,
Haunted forever by the eternal
mind,--
Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!
On whom those truths do rest,
Which we are toiling all our lives
to find,
In darkness lost, the darkness of
the grave;
Thou, over whom thy Immortality
Broods like the Day, a Master o'er a
slave;
A Presence which is not to be put
by;
Thou little Child, yet glorious in
the might
Of heaven-born freedom on thy
being's height,
Why with such earnest pains dost
thou provoke
The years to bring the inevitable
yoke,
Thus blindly with thyself at strife?
Full soon thy soul shall have her
earthly freight,
And custom hang upon thee with a
weight
Heavy as frost and deep almost as
life!
It is of course to be noted that the
child has this glow and halo about all natural things when he can not yet
recognize it or theorize about it. From the intellectually conscious point of
view, he is not the philosopher at all, but the natural mystic, being afflated
with light and buoyancy without realizing that he is thus blessed. He is bathed
in a lingering felicity, but hardly thinks to tell himself so.
The picture of childhood was
introduced by Fuller and it has pertinence to the theme from the fact that the
Greek attitude toward nature was akin to that of childhood. Rather strangely
the Scriptures themselves accentuate the high rating of child-mindedness. To
enter the kingdom of heaven it is declared necessary to be childlike. It would
seem to predicate by logic that the Periclean Greeks were racially in the
childhood period, since their association with nature was close, spontaneous
and fresh. It is hardly likely that it was consciously philosophical, or that
the analogical significance of natural forms was grasped by more than a few of
the philosophers. Nevertheless there must have been an underrunning
consciousness of the kinship of the mind with what nature gave to
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thought. To a race as given to
reflection at a high level of mental acuity as the Greeks, the discernment of
the ever manifest parallelism between natural phenomena and their noumenal
analogues could not but have been constantly evident to thought. Their
literature is replete with figures, tropes and poetic naturegraphs.
Fuller's positive assertion that
Christianity, in contrast to the Greek religion, was essentially an introvert
movement may come with some surprise to many. Christianity has become the
religion predominantly of the West, and the West is rated as extrovert in its
attitude toward life. For Fuller to categorize the objectively oriented
materialistic West as introvert in its religion seems incongruous. Yet it is
basically a true observation. It must be remembered that Christianity arose in
an Eastern land, one that for several centuries before the upsurge of the faith
that became Christianity had been inundated by a great wave of mystical
influence sweeping westward from Asia, from India. Dualism and subjectivism
came in with Zoroastrianism. The dualist philosophy sharply set the earthly
physical elements and interests of man over against his spirit as its enemies.
Hence the introvert direction of all theological systematism and spiritual
motivation was inevitable.
On the other side the Christian
embodiment of the Christos divinity in the man Jesus of Nazareth made it in a
sense the most extravert religion of all, since this move located divinity
outside all other men. So that indeed the extravert and the introvert elements
of the faith cross and clash incongruously. Its history shows the curve of
trends now in the one direction, again in the other. The point essentially
germane to our analysis is that it did historically turn the interests of
Western humanity away from the world of nature, and thus for two millennia it
has insulated both the body and the spirit of Occidental man from magnetic
contact with the most immediate source of his inner nutriment. To have caused a
third of the human family to miss for so long the salutary influences of truth
must be accounted no minor calamity to be charged to Western religion.
Next there is a sagacious
discernment of Spinoza, referring to the Old Testament literature:
"As the prophets perceived the
revelations of God by the aid of the imagination, they could indisputably
perceive much that is
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beyond the boundary of the intellect
. . . . It is clear, then, why the prophets perceived and taught nearly
everything parabolically and enigmatically and expressed all spiritual truths
in bodily terms; indeed these characteristics agree best with the nature of the
imagination."
In saying that the analogical
methodology agreed best with the nature of the imagination, all that can be
implied is that the imagination can construct no images of abstract spiritual
truth save as it can find some natural basis in the phenomenal world to suggest
to it form and substance for its fabrications. The mind's metaphysical
formulations are ever the shadows or specters of its objective knowledge, though
idealistic philosophy has it precisely the contrary.
Spinoza shows no contempt for the
physical world when he says that to make use of things and take delight in them
as much as possible is the part of the wise man. He carries this further in
stating that even the knowledge of individual things leads to a knowledge of
God. The most ephemeral thing or circumstance is more than "mere
appearance," since the most trivial thing, to be at all, must be pertinent
to the reality of all. "To understand the nature of anything is to
participate in the nature of God." To such clear envisioning of the
factual reality of our experience the introversionist presumptions are totally
blind. And there is his famous passage which can bear endless republication:
"Since nothing could be or be
conceived without God, it is evident that all things in nature involve and
express the conception of God as the reason for their essence and perfection,
so that we acquire greater and more perfect knowledge of God in proportion as
we understand natural things more; the greater our knowledge of natural
phenomena, the more perfectly we understand the essence of God, the cause of
all things. It follows from this farther that man is perfect or the reverse in
proportion to the nature and perfection of the object which he loves before all
things; he is necessarily most perfect and participates most in the highest
blessedness who loves above all else the intellectual knowledge of God, the
most perfect being, and delights particularly in it."
The intelligibility of the world is
not separate from the world itself, is one of Spinoza's observations; so that
even the changes which things undergo contain elements of eternal truth. The
mind itself becomes eternal to the extent that it seizes upon the eternal
principles illustrated by material objects.
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In his Morals and Dogma (p.
25) Albert Pike, the Masonic writer, has a strong statement on the teaching
power of nature:
"The first Scriptures of the
human race were written by God on the earth and heavens. The reading of these
Scriptures is Science. Familiarity with the grass and trees, the insects and
the infusoria, teaches us deeper lessons of love, of faith, than we can glean
from the writings of Fenelon and Augustine. The great Bible of God is ever open
before mankind."
He quotes Galen:
"Listen to me as to the voice
of the Eleusinian hierophant, and believe that the study of Nature is a mystery
no less important than theirs, no less adapted to display the wisdom and power
of the great Creator. Their lessons and demonstrations were obscured,
but ours are clear and unmistakable."
Galen was wrong, however, in
thinking that the arcana of the Eleusinian Mysteries were so divorced from
analogical foundations in nature as to deserve his strictures. Pike himself
testifies to this on the same page:
"The Mysteries were a sacred
Drama, exhibiting some legend significant to nature's changes, of the visible
Universe in which the Divinity is revealed, and whose import was in many
respects as open to the Pagan as to the Christian. Nature is the great Teacher
of man; for it is the revelation of God. It neither dogmatizes nor attempts to
tyrannize by compelling to a particular creed or special interpretation. It
presents its symbols to us and adds nothing by way of explanation. It is the
text without the commentary; . . . . the earliest instructors of mankind not
only adopted the lessons of Nature, but as far as possible adhered to her
method of imparting them . . . . To employ Nature's universal symbolism,
instead of technicalities of language, rewards the humblest inquirer, and
discloses its secret to every one in proportion to his preparatory training and
his power to comprehend them."
This is well said, and it is
followed by the statement that the symbolic natural representations implied no
hostility to philosophy, "because philosophy is the great expounder of
symbols." He adds the extremely pertinent and necessary qualification that
"ancient interpretations were often ill-founded and incorrect." It
indeed has been true that the faulty and bizarre misinterpretations of ancient
symbolism and allegory have given partisan scholars the excuse to decry the
whole of the ancient semantic and analogical science as
169
fantastic fol-de-rol. The
unfortunate business of basing dogma on unsound rendering of symbolic
structures, he says, has been fatal to beauty of expression and has also led to
assumed infallibility and the intolerance it breeds. A further statement adds
that the harmonies of heaven correspond to those of earth and the eternal Life
accomplishes its evolutions in accordance with the same laws as those ruling
the life of a dog. "God has arranged all things by weight, number and
measure," he quotes from the Scriptures.
It is hardly a diversion from the
main line of the discussion to dilate a moment on Pike's assertion that the
interpretation of ancient symbols has too often been ill-founded and incorrect.
For the genius of antiquity expressed itself and its supreme message through
the mechanism of symbols, and the miscarriage of the age-long effort to bring
their true significations through to proper understanding has permitted a
canker-worm of ignorance and superstition to gnaw at the vitals of world
intelligence and sanity. Pike is not alone in referring to the failure of
symbolic science. Plutarch (Morals), dissertating at length and in
particularity on the cryptic sense of the symbols and the nature of the gods,
says that while symbols guide the understanding to the knowledge of things
divine,
"Some, not being able to reach
their true meaning, have slid into downright superstition; and others again,
while they would fly the quagmire of superstition, have fallen unwittingly upon
the principle of atheism."
The tragic consequences of the
philosophical derogation of matter and the ascription of evil character to
nature and the world, and the separation of the two worlds, the material and
the spiritual, into two compartments of the human mind, are expressed tersely
by John Dewey, (The Quest For Certainty, 308) as follows: "The
antagonism between the actual and the ideal, the spiritual and the natural, is
the source of the deepest and most injurious of all enmities." As making
for a return to sanity in religion, these words deserve to be framed in gold
and hung on every church wall. They reach even beyond the field of religion and
are supremely challenging to the whole world of culture. They state in effect
that the almost universal addiction of religion to exalt spirit, while
degrading and vilifying material things, has wrought untold injury to mankind
in the psychological domain. It has divided man's house against itself,
splitting his psyche, so to say, into two mutually
170
antagonistic segments, causing him
to frown on his natural life of worldly interests as detrimental to his
spiritual uplift and making his spiritual life a thing apart, abstracted wholly
away from his predominant total of worldly interest and activity. The popular
clerical admonition to be in the world but not of it, attests this feature of
bad psychology. As truth is basic and paramount in all final reckoning, humans
have the first obligation to understand that they, their imperishable souls, are
definitely sent into the world to be of it. And the more judiciously and
harmoniously the soul settles itself into its proper place in the physical
world, the better it will be for its welfare both now and all down the future.
All in all, it would be hard to discover a religious influence more deleterious
to mankind than this warping of the religious mind under the persuasion that
the world, matter and nature are at enmity with the soul.
The religiously inspired
differentiation between the sacred and the secular in popular thought has borne
disastrous consequences. The dualism of holy and profane has made of much of
life a jarring jangle. All such divisions have thrown our life into a mid-point
where it is jostled back and forth between two loyalties. To engage in the
daily secular activities of our lives, under the mental pall that these
activities are iniquitous to our spiritual welfare, is to introduce a warfare
in the psychic core of our being. It is understandable that the two areas of
interest are to be entered into in a somewhat different posture of mind, as
lighter moods are more fitting to certain of our actions and graver ones to
others. But that all life interests are not to be regarded as essentially
sacred in the total sum of our experience, is a miscarriage of general sane
human ideation. It causes humans to live by far the larger portion of their
lives under a psychic cloud. It spreads the miasma of the sin consciousness out
to the farthest limit of our existence.
Dewey found himself wrestling with
this express problem and rendered his reaction to it as follows:
"The philosophy which holds
that the realm of essence subsists as an independent realm of Being also
emphasizes that this is a realm of possibilities; it offers this realm as a
true object of religious devotion. But by definition such possibilities are
abstract and remote. They have no concern nor traffic with natural and social
objects that are concretely expressed. It is not possible to avoid the
impression that the idea of such a realm is simply the
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hypostatizing in a wholesale way of
the fact that actual existence has its own possibilities. But in any case
devotion to such remote and unattached possibilities simply perpetuates the
otherworldliness of religious tradition, although its other world is not one
supposed to exist. Thought of it is a refuge, not a resource. It becomes
effective in relation to the conduct of life only when separation of essence
from existence is cancelled; when essences are taken to be possibilities to be
embodied through action in concrete objects of secure experience."
The philosopher's terms of
expression, somewhat abstruse and recondite, may not be clear or readily
comprehended. His "essence" is the substance of that unconditioned
world in which the mystics proclaim that their experience of bliss is enjoyed.
It stands for "real being" in contrast to the "unreality"
of our sensual and mental experience here. He is asserting that those who
proclaim it as a possibility of experience are logically inconsistent, since
their own definition, as he calls it, describes it as an experience not
possible to us with our available equipment or faculty, but that it is to be
attained by the cancelling out or actual destruction of all our present
equipment. He holds it to be irrational to strive and strain after the
attainment of an experience from under which you first cut the possibility of
its attainment by destroying the very faculty by which it might be brought to
experience.
Dewey's entire philosophy is the
philosophy of the practical, in the sense that our gains must be won at the
level where we stand and with the equipment that we have, not by means of a
mentally hypostatized instrumentation of some remote perfection which we at
present have no powers or faculties to implement. The expectation of a future
metamorphosis of being is not irrationally held as an ideal, it must be
granted. But the point Dewey makes--and it is crucial and decisive in the
issue--is that any conceivable realization of the infinitely remote possibility
entertained in the postulation of the consummative state can not be made in any
connection with our natural existence at our station. It is abstract and
remote; the gap between existential actualities and abstract conceptualities is
practically infinite; and, as he says, the dream of the actualization now of
infinite and unconditioned experience that can only be abstractly conceived,
could be realized only by the cancellation of the infinite gulf of separation
that yawns between the two states. Indeed, though Dewey does not stop to think
of it, it
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is a real question whether the gap
between the conditioned actual and the hypothecated unconditioned real, that
is, between the relative and the absolute, can be thought of as being ever
bridged! It is the commonest axiom of philosophical theory that the finite can
never comprehend--much less experience--the infinite; the relative grasp the
absolute. The mystical persuasion virtually stands on the presumption that it
is possible for man at his present stage to achieve this impossibility; so to
say, leap out of the conditioned relative mode of existence and dimension of
consciousness into the absolute and unconditioned being, assumedly by some
extraordinary miracle of inhibiting his present modes of conscious life--sense
and intellect--and thus freeing his ego from the limitations which are now his
agents for the actualization of his present life.
The direct upshot of Dewey's
analysis is that it makes the mystical position a vain and calamitous reaching
for the moon, in fact for infinite galaxies, when the soul's true business is
to mingle with the earth on the friendliest of terms and draw from it the
sustenance needed for an experience of growth in finite values positively more
glorious than any Nirvanic insensibility. It may be said with full truth that
the dream of religion, that merely by a mystical "conversion" the
conditioned consciousness of our earthly existence is to be by God's miraculous
grace transmuted into an eternal unconditioned swirl of unalloyed and
uninterrupted bliss, is a frightfully delusive mirage, a perilous
will-o'-the-wisp. It ignores life's eternal law of rhythm and periodicity. It
takes no account of life's other law of manifestation through polarity and its
retirement into non-manifestation--and non-consciousness--when the polarity is
neutralized at the cycle's end. The mystico-ideal philosophies simply take
their stand on the proposition that of the two opposite nodes of the polarity,
the one giving birth to consciousness and enriching it with ever-expanding
power, the other extinguishing it, the extinction is the one final real
blessedness, the former a false, cruel and evil unreality. India has stood on
this platform. Greece, all the while, has given the world the true resolution
of the matter: life brings to realization its supreme values through an
alternation of the two in a systole and diastole rhythm, and a balancing and
equilibration of the two in successive impulses, as the human body is borne
along by the alternate movement of the two legs in walking.
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CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE ETERNAL IN THE FLUX
The study requires that basic ground
be laid for the understanding of the great ruling principle which makes the
oneness of the duality of all life the prime datum for philosophy. Indian
thought, for whatever reason, revolts against the duality, sees no good in it,
and urges our dissolution of it by some mode of mental hypnotization,--since
one of the most direct steps prescribed for the achievement of escape from this
dually-conditioned existence is to master "the four states of trance."
Instead of rationalizing the stress of the duality as the modality of
evolutionary good, it advises negation and escape. But to a philosophy which
"accepts the universe" and seeks to understand it as the rationale
for effecting the good purposes of life, the opposition of positive and
negative forces is seen to be the basis and support of the whole creation, and
is therefore accredited as good, to be experienced for benefit, not escaped.
With the eye of rationality the philosopher can discern the presence and the working
efficacy of Infinite Being--God--in the duality, and therefore does not have to
denounce it as evil. As poets say that God is in the whirlwind, in the thunder,
in the fire, the hail, the sun and the rain, so philosophy can say that the
infinite life is in the tension of opposites everywhere. Both ends, both pull
and resistance, are equally God, or of God. We find this stated
epigrammatically by Heraclitus: God, he says, is "day and night, winter
and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger." The opposites are
identical, at least in purpose. Rather perhaps it is meant to be stated that
what is effected by the interrelation of the two is the real essence of the
forces at work. Heraclitus elaborates the conception: "Mortals are
immortals, and immortals are mortals, one living the other's death and dying
the other's life." The meaning of this odd form of statement is that in
the eternal swing of the cycles, as potential life units plunge downward into
matter and again return with enrichment, there is always a balance, an
equilibration. It is a see-saw operation; as one end goes down, the other goes
up. As immortals incarnate, they become mortals, and the immortal part
"dies" to give life to mortals; as the mortal part dies, it gives
life again to the immortal part. As a star sets in the west, another rises in
the east. With St. Paul we see that as man dies
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daily unto the old Adam, the fleshly
nature with its lusts, he is born anew in the spirit of the Christhood.
Everything, says Heraclitus, runs an up-and-down course. Every cycle registers
the movement of two streams going in opposite directions, so that life is
engendered at the point where they cross, and is thus crucified or put on the
cross. The Greeks called the two streams the upward and the downward ways. We
call the one force positive, the other negative. Their forces must be
neutralized, or balanced, else there could be no stability. The stars and
planets hold to their fixed orbits because they are stabilized at the precise
station at which the centripetal and the centrifugal forces are exactly
balanced; similarly the protons and the electrons in the atom. The established
peace and serenity of the physical universe, giving eternal silence and
apparent immobility in the midst of cosmic energies of inconceivable might, are
the results of the exactly balanced tensions of spirit and matter. Fuller,
commenting, says that individual objects are subject to the same law. All
things follow the two ways, being pulled in opposite directions at the same moment.
The opposite pulls create a state of counterbalance and equilibrium, which
enable the objects to persist in spite of ceaseless changes taking place within
them. Heraclitus says: "Men do not know how what is at variance agrees
with itself. It is in an attunement of opposite tensions, like that of the bow
and the lyre." Things change, giving ground to the philosophy that denies
reality to the phenomena and locates it only in changeless being,--the
contention of Parmenides in his debate with Heraclitus. But Heraclitus
announced, and Aristotle endorsed, that the divine law of order and purpose in
the run of the changes was ever the fixed and changeless reality
"behind" the changes. This law of the cosmic order Heraclitus calls
the Logos of the universe.
The German philosopher Fichte,
elaborating the formulation of Heraclitus, finds that as regards man,
consciousness would itself disappear if the tension between soul and body was
relaxed, as all power would be gone from the bow if the tautness of the cord was
relaxed. No music could be produced from an untensed harp string. So an
untensed life could generate no morality and no spirit, hence no good. The very
possibility of good is thus seen to depend on relating it tensionally with
opposition. Good must then be defined as the product of the life energy
constantly working to effect a stable
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precipitate out of the opposition of
its two-polar aspects. Morality Fuller expounds, rests upon the ego's
contrasting itself with something not itself. If there was no force of vice and
evil to contend with, there would be no merit, no virtue, no spiritual victory.
How could the dramatic hero be glorified if he had no desperate villain to
overcome? "To him that overcometh" are the seven great rewards
promised in Revelation. They--be it noted--are not promised to him that
fatuously thinks to escape all trials by dissolving the duality.
The extravagances of mystical
presumption tend to make of what is called spiritual development or realization
something that runs very close to philosophical subjectivism, if not to
solipsism itself. This is the name for the belief that the individual
I-consciousness is the sum and essence of all existence and being, making it
identical with the whole. When the Hindu system affirms to the individual Tat
tvam asi, "thou art that," it makes the individual consciousness
equate the totality of being. It empowers the separate ego to stand forth and
say, "I am the universe." Fuller points out the psychological perils
of accepting such a thesis, if it were a real possibility of demonstration in
any practical way. He says in this connection: "A duty toward a mere
figment of my imagination would rest on insanity pure and simple." And in
discussing Hegel's philosophy, he writes: "Not to rebel against life but
to love it as it is, with all its limitations and vicissitudes, is to overcome
fate and to transmute it into freedom." It is doubtful if any more direct
and succinct precept of human wisdom than this brief formulation could be made.
The practical moral of all philosophy is implicit in it. And it refutes the
bizarre presuppositions of the mystical theorists. Again he states that the
multiplicity, the variety, the opposition are all subservient to some higher
principle, in which they are all ultimately reconciled, and to the beneficent
action of which they are all necessary.
In this light Hegel says that
objective nature becomes the manifestation of a companionable spirit akin to
our own and in whose image we are created. This, it will be seen, matches the
Greek view.
The monistic idealists prate of the
blessedness of our attainment of the ultimate unity through the abolition of
the duality. So it is good to hear Hegel expound that eternal sameness would be
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meaningless except in contrast to
the change and diversity of sensual experience in conditional existence. The
rational genius must have diversion and engaging interest in rationalizing the
many episodes that actual life strings together. Unity is a linking together
the meaning of many things. Without a multiplicity of separate events to weld
together, unity, says Hegel, would be a blank. It would mean nothing. Hence the
existence of the One and the many is interdependent.
And in his chapter on Schopenhauer
Fuller makes the categorical statement which, if true, should forever silence
the mouthings of the mystics:
"It is in our immediate
experiences that we reach the rock bottom of reality. There is nothing behind
or beyond, or deeper than sensation. All our so-called getting behind or
beneath sensible experience is really constructing upon experience."
The true wisdom expressed in the
first sentence here and elaborated in the others is the prime item of knowledge
that could redeem the extreme mystics to sanity. The whole system of philosophy
could well build upon it. The reflective mind should long ago have asked itself
how it will ever be possible for man to derive the utmost of benefit from his
living experience on the globe if he does not release the whole ardor of his
spirit for full participation in its actualities. What must be the psychic
damage constantly inflicted on his ego if he approaches or partakes of every
experience in perpetual attitude of negation of its value? If he is afflicting
his very soul with the unrelieved conviction of his sinful attitude in all he
does, he poisons the well-springs of his life in their depths. Certainly life
will not shed its infinite blessedness upon soul and body when they are
contorted into diseased conditions by self-accusation in abject morbidity of
spirit. Surely life will not scatter its largesse abroad upon those who hold
its blessings in disdain and contempt. And life will endeavor in vain to reach
with its good gifts those who squint their vision to focus their gaze not upon
the outer sphere of actual events, but somewhere "behind" or
"beyond" or "beneath" what the senses and the mind present.
They presume to be looking through the unreal to find the real behind it; in so
doing they risk missing any reality at all. It may become obvious some happy
day that nature, if it is to yield us its meaning, must be looked at, not
looked away from.
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Fuller comments again:
"Life is forever present. It is
never over, it is never about to be. It is always there. Past and future, in so
far as the one is dead and gone and the other yet unborn, have no reality of
their own. Their only reality is in pleasant memories or anticipations given in
the present content of consciousness . . . . All existence, then, is
concentrated in a present moment, and is now."
A moment's sober thinking should
long ago have made it a matter of the simplest recognition that there is only
one "time" in which consciousness can have experience, obviously the
time that, at any moment, then is. If we say that we live in the past or the
future, we mean only that at the moment which is always a present we indulge in
retrospection or in imagination. Memory and anticipation are activities of a
present consciousness and, contrary to common thought, do not nullify the
present. They merely determine the subjects of present conscious activity. This
may seem a simple matter of commonplace knowledge, yet it has not been
sufficiently taken into account to correct errant programs of cult religions.
In its effort to extinguish the senses and the intellect to make way for the
incursion of rhapsodies of superconsciousness, what mystical presumption
actually does is to deaden the normal contact of the individual consciousness
with the present. All that such a "philosophy" does is to fill the
present consciousness with idealistic dream pictures of a hypothecated future
which have no more reality than what the imagination gives them. Common sense
would assert that such "dreaming" is a waste of precious present
time. It does not enable a person to escape his world, it simply fills his
present life with fantasy. One merely spoils his present by attempted to escape
it through visualizing the future. Philosophy will never bring its devotees to
the solid ground of correct envisagement of life's drama and a wholesome
orientation of the psychic nature toward it, until it drives home the blunt
simple truth that life can be lived in only one time, the present, and lived
then under the terms imposed by the interrelation of external environment and
inner intelligence. Any thought system that would wrench the ego out of this
setting in the cosmic order and try to adjust it to altered conditions
self-generated by the individual mentality is indulging in a sort of sorcery.
It is trying to manipulate states of mind by processes matching those of
witchcraft.
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In a notable passage in his The
Quest For Certainty. (p. 138), John Dewey makes the challenging statement
that, apart from the real but limited service which they perform in giving us
aesthetic pleasure,
"Ideas are worthless except as
they pass into actions which rearrange or reconstruct in some way, be it little
or large, the world in which we live. To magnify thought and ideas for their
own sake apart from what they do, is to refuse to learn the lesson of the most
authentic kind of knowledge . . . . to praise thinking above action because
there is so much ill-conditioned action in the world, is to help maintain the
kind of world in which action occurs for narrow and transient purposes. To seek
after ideas and to cling to them as means of conducting operations . . . . is
to participate in creating a world in which the springs of thinking will be
clear and everflowing."
On the basic analogy of our creation
in God's image, if the creation would not be established except God bring his
ideas to physical manifestation, likewise our creative effort would come to
nought unless we carried out our ideas to concrete results. Action at the
physical level is ultimately the only escape from stagnation of the life stream
and the foul corruption that stagnation breeds. To dream on when action alone
will keep the life forces in healthy movement is to live in futility and
privation.
Plato speaks of the intelligible
principle of the cosmos as trying to establish all that was invisible in the
foundations of the visible. If the astral galaxies and all life riding on them
are God's creation, it can not well be otherwise. The creation is his effort to
bring his will to pass. It could hardly merit the name of creation if it
proceeded no farther than the thought-form stage, held invisibly in his mind.
Its actualization had to be achieved by precipitating it into matter. In the
purely noumenal form it could be and mean nothing to his children. We could not
read his mind unless we saw his handiwork.
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If, then, the physical objects are
the very ideas of God standing before us in all their divine intelligibility,
the question invoked by reflection is: why has mankind so completely failed to
catch their message of divine truth? Why has the human intelligence failed even
to know that nature was all the while delivering this mighty discourse to it?
Why has the language of nature so signally failed of translation?
The answer is involved and abstruse.
But it brings to the fore in the discussion the next great item for
consideration--symbolism. This item is an integral element in the whole science
of the ancient arcana of wisdom. The use of symbols was the prime method
employed in the construction of ancient books, so that real skill in the
interpretation of symbols is therefore the necessary equipment for their
successful rendition. If all nature is the mute, but mutely eloquent dialect of
God's ideas, then every object in nature is a divine thought still whispering
its meaning. To be able to look at an object or to witness the unrolling of a
phenomenon and to see the idea it voices, not behind or beyond it, but directly
in it, is ultimately the supreme employment of the genius of mankind.
Subjectivism preaches the attainment of the intuition of life's meaning by
looking away from life objectified, to find it in life still wholly
subjectified. On the open view this would appear to be the extreme of irrational
folly. Man has not ordinarily any faculty by which he can objectify, and thus
have cognition of, subjective forms either cosmic or human. We can not see
thought-forms. Hence the open road to understanding of life's meanings is to
look at what life has objectified in visible forms and catch the ideal
intention from them.
It is precisely at this point that
idealism has most flagrantly erred. As even Plato declared--and so set the
philosophical fashion--it has been persistently asserted that the world objects
deceive the observing mind, that they distort the veridical forms of truth.
This posture is artificial, the result of a specious doctrine endlessly
reiterated. It needs to be met with direct and positive refutation. It is
widely admitted even by its exponents and practitioners that the claimed powers
of man to discern ethereal, mental and spiritual forms in subatomic matter are
most erratic, unreliable and precarious. They completely lack certitude and
exactness. Exploitation of phenomena in that realm tends to be as fantastic as
our experience in dreams. The very realm in which it is asserted that we
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will find truth and knowledge in
their purest forms of veritude, is just the place where they will be found
least veracious. On the other side the objective world, in which the ideas are
alleged to be least clearly and reliably envisaged, presents them in infallible
clarity. For this is the realm in which God's voice has spoken the true message
of his mind. The world of nature can not tell the story untruly. A fictitious
idealism has turned the philosophical world upside down. It urges souls to
dodge the experience which they were sent here to be instructed by.
In descanting on the heavenly
natures which descend from the celestial spheres and run the risk of
"contamination" of their virgin purity from "mixing" their
divine nature with human passions, Plutarch says that Plato first or in the
greatest degree among the philosophers:
"joined both of these
principles together, attributing to God the causality of all things that are
according to reason, and yet not depriving matter of a necessary and passive
concurrence; but acknowledging that the adorning and disposing of all this
sensible world does not depend on one single and simple cause, but took its
being from the conjunction and fellowship of matter with reason."
The deep discernment of ancient
philosophers recognized and without exception proclaimed the emergence of truth
and real being from out of the union of the superior subjective order with the
inferior material base of existence. As the law of polarity demonstrated, full
being is to be predicated of neither end of the tension alone, but comes out of
the equilibration of the two forces. The manifested universe is the Logos, the
Son of God; and a son is always the product of sexual polarization or union of
the two creative energies. To put it more explicitly, the universe is the
product of the fatherhood of God in copulation with the motherhood of matter.
The child expresses the mean product of the elements contributed by both
parents. Hence our mundane consciousness is the mean generated by the
interblending of the spiritual energies of reason with the atomic energies of
matter. Idealism always tends to leave matter out of the combination. But if
this were possible, there would be no present existence or consciousness either
to philosophize or be philosophized about. Says G. R. G. Mure in a work on
Aristotle's philosophy: "The essence of Aristotle's teaching is the unity
of subject and object." Aristotle called the divine ideas
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logoi enuloi, "logical principles embodied in
matter." "Thought turned wooden" might be a permissible literal
translation of the phrase. "The mean is what possesses the contrasting
quantities in equipoise," it is stated in The Analytics. The
philosopher even goes so far as to affirm that a sense is a logos. Again
it is declared that a form (mental divine idea) achieves its destiny and
receives its proper embodiment only when perceived. Here one has to
recall Berkeley's dictum as to the reality of any object: esse est percipi; to
be is to be perceived.
The principle of union of opposites
brings into prominence the element of ratio and proportion. The Greek thought
made of measure and proportion, which with us are sheer quantitative values,
essentially moral qualities. That is, the proportion in which the ingredients
entering into the constitution of anything were mingled, was the factor
determining its nature and its mode of being. "The reason (Latin ratio)
for anything is this ratio of its compounds." In the living processes, all
things being compounded of the four elements, fire, air, water, earth, the
nature of things changed as the ceaseless flux of the elements alternated in
prescribed rhythms. All four elements pass into one another in cycles, and
always the coming-to-be of one is the passing away of another. This can be seen
in the origin and life history of the heavenly bodies. Fire passes into air,
air into water and water into earth, and in the dissolution process the order
is reversed. Similar transmutations of elementary essence account for the
coming to be of all things, and explain growth and decay.
Fire is the only one of the four
that is not corruptible, and all things emanate out of one primordial fire, of
which they are modifications, and return to it. Ur is the original word
for fire, and so it was out of Ur of the Chasadim, or the
seven archangelic Fires, that the first father principle, Abram, came, to go
"west," the direction pointing from spirit to matter. In the process
each successive stage or step was for the sake of and found its meaning in the
next. Any development is a mid-stage between two levels partakes of the nature
of the one above it and of the one below. In this situation man, the human, partakes,
through body, of the nature of the animal order, and through intellect, of that
of the gods above him. That is the reason why the typical divinized human, the
Christ, is portrayed in drama and allegory as both Son of God and Son of
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Man. The highest virtue is the
perfectly balanced and proportioned mixture and harmonization of the two
natures. How in accord with the Greek principles St. Paul expresses this datum,
speaking of the Christos: "For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and
hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us; having abolished in
his flesh the enmity, for to make in himself of the twain one new man, so
making peace"! A whole new charter of the reconditioning of Hindu
religionism is to be found in Paul's phrase: "having abolished in his
flesh the enmity." For it would instruct the Hindu mind that right here in
the flesh the "enmity" between spirit and matter is to be reconciled
in a harmonious union of the two. No longer would there be need or justification
for the abolition of the flesh, to be rid of it as an enemy of the spirit, when
it is understood that only by the spirit's union with it will new growth be
won. The dissolving of the dividing wall and the merging of the two natures in
a new creation is what is meant by the atonement and reconciliation of (the)
man with (the) god in humanity.
From the standpoint of
psychoanalysis it is interesting to note how Jung, the psychologist,
rationalizes the relation between the spirit and the physical body in our life.
The soul, being the positive node of the polarity, with body the negative, is
dramatized as thus being bound in and under the cyclical rhythms of its
vehicle. The physical world, and hence the human body, is the kingdom of the
mother, or matter, principle. The body, independent of the mind, is ruled by
the so-called "unconscious" element of the psyche. If the mind-soul
permits itself too long to be carried on by the swirling cycles of instinctive
automatic motions and passions of the body, it may be considered to be thus
bound in its prison of the unconscious and the sensuous life of the
"mother." To win its freedom it must assert the divine prerogative of
the rulership of reason, its own dormant powers of thought, and break out of
the "vicious" cycle of physical automatism on the "mother"
side.
"Only he can break through this
magic circle who has the courage of the will to live, and the heroism to carry
it through. Only the overcoming of the obstacles of reality brings deliverance
from the mother, who is the continuous and inexhaustible source of life for the
creator, but death for the cowardly, timid and sluggish."
In its deepest import poetry is the
exercise of the genius which flowers to its highest artistry in the discernment
of the divine nou-
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menal forms in the earthly
phenomena. It is the insight which sees the divine in the natural. It
interprets nature in the terms of the cosmic logoi. It sees in nature the
reflection, and not the vague confused shadow of the universal reason. It is by
the sharpening of its analogical faculty that it comes to discern the spiritual
in the natural, or discerns that the natural is the spiritual, hardened
in matter. We find Plutarch saying: "For generation is the production of
an image of the real substance upon matter, and what is generated is an
imitation of what is in truth."
Mure, in his Aristotle says
that
"The eye for an effective
metaphor is in fact a mark of genius and unteachable. And in devoting most
space to illustrating that form of metaphor which depends upon analogy,--as
when old age is described as Life's sunset--Aristotle means, perhaps, to mark
the manifestation within the poet's imaginative world of that hierarchic order
of analogous stages which pervades the whole Aristotelian universe."
Miss Langer quotes M. W. Urban (Language
and Reality):
"It is not true that whatever
can be expressed symbolically can be better expressed literally."
This is the rebuke administered to
unimaginative factual prose-minded attitude toward existence by sensitive
genius which appreciates the hidden values of beauty and meaning in nature. The
conceptions of the human mind would be a drab, bleak and barren poverty of
consciousness if they could not be haloed with a true mystical aura and
experience the discovery of expansive intimations.
All this takes us into the next
phase of the elucidation,--that poetry is in itself philosophy under a veil.
Naturally this must be so, for if poetry is the sensing of the basic
correspondence between the outward manifestation of the forms and the forms
themselves, it is a delineation of the fundamental archai of the
creation, which is philosophy. So Aristotle says (De Poetica):
"Hence poetry is something more philosophical and of graver import than
history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals; whereas
those of history are singulars."
Urban, just quoted, writes again:
"But when all is said and done,
it remains true that poetry is covert metaphysics, and it is only when its
implications, critically
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interpreted and adequately
expressed, become part of philosophy that an adequate view of the world can be
achieved."
Miss Langer says that the symbols
embody basic ideas of life and death, of man and the world, and are naturally
sacred. But, catastrophically, naive thinking does not distinguish between the
symbol and its abstract counterpart, or divine its inner import. Then this
writer, in her Philosophy in a New Key, articulates one of the most
significant principles in all this field of understanding: "Our
metaphysical symbols must spring from reality." They must come into the
mind from their connection with the real life of the world, else they may
spring from fantasy and darken the mental view. They must be part and parcel of
that infinite essence with which we are to attune our lives.
Like poetry, art also wins its
edifying power over the human spirit by being cognate with the natural order
and designed to depict the inner elan and meaning of that order. Fuller tells
that Aristotle, as would be evident, did not agree with Plato's idea that art
is base because it is only an imitation of nature. It is inspiring because it is
such an imitation, contended the Stagirite. Perhaps art, however, only
attains its high power of uplift when it is a divination of what is universal
and eternal in the particulars it portrays, adumbrative of what in nature is
true, expressing in sensible terms the ideal which nature silently proclaims.
Dewey makes the profound observation
that "symbols afford the only way of escape from submergence in
existence." This might suggest to the Hindu mind a better way of escape
than self-destruction! Unquestionably symbols help the mind to gain that degree
of understanding of the run of events which enables it to maintain its poise
and equanimity amid the constant succession of things which in their isolation
can furnish the thought with no principle of rationalization. A symbol,
expertly envisaged, points to meaning, and it is meaning alone that can fortify
mind with the power to participate in the manifold of experience without
becoming an idle drifter or totally lost. To be carried along on the
transmission belt of events without having a view of order, plan or purpose, or
at least an eventuality that will have meaning, is only to wander aimlessly in
a thicket. A symbol affords the thought a link by which events can be tied
together to engage the interest and so feed the hunger of the rational nature
with satisfying food. It is
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no mere poetism to say that the reasoning
faculty must be fed with proper rational diet, as the body with physical food.
Man's life is cast among things. His intercourse with things is only redeemed
from banality and deadness by virtue of his knowing something of the relation
things bear to the ultimate and total meaning and purpose of the creation, as
Dr. Hocking has said. The nature of a thing, said Socrates, involves the
presupposition of its purpose or end in the total of things. The teleological
significance of any object or event must therefore wait on time to unfold it.
The meaning of some one bolt, bar, rod, lever, wheel, valve, pin or ratchet in
a printing press can be known only when its essential contribution to the
running of the machine as a whole is known; and even that comes to meaning only
when the purposes of a newspaper or book are known. And confronting mankind is
the still further step toward knowing the true purposes and ends of newspapers
and books. The regress goes on until it brings man face to face with the end question
of all: what is the total meaning of human life, what the essence and purport
of the universe. All actions, moments and events in life are contributory to
some evident design, something that the supreme entelechy comprehends. What
this is is the task of philosophy to discover.
As man is a miniature copy of the
universe, his experience may point by analogy to the corresponding, if
infinitely surpassing, experience of higher Logoi and creative god powers. When
a man makes something designed to serve a specific purpose, he can be thought
of as a small god, throwing a number of cosmic elements into a compound to
effect the desired result. It yields him the feeling of a creator, and
psychologically it is the most satisfying perhaps of all self-generated feelings.
It represents at its inferior level and degree the creative Lila or joy of God.
That there is a very god within every man, eager to gain his majority
and enjoy the sense of his creative potential to regulate and rule a portion of
the complex of events in his corner of the universe is well stated by the Roman
philosopher Seneca:
"There is no need to lift up
your hands to heaven or to pray the servant of the temple to admit you to the
ear of the idol that your prayers may be heard the better. God is near thee; he
is with thee. Yes, Lucilius, a holy spirit resides within us, the observer of
good and evil, and our constant guardian. And as we treat him, he
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treats us; no good man is without a
god--that a god dwells in the breast of every good man is certain."
This is echoed in the Upanishads of
India: "The one supreme power through which all things have been brought
into being is one with the inmost self in each man's heart." "God's
dwelling place is the heart of man." "Thou are the sheath of Brahman."
The inner immortal self and the great cosmic power are one and the same. Man
comes to have the rudiments of a sagacious understanding of what his residence
on this planet may mean only when he has gained the firm realization that he,
dually segmented in consciousness and body, compounded of spirit and matter, is
himself a seed portion of the totality of life. As seed of a larger growth, he
faces a process of evolution, for, as a seed, his existence is forever
meaningless apart from cycles of growth. Any philosophy that deals with life on
terms that take no account of growth and development in a time process is a
fatal mirage.
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CHAPTER FIFTEEN
FIRST THAT WHICH IS NATURAL
The work up to this point has been a
fairly scrutinizing survey of the general theses of the
idealist-mystical-monistic philosophy. The treatment has been fairly
comprehensive and exhaustive, and it has brought the force of considerable high
authority in philosophical world thought to bear upon the pertinent issues in support
of the severe strictures enunciated against the extravagances of the mystical
position. It is felt, however, that the crucial determination involved in the
study will wield such potent influence in shaping the future fortunes of
humanity, now that the great message of the Orient has reached over to touch
and vitally affect the positive and energetic life of the West, that a still
more searching inspection of the massive inculcations of Eastern subjective and
negative persuasions about our life is eminently in point. The meeting of Hindu
thought structures with the Occidental mind is doubtless the most momentous
phenomenon manifesting in the world of ideology today, and unquestionably the
most crucial issues hinge upon the outcome of the fusion. If left unchallenged
by a competent critique, there is the imminent possibility that the invasion of
Oriental passivism and pessimism into the psychic life of the West may palsy
and cast over its thought area the pall of fatalism and lethalistic
resignation. Historic tragedy might all too easily flow from the deadening
influences of thought formulas minimizing the value of the physical life and
material interests.
A philosophy that frankly stands on
a denial of any and all value to the earthly life for man is without hesitation
to be considered a deadly menace to all incentive and the will to accomplish
notable things for the upliftment of world life. There is abundant warrant,
then, to justify as piercing an inspection of the principles at stake as it is
possible to give them. The portion of the work so far done can well stand as
"introduction" to a further and deeper analysis of pivotal elements
of the Hindu philosophy. The treatment so far has been somewhat cursory; the
great questions must be more thoroughly canvassed.
As the solid achievements of
rationalistic effort gain in validity and the slow but empirically substantial
progress is registered in
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psychology, the vast area of wild
free pietistic, mystic and emotional religion is by so much curtailed, and the
area of "scientific" causation and natural rationale extended. The
possibility is not negligible that the tremendous extension of the field of
human motivation into one area of the "unconscious" phase of the
psyche in man may provide some firm ground for a critique of India's negative
and nihilistic attitudes not available before. Even a "snap" judgment
on the validity of Hindu philosophies, arrived at by purely external and
earthly standards, would seem prima facie to indicate that Hindu thought
tears Indian life far away from wholesome relation to the life of the world,
the body and nature. It might be said that one can see by merely looking that
Indian life is "in the world, but not of it," to an extraordinary
degree. Indian thought, seared deep upon the Indian consciousness by ages of
uninhibited traditional bent, has made Indian life almost alien to the warm
friendly embrace of mother earth and her beneficent influences, which the
Egyptians and the Greeks imbibed so deeply and refreshingly. Scorned and
trodden under foot by Hindu mentality, mother earth has had her own karmic
requital in refusing the abundance of her agricultural bounty to sustain the
half-starved Hindu body.
The great issue is whether the
Oriental subjectivism and detachment from the concerns of physical existence
that is sweeping so surreptitiously into Western religion is salutary or
deleterious. It is the obligation of Western studentship to weigh the problem
and evaluate its issues by the norms of the best intelligence available. So our
work so far may be considered to be a formulation of the principles on which a
more exhaustive critique could be based.
A lengthy citation from R. Wilhelm,
with Jung's endorsement, presented earlier in the study emphasized the menace
of the invasion of Oriental thought in the West. Probably the Occident's best
defense against the insidious thrusts of the unearthly metaphysics of India is
to be found in the robust use of the mind, the intellect. Perhaps sensing this
as an obstacle to its encroachments on the West, the Eastern movement comes
directly armed with a weapon to countervail against it,--the negation and
disqualification of the mind. For incessantly it cries the incompetence of the
mind to lead us into truth. This is what led Wilhelm to say that Eastern
philosophy creeps in upon us by the back door of the
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"unconscious." The alleged
supramental faculty called intuition is to supplant the mind. In fact it is
alleged to supervene only after one has destroyed his mind faculty.
To envisage the peril to Western
balance of mind from the Orient, knowledge of a startling fact in the history
of Indian thought is itself of the greatest importance. From consideration of
it is gained an understanding of the source and nature of the evil influence
exerted upon us by a philosophy which in the light of this item is seen to be a
melange of misconceptions and distortions of primal wisdom. It is fortunate
that the authority for the statement of historical fact is himself one of the
two foremost philosophers of India, the eminent Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. But
before introducing his pronouncement a background against which his statement
will be silhouetted in sharper outline must be set up.
India proudly cites her heritage of
the ancient religious books known collectively as the Vedas. They
unquestionably are of remote and supremely exalted source of recondite
intelligence. They are one of the greatest treasures of a divine or semi-divine
authorship vouchsafed to the race of men on the earth in the earlier days of
the race's history. They purvey a wisdom so profound, a spirituality so lofty
as to seem worthy of veneration by all mankind. Putting on display a knowledge
of things cosmic, divine and earthly in an organic synthesis, they sound out a
message that seems to transcend the normal range of purely human intelligence.
Either beings evolved beyond the human order, or surpassingly evolved men of
our own humanity were the authors of these sage documents. They internally
carry their own credentials of supernal authenticity, their own ostensible
evidence of consummate wisdom.
From the Vedas stem and on them are
based the various religious and philosophical systems of India. With impeccable
wisdom as their authority, the systems of Hindu religion started out facing the
grand opportunity to lead, enlighten and inspire the world. (With a somewhat
similar foundation in another deposit of ancient literature, the Hebrews
presumed to provide the saving culture for the entire human family.) But alas!
the dire fatality that has fallen like a blight upon every high primeval body
or movement of exalted religion overtook and overwhelmed the Vedic wisdom of
India. It has supervened in the historic course of every noble religion,
Chinese, Hindu, Persian, Greek, Egyptian, Hebrew,
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Christian. These faiths emanated
from or as the teachings of near-divine intelligence. They express cryptically,
allegorically, mystically the highest conceptions and the most sublimated
elevations of the human consciousness in understanding and in feeling. But, triste
dictu, the effort to disseminate their rich legacy of truth and edification
amongst the people at large has in every case brought the same disastrous
result. The gallant ship of spiritual truth was dashed to wreckage on the ugly
reefs of stolid dullness of intellect and souls as yet barren of any divine
susceptibility to elevated mystical values. Every splendid system of truth and
moral purity passed through the heavy mill of popular conceptuality and came
out as hash unpalatable to any more discriminating digestion. In every age only
a few were able to make their way through the rubbish heap of unconscionable
beliefs that sprang into vogue through the crude concretization of every
spiritual intuition and the ignorant historization of spiritual drama, and
recover the lost keys of mystical ennoblement and intellectual understanding.
Over the whole area of common thought there reigned the chaos of gross
misconception and arrant credulity, enslaving the minds of millions under the
force of artificial and grotesque ideas that, consciously or unconsciously, set
up neurotic conflict in all psychic experience. Even in our twentieth century
and before the titanic world holocausts of war, the psychologist Jung was
impelled to say that Europe was a madhouse, the reasons given being the
philosophical meaninglessness of life, from which came aimlessness of plan or
purpose. It is legitimate and according to fact to assert that the literalized
misinterpretation of ancient Scriptures has in large measure derationalized the
world mind, more particularly perhaps the extravert West, but very extensively,
too, the East. The stupid mechanization of Scriptural meaning was perhaps at
its grossest in the West; but the East, moving in the direction away from the
physical and worldly side, lost wholesome contact with reality altogether, or
dissolved reality into vacuous tenuity. In the one case the ethereal essence of
conceptual reality hardened into lifeless realism; in the other it was
sublimated to such thinness and volatility that it pretty nearly disappeared
like wisps of vapor in the empty area of consciousness. In both cases it
contorted life out of harmonious relation with its environment and wasted
precious evolutionary time in misdirected human effort.
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Radhakrishnan's strong statement can
now be received with the full force of its momentous significance. Also it will
be seen to corroborate the analysis of the historical situation just outlined
to explain it. Here it is (the italics ours):
"The Upanishads were a
sealed book to the people at large. Their teaching was lost in a jumbled chaos
of puerile superstitions."
Here, in spiritual India, is the
dolorous picture that will be found redrawn in every ancient civilization. It
is the disheartening scenario of sublime truth, vouchsafed by divine
intelligence, but now traduced by human ignorance to wretched superstition. It
is the saddening spectacle of heavenly light obscured to near darkness in the
dim chambers of the unenlightened human mind. The glowing wisdom of the
Upanishads had been dimmed to the opaque forms of low opinion and impossible
credulities of ritual and magic.
But a note of ringing significance
is struck by Radhakrishnan when he says that "in the Vedas the vast order
and movement of nature engages attention. Their gods represent cosmic forces.
In the Upanishads we return to explore the 'depths of the inner world.'"
If this is the truth, there is seen
to be in the relation of these two great literary products a principle that perhaps
has escaped due recognition. The two productions then stand ostensibly as
expressions respectively of the two phases through which life in manifestation
itself always passes, the natural and the intellectual or reflective, crowned
finally with the spiritual and the intuitional. The childhood period is, as it
were, passed in the natural world and at its level; the adult or mature period
is spent at the level and in the interests of the mind. Life lays the
foundations in nature and later erects on them the building of conscious
intelligence and the extended evolution of mind powers. "First that which
is natural, then that which is spiritual," is the way St. Paul states it.
He emphasizes that the first is not the spiritual, but the natural. The natural
is the John Baptist who comes to prepare the way for the advent of mind, the
Christos. Jung divides our life into the two periods of thirty-five years each,
the first being given to the growth and maturing of the body and the making its
place of security in the physical world. The second runs the course of
development of purpose in relation to a philosophical understanding of life's
whole
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meaning--"years that bring the
philosophic mind," as Wordsworth phrases it.
If the Vedas deal more specifically
with nature, it is an item of utmost moment. And if the Upanishads take the
Vedic material into the realm of the highest spiritual conceptuality, it
increases the momentousness of both items. The two aspects indicate that the
Vedas proclaimed the universe of nature to be the crystallized structure of the
cosmic mind-forms, and the Upanishads were then the abstraction of the
principles of being found adumbrated in nature and their application to the
rational life of humans. If the order and harmony of nature was, or was to be,
paralleled by the order and harmony of human thought, the Vedas were at pains
to delineate that order, and the Upanishads to parallel it in human ideation.
The Vedas drew the first line of the parallel, the Upanishads ran the other.
The first line ran through nature, its parallel ran through mind. Egypt had
always portrayed abstract truth over the imagery of nature. It looked outside
to find in the natural order the certifying analogue of every mental
conception, of every law and principle. A correspondence revealed an identity;
a parallel led to the perception of a paralogue. The analogy of reason with
nature was discerned, and as man has to proceed from the known, the visible, to
the unknown and invisible, his mental unfoldment rested on and began with
nature. What he observed and learned from nature in his early contacts with her
manifold forms, would be utilized later as the paradigms of his knowledge
formulations. The life of the insect, the plant, the action of the elements,
the flow of the stream, the dart of lightning and sweep of the rain, the
movements of sun and moon, the mysteries of the seed, the flower and fruit,
would all enlighten his mind with an insight into life's modes and laws. An
isolated phenomenon in field or forest bespoke a universal principle. The
universe is proclaiming and demonstrating its norms of procedure on every hand
at every moment. Summer's life and winter's death told the same wonder-story
from two opposite sides.
That the Vedas likewise rested on
nature seems to be inferred from the philosopher's statement. Then came the
Upanishads, the mind's adopting and employing the logic of natural verity to
architecturalize the structures of thought. The mental realm was governed by
the logical counterpart of the physical regime. The spirit-
193
ual law was valid in the natural
world, the natural law in the spiritual, for it was the same law operating at
the two levels. Its operation in the noumenal world would prefigure its
operation in the phenomenal. It was invisible in the one, visible in the other.
That nature must embody and manifest
the immanence of the divine mind is certified by what is said in the
Upanishads. There it is stated that the God of life created matter by his will
and deposited in it a seed to become the golden germ out of which he himself
was born as the generation in new form of a portion of himself not yet existent
and self-conscious. If his spirit and mind were thus the very life-germ of the
creation, then the world in process of creation would be the unfolding
expression of his cosmic being. So far from being a soulless inanimate
automaton of physical forces, nature was the expression of the very mind of the
deity who had veiled himself in matter for the purpose of bringing to birth his
powers latent in the seed. Study nature and one will read the cosmic mind
unfolding its thoughts. Exulting in his powers made actual in nature, the Lord
cries: "I am Hiranyagarbha, the Supreme, of Himself become manifest in the
form of Hiranyagarbha." In similar exultation the soul of cosmic life in
Egypt exclaimed: "I die; and I am born again; and I renew myself; and I
grow young each day." Can nature be dumb, or is it we who are dumb to nature,
when she is pronouncing in every form and gesture the ineffable word of God?
How fatuous for us to turn from it in disdain as being too low for our
attention, too dead for our instruction!
The parallelism of nature and mind
underwrites the true Eastern doctrine of the essential unity of subject and
object in consciousness. This identity of the noumenal and phenomenal is not a
vague hypothesis, but the necessary foundation of all religious thinking,
feeling and willing. Nature not only matches man's inner logos, but ministers
to his needs and accommodates herself to his habitudes. Her rhythms tally with
man's; her day matches his day of working activity; her night lulls him to
restorative sleep. Her phases supply him with inspiration and incentive, as she
reflects his own moods and ideas. Nature, says Radhakrishnan, summons us to the
spiritual reality of life and answers the needs of the soul. Nature is formed,
vitalized and moved by the same spirit that is thrusting itself eagerly out to
manifestation in man. This oneness of subject and object, their unity in an
overshadowing Brahman, has been
194
the midrib doctrine of the great
religious philosophies. The soul must regain her lost awareness that the outer
nature is kin to her.
Mind evolution goes pari passu with
body evolution; higher powers of thought must have more highly evolved bodies
to channel them. The vast body of the world is the host, so to say, of the
world mind. Alexander Pope's famous couplet expresses this conception:
All things consist of one stupendous
whole,
Of which the body nature is, and God
the soul.
The Hindus called the mind of the
universe Hiranyagarbha, the world soul. The total consciousness of all effects
is the awareness of Hiranyagarbha. Until the effects of its mentation are
outwardly manifest, the operations of this mind are confined to pure
consciousness. They emerge to visibility as creation advances. In the early
stages all is purely potential, hatching in the egg of thought. The supreme
self beyond cause and effect is the Brahman; but when it becomes self-conscious
through union with the dynamism latent in matter, it comes out as Ishwara, the
sovereign Lord of creation, God.
We find endorsement of the view
expressed when we consider Radhakrishnan's statement that the Vedic was a
religion that expressed the delight of the human at finding himself in a world
full of pleasures. It voiced the natural wonder and joyousness, one might say,
the spring-time joyousness of young life in being permitted to live in a
veritable Gan Eden, or Garden of Delight. A youthful period of racial life in
the world was, as all ethnic tradition remembered and recorded it, an age of
childhood's brightness. "Life on earth was simple and sweet
innocence." Not yet had come the dull, drab realism and the "heavy
and the dreary weight of all this unintelligible world" to end "the
glory and the dream" of the still lingering celestial light that had
suffused the conscious life of childhood.
But childhood passed and the man
found the splendor in the grass and the glory in the flower dying out and
fading into the light of common day. Childhood spontaneity of fresh delight
being gone, it became the business of mind--before mind it had been feeling--to
ponder on the meaning of the world and its own presence in it. The end of the
childhood fantasia was the birth of mind and understanding. In proportion as
the instinctive delight receded the re-
195
sources of the mind were called upon
to furnish satisfactions and rationalizations in the face of growing stresses
and the seeming barrenness of the struggle. So was born philosophy. And the
Upanishads give voice to this side of the religious expression of the human
genius in their rationalizations of the world experience. But their basic text,
their supreme primer, was the Vedas' kinship with nature. Hence their content
and their message was, so to say, the exposition of cosmic truth as reflected
in nature.
Radhakrishnan expounds this shift
from the happy association of life with nature in the Vedas to the brooding
philosophy of the Upanishads as due to the divine discontent that followed upon
the vanishing of the primal spontaneous delight of the earlier period. In the
wake of the vanished simple sweet innocence (how clearly this matches the Genesis
story of man's fall from innocence into sin!) came the spiritual longing of
the soul for solider realities than are afforded by the fleeting interests of
the world which with the years grow ever more empty and volatile. The somber
religious concerns and problems rebuke the light-hearted joyousness and demand
answers from the reason, and if not from there, then from
"revelation." Discontent with the actual is the necessary
precondition of every break with the settled and the traditional, the incentive
to every moral change and every spiritual rebirth. "The pessimism of the
Upanishads is the condition of all philosophy." Discontent drives man on
to exertion to bring about escape from the conditions engendering it. The
Upanishads then take up the problems arising out of this situation, in which
the soul finds itself in a world that for the most part overwhelms it with the
unintelligibility of its thronging events.
It is quite worth noting that
Radhakrishnan takes a moment to add a sentence in reference to the pessimism of
the Upanishads, stressing that it has not developed to such an extent as to
suppress all endeavor and generate inertia. "There was enough faith in
life to support all genuine search for truth." This qualification is
notable because it is the crucial point that was not kept in view in
later development of Hindu philosophy. The note of pessimism sounded
dialectically in the Upanishads swelled louder and louder until it fairly
drowned out any positive voice in Indian religion, and gave the overall
dominant tone of negativism to Hindu thought. Radhakrishnan's reservation was
no doubt registered here to fend
196
off the specious accusation that, he
was aware, could be brought against his land's boasted religious wisdom. The
Upanishad philosophy was pessimistic, but, he hastens to ask us to believe, not
too pessimistic. And he leaves us to understand that it was only a dialectical
pessimism, the necessary basis for the birth of philosophy. And a sound
philosophy would dispel the pessimism eventually.
He has support for his elucidations
in the books themselves. He cites a writer, Cave, as saying that within the
limit of the Upanishads there are few explicit references to the misery of life
caught in the ceaseless cycles of birth and death. Its authors save the system
from pessimism by the joy they express at the message of redemption proclaimed
in the books. They point to the earth life as the pathway to self-perfection.
To this end the discipline of Samsara has to be undergone, but it brings great
reward. Strenuous as it may be, life furnishes the zest of a battle for the
rewards of self-conquest. Samsara is only a succession of opportunities. Life
is a stage in spiritual growth to perfection, a step on the road to the
infinite. Life is not an empty dream and the world is no delirium of spirit.
The philosopher is thus at pains to
emphasize the positive and affirmative position of the Upanishads toward the
earthly life, because he knew it was absent in most Hindu cult systems. And his
further attempt at apology and exoneration for the dominant
negative-pessimistic strain in Indian thought is quite worthy of our notice:
"In the later versions of rebirth in Indian thought we miss this ennobling
ideal, and birth becomes the result of an error in the soul, and samsara a
dragging chain."--which, philosophy then could only think, was to be
snapped by an escape obsession of the mind. Can it be missed, as we pass by
this point, that here in this distortion of Hindu dialectic was planted the
germ of the later Christian theology of the "fall" of man through a
similar "error in the soul"?
But even this attempt to claim for
Indian thought at least a half-optimistic attitude backfires, when he says that
in so far as Hindu thinkers look upon the world as an evil and a lie, they are
pessimistic; but they are optimistic in that they feel that there is a way of
escape from the false existence into the realm of beatific non-consciousness.
For if optimism can be generated only by the hope of escape from an evil condition,
it is itself only another mode or
197
aspect of negative thought, or
pessimism. It is simply pessimism tinctured with the hope that it may have an
end. It can live only in the future; it can not optimize the present. Never is
there a positive assertion that the world is the locale of an experience itself
good, to be embraced by the soul in full confidence of its beneficence both now
and later, and wholly blessed for the creature living in it. Always the world
is an evil and a lie. If the only possible assertable good of a thing is that,
if evil, it may be escaped, the very good of escape from it leaves its evil
character unredeemed. The only predicable good about chills and fever is that
one has a chance to come out of their grip. They still remain chills and fever.
That the pessimistic strain and the
negative view of life are an incrustation of later popular misconceptions and
distortions and not an expressed attitude of the Upanishads it is permissible
to affirm. For there is hardly any suggestion in the Upanishads that the entire
universe of changing drama is a baseless fabric of fancy, a mere
phantasmagorical show or a world of shadows. The artistic and poetic souls of
the Upanishads authors lived always in the world of nature and never cared to
fly out of it. The Upanishads do not teach that life is a nightmare and
the world a barren nothing. Rather they are pulsing and throbbing with the
rhythm of the world harmony. The world is God's revelation of himself. His joy
assumes all these forms of expression.
"But there is a popular view
which identifies the Upanishad doctrine with an abstract monism which reduces
the rich life of this world into an empty dream."
Again there is the testimony that
later ignorant misreading of the profound sense of the Upanishads was
responsible for the popular view as to the non-reality of the earthly
experience and the world itself. As this fact gains in certainty it strengthens
the realization that what has become accepted generally as the fundamental
doctrine of the supreme spiritual philosophy purveyed to the West by India is
not basic primeval Hindu philosophy at all, but grossly warped perversions of a
more rational and less negative system of truth. It is not India's true and
illuminating message, but a wretched caricature of it, that the motherland of
spirituality has preached with so much persuasion of its superiority over all
other systems the world over. The Upanishads are not back of the senseless
198
Hindu repudiation of the reality of
the world and of the value of the soul's sojourns in it.
And how can we longer miss the
positively terrific imputations that lurk in Radhakrishnan's brief sentence?
What more damaging verdict could be brought against any system of religious
belief than that its very cardinal doctrine comes out in the end as an
abstraction of thought which reduces the rich life of this world to an empty
dream? Nothing in our critique of Hinduism and mystical religion in general can
rate as more vicious denunciation of Oriental thought than this admission of
India's own great philosopher. And India has never resented this nihilistic
outcome of its systematism; it has in fact accepted it, and not only that, but
has hailed it as its crowning achievement, and continues to urge it as its
supreme peak of beneficence. It is India above all others that has pronounced
this world's rich life an empty dream. Max Mueller assures us that India alone
has taken this stand in human thinking. He rates it as a staggering fact in
world history. It is perhaps not too wild a surmise to assert that if our world
experience is in any considerable measure an empty dream, it is Hindu
philosophy that has made it so.
Radhakrishnan's further dissertation
on the point strengthens the positive view. Development of the one into the
many gives rise to name and form, variety and diversity in world objects. There
is no suggestion, he affirms again, that these numberless modifications are
unreal. They have, he concedes, no reality apart from the eternal Brahman. But
in Brahman they achieve reality. In the Upanishads the progression from the One
into the many means the individualization of the One in each unit. This is the
central principle in the creation. Things and persons are the ultimate modes of
the existence of the One God. They are not real if detached from their
integration in the One. Things that appear to stand in their own separateness
are nevertheless integral in Brahman. Their separateness is only apparent and
superficial. Pervaded and animated as they are by the being of Brahman, they
share ultimate reality.
Nowhere are the Upanishads found to
assert also that the Infinite excludes the finite. In holding that Brahman is
the only reality, they do not shut out the things of the world, for they are
rooted in Brahman and partake of his reality. "The finite is in the
infinite. This Atman is the entire universe," says the Chandogya Upani-
199
shad. "God is present in the vile dust and the
small mote." The affirmation of the real involves the affirmation of all
its parts, all that is based on it or is permeated by it. If the reality of the
subordinate modifications of the one life is not absolute, it is at least real
in the relative sense, as all things below the absolute are relatively, but
none the less wholly real. Things here may not manifest the highest reality,
and no one claims they do; they manifest their particular mode and degree of
reality.
If in postulating a monistic
universe we ignore difference, we reduce the absolute to a non-entity. We do
not improve the case of the absolute by repudiating the relative. The
eternal need not make null and void the temporal. We can not negative the
reality of the temporal, the finite, of man and his world just because we deal
with universals. For these subsist in the eternal Real. To deny the particular
and the contingent is to falsify the necessary and the universal. The
Upanishads support the doctrine of unreality only in the sense that there is a
pervading reality which embraces all things from God to clod. "That Atman
is in the hearts of all living creatures from Brahma to a post." The
different grades of individuality are all fragmented aspects of one Absolute.
The things of the world may be but partial representations of the perfect being
of God, but they are not on that account illusory semblances of it. They are
real as far as they go in the time development toward fuller showing forth of
reality, toward a more adequate expression of the wholeness of their being.
Until they reach the ultimate point of that development we must characterize
them as relatively real. These things represent real being at work. "There
is no suggestion in the Upanishads that the objects which lie around us on
every side in infinite space, to which by virtue of our bodily frames we all
belong, are only apparitions."
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CHAPTER SIXTEEN
ON THE BRINK OF THE VOID
The doctrine of illusion has rested
on the specious logic of the thesis that since the absolute is beyond our ken,
the things of objectivity must stand outside the absolute. This is not the
position of the Upanishads. That assumes all existences in the absolute. They
are modes of its being and manifestation. Reality puts itself on display in the
temporal flow of created life. The mistake of the illusion dogma is that it repudiates
the very evidence which the absolute has presented of its universal presence
and its activity. We can ask no more of any power that would advance its
credentials to real being than that it demonstrates its ability to create
something tangible and substantial. What a reversal of common sense it is for
us to look at the mighty creation of infinite being and shake our heads in
doubt or denial of its reality! We put ourselves in the same category of
stupidity as the farmer who denied the existence of the giraffe at the circus
while beholding one for the first time.
Then Radhakrishnan has penned a
sentence that, with the authority of the Upanishads to validate its dynamic
truth, should forever stop the cry of "illusion" and end the
preachment that we must inhibit the world if we would contact reality: "If
we seek the real in some eternal and timeless void, we find it not." Here
is the announcement of the absurdity and futility of the doctrine that would
end by having us destroy ourselves and our world to seek timeless and
objectless reality. To repudiate relative reality because it is not
reality absolute is the veriest folly. This is equivalent to the
asininity of refusing to accept half a million dollars because nothing less
than a million is real money. And it is time the hard fact were faced that if
we presumably could annihilate the objectivity of our world and
ourselves and our intellects, there would be nothing to take its place. To
destroy that form of reality which we can experience with the thought that a
better one will then have a chance to supervene, will be to destroy all
possible reality along with ourselves. We must make actual the grade of reality
we are conditioned and equipped to register here and now, for we have, as yet,
access to no other.
All that the Upanishads urge,
continues the philosopher, is that the process of unfoldment in time finds its
basis and signi-
201
ficance in the absolute, which is
timeless, but seeks to give itself the experience of reality by projecting its
energies out into time and space. This conception, he says, is necessary if we
are to predicate progress. But the full monistic-idealist view deletes the
conception or the need of progress. It relapses into the absolute and the
unconditioned, of which progress can not be predicated, since all exists in
perfection at any given moment, in the eternal now. But in the sane
relativistic view the endless succession of events, as the phases of creation,
that die in passing in turn into succeeding phases, would be a meaningless
string of unrelated items of dead fact if they were not considered to be the
integral elements in a total movement conceived and processed by an
all-embracing unity of absolute being. Mere motion and succession need not
necessarily constitute an evolution, if events are not integrated in some total
scheme embracing all in oneness. Change does not inevitably spell progress,
although it is evident that in the actual universe the flow of events does
constitute progress. It becomes progress if back of all change is a permanent
reality out of which, and back into which all things flow. The absolute
guarantees that the world process is not chaotic, not meaningless, but ordered
to an end. We must postulate teleology. The immanence of the absolute in
the process makes it an interpretable phenomenon and assures us of its reality.
We are not chasing butterflies we can never catch. We are not being deluded and
allured into a vain and futile pursuit. "In a sense the real is expressed
at every moment of its history." The flux of events would not be history
if it did not create reality. This is the vital, the crucial realization that
philosophy needs to promulgate. Philosophy has too long and too insistently
preached the doctrine of the unreality of the world and of ourselves. It is
psychologically disastrous to greet our world with any other conception than
that it is a real world, adapted to us as real beings. That which is and that
which is to be are identical, being but two aspects of the same reality. This view
throws the Upanishad teaching into complete harmony. It does not have to deny
itself. It does not support the doctrine of world illusion. Hopkins is cited as
asking: "Is there anything in the early Upanishads to show that the
authors believed in the objective world being an illusion? Nothing at
all."
Matter, the bete noir of
idealist conception, could not develop life or consciousness if it did not
carry the potentialities of them in
202
its constitution. No amount of
contact and repercussions--the mechanistic theory of materialism--could extort
life out of mere matter. The most exalted capabilities of consciousness,
supreme knowledge and bliss, could not emerge out of evolution unless they had
existed before and were replanted germinally in it for new growth. Nothing
could be produced in the end which was not potentially present at the start.
Even modern physical and biological science has found that in the
"Darwinian" concept of evolution only that unfolds to manifestation
which was implicit in the life cycle at the beginning. In the beginning God
created the world. The destined end was marked from the beginning. In the time
sense the world is not the product of a creation, but of an evolution. If we
use the term creation, we must understand it in this sense. The process only
brings out what is already present in it in germ. In this reference the
ancients denominated the life potential in all creation as seminal essence.
The philosopher admonishes us that
so long as we imagine the world to be the product of something else than the
absolute we are lost. The Upanishads expressly protest against the existence of
a factor in world causation separate from Atman. It is not conceivable in logic
that the world should have a creator, and alongside of him another efficient
power working with or against him. To this absurd conclusion some of the
illusion philosophies as well as the crude Christian concept of Satan and his
hosts--have practically been driven in their postulation of an evil power that
produced the mayavic or illusionary world of false being.
The thought is developed that the
world is real to us because we are not as yet perfected selves. This seems to
contradict common naive logic, which would think that not our imperfection, but
our perfection, would open our faculties to the perception of the real. What is
meant, however, is that if we had attained perfect development we would see the
world as unreal, as non-being, as mere appearance. But being yet
imperfect in our development, we mistakenly imagine that what we see is real
being.
The important thing in this juggling
of hypotheses is that beyond all doubt the things of our world, as received by
our senses and mind power, are real to us. If, as the Kantian schematism
heavily accentuated, "the world is what our conceptual faculty makes it to
be for us," if it is our re-creation, if not our actual creation, the
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reality of the world would be
contingent upon us, upon our power to translate the world to consciousness. It
would be only as real as we can make it, only as real as we are. Reality would
then be a coefficient of our growth, developing pari passu with our
development, waiting on our growth for actualization, begging us to give it
substance. This would reduce reality, an assumedly absolute quantity, to a
relative status, subject to conditioning. This ends up in a contradiction of
terms.
It would appear that what is needed
is a new and more specific definition of "reality." As it is
universally employed in philosophical analysis, it stands for a predicated
state of unconditioned being. As such it is not, and can not be, experienced by
any mortal. It is wholly in the ideal category. All empirical consciousness
fails to glimpse it. It is an ideal mirage floating forever ahead of all
conscious achievement, in the brains of metaphysical speculators. As
consciousness is the final criterion of real being (an entity without
consciousness hardly being creditable with real being), it would seem that
whatever registers as conscious experience in the life of any creature is
entitled to the ascription of reality. In this view it has often been urged
that a dream is real, though it does not carry the validity with which our
waking experience interprets its content. A mirage is real, a reflection is
real, a photograph is real, if we do not let them impose on our credulity. If
man's world is not real, real to him, by what other road shall he travel to
find reality? There is no other. Yet idealist philosophy rabidly asserts that
his contact with the world by his prescribed modus of cognition is precisely
the obstacle in his approach to reality, which can be opened to him when it is
removed.
One school of thought has posited an
antagonism between man's present capability of cognizing perfect being, now
admittedly imperfect and undeveloped in man, and the ideal perfection of his
powers. This simply sets up an imaginary hostility between a present state of
imperfection and the final perfect state. This is to set a sapling at odds with
its own later tree stage, to pit the child against the man. It is possible, but
silly, to regard primary states as opposed to maturity. To be sure, one's
immaturity is an obstacle to the consummation of maturity, but only in a
crotchety way of twisting an argument. The child is father of the man, but not
his hindrance. So it can be said that the earth is the mother of man, but not,
as idealist thought has ever made it, his enemy.
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It is evident, of course, that the
forms of reality that man has not yet made actual in his consciousness, the
illimitable ranges of reality that are still transcendent to him, will, as they
are actualized in progressive expansion of cognitive power, furnish the ground
of fuller and more authentic rationalization of the cosmic experience, the
cosmic unity. So Radhakrishnan says that the transcendent reality is the ground
or explanation of the struggle between spirit and matter, and that since this
ultimate reality is beyond man's reach, his present experience is inadequate to
explain it. He must perforce continue to see in part; he can not yet comprehend
the perfect unity of all. The whole world is conceived as possessing an
identity or community of purpose, which, if it could be apprehended, would
elucidate the total run of constant change. The Brahman, encompassing the
total, is the sole and whole explanation of the world, being both its material
and its efficient (as also its formal and final) cause. The entities of the
world and their doings are knots in the rope of development, links in the
unrolling chain, which runs from inchoate matter at the start to conscious
bliss at the end. "That created itself by itself," says the Tait.
Upanishad. "He creates the world, then enters it," says the Brih.
Upanishad. The Atman pervades the creation as the salt pervades the ocean.
As the spider his filament, the Atman unfolds the long thread of manifest
existence out of the immense body of his infinite being. But Atman and his
creation are not different. The world is his manifestation. The Upanishads are
decisive as to the principle that Brahman is the sole source of life in all
that lives, the one thread binding the whole manifold of existence into a
single unity.
The designed end of existence is
present throughout the entire run and from the beginning. It is possible for
the human mind to grasp the force of this as a reality of life by considering
such a matter as romantic courtship leading to marriage and reproduction. Every
step of the way is motivated by the final consummation in marital union, held
as the contemplated entelechy. That ultimate reality pervades the present as
conscious objective. The objective may not even be consciously conceived.
Modern psychology indeed finds that it is a great "collective
unconscious" motivation. It is in us as seed of reality, and its
influence, though not deployed in full, nevertheless stirs within us.
Everything in the world is thus of the essence of the ultimate reality and
points, no matter how far
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off, to it, as the first shy glance
of youth and maiden point to the connubial felicity at the end. Development
means the manifestation of the potentiality, as Plotinus said. "Who indeed
could live, who breathe, should not this Ananda be in Akasha?" (Tait.
Upan.) Ananda is the beginning and end of the world. It could say "I
am the Alpha and the Omega." It is the primal and eternal, hence the final
cause. It is the fruit as well as the seed, for the seed is in fact the fruit;
the two emerge simultaneously. Even matter conceals in itself the highest
Ananda. The course of development is a transition from potential to actual of
that which now comes, now goes, but ever is. Matter, says the philosopher, has
more potentiality in it than life, but the life will increase. The Upanishads
refuse to array God and matter against each other,--except as ends of the
polarity. The polarity does not spell dualism, does not disintegrate unity, and
the Vedas stand for the unity of all the world. The unity contains the polar
duality within itself. Matter itself is a god, it is affirmed.
In the Isa Upanishad the
worship of Brahman in both its manifest and unmanifest states is urged. The
Upanishads do not offer us for our worship an abstract monism. It is a monism
both abstract and concrete that is to receive our homage. Brahman is infinite
not in the sense that it excludes the finite, but that it is the inclusive
reality of all the finites. It is the timeless reality of all things that come
to being in time. The word Brahman means growth, and hence it is
necessary to predicate growth to that which is already the total of all things
in being and to be. Astronomy tells us that the universe is expanding. The elan
of all being, then, is the irresistible drive for larger and richer
consciousness, for fuller and sweeter existence. The ultimate realization of life
at its highest is called by the Hindu systems the triple unity of sat-chit-ananda,--existence-consciousness-bliss.
"Knowledge, power and action are of its nature." This is the great
trinity of life. Its triple nature makes it to embrace all force of being, all
unity of essence, all meaning of action.
Radhakrishnan meets the traditional
argument of the mystics that by erasing the consciousness of body and mind we
clear the field of the cluttering rubbish for the downpour of supermind and
true reality. Prefacing that we can not deny the reality of the absolute simply
because knowledge and experience of it are inaccessible to us (except in our
partial measure), he expounds that our knowl-
206
edge of things is made possible by
their being conditioned to meet the terms of our appreciative capacities. This
conditioning relates subject and object in the polarity. If the tension which
sets the conditions were relaxed, the terms by which our knowledge of the
things is conditioned would be eradicated and we would be facing a blank. To be
free from the law of contingency and dependence, free from relativity and hence
made absolute, a power dissolving all empirical cognition would be required. We
have no such power. (In spite of that the monists and unity-criers keep on
chanting it as a possibility.) Says Radhakrishnan, every existence is a
mediation of two opposites, and as for us in this world it is not possible to
separate being and non-being, to eliminate the objective and have the pure
subjective left for supreme enjoyment. That project is the absurd predication
the monists are guilty of. If we try to isolate the one from the other to break
their "opposition," we will find that both melt back into the
unmanifest. They dissolve with the dissolution of their "hostility."
We then have nothing. It is fortunate for us that we fail and must always fail
in this insane effort. But even the mental assumption of its possibility,
nugatory as it is, can work sad havoc in the psychological domain.
Hence it is illogical to deny
reality to existent things, for they are the forms which reality takes when its
aspects are to become the objects of knowledge. Radhakrishnan assents to their
being denominated unreal, but refuses to deny their existence. He must however,
be using the term unreal in a relative and technical sense, for one can
naively ask how a thing can exist if it is not real. He means, of course,
philosophically real. The view that holds that the mind is a lens that can
dissolve the world into an unreal dream and that recks not of any reality in
the flux, reduces the world of knowledge to a mere appearance of a reality that
is all the time transcendently real. Without the positing of that reality
which, while lying beyond our grasp at the moment, yet is transfused through
all events, experience would become a string of unrelated events in
consciousness that could never be integrated to become knowledge. The words know,
knowledge derive, it seems certain, from the ancient Egyptian name of the
original symbol of the cross, the crux ansata, which they made the
hieroglyph for life itself, the ankh. It has the basic meaning of
union or tie. Life can exist only where the two nodes of the
polarity, spirit and matter, are tied to-
207
gether in union, so to say, ankhed.
Knowledge is itself the ankhing together of the two polar ends,
namely consciousness and an object to be known. There is in this symbol and its
connotations sufficient ground of truth to overthrow the egregious presumptions
of the mystical theorizations. For it establishes that there can be no
knowledge in consciousness independent of its relation to an object, which
possibility is the astonishing contention of those who want to tear the soul
away from all objectivity.
This conclusion then brings us to
what may be considered the supreme decisive negative judgment which
Radhakrishnan, with abundant Upanishad support, pronounces against the
outlandish claims that the soul can consummate its divinity in the vacuum of
this absolute.
The scholar elaborates on the debate
in the Brih. Upan. between Prajapati and Indra. Prajapati is quoted as
saying, "When the sun is set, when the moon has set, and when the fire is
put out, the self alone is his light." But, comments Radhakrishnan, Indra
formulated a rebuttal of this position. He felt that this self, when freed from
all bodily experience, and left standing in a contentless world, is itself
only a barren fiction. Indra was considering that if it was the soul's tie
with the objective world that caused its sun, moon and divine fire to flare up,
its own light would be extinguished when the fuel for the burning was cut off.
It might retain the potentiality of generating light within itself, but the
fuel for its generation would not be present, and its light would be darkness.
Prajapati argues that if the self is not what it knows, feels and reacts upon,
or if it is divorced from that, and thus emptied of its content, we must ask
what remains. Nothing, said Indra. Bradley is quoted (Ethical Studies, 52):
"To be free from everything is to be nothing." In his Appearance
and Reality (89) he points out:
"The Ego that pretends to be
anything either before or beyond its concrete physical filling is a gross
fiction and a mere monster, and for no purpose admissible."
This would be true on the basis of
the knowledge that the soul and its possible content can have no entification
apart from their polarization with each other, and that both disappear when the
polar tension between them is dissolved. The ego, as all profound ancient
philosophy made plain, is born only out of the tension set up for consciousness
with its polar opposite, matter. It arises only when coupled with its opposite
and disappears with it.
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Radhakrishnan takes up the
discussion from this point and builds on this foundation. He says that on this
view, in dreamless sleep there is no self at all. (One would have to specify,
no self in consciousness or in function, since the self does remain over the
hiatus.) Then he says that which, if well considered, would do more to sanify
all religious understanding than perhaps any other single utterance of the
literature of religion: "Indra has the courage to declare it [that the
soul does not exist when it has no content]: 'It is indeed destroyed.'"
This has an important lesson which is again and again forgotten in Indian
thought: "To deny the life without is to destroy the God within."
No human mind has perspicacity
sufficient to realize in any fulness what the clear envisagement of this
clarion pronouncement could do to end the chimerical hallucination that had
beguiled millions of souls into disastrous belief that they could escape the
rigors of life by a sheer mental inhibition of the reality of their existence.
The renewed power springing from the renaissance of this great truth could
launch a new Reformation in general religion dwarfing any movement in the
historic centuries. It could mark a great epoch in human enlightenment. It
could immeasurably brighten world life.
Radhakrishnan elaborates:
"Those who think that we reach
the highest point attainable in pure subjectivity must turn to the dialogue of
Indra and Prajapati. The condition freed from the limits imposed upon the
organism, from time and space, from the existence of objects, is simply
annihilation, according to Indra. This contentless Ego, this abstract Cogito
of Descartes, this formal unity of Kant, this objectless subject supposed
to stand behind, unrelated to all empirical consciousness, is an
impossibility. Philosophical reflection, as well as psychological analysis
leads to this result. Prajapati shows that the whole world is the one process
of the self-realization of the absolute thought."
The world is a development of the
absolute spirit, which, being reality itself, must further evolve real being,
or at any rate wills so to do. Nature is a system of spontaneity or
self-evolving antinomy, since it is the energizing of the absolute. In this process
the first stage gives rise to the two factors of a self-conscious God and a
passive potentiality of matter, standing in relation to each other. The
self-expression made possible by the process becomes the essence of the
absolute activity, for this self-realization is the law of
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life. It carries all possible
actualization of good with it. The energy thus straining to actualize itself
can exert sufficient force to bring itself to being. A philosophy that would
preach the practical realization of the highest potential of being by
inhibition of any portion of the process by which life is exerting itself to
reach its goal, so far from opening the door to its better consummation by
removing an obstacle, would simply tie life's hands from doing any work at all.
The philosophy of the authors of the
Upanishads is not at all a monism; on the contrary it is in Hindu terms an
Advaitism, which reads "not a twoness." By no means denying the
duality, or polarity, of the two facets, spirit and matter, it still is not
either exclusively a pure monism or a factual dualism. In the same way that the
God of all being is described as a trinity, one in three and three in one, he
is also describable as a duality, or two in one and one in two. He is not God
and an opposite, but himself in two related modes of his own oneness. The two
halves still compose his one self. He is adwaita, not two things, but
one thing in two aspects of itself. Brahman underlies, includes and eventually
reunifies both sides. Radhakrishnan declares that the two aspects could be
dissolved back into the one "only in a figurative sense."
The empirical form of conscious
experience is that which emerges to view at the point exactly intermediate
between the two poles of awareness and its objects. It measures and registers
the progress made from non-being through becoming. Buddha, avers the scholar,
is convinced of the futility of the logic which attempts to deal with objects
of sense or of thought as though they were fixed and static entities instead of
phases in an eternal progression toward realization. His silence on the
absolute indicates that the eternal substance is not in his view available for
knowledge or for the explanation of phenomena. Experience is all that is open
to our cognition, and the unconditioned lies beyond the experience. It is a
waste of effort to strain fruitlessly to grasp what always eludes us.
It is impossible for us, to be sure,
to think of changes constantly taking place without postulating a permanent
something behind it, in relation to which the changes could alone have meaning.
The changes must be ordered by that something and presumably in its own
interests. They come under law, which governs their nature and their order. We
contact the reality back of the ordered process by being thrown ourselves into
the stream and there experiencing
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the elan, the movement and at least
something of its purpose from our immediate participation in it. It is
certainly not a useless and vain detachment of ourselves from reality either
immediate or ultimate. It is the bountiful opportunity given us to share in the
fulness of blessed life which it opens out to us.
In dissertating on Buddhism
Radhakrishnan expounds that the law of universal causation, with its corollary
of the eternal continuity of becoming, is the chief contribution of this great
Asiatic system of Indian thought. Existence is not static being, but
transformation. It takes consciousness through a series of successive stages.
The religion stresses as challenge to man the impermanency of things in the
flux. So the Buddha, like the Upanishads, impresses with the realization that
in this world of unresting change and eternal becoming, "there is no firm
resting place for man." And Buddha also declares that truth emerges from
between the two sides, the two extremes, and is always the golden mean. The
identity of such teachings with the Greek philosophy must be evident.
Heraclitus and Plato echo these fundamentals of understanding. The law of
change could hardly be impressed on human realization more lucidly than is done
by Heraclitus when he says that life is a living fire, its ceaseless burning
being the agent of the endless transformation that enables the cosmic mind to
implement its planned constructions.
In the Majihima Nikaya (Vol.
I, 29) the philosophy that urges escape uses the dangerous character of fire to
add force to its theses. It suggests that one in a fire should not delay to
discuss whether it is good or evil, but had best rush to escape it. But this is
a gross begging of the question; it puts the conclusion in the premises; it
plays false with the true conditions and rationale of the fire, its nature and
purpose. To be sure, all life is dangerous. But to present the fire of life as
only dangerous, ignoring its beneficent agency, is logically dangerous, besides
being untrue. Bosanquet observes that all the reality of truth that is lived
out with thoroughness has its dangers.
As all the creation below the
absolute is necessarily in the realm of the relative, even the supreme Lord,
Ishwara, requires in his constitution an element on the negative side of the
polarity, otherwise he would remain a sheer abstraction.
The one eternal spirit expresses,
impresses, unifies and enjoys the varied life of the world, with all its
paradoxes and passions,
211
loyalties and devotions, truths and
contradictions. But for the souls here, unaware of or unintelligent about the
organic unity of all the multiple elements, unable to balance present woe
against future happiness, it is easy to grow weary of the conflict and succumb
to distraction and panic of mind. The great universal need, therefore, is the
knowledge of the underlying harmony toward which, as in woven design, the
diversity is working. From such knowledge it would be possible to draw courage
for the battle, and even joy in its adversities, there being always the
certitude that the potential benignance will emerge from the struggle of the
discordant elements. The product of blessedness issues out of the oppositions,
as the wine issues from the crushing of the grape. Reality is not attained by
the achievement of a condition of static rest in a world beyond experience.
Rather it is achieved by the maintenance of a poise between two opposing forces
at the point of neutralization.
Even in the atom this principle is
manifest in the discovery of the particle intermediate between the proton and
the electron, the meson and the neutron. Reality, as Heraclitus said, is born
out of unrest. The tension between the finite and the infinite, which is in
evidence throughout the universe, comes to its expressive phase in the human
consciousness. The body of man, or more specifically the soul animating it, is
the battleground of this Armageddon conflict.
While it is true that life is thus a
hard struggle, wherein the soul has to maintain its poise between the two
contrary pulls, it is not ordained irrevocably that life should be an ordeal of
unrelieved suffering. The pain and travail arise from the imperfection due to
initial ignorance. Suffering can be avoided by the exercise of intelligence
hitched to resolute will, and this intelligence and will are developed as
experience enforces its object lessons. These two guiding lights are indeed
what philosophy is primarily intended to enkindle in us. Out of every tense
exigency comes the birth of new intelligence adequate to balance a disturbed
harmony and lighten the wings of the soul. Life is not intended for sheer
rollicking hilarity; yet neither is it meant to be a vale of tears. The true
poise of the soul, intermediate between the two extremes, is intrinsic delight
generated by intellectual assurance of the good purpose underlying all. A
deep-seated delight, which must have philosophical undergirding, ever marks
true advance in evolution.
212
The great question of the reality of
evil can be resolved in the understanding that it is not real in the final
sense, since it is bound to be transmuted into good; but it is quite real in
that it inflicts suffering and demands often heroic effort to live out its
inflictions. The actualization of the power of spirit is not a smooth, even,
automatic process. Some pain is inevitable, until the soul learns. Perfection
is worth what it costs. The good and the pleasant or the delightful are not
always conjoined. Evil is not directly punished with hardship, nor is good
immediately rewarded with benefit or delight. Lower tendencies which for a long
time appear pleasant, have eventually to be checked. Every gain for spirit is at
the cost of a setback to nature. "It is good for me that I have been
afflicted," says the Psalmist. Suffering is the great educator of the
spirit, which, too, has to learn. The gist of all this is in the great fact
that it is resistence that compels the soul to exert its whole strength, from
which exertion comes growth. Life ineluctably takes the soul through its divine
birth pangs. The law of karma is in the spiritual realm what gravitation is in
the physical. It maintains the balance and the conservation of moral energy.
Man's spirit is greater than the law of karma and empowers him to come out
victorious. The discipline of the spirit arises out of the balance between
freedom and necessity.
The conception of Ishwara is the
highest attainment of the religious consciousness, says Radhakrishnan. But
Ishwara is the intellectual principle, the Logos of the creation, and would
remain unmanifest if he did not immerse himself in nature and become
Hiranyagarbha. In the language of the Latin scholastics of the Middle Ages, he
must transform himself from the form of natura naturans (nature
animating) to that of natura naturata (nature animated). In the latter
form he has set up or brought out distinctions within his own nature, so that
he might seem not to be the one supreme Lord, but many powers. However, the
distinctions are capable of being transformed by clear insight into a unity of
the highest reality. Ishwara's transformation of himself from the unmanifest
state of noumenal activity into the visible world of creation in many forms is
compared to the bursting forth of the innumerable forms of life coming to bud,
blossom and fruit in the springtime.
It is obvious that the ultimate
reality is not thought alone, or knowledge alone or love and beauty, but the
living unity of essence
213
and existence, consciousness made
concrete, one might say. It is also obvious that, as it is expressed, objective
knowledge of the subjective world is impossible. The function of the subjective
is to know and to feel; of the objective is to be known. Yet every object is an
appearance of an aspect of the absolute, and by being interpreted by the powers
of mind the nature of the absolute can to that degree be intuited. It is
paradoxically true that while the unit parts of creation can never know the
absolute, they are themselves parts of that absolute, and to the extent to
which they gain knowledge of themselves, they know the absolute. It was this
realization that inspired the founders of the Greek Mysteries to inscribe over
the doors of the temples of initiation the shibboleth: "Man, know
thyself--and thou wilt know all things." Man must come to know that he is
the universe in miniature, potentially the universe itself.
It is a necessary element of human
intelligence to know that life, carrying man on its tides, oscillates between
nature and spirit and so is subject to both freedom and necessity. The attempt
to suppress either term in the period when it predominates in the rhythm must
be disastrous. The two phases are alternately thrown out of balanced relation
to each other, and again restore the equilibrium, as Heraclitus stated. He said
that life does nothing but alternately divide itself and again reunite the
division. Jainism asserts that it avoids both idealism and materialism by recognizing
the correlativity of mind and matter. It protests that it does not concern
itself about transcendental being, but only about being as realized in
experience. It appears to occupy a sane position in holding that while spirit
and matter stand opposed to each other in the polarity, they are not opposed to
the unity which is a synthesis of the opposites. The world is a concrete whole,
of which pure being and pure matter are the constituent essences. The
struggle of opposites is present in all degrees of reality. Where there is
no struggle of opposites, there is no life, and without life there would be no
question of reality or non-reality. The resolution of opposites brings the
harmony of the absolute. Jainism tends to regard reality as truly, not falsely,
expressed in the concrete worlds, and not to be found in a state beyond our
experience. A pure spirit, an abstract absolute, with nothing to struggle
against, an actionless spiritual energy, is in the Jain view sheer nothing.
214
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
TRUANCY FROM LIFE'S SCHOOL
From the side of Buddhism, too,
Radhakrishnan protests that "to make people long for escape from this
world and its blackness is a little overdrawn." Yet in the wake of such
statements of the sound position of these two systems, it seems wholly
incongruous and self-contradictory when we hear Radhakrishnan assert that
"to both Jainism and Buddhism life is a calamity to be avoided at all
costs." With none but an outward superficial view of life's values,
our existence here can, of course, appear terrible enough to make a soul cry
out: Let me escape; let me die! This note is given such prominence in the
rationale of Hindu systems that many of them have announced that the one remedy
for all life's woes is to escape their thraldom. The philosopher considers that
Buddha overemphasized the dark side of things. The Buddhist view of life, he
says, seems to be lacking in courage and confidence. "Its emphasis on
sorrow, if not false, is not true . . . . There is a tendency in Buddhism
to blacken what is dark, and darken what is gray." This is the strong and
apparently invincible dominance of the spirit of pessimism that pervades Hindu
thought at all times. Out of this tendency came the predilection to extol and
glorify the paradoxicality of earthly gloom and sorrow, the release of the soul
from all conditioned consciousness, to woo the bliss of the hypothecated
freedom of the absolute. And in spite of all their recognition of the presence
of the eternal in the world experience, the Upanishads accentuate that the
eternal is bliss and the transient is painful. As long as the soul is attracted
by desire, which of course it centers on worldly things and conscious states
that can not be permanent, it will be courting sorrow and disappointment, as the
prizes won or lost fade out in emptiness. "All that is, when clung to,
falls short" (Naji. Upan., 32).
This somber view of life dominating
Indian thought has been received with too little critical scrutiny. An almost
universal feeling as to life's stressful and painful and fruitless character
has haloed the doctrine with a certain specious legitimacy and even nobility
both in India and elsewhere. But if it does not bespeak an outright lack of
spirit for life and fortitude to work cheerfully through its
215
hardships, if it does not betoken an
overt cowardice in the face of life's challenge to the valiant soul of divinity
animating the life of the race, it at least reveals a total want of the
philosophical resources that are available to balance the negative strain with
the assurance of positive values. As intimated earlier, Oriental philosophy
hardly merits the dignified name of philosophy, the high function of which is
to rationalize the actual experience of humanity, and not to dodge this task by
declaring the experience invalid. The Hindu systems do not so much explain
life, as explain it away; or if they do attempt to rationalize the experience,
they do not leave the final and decisive verdict a positive one. They sound the
nullity and futility of life as their most dominant keynote. To bring the issue
down to a close analysis, the Indian religions stress not the good of life, but
the good to be found by getting out of it.
The Buddhist and other Indian
systems announce a dialectic that analyses man's presence in the world as
itself an evidence that he has wandered away from true being into false
existence. His presence here is due to his sin, obviously committed in some
former state. (This is seen to match closely the Christian doctrine of the
Adamic "fall.") Some quirk or aberration in his nature at some
juncture in his history led him to desire an experience of low
sensuality and unreal being, and the cosmic law which fulfils desire in life's
conscious units gratified his craving by bringing him here where he could play
with the objects of his desire freely. But the desire itself is in the first
place given force by the root cause of all non-blissful existence,--ignorance (avidya).
Man's one sin is to have been born as the result of desiring to be born. If
souls were not obsessed by avidya they would have avoided birth and
life. They would have managed to stay in heavens of dreamy blissfulness and
have seen through the false glitter of life's superficial and tawdry attractions,
for they would know that under its glitter it hides sorrow. "Men are
unhappy simply because they are alive." The source of all sorrow is the
affirmation of life. And the force of ignorance is so strong that in spite of
grievous suffering men still cling tenaciously to it. This
"philosophy" is carried to its extreme form in the assertion that man
does not generate the sorrow,--he is himself the sorrow! His individual sense
of I-ness, his very selfhood, which fosters his illusions, is itself an
illusion. Individual existence is the symptom as well as the disease. Ignorance
and individuality are virtually inter-
216
dependent, for both imply
limitation. So ignorance can cease only with the extinction of the
individuality. In this doleful strain runs on the wail of Buddhistic dialectic
and most Indian theology.
That it falls short of being a
philosophy worthy of the name is evident on the surface, but also is stated by
Radhakrishnan. His analysis shows that it fails to explain what it postulates.
"The whole scheme rests on avidya,
but we are not told how avidya arises. It seems to be a blind end or
an incomprehensible reality which we must accept unthinkingly . . . Buddhism
seems to assert the eternity of ignorance. In the chain of causation it is put
first, for through it comes willing and through willing existence."
It seems never to have struck the
mind of any of the millions of students of the Buddhistic philosophy, or any of
its own millions of devotees, that this great religion's central doctrine, the
postulation of ignorance as the primal cause of life and life's misery, is, on
Radhakrishnan's pronouncement, itself grounded solely on ignorance. If Buddhism
wishes to be regarded as a world philosophy worthy of man's fullest loyalty,
let it tell us how ignorance arises and why. If one of the two greatest modern
Hindu thinkers can say that this root cause of human sorrow is a blind end and
an incomprehensible reality Buddhism is asking us to follow a philosophy that
rests only on an insoluble mystery. It takes no profound wisdom for any mind or
any system to tell us that most of human woe springs from ignorance. It is an
everyday observation. But a competent philosophy must tell us the raison
d'etre, or the beneficent function of this ignorance in the total scheme of
being. Greece and Egypt have rationally explained the ultimate good role of
ignorance. But India, overwhelmed by the horrid spectacle of suffering due to
ignorance, throws up its hands in dialectical despair in the face of the
prodigy, crying our helplessness to turn it to good account and urging the
destruction of our very selfhood to escape the dire entanglement. And
confronted with the inexorable power of the predicament that it can in no wise
explain as beneficent, it has perforce to declare all life evil. To live is to
be ignorant; to be ignorant is to live; therefore to avoid ignorance, it is
better not to live. This is India's syllogism and it ends in negation.
"Life on earth is a pilgrimage in a strange land which the true knower is
not anxious to prolong. Salvation consists in the unmaking of ourselves."
217
Greek philosophy in forthright terms
characterizes the soul's peregrination through the kingdoms of nature in many
forms of incarnation openly and categorically as a veritable "death"
for the divine unit of life. It even outdoes Hindu mythopoetic art in
dramatizing the soul's incarnation in body as a loss of its celestial
beatitude, a direption from all supernal consciousness, a plunge into a dark
stream of life dominated by low animal sense and base pleasures, to suffer an
obscuration of divine vision, to lose the memory of transcendental things and
find its clearer view of reality distorted and diffracted by a mental blindness
that makes its existence here a groping in dark labyrinths. It even designates
the body which soul animates here as its prison-house, its bird-cage, its dark
tomb (soma, body, sema, tomb in the Greek!) and the grave of its
crucifixion. Egypt denominated the human body the coffin or mummy case.
But,--except as this typism has been
misunderstood by shallow exegetics--never does it take all this as the ground
for pessimism, or a repudiation of its complete beneficence. The descent of
soul into body, while it confronted the soul with the challenge of empirical good
and evil hap, was held to be the normal natural life procedure for ends of
good. Its "evil" aspects were seen as relative always to later
ultimate good. And since the end was good, the whole process could be
categorized as good. Its "death," its distraction, its loss of
divinity in exchange for earthly animality first and humanity later, all were
stages relative to the glorious destiny that came with consummation, or came in
part with any advance. "The sufferings of this world are not to be compared
with that glory which shall be revealed," declares St. Paul. Through the
muck and murks of the earthly experience the Greek mind could keep in view the
glint of that shining goal of evolutionary glory, that very ananda that
Hinduism so constantly predicates and so insistently urges us to grasp in a
sudden rush out of the earthly compound in a wild vain effort to dissolve the
temporal and seize the eternal.
India apparently knows nothing of
what was elementary to the Greek consciousness,--that we are not gods, but only
sons of God; and that as recently born sons, we must start evolution at
the humble beginning, which predicates at once a start in and from ignorance.
There is not and never should have been a deep mystery
218
about ignorance in philosophy: it is
simply the state that exists before knowledge comes! India does not seem able
to rationalize this ignorance apart from the association of evil with it.
Unwarped thought sees no evil in a child's ignorance of its life on earth. It
is inevitable, natural and certainly amoral. Man's initial ignorance as the
child of God should be accepted on this analogy. But India has made it a matter
with not amoral, but definitely moral connotations. Christian dogma has in like
manner connected man's inceptive state with moral action and alleges that it
involved him in sin. Man's "transgression" was committed in his
evolutionary infancy, in spite of the fact that theology dare attach no stigma
of sin to the acts of childhood! In both Hinduism and Christianity theology has
perpetrated a gigantic travesty of interpretation in this respect. Unless all
life is to be finally discountenanced as dire evil in the absolute sense, the
ignorance which is naturally incident to the early stage of life in this sphere
can not rationally be stigmatized as evil, or categorized as the cause of
life's woes, and certainly not without correlation with the total beneficent
purpose of life itself. And this total beneficent purpose has apparently never
been discerned or acknowledged in Hindu philosophy. Instead of a philosophy and
a message of truth, this great land which so strenuously acclaims its superior
role as the Mother of Religions, has given to the world nothing but a wail of
grief over the evil nature of existence. Its supreme evangel to humanity has
been the hatred of life. Its spiritual science has been a technique for the
destruction of life.
But if this was the dolorous outcome
of the Eastern philosophy, it is now found to be incongruous with the more
positive affirmation of life's values in the Upanishads. From this angle it
might perhaps be said that India has not succeeded in communicating its true
gospel to the world. Seemingly in direct contradiction of the principles of
Buddhism just elaborated, Radhakrishnan's further dilation upon this religion
presents elements that ring out a positive note. He says that mental culture
requires the training of the senses so as to discern the real worth of sensual
experience. Spiritual insight is an expansion and development of the generally
despised intellectual vijnana and sense perception working in concert to
perfect their operation.
219
Again we read that the self apart
from the contents of its experience is characterless and barren. But also the
contents apart from the self leaves the ego under the law of external
determinism. There is more to the world than mechanical law, even though all
desires and thoughts have a natural history under the rule of law. Karma
asserts and guards the orderliness of natural and logical creative processes,
as well as of spiritual growth. The lower floors of the edifice of life are not
scorned. "Mystical contemplation without practical goodness is not
perfection." "The ascetic is not he who punishes the body, but he who
purifies the soul."
Buddha does not call for a
suppression of emotion and desire, but asks for the cultivation of true love of
all the creation. This glowing emotion must fill the whole universe so as to
animate and motivate all life with good-will. The growth in good-will requires
the constant breaking of fixations of habit in the life below spirit. The
hardening of disposition in set attitudes through repetition is to be
interrupted and the soul kept pliant, alert for the grasp of ever true
recognitions. Habit can all too readily bind the self and destroy its freedom.
We can not escape the effects of our acts. To advance in the future
necessitates that we constantly liquidate the bills and mortgages of our past.
Max Mueller and Childers are cited
by Radhakrishnan as testifying that after systematic examination of all
passages relating to Nirvana, they have to conclude that "there is not one
passage which would require that its meaning should be annihilation." The
human envisagement of the concept--or the reality--of Nirvana is doubtless
inane, as its conceivability is beyond man's reach. Presumably it can be
thought of only on the immediate analogue of the persistence of the self of man
under, behind and through the unconsciousness of sleep. Selves are all of the
essence of the total Self of Being, and all philosophy argues that there can be
no annihilation of this eternal Being-Self. There is a something which now,
ultimately and eternally is, and basically that which is can not cease
to be. All that our intellectual faculty empowers us to know of it is that it
alternately manifests itself in periods and cycles of activity, in which it
expresses its nature and purposes in the evolution of consciousness by
involving itself in matter, and then dissolves the manifest modes of this
expression and retires back into unconsciousness. So to say, it gives itself an
experience
220
in consciousness and in turn sleeps
in unconsciousness, as do we who are made in its image.
Perhaps the only eligible way for us
to think of Nirvana is that it is the nonconscious state of being. Surely being
does not cease, or there never would have been, never be or never to be any
being at all. That which can be now must ever have been and never not be. It
must be agreed that being it not annihilated. It does not cease to be, but in
Nirvanic state it does cease to be conscious. The analogy of sleep and waking
must guide our thinking here. How it retains the power to recover or renew
consciousness after its periodic lapses into unconsciousness, or Nirvana, the
human mind will not know until it knows how our permanent selves subsist during
dreamless sleep. The only hypothesis conceivable seems to be that the
constitution of man is multiple; that a series of outer bodies of graded
degrees of the sublimation of atomic matter, from finest "spiritual"
through "ethereal," "psychic," "astral,"
"pranic" and finally physical, are essential to beings developing the
potentialities of consciousness; that as, in dissolution, consciousness retires
from one after the other of these, there is left as the indissoluble core one
final body nucleated of what must be called the ultimate essence of matter; and
that into this body the abiding self of the being retires, to subsist there in
a state of being completely out of relation to its mode of existence in the
bodies through which it evolved the powers of consciousness. As the entire
mechanism through which it attains consciousness is dissolved at the cycle's
end, there is no consciousness existent that is able to register what its condition
of non-consciousness can be when it is not functioning in consciousness.
The problem is complicated by our
almost inescapable tendency to identify being with consciousness. As Being
alternates between consciousness and unconsciousness, it must be primarily
assumable that it can be as well without as with consciousness. In
Nirvana it simply is, without being conscious. We base nearly all our
religion on the universal assumption that our soul is a durable thing, which
alternately puts on and takes off an earthly body. Religion generally assumes
that it retains some sort of consciousness when the body is dropped. There is
wide diversity of opinion as to what grades of consciousness it may manifest in
its disembodied state.
221
If it has this series of
differentiated bodies, it would obviously exercise a different degree and grade
of consciousness through each one.
It is also obvious that the design
of the construction of ancient sacred temples, with an outer court, several
courts successively inner to those outside them, and finally the innermost
chamber, or Holy of Holies, was to configurate these several bodies in the
constitution of man--and the universe. The innermost sanctum, the center of
ineffable holiness, represented the indestructible inner body, in which the
most real being resided in its purest form. By analogy--our only guide--we must
think that total Being puts on and takes off its vestures. Nirvana must be to
total Being what our night's sleep is to us.
As Radhakrishnan brings out, even
extreme monists recognize that becoming depends on being. That which emerges in
emanation must be what being projects from itself. Hegel rightly perceives that
the conditions of a concrete world are a subject and an object. It takes the
combination of these two to generate and expand consciousness. The two phases
are in the constitution of being eternally, but alternate periodically between
polar opposition and polar neutralization. They swing apart, and between their
opposite pulls uphold the worlds. Again they merge together and the universe
recedes into inanition. In the latter state it "enjoys" Nirvana.
It has been the habit of philosophy
to regard the untensioned, unconditioned period of the cycles as the
"perfect" or "pure" state of absolute being. It is then
"real;" but when it is in the process of expressing itself in the
active arc of its cycles, it is "unreal." So far as one can discern,
this turn of thought simply got a start and became a conventional or habitual
reaction in all thinking down the centuries. It has been repeated so often that
the assumption of its truth has prevailed. It doubtless arose from the
reflection that obviously the total has not, and perhaps can not, express the
whole of itself in any stage or form of its manifestation. On this ground and
in this sense the ascription of unreality to its manifestation in the world
order might be legitimate.
It is a matter of wonder whether it
is legitimate to apply the criterion of either perfection or reality to the
manifest, the conditioned existence at all. It surely is not demanded of it
that it be either perfect or real in the absolute philosophical sense. It
frankly
222
admits to being perfect and real
only as far as it goes. Further perfection and fuller reality await it on the road
ahead. Conditioned existence, or becoming, is in this way being charged with
failure to be something other than what it has the right to be. It has no
absolute obligation to be either perfect or real in ultimate grade. To charge
it with imperfection is simply to accuse it of not having finished its work,
when the time has not yet come for that finality. As, by analogy, we have no
right to charge an acorn or sapling oak with imperfection on the ground that it
is in reality a giant oak, but has somehow failed to manifest its true finished
or perfected ideal, so we have no right to judge temporal existence as unreal
because it does not demonstrate at the given moment its ultimate perfection.
Pure subjective philosophy takes no account of time and, as far as human
language can express the truth of the matter, it takes this element of time to
bring reality to pass. To fail to consider time as the element introducing
relativity into the scheme of being is to make the problem impossible of
solution on rational theses.
In Radhakrishnan's words Nirvana is
not a sinking into nothingness, but the perfection of being. He says further
that it is better to consider it as concrete than abstract, citing for this
that each higher principle is more concrete and inclusive, more real and
substantial, than the one below it. Therefore ananda, which is the
consciousness of Brahman, is the ultimate concrete and conclusive principle.
From it flow all things. The concrete ananda is the real revealed to
thought,--and he would have to add, only partly revealed in experience. The
self-conscious God, who later develops into an organic whole of existence, is
the maximum of being and the minimum of non-being. He is least permeated by
objectivity and affected by externality. Yet a significant corollary of this
fact has not been scrutinized by Hindu philosophy: that even the highest and
most perfect gods do not sequester themselves in their presumed rich enjoyment
of abstract existence, but choose to descend for the sake of experience into the
lower levels of matter. It is to be noted that in one item the Hindu analysis
of worldly experience regards the act of creation as a sacrifice, with Purusha,
the spiritual principle, as the victim. This must be seen as identical with the
great self-oblation of the gods on the altar of matter for the sake of
enriching lower life, which found such general expression in universal
mythology and in Greek, Hebrew and Christian theologies.
223
It should be a sobering reflection
for the cultist of denial to note what the psychologist Jung has to say with
regard to the possibility of realizing higher values of spirit by blotting out
the world: "Flight from life does not free us from the law of age and
death." What this actually says is that the effort to blot out the world
and our relation to it is doomed to failure. Nature, not spirit, is the victor
in the end. By no way save that of hypnotism--or by death--can one sever his
affective connection with the world.
The highest and all-embracing
conception reached in the Vedic hymns is that of the One Reality realizing
itself in all the infinite multiformity of existence. The highest aim of being
is to enhance itself through cycles of existence. It is well to recur to
Plotinus' statement that it is not enough merely to be; life must show what it
can create! The great reality that is postulated as existing above nature is
the same reality that is coming to view in nature. The Brahman is the Atman and
the Atman is the Brahman. The supreme power is now in each man's heart; the
supreme life is now in nature, in process of self-realization. The eternal
Be-ness, or potential being, must produce creatural units of itself in whom it
can develop and enjoy the consciousness of an entified being. Its consciousness
would be in the abstract, and hardly a true consciousness at all. There would
be no delight in that status; it must become individualized self-consciousness
to enjoy the blissful Lila or delight in being. As Das Gupta (History of
Indian Philosophy, 214) says, the self is in itself without consciousness,
and if it desires consciousness (which is apparently the first great
"sin" in Buddhist theology), it can come to it only through its
connection with sensory organs and manas, or mind.
By all the varied vicissitudes of experience,
even by the ignorance, by struggle, by work, by enthusiasm, by the
conglomeration of elements and events which is precipitated when purusha throws
its energies into the arms of prakriti, nuclear consciousness pursues its path
toward the bliss of full self-awareness. Out of the jumbled experience come
action, feeling and knowledge, which could not be generated without this
ordeal. These expressions are the varied forms which the ego-activity takes,
and can take, only in association with the life of nature, with the body and
with the world. It is the
224
final and radical truth in this
matter that the soul that undergoes mundane experience is itself generated and
brought to birth only by this ordeal of tension set up between the raw
potential of consciousness and the external concrete world. Hindu belief always
contemplates the soul as of itself taking rebirth in all kinds and grades of
creatural existence, the successive choices being freely made of its own
volition. As light can not be seen apart from the candle, so the self can not
be seen, can not have its existence, apart from the body.
All question of the reality of
existence would seem to be answered categorically by what Radhakrishnan says:
"That from which these beings are born, that in which when born they live,
and that into which they enter at death, that is Brahman." It is evident
then, that there is never a time when the conscious unit is not immersed in the
real being of the Lord of life. As Radhakrishnan sets forth, the ego implies the
non-ego and therefore can not precede it. It arises with it and by virtue of
its polarization with it. As he puts it, the timeless whole is ever
(periodically) breaking out of its inanition to give itself the delight of
becoming something it has conceived, willed and energized for creation. It is
forever rushing forth in series of becomings. And the process begun in each
will go on until the self in each unit life reaffirms the fulness of its
potential self-creativeness through the rich if rugged course of experience.
The world is not a purposeless phantom of some false grade of consciousness--as
Christian Science so glaringly errs in saying--but the arena of the evolution
of God, who is embodied in the creative whole in the individuality of his own
sons, the potentially conscious life units.
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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE PANORAMA OF REALITY
It is one of the paradoxes of which
life furnishes so many that the very act of the absolute's self-realization of
its nature is also a concealment of it. There is no doubt that the revelation
is open, clear and complete; there is nothing hidden that shall not be
revealed. Yet it is not, so to say, physically visible, so that he who runs can
read it. But physically visible it is after all, for that is precisely how it is
revealed,--in physical forms. Always it must be remembered that while its
physical form or embodiment is seen with the eye, the eye alone can not report
the full truth of the hidden noumenal idea or form which it bespeaks. To catch
the ideal form in the object the power of the eye must be supplemented with the
power of the mind. The eye will not pierce the hard shell of matter to discern
the inner meaning unless aided by intelligence, which can bring the faculties
of reason, deduction and the great beacon light of analogy to aid the
revelation. It requires the expert and facile talent of transmuting the
features and qualities of a physical object or phenomenon into an abstract
mental form identical with it in construction, to elicit the cryptic meaning of
the world. One must be able, as it were, to mentally dissolve a physical object
into the ethereal structure of a mental concept. The mortal form hides the
immortal idea. The objects in space and time conceal the logoi of divine
thought. Radhakrishnan says that the passing semblance of life is in no wise
its immortal truth, that the real being is above these things. God manifests
himself, but draws a veil over his face. Indian thought always presumes that
what the senses report to us is not the truth of things. It can be admitted
that it is not, where there is no intelligence or genius in the interpretation
of the senses' report. The meaning of the world of life is always hidden from
the ignorant. That does not certify that it can not be revealed to the inner eye
of intelligent mind.
This truth has been obscured in
Indian philosophy by the traditional force of Oriental intellectualism in its
tendency to explain away, instead of explaining, the life experience. Surely it
is hardly logical to assert that there is any concealment when an object,
otherwise invisible, is made concrete and set out to open view in the sight of
all men. We would have concealment if this proced-
226
ure were exactly reversed. As it is,
we have revelation full, complete. All may see who will look, but with the mind
as well as with the eye. It is because we have looked without seeing that we
have been led to think that God has hidden himself behind his creation. St.
Paul says that what makes God knowable to us is manifest, not hidden. The
Talmud enjoins us to open wide our eyes on the visible. The veil is not over
God's face; it is over our eyes. In Exodus God says to Moses (man) that
as he in his glory passes by, he will place his hand over Moses' eyes, so that
the overpowering effulgence will not blind his feeble vision; and when his
glory has passed by, he will remove his hand and then man may safely look upon
God's hinder parts. The hinder or reverse side of God's spiritual glory is
matter. Man may not gaze upon God's full cosmic glory of spirit, for it is said
that no man can look upon the face of God and live. That glory is so fierce in
brightness that it would in a flash burn man's body to a crisp. Only when
dimmed by its incorporation in the lower vibrations of matter can man safely
gaze upon it.
Yet the material forms are shaped
over the pattern of the divine thought and in fact are those thoughts concreted
in matter. Man can read them if, as Sir Joshua Reynolds said of his
paintings, he will mix his observation with brains. He must become adept in the
subtle art of transferring the form of a physical object into its image and
counterpart in a noumenal conception. "With sharp and subtle mind is He
beheld," says the Kath. Upanishad (III-12). The world of
religious thought would not have fallen into the sluggish groove of calling the
objective world an unreality and a phantasmagoria of deceptive shadows
caricaturing the real essences if the perspicacity to read the noumenal idea in
its earthly entifications had been kept alive and the "sharp and subtle
mind" needed to see the one through the other had been assiduously
cultivated.
Radhakrishnan discerns this
requirement when he says that in the enjoyment of a melody, in the appreciation
of art, nature, beauty, or a work of mental genius, we exercise a high degree
of mystical faculty. Mysticism of this grade, grounded on objective beauty, is
a permissible and a true mysticism. Earthly things viewed with this sensitivity
to the presence of the divine thought which they embody, are thus transfused
with the light of the eternal.
Again the philosopher assures us
that the Upanishads do not preach a renunciation either physical or
dialectical, of the objective
227
existence. The essence of ethical
life is not a sublation of the mind and will in metaphysical states alone. The
false doctrine that holds life to be an illusion is out of unison with the
sentiment of the Upanishads. To flout the world in a strained spiritual
pietism, to retire from the world's society and a close and friendly contact
with nature, is to despair of humanity and to assume even God's discomfiture in
his evolutionary enterprise. We are asked to see through outer forms to their
internal and eternal realities, and to come to feel the presence of God in the
world of nature and of society. Then comes from the philosopher a forthright
declaration worthy of great applause from seekers of truth over all the earth:
he says that a philosophy of resignation, an ascetic code of ethics and a
temper of languid world-weariness are an insult to the creator of the
universe, a sin against ourselves and the world that has a claim upon us.
The Upanishads believe in God, and so believe in the world soul, since that is
the ray of God in the world. In the light of such a rebuke to Hindu
preachments, it is evident that Mother India will have to amend its own
spiritual message by the clearer light shining in Greek philosophy and even in
its own Upanishads, before it can substantiate its claim to the lofty
distinction of being the world's foremost spiritual teacher.
If, as Radhakrishnan says, the soul
in man is the keynote through which we look out upon the world landscape, it
must be that God has turned the gaze of soul outward, and given us a window
through which to look. Evidently it was conceived that soul needed to look
without, and therefore provision was made for the extroversion of view. And if
there was this necessity, it is to be concluded that the soul's growth to its
full awakening was only to be effectuated by having it receive its education
through what it could learn in the world. The philosopher bends toward the
conventional exaltation of the inner spirit in saying that the soul's attention
turns from the outward physical fact to the inner reality of its own immortal
possibility; and that we need not look to the outer sky for the bright light;
the glorious fire and flame is within.
Yes, this is true; but it is always
erroneously related in Eastern theology to the thought of increasing the inner
shining by withdrawing the inner spirit from all intercourse with the scene
outside the window of its house. This is the false orientation of the view of
soul enlightenment. That soul-light evidently could not be made to
228
enhance its glow by remaining aloft
in the spiritual skies. There was no fuel there to feed its lamps. Only on
earth could it draw from below the energies that would enable it to magnify its
potential glory. Therefore to despise earthly influences is to flout and defeat
the prime purpose of God in the human creation.
Several times, according to
Radhakrishnan, the Upanishads strike a distinctly positive note in appraising
the value of life in the world and the necessary role of the body. The Indian
thinkers believe in the dependence of mind on the body, and so prescribe purity
of food as necessary for purity of mind and soul. We are not to despise the
body, or regard it as an encumbrance or clog on the soul. The body is the
servant of the soul and not its prison. A note of joy in the soul's
participation in the life of the world permeates the Upanishads. To retire from
the body is to despair of humanity, is to retreat in the face of life's
challenge. But not even the Upanishads have been able to avert the surrender of
general Hindu philosophy to negativism and pessimism. The Upanishad conception
of the world stands as a direct challenge to the valiant powers of the spirit
in man. If the world is very evil, the spirit is here tenanting in the flesh to
redeem the world from its evil. God so loved the world that he sent his Son
into it, not to condemn it, but to redeem it to divinity. The philosophy that
urges the soul to shrink from its cosmic assignment to regenerate itself in the
garden of earth is a renegade philosophy.
It is even granted in the Upanishads
that human love, so sharply falling under the condemnation of the suprasensual
cast of thought, as being low, fleeting and binding to earth, is admitted to be
the shadow of divine love. "We may love our wives for the sake of the joy
that burns at the heart of things." Husband and wife are dear, but not for
their own sake. "For the sake of the Atman is the husband dear,"
assert the Upanishads. The objects of the world are represented not as lures to
sin, but as pathways to the divine bliss. The righteous man is not he who
retires into a cloister, but he who lives in the world and loves its objects
and interests, however, never for their own sake, but for that of the infinite
they contain, the universal they conceal. Love of human beings and external
things for their own sake or for one's personal pleasure is a false motive.
They must be loved for the sake of the infinite self which, in individualized
seed form, is sent here to expand its joy by loving them.
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Plato is called to testify that
thought is best when the mind is gathered into itself and no outward things
distract its absorption in the contemplation of truth. The ego must be so far
untrammelled by bodily interests that it can survey clearly the field of its
own activities. Nothing can too long inhibit its aspiration after the deeper
realities of being. This can be considered valid doctrine as a general
principle, and it is certainly most true for the high moments in our psychic
life when we do seem to be lifted out of the commonplace realism of the level
of daily interest to a sense of more buoyant modes of being. But it would
hardly substantiate a universal deprecation or belittlement of the value of our
concern with things. Things are necessary for the conditioning of the body, so
that it may serve as the basis for the mind's power to think without
distraction. To despise things because they are not spirit and are rated in
value below spirit, is to fail to see things in their proper perspective.
We are brought back again to a
further consideration of the doctrine of maya. Its place in Hindu systematic
thought is so prominent and its influence so decisive throughout that the
cursory treatment already given it can profitably be supplemented by further
elaboration. The rank negative view of the world as maya or illusion is stated
in Das Gupta's review of the Buddhist philosophy in the Lankavatara:
"All our phenomenal knowledge
is without any essence or truth and is but a creation of maya, a mirage or a
dream. For it is said that illusion is like the principle of maya, which may
explain the origin of other notions. There is no category which can be called
maya, because all entities or appearances being similar to magic, are called
maya. All things are called similar to maya because they are false and as
evanescent as lightning sparks."
The appearance of the many changing
things in the world is called maya. Anything considered to be other than the
One undifferentiated pure unmanifest Being is called maya. Everything below the
absolute is declared to be the maya. The one in its pure essence is alone real.
"All things that appear as compounded are but dreams and maya. Appearances
are produced only apparently, not in reality; their coming into being is still
maya, and that maya again does not exist."
What sort of logic that can be which
explains a phenomenon as being due to something which itself does not exist, we
are at a
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loss to comprehend. Christian
Science has enmired itself similarly in this illogical syllogism. It claims
that sin, sickness, evil and death are the creations of "mortal
mind," which on another page is blandly stated to have no existence. So
steeped in the attitude and spirit of negation have the illusion philosophies
become that even the cause of the illusion is declared to be an illusion. By
all the laws of reason this should end up in the affirmation of things denied,
since the negation of a negative asserts a positive. To say that a non-existent
thing produces another non-existent thing says nothing at all. This double
negativism doth protest too much and strangles itself to death.
On this we find Das Gupta saying
that the negation alleged in the maya argument is not a separate entity, but is
only a peculiar manner of the manifestation of the positive. Elaborating on
this, he presents the dilemma in which the maya doctrine involves itself. Using
the term ajnana (not-knowledge, illusory opinion, Plato's doxa)
he argues that if the untrue knowledge (ajnana) is a nonentity
altogether, it could never arise at all; and if it were a positive entity it
could never cease to be. The ajnana therefore is a mysterious category
midway between being and non-being, a something indefinable in any way, and so
it is characterized as indefinable and indeterminable either as real or unreal.
It is unreal as an indeterminable character; but nevertheless real as needing
to be dealt with. That which itself is only the name for the absence of a
positive essence is no determinable thing; it is only to be dealt with in
relation to the thing it is the want of. For instance, ignorance is nothing
that can be described, seen, made palpable or handled. It is the dark abyss
left by the absence of intelligence. It can not be dealt with as ignorance; it
can only be handled by entifying intelligence. As the sun comes up darkness
disappears. As intelligence dawns ignorance disappears.
There are rebuttals of the bald
denial aspect of the doctrine, and Das Gupta presents this one: the stuff of maya--the
things of the world--undergoes a transformation through change. As this change
is asserted to be the basis of the non-real or illusory character of the world,
it itself must be real. If, then, Brahman is credited with absolute reality
because "he" does not change, while his creation is subject to
change, reality must then pertain to both aspects of being, the changing and
the changeless. And if maya is re-
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garded as a power exercised by
Brahman, how then can the power of Brahman, as well as its transforming work,
be regarded as unreal and false, while the possessor and wielder of the power
is regarded as real and absolute? This posits a real, in fact the real
being of the universe as generating an unreal illusory world. Heraclitus
asserted that the ultimate reality of the changing world was found in the
nature and meaning of the change.
Das Gupta argues that if we accept
the doctrine of the creation as illusory maya, it would have to be conceived
that God created the universe as mere sport. This, it is to be recalled, is
precisely what Aurobindo affirms, but without any slur on the word
"sport." Das Gupta would seem to deride the Lila doctrine; Aurobindo
takes it with straight seriousness and aureoles it with its proper nobility at
the supreme cosmic level. We can not, he thinks, imagine a higher cosmic motive
than God's delight and enjoyment of his majestic work of creation, and it is
not demeaned by calling it play or sport.
A boiling down of many varied
dissertations on the theme of maya leaves one with the precipitate which seems
to comprehend the essence of all of them: maya is the exertion on the part of
absolute being to give itself expression. Maya is the order and nature of being
when it sets itself to the task of actual becoming. It is the absolute when it
has ceased to remain asleep, ceased to abide in quiescence, and begun to awake
to the exertion of creation. It is the absolute manifesting its capabilities.
It is be-ness stirring to action, having broken out of the death-grip of
aeonial sleep to plunge into the delight of a new morn of world building. It is
life breaking out of the bonds of its stagnation in unity to throw itself into
the tension of duality and polarity, so as to set consciousness over against
objectivity. In the process it veils its absoluteness with condition and limitation
for the sake of bringing consciousness to birth and then to sharp acuity.
Quoting Bradley and Green to the
effect that the relation between Brahman and the manifest world can not be
known by us (why Brahman created the world at all, if we do not assume it was
for Lila, his delight and enjoyment, is an insoluble riddle to us, they hold),
Radhakrishnan says that the reason for God's exertion of himself to create the
world is inexplicable to us, and says that the later Vedanta gave it the name
of maya. He says that a "white
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intellectual modesty born of the
imperfection of human intelligence" compelled the authors of the
Upanishads to attempt nothing beyond negative statements when confronted with
the question of accounting for the nature of the supreme reality and its
creational motives. On the other hand, he states, false imitators of the
Upanishad ideal, in an extreme display of arrogant audacity, declare that
Brahman is an absolutely homogeneous impersonal intelligence. He takes this to
be a dogmatic assertion alien to the true spirit of the Upanishads. Such a
positive characterization of the being of Brahman is illogical, he maintains,
citing Sankara as saying that the real is non-dual, advaita, and nothing
positive.
Activity, the exertion of energy, is
almost divorced in mayavic philosophy from the being of Brahman. It is made to
appear that the Brahman is only real when, so to say, it is asleep. What it
does or creates in its work in the waking state must bear the stigma of unreality.
This is refuted by the assertions of Radhakrishnan, based on the Upanishads,
that active exertion to consummate self-expression is an inherent and eternal
attribute of the Brahman, the aspect of its nature which it expresses in
alternation with its periods of relapse into sleep in its regular rhythms.
Force and its deployment are inherent in absolute being. Maya, the bent of God
to exert his energies in creation, is potentially eternal in being. It is not a
human construction or product, because it is prior to our intellect and
independent of it. It is itself the generator of both things and intellects; it
is the immense potentiality of the created world. It is sometimes called prakriti.
But slipped into this descriptive
data is the sentence which says that the world of becoming is an interruption
of being. But, as has been shown already, this reverses the proper rating of
values: it regards the sleep condition of Brahman as real existence, and its
active period as its unreality. By analogy it becomes a question whether we
shall call our daily existence between our nights of sleep the interruption of
our being, which we partake of in dreamless repose, or whether that sleep
interrupts our real being of the waking state.
Radhakrishnan is led by Hindu thinking
to say that maya is a reflection of reality. As a reflection is usually
inverted, this is to say that the world process is not so much a translation of
immutable being as its inversion. This may be affirmed as a not untrue way of
viewing the process, if the word or the idea of inversion is
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not made synonymous with negation of
immutable being. It is an inversion in the sense that, being the opposite polar
force to quiescent being, it manifests the opposite complement of that being,
i.e., its manifestation, and is not taken to be its denial. To quiescence it
manifests the opposite phase of activity and objectivity, or the reverse of
inaction. There can not legitimately be any connotation of unreality attached
to the idea of matter when considered as the obverse of spirit. It is indeed
its foil, the power against which spirit must exercise its full strength, and
thus grow in might.
There is much evidence to
demonstrate that the conception of maya was well enough comprehended to be
generally understood in its true light as nothing apart from or independently
opposed to the supreme being and reality, but was inherent in, a deployment of
and entirely dependent upon ultimate being itself. Maya represents the power of
the One existence to throw itself into the distinction residing at the very
heart of reality, its inherent necessity to manifest itself by division. Maya
is the self-generated force in the heart of being which drives it to express
itself through growth. It is a striking way of describing the soul to say that
it is an individual unit of the Atman coupled with sense and mind. Hindu
thought has been misleading in holding that this union with the transient forms
of sense and mind, feeling and thought, is a calamity, an experience of
unreality, a hindrance or interruption of real being. It is the Atman unit at
work to bring itself along to supreme attainment of something more real than
innocuous vacuity in an unconditioned state.
The apparent imperfection of the
world life is due to the circumstance that the two elements in play, the
potential divine and the natural, being polar opposites, and able to do their
proper work only as such, are seemingly at strife and incapable of effecting a
harmony. But the problem exists only by virtue of the ignoring of time, a
tendency paramount in all monistic speculation. The accumulation of experience
in repeated lives is the dialectical as well as the actual solvent of the
problem of disharmony. Time will eventually bring about the at-one-ment, the
complete neutralization and perfect union of the two sides. For it is the
evolutionary task of the divine part of us to use its potentially capable
genius to effect the harmonization. The experience is its education; the
upsurge of its expanding power gives it vision and knowledge. It learns how to
transmute the mere animality in the human into
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something lovelier and sweeter,
until the product of the struggle emerges in spiritual ecstasy and the
beatitude of supreme peace.
But, contrary to all the perfervid
assumptions of the monistic and illusionist theories the Upanishads are
insistent that as long as man is finite and human he can not dissolve the
conditions under which he partakes of the largesse of life at his present stage
and actualize any final achievement of unconditioned real being. Thus the
entire ground-claim of these egregious cult philosophies is declared to be
itself a substanceless figment of philosophical error.
The Scriptures strike the note of
truth in telling us that the soul is a fragment of deity, a seed unit of
universal being planted in a world for growth and aspiring by innate impulse to
become an embodiment of the whole. This great basic truth was dramatized by the
Gospel Jesus in the breaking of the bread, declared to be his own (spiritual)
body, into fragments in the Eucharist, and by the parables of the seed. The
growth involves the struggle between the divine drive of the soul and the
demoniac obsession of the personality. But only by the hard road of victory in
this battle can the divine realize the fulness of the stature of its godliness.
The divine part would vegetate and stagnate in continued quiescence and
inanition if it was not challenged by opposition of the (relatively) non-divine
elements. The confrontation to it of diverse influences arouses it to exertion.
Everywhere the finite is striving for enlargement of being, expansion and
heightening of consciousness; and this tension, as it centers in man's life,
constitutes his tense moral struggle.
Wherever the word maya occurs,
says Radhakrishnan, it is used only to signify the might or the power:
"Indra takes many shapes quickly by his maya." It is his power, which
is never separate from his eternal being and never negative to it, by which he
is able to unleash his creative genius in the expression of his delight, his
majesty and his glory. Through the unwarranted misconception attached to the
terms reality and unreality, the idea of maya has been subverted in so much
Hindu and general philosophy into the category of unreality and illusion, a
perversion which, with its concomitant derangements of the understanding, has
to be numbered among the major tragedies of human delusion.
All the while the great light was
shining, though shaded under myth and allegory, in the great literature of
ancient divine authorship, that would have illuminated the dark recesses of the
human
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mind on the subject of maya. In
Scriptures and in mythology almost universally the mothers of the Christs,
Messiahs, Avatars and Sun-gods, bore the name of Maya. Here was the
unmistakable intimation that maya was the mother of our divinity. The
assumption that maya is a dream of unreal existence reads into the ancient
mythos of truth an eccentric and untenable postulate: for by analogy it says
that while Maya's divine son was the expression and essence of reality, his
mother was only a phantom of unreality. Are we to suppose that the great myths
are telling us that unreality gives birth to reality? By every principle of
logic this is what the myths do tell us, if we are to accept the
philosophical derogation of matter, the eternal mother of all things, as the
phantom of unreality. Shall we glorify the divine sonship and in the same
breath vilify the motherhood? This sharp delineation indeed sets in vivid
contrast the discrepancy between a natural view and the twisted theses of the
mystics. When the full significances of the analogical parallels are
recognized, it is apparent that every slur cast upon matter, the body, the
physical world, is so much mud thrown in the face of the divine motherhood. An
immense portion of religious ardor has been expended in the disastrous effort
to magnify the Son by traducing his mother. How can we suppose that Maya can
bear the Christs, and yet be catalogued in theology as the vessel of dishonor?
It can bear the Christ-child of course only if it is impregnated by the seed of
that divine birth. But that is what a thousand myths had cryptically delineated
in their structure. That is what the world, the matter, the maya is; eternal substance
fecundated by the creative blood essence of the divine paternity of spirit.
He who rails out against the evil of
life, of matter, and holds it as vile and diabolical, is reviling the eternal
mother of life. Being and non-being are correlative terms; one is destitute,
impotent, incapable of existence, without the other. Perhaps the most luminous
realization that the pursuit of philosophy can bring to the race of mortals is
the knowledge that the earth, and the human body by which the divine spirit is
attached to earth, are the garden in which a seed of God's life has been sown,
and that therefore the most immediate and constant practical end in life is to
gain the knowledge and the wisdom to promote to best advantage the growth of
that seed in that soil. India would verily uproot the seed or the developing
plant out of that soil. Obviously this can not be philosophy, or religion, or
science; it must be charted as ignorance and fatuity.
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CHAPTER NINETEEN
THE FLOWER OF THE INTELLECT
Further strictures must be adduced
on the item of the mystic's deprecation of the intellect in favor of intuition.
It has received attention in the introductory half of the work. But it is
important enough to warrant additional critique. In The Phaedo Plato has
a sentence that should be broadcast so widely in the world that the cult of
derogation of the intellect should stand forever rebuked and silenced: "For
no greater evil can befall us than to become haters of reason."
Radhakrishnan says that what is
dogma,--and therefore a conclusion reached by the intellect--to the ordinary
man is experience to the pure in heart. On a superficial view this sounds like
a profound observation. But would it carry home as a truth to us the
implication that the intellect had no part in bringing the spontaneous surge of
realizing experience to its overt expression in our lives? Hardly.
Radhakrishnan himself elaborates the thesis that Spinoza carried to its final
development, that the highest and fullest rapport between the mind of
the part, the unit, and that of the whole is productive of the most exalted
religious afflations. The richest love of God, he asserts, is an ideal,
therefore an intellectual love, precisely as Spinoza so luminously expounded
it. So he says that the lofty Hindu religions, as volubly voiced in the
Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita and the Vedanta Sutras, substituted for prayer,
the more specifically feeling aspect, mystic contemplation of the supreme
beauty, truth and goodness. Such an ideal love of God, and such meditation
inundate the mind with the cosmic emotion and cause to glow warmly our
sense of oneness with the Whole.
Then he says that it is true that
religion of this ideal sort seems to those who have not been able to rise to
such exaltations and sublimations, and so have never felt their power, to be
too "cold," too "intellectual." "Yet", he
concludes, "no other religion can be philosophically justified." So,
then, if what the "cold intellect" has found logically sound as
dogma, becomes the living experience of the pure in heart, this is the
endorsement, not the contravention or rebuttal, of the intellect by the
intuition. So much loose religious thinking has set the intellect at odds with
the mystical emotion. The verdict
237
of our philosopher is that the highest
and truest feeling comes from the sublimation, not the inhibition, of the
intellect.
At another place he clearly expounds
that the ideal of intellect is to discover the unity which comprehends both the
subject and the object. It is in this conception that philosophy can find the
resolution of all its dialectical problems that rise from the apparent disunity
of thoughts and things. That there is such a unity, or capability of synthesis,
he says, is the working principle of both logic and life. Philosophy must aim
to find this point of integration of mind with the creation. But he doubts the
capability of the human mind to grasp the synthesis in its completeness and
perfection. So, by the track of this reflection he arrives at the same
conclusion that besets and mars the general Hindu dialectic: the intellect is
powerless to grasp the real. Ergo we must set aside the intellect and make the
herculean attempt to jump over it into a terrain beyond, where a totally other
mode of experiencing reality will supervene to satisfy our need for the more
nourishing food of being, a mode called intuition or mystic illumination.
Radhakrishnan does not go so far as
to state this positively. He stands by the intellect as indispensable for the
attainment of the high end in view; for he says, "though man's
intellectual capacities are not adequate for the comprehension [of the
supramental states], still they will have no existence but for it." Still
wrestling with the dialectical dilemma, he says that intellect deals with the
categories of time and space, cause, force and relation, which involve us in
deadlocks and antinomies. "The puzzle cannot be solved by intellect pure
and simple. It must confess itself to be bankrupt when ultimate questions
arise." We can not solve these problems as long as we remain at the level
of intellect. It handles relations and conditions, and has no power to grasp
the relationless and unconditioned absolute. When this is said, the door seems
to stand open for the victorious entry of the mystical philosophy. But hold!
Radhakrishnan follows this with the saving clause that gives intellect the
victory after all: "There is nothing on earth existing in space or time
which is not an appearance of the absolute." And, as this essay has
demonstrated perhaps for the first time concisely in philosophy, the appearance
of the absolute in space and time is a true appearance and not a false one. So
then the absolute has revealed itself in such form that the intellect can apprehend
its real-
238
ity! And this ought to wind up the
debate with the verdict going to the side of the adequacy of the intellect. It
seems likely that a ground for the resolution of the elements that appear to be
in conflict is to be discovered in further reflection on Radhakrishnan's
statement that "the puzzle can not be solved by intellect pure and
simple." This conclusion is supposed to eliminate the intellect in
finality from consideration as the instrument for the apprehension of real
being. But this may be a mistaken conclusion. It appears possible that what the
statement eliminates from eligibility is not necessarily the intellect, but the
"pure and simple." It is to be re-called that the Upanishads declare
of the Brahman that "with sharp and subtle intellect is he beheld."
This is the sum and essence indeed of what Spinoza, Aristotle, Plotinus and
even the mystics themselves, in direct word or in effect, have repeatedly
declared. The higher altitudes of reality perception are surely not to be
attained by intellect that lacks keenness, sharpness, subtlety, the piercing
clarity of discernment that has been symbolized in theology and mythology by
the metaphor of the eagle's eye. But religious philosophy has not made a proper
place for the operation of the intellect sublimated and subtilized by its
released powers of eagle-eyed penetration at lofty heights, in spite of what
the philosophers just mentioned have done to emphasize this item. Earlier
dissertation in this work has contended that intuition is not a power transcending
intellect, but just the acutely sharpened powers of the intellect itself, in
its more perfected development.
The world is declared in the great
religions to be the Logos of God, the expression of his divine ideas in
physical matter. And if man's lesser comprehending power is to grasp an ever
increasing degree of the logical structure which life has revealed of itself,
the faculty by which this meaning is grasped must still and always be a logical
one. If the ultimate in the meaning of the universe is a logical structure in
creative mind, then its apprehension by the creature mind must be likewise the
work of intellect. The perceptive faculty in the creature consciousness must
fall in the same category as the constructive faculty exercised by the creator.
Mind could hardly be perceived by other than mind. Little mind, mind of small
dimension, may have difficulty in matching in its reflections the mighty work
of the Great Mind. But mind, intellect it must be to grasp the Logos of the
creation. No other faculty can be substituted
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for mind. Mind may be aided by
powers of vision and sharpened and deepened by feeling, but its comprehending
are still those of intellect. To contend otherwise is like arguing that some
other sense or faculty is better for seeing than sight. It should be the final
upshot of argumentation on this eternal question that what of reality the
intellect of man is predicated as being unable to grasp simply will not be
grasped. An alternative to the intellect has always been dragged in by the
mystics: that what the intellect can not grasp may be grasped by a higher
power, the intuition. Here is located at last the point of error in the
mystical philosophy. Instead of predicating simply that man's intellect has
definite limits to its capabilities, that it can not as yet do what the
intelligence of gods and elohim can do, resort has been made to the alleged
transcendent power of another faculty declared to be available to man if only
he will push the incompetent and confusing intellect aside. This resort has
been, and must now be seen to be, a baseless subterfuge, a straw man in fact.
Some portion of reality is brought
home to consciousness through the senses, through the powers of sensation;
another portion or aspect of it is experienced through feeling, the emotions;
consciousness is still further oriented to it through mind, the intellect; and
mind sharpened to swift perception grasps it by what is called intuition. In
the end it is intellect that organizes the work of the several modes of
experience into knowledge. So that in finality, if man is to know
reality, he must do it through the mind. The argument from the mystic side has
been that since the intellect of man is incapable of cognizing ultimate
reality, there must be some other faculty that can; and intuition has been
predicated as this miracle power. What would have simplified and clarified the
entire problem all along is the recognition of the obvious fact that ultimate
and absolute reality is something that man will never know. The problem need
never to have been involved in the complicated elements of sophistication if
this plain fact had been squarely faced. Neither with intellect nor with
intuition, nor with any power within his capability can man grasp the absolute.
It has been a faux pas from the beginning to risk, nay to plunge into
the rash predication that by any faculty at all man can achieve consciousness
of absolute and unconditioned being. And it is certainly permissible that this
denial be followed by a robust: "who can?" Neither archangels nor
solar
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Logoi can comprehend the absolute.
The absolute is the incomprehensible, the unknowable, because it is the
undetermined and indeterminable, as Aurobindo has said. It is therefore a silly
waste of breath to talk of man's full merging into the absolute being or
consciously becoming identical with it. And it is likewise illegitimate to
postulate a special and non-existent power transcending his existing powers by
which the impossible is declared achievable. Using any power or faculty within
his reach, man will not become in any but a relative sense one with the
absolute, or merge into any final and perpetual static bliss. Life has not
planned it that way. Man will progress toward larger life. What that progress
will reveal in the way of experience transcending present capability is the
romance of the future, and the assurance of its possibility is the great lure
that carries life happily onward.
What the gods themselves can not do,
it is not reasonable to expect man to do. The idiocy of the pretension that man
can scale the uttermost peak of being the whole way up from the level plain of
his lowly humanity by some thaumaturgic manipulation of his consciousness can
be seen with shocking clarity when one looks at the glaring ambiguity in
religion's estimate of man's position and rating in life. Could any spectacle
of inconsistency and illogicality be more ironic than that of the double and
contrary views which religion holds of man, that at one end of the theology he
is esteemed a wretched worm of the dust, a vile creature of sin and
selfishness, who can urge no merit in God's sight to justify mercy and
salvation, while at the other end he is extolled as a being of such cosmic
stature and capability that he can transcend the very Logos of God and in fact
consummate absolute perfection? How religion has got itself involved in such a
predicament it were surely worth the worldwide effort to ascertain. The blaring
absurdity of it all should awaken purblind minds to some corrective thinking
that can somehow introduce balance and sanity into the situation.
It must be set down as a true
notation that the real delusion involved in religious attitudes springs from
the inveterate and apparently incurable propensity on the part of humanity to
dream of ultimate perfections and to clutch eagerly and tenaciously at its
dream of a final static perpetuity of bliss. This, be it noted, is the one
thing that life and nature never demonstrate or put on display. If man is to
assume that he can judge of life's true nature and being
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by what he sees life and nature
manifesting as outer type of inner intention, he can see that life bestows the
blessing of comparative bliss at intervals, at high moments which consummate
long periods of development, and generally at the climactic point of its
periodic surges and cycles. What he never sees anywhere is a perpetuation of
static bliss. Life never makes bliss static; it comes as the topmost breaking
into foam of each successive wave of its eternally repeated surges on the
shores of material existence. The bliss that caps each wave is not possible
unless the unit portion of the vast deep be thrown into wave form by the
resistance of the beach. By poetic analogy with this truth-telling form of
life's manifestation of its nature, philosophy and religion should be
instructed finally that even the bliss that they postulate is wholly a product
of the resistance which matter in polarity offers to spirit.
The struggle which man has to
undergo at the meeting point of the two opposite poles, his aeonial weighing in
the balance between soul and sense, is a hard one. It could well be that his
dream tendency is a natural recourse to enable him with some placidity and
equanimity to endure the ordeal a bit more steadily. The vision of future bliss
and glory is not to be decried as totally without utility. It is perhaps both
inevitable and salutary. Paul reminds us that the sufferings of this world are
not to be compared with that glory which shall be revealed in us. The error is
in failing to use our sufficiently keen intellectual powers to give us a
balanced and rational view of the process and its reasonable possibilities. We
have let the roseate vista of future glory so obsess our reason and imagination
as to unhinge us from the reality of the present and to reduce us to
half-intoxicated victims of self-hypnotic delusions of fancy. It could indeed
be true that India's predilection to discount and discountenance the intellect,
eventuating in an age-long traditional effort to smother it with all kinds of
sublimated feeling, or the total suppression of feeling, has been the most
potent force in fastening this entrancing delusion on the world.
If it be true, as Radhakrishnan has
said, that there is nothing existing here in space and time that is not an
appearance of the absolute, mystical philosophy is challenged to show why man's
intellect can not catch something--and always more--of the meaning of the
manifestation from contemplating what the absolute has revealed of itself. How
can the philosophy of negation uphold the
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thesis that man's intellect will
necessarily be deceived by studying the manifestation the absolute has made of
itself? It would be the natural inference that the absolute manifested itself
to enlighten its conscious creature units, not to deceive them. The play of
maya was to instruct all creatures, not to delude them. The maya was the show,
the epiphany; how could any mind be deceived by looking at it?
Yet the debate runs on and on, and
Radhakrishnan has to call in the intuition to redeem man from the imperfection
of his intellect. "It is when thought becomes perfected in intuition that
we catch the vision of the real. The mystics the world over have recognized
this fact." But it is to be noted that the philosopher does not say here
that the vision of reality comes when we have supplanted intellect with
intuition, but when it becomes perfected in intuition. This quite definitely
supports the position taken in this essay. Intuition is simply the perfection
of the intellect; therefore it is still in the province of intellection and not
some alien power far transcending it.
It is the failure to have grasped
this relation of intuition to intellect that has given a false slant to a vast
body of reflection on this point in philosophy. When book after book talks of a
power higher than the intellect and asserts that this power is posited in the
Upanishads, it throws the mind off balance by a false reading of the word higher.
Yoga practice attempts to unfold this superior sense. By it man transcends
the distractions of the intellect and solves the riddles that harry the reason.
The problems raised by the intellect solve themselves the moment we transcend
the reason and start to live the religious life of renunciation. The Upanishads
ask us therefore to lay aside our pride of intellect and approach facts with
the fresh outlook of the child. So runs Radhakrishnan's elaboration of the
theme. "Let a Brahman renounce learning and become a little child."
The eminent psychologist, Jung, has
done much to clarify the character of the incipient divinity in man by means of
the paradigm of "the child." The god in us is a child stage of
divinity set to grow to adulthood. Being in its childhood stage, it has undoubted
affinities and correspondences with the psychology of the human child; supreme
purity and motive, trust in life, confidence in good. The analogy carries far
and suggests profound truth. But religionists
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make an illegitimate and
disingenuous use of it. To assume, on the wording of the Scriptures, that the
child has risen above the intelligence of the adult in overriding the
perfection of the intellectual potential, and knows and feels the unity of all
truth in an all-embracing synthesis of understanding, as by implication the
astute philosopher does not, is to preach the silliest fol-de-rol. This is true
even when the "child" figure is used only as poetic allegory. It is
when the ego has developed to its utmost perfection the capability of its intellect
to clarify understanding and united this insight with the regained innocence of
the child mind, that the perfection of knowledge of reality comes to man,--as
far as it can ever come to him.
Radhakrishnan makes a logical
approach to the problem of the competency of the intellect in saying that
nature has life concealed within it, and that when life develops its conscious
potential with the perfection of the intellect, the mission of nature is
fulfilled. This must indeed be so, for nature is the mother of life, and
her destiny is fulfilled with the birth and rearing of her child. As nature
bears and rears life, life in turn bears and rears consciousness. And when life
generates and empowers consciousness its mission is fulfilled. "The
destiny of consciousness is fulfilled when intellect becomes manifest."
Then, it might be said, with one more step to go, the destiny of intellect is
fulfilled when it has perfected its powers in swift intuition. This last
indefinable and elusive quality or faculty of consciousness is described by
Radhakrishnan as "neither thought nor will nor feeling, but yet the goal
of thought, the end of will and the perfection of feeling." As has been
expounded earlier herein, the mistake that has brought confusion into the
counsels of the mystical philosophy has been the regarding of intuition as a
form of knowing wholly above and separate from intellect, when it is just the
magical sweep of the highest intellectual power itself.
Again the affirmation of freedom won
by mystical magic comes up for review. On this Radhakrishnan commits himself to
a statement which is expected to be taken as a paradox, but is in reality a
plain self-contradiction. He asseverates that the free can do what they choose
with perfect impunity, "but this freedom is not 'the madness of
license.'" The mystic becomes a law unto himself, and the lord of himself
and of the world in which he lives. Laws and
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regulations are necessary for those
who do not by invincible rectitude conform to the dictates of conscience and
the promptings of that great fulfiller of law--love. But this in fact merely
says that the free can do as they choose, since they have come to choose that
which does not violate the principles of the higher law. They are not free
after all; they have fully learned their lesson. They have finally brought
their will to full conformity with the prescribed rules that lead to the only
freedom man has, the freedom to find happiness in conforming to the laws of
life. There is no freedom save under law, conformity to which brings happiness
through the perfect harmonization of the will of the unit with that of the
whole. Man labors under the delusion that he is free to obey law or violate it,
taking the consequences on either side. He finds that he is not free to violate
it very long at any stage. All talk of the mystic being a law unto himself, not
subject to the laws to which the non-mystic is bound, is a dangerous bandying
of words. No law is escaped; the developed mystic simply avoids the harsher
ordeals of conflict with the law to which most are still in heavier bondage by
having learned the blessedness of conformity and obedience. Even then he does
not escape the firm grip of the law; he only escapes its stern retributive
hand. He reaps its rewards in far fuller measure than its punishments.
In the utter abstract sense of the
words, even more than the rebel he is bound by the law, for he has fully
conformed to it, completely surrendered, while the rebel still asserts his
"freedom" to flout it. The rebel retains still a measure of license,
if not of freedom; the "liberated" soul has given up all thought of
license for full obedience. He does not escape the law; he escapes the evil
consequences of violating it, which the stupidly rebellious still invoke upon themselves.
He is in supremely happy case as compared with "the kicker against the
pricks." But it is not strictly true to assert, in the height of mystical
flare, that the mere exaltations of consciousness bring escape from all law. It
is only true to say that the fulfilling of all law brings the exalted states.
The Scriptures are not saying that love liberates the lower from all law; they
do say that in the majestic sweep of the power of love he fulfills all law.
It is in the spirit of this
"freedom" that the Hindu thinker goes so far as to say that the
highest religion of the Upanishads is free from dogmas, traditions, forms,
miracles and appurtenances
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such as still hang upon the skirts
of other religions. It has then, is the inference, the highest claim to acceptance
as the one completely eligible religion for humanity. The argument is advanced
that it leaves the spirit of man free to find God and unite with him under the
terms of the actual conditions ineluctably to be met to effectuate this result,
terms imposed by God and life, not those prescribed by human priestcraft in the
religions. But it is a cheap and easy way to the claim of superiority merely to
say, as any religion might--and in fact nearly all do--that the
particular religion offers complete freedom, while others bind their devotees
to certain prescribed observances, doctrines, beliefs. If all offered complete
freedom and all their followers acted with complete freedom, there would be
insufficient distinction between them to justify even different names. The
human being is in no position to accept total freedom. He is hemmed in on every
side by restraints and compulsions, and finds that his welfare, security,
health, and happiness depend on knowing the specific terms on which this
benison is to be won. He can make use of total freedom only by a selection of
acts based on specific knowledge. Every choice, every act of freedom brings
back to him its consequences. The best religion is not one that proclaims total
freedom for the individual, but one that will most dynamically enlighten and
inspire him with both the knowledge and the incentive to pursue the thing that
life requires of its creatures as conducive to their greatest beneficence. To
cry the shibboleth of freedom without at the same time offering the knowledge
to use it aright, is to beat on a tinkling cymbal.
But, avers Radhakrishnan, the
Upanishads do not regard the absolute, when attained by man, as a total
abstraction, for if it is, when the liberated soul merges into it, it would
only be a lapse into a void. But this is indeed the outcome which the claims
and theories of mystical presupposition force upon thought by the terms of
their definition of the absolute. Radhakrishnan's argument is that Brahman dare
not be made a void, an abyss, because then union with him would be a sinking
into a blank. This is the position taken and maintained throughout this essay.
The Hindu philosopher, standing upon Upanishadic bases, rejects the void
character of Brahman so that the soul may have conscious enjoyment of the
ineffable rapture when finally absorbed in mystical union with him.
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Even so it is still necessary that
the creature character of the individual soul be abolished if union with
Brahman is to be enjoyed. The creature must transcend or abolish himself as
such, for one encumbered with creaturehood can not enter the bosom of Brahman.
Flesh and blood shall not enter the divine kingdom.
"The highest state is that of
rapture and ecstasy, a condition of ananda, when the creature as creature is
abolished, but becomes one with the creator, or more accurately realizes his
oneness with him."
This is high-sounding, what the
dictionary used to call grandiloquent. But on all the conditions predicated by
the mystical persuasions, by the time the creature has transmuted himself into
fitness to achieve the rapture and the ananda, he will have divested himself of
humanity altogether, and possess neither sense, feeling, mind nor consciousness
to enjoy anything. For to fulfill the conditions laid down by mystic theory, he
will have dissolved all relation with a concrete individual conscious
existence. Under the law of polarity, considering the dissolution of the
tension that comes with the final neutralization, the great asserted apotheosis
of the spirit through its transcendence of all conditioning eventuates not in a
glorious expansion of consciousness, but in the extinction of all
consciousness. With the dissolution of the tension of the polarity the individual
consciousness goes out like a light. And with that outcome all the grandiose
philosophy of Nirvanic bliss likewise goes out in sheer impossibility. For it
rests on the claimed condition of consciousness under terms which insure the
destruction of consciousness. It is fairly well analogized by the legend of the
canny farmer who to reduce the cost of feeding his horse by degrees fed him
less hay and oats and more sawdust. Just when he had him safely subsisting on
sawdust he died. In the case of the mystic's claim that consciousness can be
withdrawn from under the conditions of existence in the world to enjoy the full
ananda of unconditioned being, the individual so unconditioned vanishes. If the
human as human is to enjoy ananda he must be kept somehow in the human sphere;
and Radhakrishnan attempts to do this and avers that the Upanishads do
likewise. But to hold man in the human area, where life is conditioned and
never can be absolute, all the grandiloquent verbiage that promises the
absolution of the human consciousness from the impeding baggage of sense and
mind
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as the necessary condition for
"liberation," has to be rejected as so much pious froth and jargon.
It is as clear as anything logical
can be that the state of unconditioned being which is asserted as the
attainable mystical possibility is "sawdust" on which no human can
subsist without perishing as a human. This being evident, the mystical theory
has been forced to go the limit and postulate the annihilation of the human,
calling it a metamorphosis into the divine. It is claimed that it is not fair
or logically possible to apply the norms and standards of our waking human
experience to either the world of our dream consciousness or to the predicated
superhuman, supramental world into which the "liberated" soul is said
to enter. This may be granted as likely so. Yet the mystical possibilities of
such apotheosis are held before humans and declared possible--easily and
immediately possible in the preachments of some expositors--for humans at their
present status in evolution. What this essay contends for is that the
proclamation of the human's escape, as human, from the conditioned world into
the unconditioned is a wild and fantastic chimera, utterly impossible. What
state of consciousness the egos of present humans may enter into when they
shall have transcended the human order for some higher dimension of being is
not of necessity a part of the discussion. The debate, however, is vitally
affected by consideration of the obvious fact that the human being can not be
translated, like Enoch and Elijah, into the world of unconditioned being and
have the experience as a human. What grade of conscious experience he may have
in the regions above humanity is another question, matter for speculation on the
distant future. We are not able to forecast our experience as gods.
The condition postulated as the
basis of all mystical sublimation is a state of unconscious consciousness to
which, as is admitted, only negative terms can be applied. All we can say is that
it is not this and not that, or any known state or grade of consciousness that
we can describe.
"It is impossible for us finite
beings to define the character of the ideal reality; though the Upanishads are
quite emphatic that it is not a blank . . . . Strictly speaking we can not say
anything of it."
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CHAPTER TWENTY
PILGRIM IN THE INFINITE
It seems necessary to enter a
protest against the mystical flair for the endless use of such phrases as
"union with the absolute," "man's realization of God,"
"merging into the infinite" and the like. They can be misleading and
mischievous. Their meaning can never be more than relatively true, and their
validity depends upon knowing the degree of relativity involved. In the way in
which they are bandied about in mystical parlance, they invariably infer or
presuppose the achievement by the human of an ultimate and permanent state of
being at the absolute level. All these idealistic shibboleths carry the
suggestion that man can rise to the level of God, become equal with God, merge
into the being of God and be established there forever, one with God.
This again is a case in which
mystical thought doth protest too much. Its untenable elements are the height
and the finality of the achievement. Man will never rise as high as that, nor
can any rise of his or any attainment be a final one. Progress in evolution is
a ladder on which there is always a higher rung. If it had a top rung, it would
be the construction of a finite being, whereas it is the product of an infinite
being. It is the output of being that knows no bounds,--except those it
voluntarily puts on itself. One of the names assigned to it of old was to
apeiron (Greek), the Boundless. It is the unknowable, the measureless, the
infinite. It is not going to stop working at a point of finality and rest
forever thereafter. "My father worketh hitherto, and I work," said
the Son in an ancient drama. And the Father will continue to work. Infinite reads
"not an end." But man, who lives in the swirl of the days, the years,
the cycles, the aeons, in the rhythm of which the Boundless chooses to deploy
its energies, is accustomed to thinking of an end, for he experiences beginning
and end in every cycle. In his ignorance he knows only the cycle in which his
movement is at the time involved. He knows it has its end, and unless he has
gained a glimpse of nature's endless continuity of process, its repetition of
cycles, he counts it the end of his existence lived in the period.
But if being is eternal and
infinite, the run and succession of the cycles must be infinite. Being
intimates this to man's intelli-
249
gence by putting on display endless
successions of smaller cycles within the compass of larger ones. Man certainly
must organize his conception of the order and modality of infinite being over
the patterns which he observes in the visible modes of being's manifestation.
Two of these modes at least are evident beyond cavil: the endless repetition of
cycles of birth, growth, decay and death for creature life; and the inclusion
of a round of (seven) minor cycles in the constitution of larger ones. Man can
not miss observing that the ongoing movement of the world order is systematic.
Seven turns of a smaller wheel turn a larger wheel once; seven revolutions of
that one turn a larger one once. The planets turn in a solar system; solar
systems turn in a galaxy; galaxies turn in a super-galaxy; and those in a
super-super-galaxy, if we may take the word of the astronomers. The day cycles
constitute a year, and the years count a great year of 25,868 years of the
precession cycle. Sub-atoms constitute atoms; atoms constitute molecules;
molecules constitute cells; cells constitute organs; organs constitute bodies,
bodies races and so on up to angelic hosts. Larger entities are necessarily
composed of many smaller. An organism is a meaningful combination of many
diverse components. And life is everywhere organic. No cycle runs its course in
independence of its inclusion in a larger cycle and even the relation of that
cycle to others antecedent and consequent; and all are integral elements of the
Whole.
Therefore man's predication of final
is forever a false one, a prostitution of his divine prerogative of knowledge.
The dream of man's merging in the absolute is as fatuous as the stupid case of
a man going around the house searching for his hat when he has it on his head
all the while. If man is not "merged" in the absolute of life now he
will never be in that happy condition. We mouth the great and momentous phrase:
"In him we live and move and have our being," and immediately turn to
argue whether we may at some distant epoch become one with infinite being. How
can we live without being one with the total of being? To argue otherwise is to
claim that we can live, can be, and yet have no part in being; that we have to
destroy our present participation in life in order to come into the range of
real being. There is nowhere else that man's life can be save in the absolute;
certainly it cannot be outside it. Man therefore partakes of the infinite and
absolute being, but he
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does so by progression through an
endless gradation of states determined by infinite modes of self-limitation
imposed upon itself by infinite life,--as ancient wisdom asserts, for its own
delight.
The mystical scheme takes no account
whatever of the actuality or the significance of the cyclical order of the
universal creation. It blinks it utterly. Monism pays no heed to particularity,
diversification of function, graduation of powers, gamuts of stages of
progress, but wipes all these out in one vast uniformity. It brashly asserts
that the soul of man need not consider itself bound under any necessity of
progressing through cycles of development to higher being. The admission of all
such paraphernalia is the proof of its ignorance and its bondage. It asserts
that the spirit can break the chain at any time and step out of the time order
into timelessness. In refutation of such arrant claim all that need be said is
that nowhere in the universe can there be found a single item of fact or
phenomena that would lend the faintest substance to it as a practicable feat.
It is not done in this universe. One is warranted in saying that it will not be
done. The creature will not disrupt the universal order. If he rashly attempts
it with serious resolution, he will break, not the order, but himself. Mystical
presumption is at least aware of this possibility; for it consistently advises
that to break out of the ring-pass-not of conditioned being in the time flux,
man will have to destroy himself as man.
A few of the great philosophers,
notably Hegel and Kant, have noted the insatiate bent of monist and idealist
thinking to affirm the attainment of finalities, perfections and ultimates, and
to their credit be it said, have rebuked it. Hegel called all such
"universal abstractions" "shams." Kant declared that they
had only a slight regulative value for thought. They had no practical, but only
theoretical value for man. They found only a very minor place in his
speculative thinking. One is permitted to dream about absolute perfection and
"final" bliss, but always and forever conscious activity lay, and
must lie, in worlds of relativity and comparative "imperfection." It should
sanify the thought and cheer the spirit if it could once be realized that in
full truth life is cast at all times in the very heart of absolute being, which
it is the incalculably joyous privilege of the unit soul to partake of
progressively to infinite extent. To project the unit of consciousness out of
this progression into a static mode of being in which total being is won in
timeless-
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ness, has ever been the baseless
dream of idealist mystic romanticism. The incidence of some hyperfervid
afflations of supersensible dream experience in trance states has given ardent
devotees the ground of claims to the possibility of "union with the
infinite." How empty, unsubstantial and futile these extravaganzas of
hypnotization really are is at last coming to be discerned by psychologists and
thinkers of less maudlin sensibilities but more balanced intelligence. The
human's salvation is to be effectuated by himself at his human status and with
his human equipment, and not by dehumanizing himself. For in his human
equipment is the seed of his divinity. If he destroy his humanity he ends the
possibility of mothering that divinity to its maturity. He will not grasp total
divinity at one fell swoop. And he will never "save" himself
otherwise than relatively and partially, piecemeal, as it were. Never will he
be divinized in finality. What he likes to think of in mystical illusion as his
perpetual blessedness is just a paralysis of his present consciousness. His
"salvation" is a continuing process, never ended. As he dies every
day unto an "old nature," and is reborn every day anew, his
"salvation" is recurrent with each day's sun. Doubtless the
consummate hallucination with which humanity has deluded itself is the almost
universal religious belief that at death we step from this life into a state of
bliss that lasts forever. Mystical philosophy goes beyond that in folly by
asserting that we can step into this eternal bliss without waiting for death,
or evolution.
Sense and sanity breathe in several
paragraphs in Radhakrishnan's analysis. We find him saying that the world
expression brings out the rational nature of the whole. The soul's commitment
to the flesh provides the mechanism by which spirit works ahead to higher
state. What appears to be the iron law of dead mechanical necessity in the
world of nature is the modality through which spirit will master the proper
terms for the expression of its freedom. Freedom and karma are two aspects of
the same reality. Karma is the modality of freedom. If God is immanent in the
cosmos, his spirit resides in the machine. This would warrant one in saying,
then, that the forms of ancient animism in religion were grounded in essential
truth, however far they may have swung away into distortions.
Again the Hindu thinker writes that
with the finite we can never reach the absolute, however near we may come to
it. Pro-
252
gress is a ceaseless growth or
perpetual approximation. Samsara, or experience, he says, is intended to
discipline the spirit. And he asserts that the Upanishads protest against the
transfer of creative functions to mere matter if the latter is considered
divorced from God. If matter is God's mode of expression, it can not be
divorced from him. We are immersed in reality at all times; but it is reality for
us, and its measure and quality depend upon the degree to which we can
respond to its impacts by the quality of our apperceptions. Philosophic truth
and understanding do not come to the feebleminded. Error is just the intrusion
of inexperience and the imperfection of the instrument into the soul's grasp of
the reality that confronts it. Radhakrishnan utters a great truth needing
constant reiteration: "we must be saved from the malformation and
miscarriage of our minds." It is to be noted that he does not say we are
to be saved from the function of our minds, but from its imperfect functioning.
And he is vigorous in saying that our minds rebel against the drive of dogmatic
religion to smother the intellectual curiosity of people. Systematic religion
has ever feared, and not entirely without some justification, the granting of
full privilege to curiosity. It is all too likely to cause followers to roam
too far afield or even to desert the fold. A free mind in religion becomes
impatient with all formal authority and revolts against discipline and
conformity. And again the philosopher testifies to the untenability of the
teaching that the human spirit can retire into the contentless void declared to
lie open to man's experience in ecstasies far above the world consciousness. A
pure spirit, an abstract absolute, with nothing to struggle against, an
actionless spiritual energy, a motionless being, all this is mere nothing. And
he declares Jainism to be following a mirage in predicating such a possibility.
The two opposing tendencies, spiritual and material, are in no sense (except in
poetic dramatism) hostile. They are well adapted to each other, to promote the
progress of the whole. The struggle of opposites to effect a happy balance is
present in all grades of reality.
He gives forceful expression to the
evil consequences of irrational thought. And it is a mighty pronouncement he
makes in saying that "anarchy in thought leads to anarchy in morals."
If we have not recognized this as having terrific practical consequences, it is
time we do. Much damage, he adds, has been done to
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the moral nature of man by a
superstitious belief in God. Many "good" men do devil's work, in the
persuasion that it is divinely sanctioned. It is difficult to overestimate the
gross bulk of evil caused in the world by the confusion of morality and
religion,--one might add also, from the confusion of Scriptural allegory with
alleged history and literal factuality; from the worship of a symbol instead of
the idea conception it represents.
There is nothing beside the
universal Self, the Atman. Yet, the discussion unfolds, there are the many. And
the verdict is that if there is nothing but the One, and yet there are the
many, logic would have to say that the One must be the many, and the many the
One. There are many parts and organs to a human being; yet he is the one being.
The universe is both a unit being differentiated and distributed into many
portions, and many things organically unified in one composite being.
Again the confusion into which the
debate has been thrown by the ill-defined use of the terms real and unreal
becomes evident when the philosopher plunges into the dilemma which arises when
we say that the so-called philosophical unreal world of becoming is actual; "though
we do not know why." Obviously it is actual because it is the immediate
form of reality to which we are equipped to respond and to cognize. It is
actual because it registers its reality to us.
Again there is a plunge into the
sophistry of technical epistemology when he says that there is a real, but we
can not know it. And he adds that what we do know is not real. Its reality
breaks down and disappears under test. A strange statement is that which
declares that thought gives us knowledge of reality; but it is knowledge, not
reality. We must call in something beyond thought and knowledge to give us
reality. "If we want to grasp the real we must give up thought."
The tragic aspect of this is, as
this work has adduced eminent authority in corroboration, that if we give up
thought we have nothing left, at least nothing of higher capability, to give us
reality. If we have not done astute thinking we will never develop the great
and luminous faculty of intuition. Thought is the root and stem of intuition, and
if the root and stem are neglected, how can the flower come forth? We have no
right to give up thought, for that is to condemn us to perpetual ignorance; and
in fact there is no way
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by which it can be given up, except
by our inhibiting it by trance, or by self-destruction, both of which methods
the Hindu philosophy offers us as practical procedures. It is admitted that
"what thought reveals is not opposed to reality, but is revelatory of
it." If the full implications of this admission are followed out, it
condemns the mystical theses of Hindu thought and concedes the case for the
reality that those theses deny. If thought gives us knowledge of reality, even
if not reality itself, and what it reveals is not opposed to reality, we ought
to conclude that thought is performing a great and beneficent function and
cease disparaging it in comparison to intuition. It registers no failure of
fucntion on the part of thought to say that it gives us knowledge of reality
but not reality itself. We have no right to expect it to do things out of its
province, and its function is well performed when it gives us knowledge.
Evidently Hindu philosophy holds that knowledge of a thing is not the limit of
our possibility of acquaintance with it; that beyond knowing it we must feel
it, intuit it, experience it in some sort or way of realizing it that thought
fails to give us. It thinks that knowledge does not bring us into sufficiently
close contact with reality. Some "higher" faculty is necessary for
that.
But knowledge gained by thought
performs the inestimable service of enabling us to relate ourselves to
experience by acquainting us with the actualities and the laws of life, so that
we may harmoniously conform our lives to the order of which we are a part, and
non-conformity with which subjects us to pain and wretchedness. It enables us
to relate ourselves to the actual order with such complete affinity that the
utmost of the beneficence which that ordained relationship can impart to us to
expand our being is appropriable by us. By means of effectuating this
harmonious relationship, thought puts us in such favorable position that the
other "higher" modes of realizing the beatitude of life are rendered
possible and operable, certainly more than if knowledge were lacking. In fact
thought gives us knowledge of how to establish the possible conditions for this
higher apprehension.
It is asking more of knowledge than
is legitimate if we expect it to yield us the whole experience of perfect
being. But surely it is the chief agent for giving us ever fuller realization
of the heights and depths of real being possible to us. We could never attain
these fuller realizations without it.
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Radhakrishnan has the fairness to
say that the Upanishads do not maintain that intellect is a useless guide.
(Many Hindu cult philosophers do.) The account of reality given by it is not
false. (Many claim the opposite.) It fails, he says, only when it attempts to
grasp the real in its fulness. Everywhere else it succeeds. What the intellect
investigates is not the unreal, though neither is it the absolutely real. The
real and the passing are complementary elements based on the one identity.
Intellect need not be negated, but has only to be supplemented. And at last he
says that a philosophy based on intuition is not necessarily opposed to reason
and understanding. And finally the great admission is scored, when he says that
the results of mystic intuition require to be subjected to logical analysis in
the end.
"And it is only by this process
of mutual cooperation and suplementation that one can live a sober life. The
results of intellect will be dull and empty, unfinished and fragmentary,
without the help of intuition; while intuitional insight will be blind and
dumb, dark and strange, without intellectual confirmation . . . . Only be the
comradeship of scientific knowledge and intuitive experience can we grow into
true insight."
So it leaks out finally that in the
realm of the predicated absolute perfection of life, high above the intellect,
this "intuitional insight will be blind and dumb, dark and strange,"
and must in the end subject its findings and envisionings to the court of the
intellect for judgment as to their true worth and validity. All this is what we
are building up our brief to venture and declare on our own unrecognized
authority. Now Radhakrishnan has said it for us. But can we not see--can the
mystics not see--that if this is so, it disproves and overthrows every claim,
every position which the negative philosophy has supported in asserting that
the great consummative power of intuition can only perform its high function,
in fact can only come to the perfection of its function when the intellect has
been "killed out"?
This upper region into which
mystical prepossessions invite us it not necessarily blind, dumb, dark
and strange; but it will be prevented from being such only by our training it
to distinguish between fact and fancy in the selection of its images by the
sharp and subtle acuity of the intellect. If we crush and stamp out this power
of the mind at the misguided behest of fanciful theory, we
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destroy the instrument which life,
at the cost of an immense timeborn development, has provided for us to make
unerring choice of the ideal forms that are to fill the upper vacuum. As
Radhakrishnan has said, the ideal of the intellect is to achieve the unity that
comprehends both subject and object. And from the knowledge that the mind is
able to grasp as it interrelates the elements of truth, come the proper images
and conceptions with which the blank field of the superconscious can be
populated.
And always the catastrophic blunder
that mystical persuasion has committed lies in its assertion that the unifying
power of the intellect can construct these forms of absolute truth in complete
disseverance from the world of objectivity. Perhaps it is truer to say that it
presupposes the self-discovery of these forms of absolute verity without the
use of the intellect at all. Mystical ideology would first dispossess and
dismantle the intellect; then wait for the intuition to speak its piece,
already prepared from the foundation of the creation. The nub of the refutation
of this theorization is the revelation that the so-called intuition is nothing
separate, above, independently transcending the intellect, but the flashing
insight of the intellect itself in its surpassing genius. So far from being a
faculty that supervenes in the high sphere of consciousness when the intellect
is suppressed, it can never supervene at all if the intellect has not first
worked in the area of experience and out of the exercise evolved the
near-magical power to act with incredible immediacy and accuracy in swift
cognitions. Without the long slow training of the intellect in preparatory
stages there never would be any intuition.
A point of much importance is
Radhakrishnan's statement that in the view of Indian thinkers knowledge and
will are so closely related that no distinction is made between them, so that
in fact they are both expressed by the one term cetana. If this is true,
then the rank and function of the intellect are irrefutably established as of
supreme importance, in no wise meriting belittlement. People act, and must do
so, on what they know or fail to know. One wills to act because one knows
something, knows how the will can have its desired object. To give a man
knowledge is to give him the reasons for acting in specific ways. As fast as it
is gained, knowledge lifts its possessor from fitful, distracted, wildly-aimed
action, to action directed toward the high ends of beauty, truth and goodness.
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Without knowledge there could be no
integration of life at all, no coordination of activity toward designed ends.
Without knowledge the individual human would drift as aimlessly as a chip on
the current, swept along or stopped by the accidents of the movement. And
mystical presumption urges that to consummate our blessedness we must discard
all knowledge, inhibit the use of the mind by which we obtain knowledge and
enter what is asserted to be the temple of absolute being in a state of
complete mental nakedness. If it be in any wise true that, as said, when
knowledge is attained suffering is at an end, intellect, the builder of
knowledge, must be recognized as the veritable savior and redeemer of the race.
To deny it is crass ineptitude, a fatal blight on human understanding.
The peculiar argument advanced by
idealist theory that the intellect may give us knowledge of reality, but fail
to give us reality itself, must be further examined. For it poses in strong
light the necessity of determining the relation of the two things, knowledge
and reality. Is reality to be achieved by the human by coming to know it, or by
some other mode? Can we have reality without knowing it? Is there a cognitive
power transcending knowing, by which we apprehend reality? All the predications
of Hindu philosophy seem to rest on the affirmation of the existence of a power
or faculty transcending the knowing function of the mind. But, as Radhakrishnan
has said, such a superior faculty could work to no advantage for humanity if
its phenomena were not integrated with, or supplemented by the knowing function
of the intellect. These observations give this transcendency of the higher
power a transcendency that after all does not transcend. It still must call
upon the lower. For the final effectuality of its operation it must depend upon
the intellect.
Over such a question as that of
determining whether--or how--the human being may experience reality without the
intellectual procedure of knowing it, the mind developed in mortals at
the present stage can involve itself in practically inextricable entanglement.
After all it is probably a matter of nothing more than the more precise
delimitation of the meaning of words. The word mind, for instance may be
used to cover in its sense all that the mystics designate with their word intuition
and the claimed states of transcendent consciousness. Likewise it would
have to be determined whether the term knowledge can be used to cover
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not only mental apprehensions, but
all states of conscious awareness of experience declared to transcend the
purely mental function. And again, how shall reality itself be defined?
Mystic theory asserts that the experience coming through sense, emotion and
mind (the latter in its very narrowly delimited sense) do not possess reality,
but that the experiences ensuing upon the crushing out of these three modes
does possess reality. But never have the proponents of this position laid down
any code of determinants by which one can know which of his experiences is real
and which is not. Is such a code possible? From every appreciable point of
view, it would seem not.
And again all debate hinges on the
distinction, which seems never to be sharply delineated, between the reality of
objects, or the universe itself, and the reality of the consciousness that
apprehends the objects and the universe. Kant very deftly wove the two together
in one formula: the reality of the object is a determination in the
consciousness that surveys the object. He interwove the objective with the
subjective. But often the debate uses the term reality with reference to
the one side, excluding the other, and loosely confuses the issue. With
pertinence to the issues of the controversy as they are raised in Hindu
philosophy, since the debate hinges on the reality or non-reality of man's subjective
states almost entirely, it seems that it should be possible to agree that
any conscious experience is a real experience, or real as an experience. As
intimated earlier, for a thing to be at all, it must be real, whether as object
or experience. But the mystics insist in identifying reality with only the
one--and they call it the final--grade of consciousness, namely the totally
unconditioned.
Some portions of Albert Schweitzer's
Indian Thought and Its Development are pertinent here and call for
comment. He writes (p. 38) that
"One must never forget that the
Brahmanic doctrine is not to be understood as if union with the Brahman can
result from reflection by the light of reason. Many passages of the Upanishads
indeed give this impression. But the real belief of the Brahmans is that man
does not attain to union with the Brahman by means of any achievement of his
natural power of gaining knowledge, but solely by quitting the world of the
senses in a state of ecstasy and thus learning the reality of pure Being."
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Here is indication, if it were
needed, that we have not been wrestling with a straw man labeled Hindu
philosophy, but with the real postulates of that philosophy. We have not
caricatured it to render it more easily vulnerable. Here is the evidence that
Indian systems disdain all man's "natural power of gaining knowledge."
Earthly knowledge will in no wise equip man to take conscoius stock of ultimate
reality; on the contrary it will stand as a barrier between him and reality. It
must therefore be swept out of the way.
What Schweitzer writes (p. 37)
follows as natural corollary to the passage above:
"So in the Upanishads we find a
whole series of saying in which complete renunciation of the world is
recommended and praised as the only sensible attitude. The true Brahmins . . .
. were those who desired neither sons nor property, but were only concerned
with the Eternal and had therefore given up everything and gone forth into the
world as beggars . . . . But to become one with the Brahman not only demands
renunciation of the world, but in addition the concentration of the spirit on the
Supra-sensuous. Detailed instructions on how to practice this concentration are
given in the Upanishads. The repetition of the sacred sound 'Om' plays a great
part in such exercises in self-submergence. What is aimed at in this Yoga
practice is ecstasy, the physical experience of union with pure Being."
True to the analysis we find here
the doctrine of the renunciation of the world and a focusing of the whole of
consciousness upon a state of inner intentness that shuts out the world
altogether. But of particular interest and significance for the purposes of the
present critique is what is said as to the repetition of the sacred sound
"Om" to induce "self-submergence." Mr. A. P. Sinnett, a
college-mate of the poet Alfred Tennyson at Cambridge University, says that
Tennyson declared he had been able to hypnotize himself by repeating his own
name a certain number of times. A point which this essay has been at pains to
demonstrate and which must be regarded as of no slight moment, is the
establishment of the preposterous miscalculation in the mystic's rash
identification of the human states superinduced by trance with "union with
the absolute," "union with Brahman," and similar extravagant
hyperbolic assumptions thus expressed. It ought long ago to have been seen--and
to give us sanity on such things is one of the great
260
purposes of the evolutionary
development of the intellect--that if the total purpose, end, supreme and final
consummation of absolute being is a matter that can be achieved by
insignificant creatures such as humans on a minor planet by a bit of hypnotic
manipulation of consciousness, a mere jugglery of psychic legerdemain, we face
an anticlimax so staggering in its defeat of our faith and our hopes of real
grandeur of being that we must regard the whole enterprise of religion as an
insensate hoax, delusion and folly. We make of the grand apotheosis of humanity
a mountebank's trick. It is at any rate by now apparent, in consequence of the
phenomena of hypnotism, that an immense volume of religious experience that has
been extolled as the human's near attainment of equality with God, has been
nothing but the unanalyzed exploitation of hysteria and hypnotism.
Consummations that must be worthy of man's age-long expectations must be the
product of ages of growth, not the result of weird and bizarre toying with the
magic of a moment. But India cares not for the idea or the process of growth,
condemns the nature in whose body spiritual growth must have its roots and
utterly disregards the need of time for the perfection of conscious life. India
disagrees flatly with all that the processes of life manifest as to cosmic
purpose and the means and methods of its universal achievement, and hotly seeks
some way of obliterating it all from consciousness. Since it finds itself
thwarted in its effort to obliterate the external world, it flies to the only
possible alternative,--the destructoin of consciousness. Albert Schweitzer
summarizes the whole history of Indian philosophy in the statement that the one
dominant motive of that philosophy has been "world and life
negation," which, however, finding itself baffled both physically and
logically at nearly every turn, has had to make concessions to "world and
life affirmation." And even when it is forced to concede a modicum of
value to life, it does so on the premises that such value is realized in the
education of the ego as to the practical modes of escaping life's burden in the
speediest possible manner. It will be for the judgment of historians and the
verdict of humanity to discover how extensively and disastrously this
preachment of life negation has blighted the happiness of the human race.
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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-
263
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
264
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,
270
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,
271
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
272
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-
273
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-
274
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."
275
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
276
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
277
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."
279
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
280
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
281
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-
282
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-
283
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
284
"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.
285
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
286
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-
287
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."
289
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.
290
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-
291
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
292
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:
293
"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
294
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,
295
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."
296
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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