Life divine

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THE LIFE DIVINE

THE LIFE
DIVINE

SRI AUROBINDO

THE SRI AUROBINDO LIBRARY INC. NEW YORK, N. Y.

Copyright, 1949, 1951
BY THE SRI AUROBINDO LIBRARY, INC.

Copyright in Canada, 1949, 1951
BY THE SRI AUROBINDO LIBRARY, INC.

All Rights Reserved
under International and Pan-American Copyright
conventions. This book, or parts thereof, may not
be reproduced in any form without the written
permission of The Sri Aurobindo Library, Inc.,
35 East 64th Street, New York City.

PubHshed by THE SRI AUROBINDO LIBRARY, 35 East 64th Street,
New York City

Second Printing

Manufactured in the United States of America by
The Colonial Press Inc., Clinton, Mass.

CONTENTS

BOOK ONE

Chapter Page

I. The Human Aspiration 3

II. The Two Negations:

The Materialist Denial 8

III. The Two Negations:

The Refusal of the Ascetic 18

IV. Reality Omnipresent 26

V. The Destiny of the Individual 34

VI. Man in the Universe 42

VII. The Ego and the Dualities 50

VIII. The Methods of Vedantic Knowledge ... 58

IX. The Pure Existent 68

X. Conscious Force 76

XI. Delight of Existence: The Problem ... 86

XII. Delight of Existence: The Solution ... 94

XIII. The Divine Maya 105

XIV. The Supermind AS Creator 114

XV. The Supreme Truth-Consciousness . . . . 123

XVI. The Triple Status of Supermind 132

XVII. The Divine Soul . 140

XVIII. Mind and Supermind . . 148

XIX. Life 161

XX. Death, Desire and Incapacity 174

XXI. The Ascent of Life 183

XXII. The Problem of Life 191

XXIII. The Double Soul in IVIan 201

XXIV. Matter 213

vii

Vlll

CONTENTS

Chapter Page

XXV. The Knot of Matter 221

XXVI. The Ascending Series of Substance . . . . 232

XXVII, The Sevenfold Chord of Being 241

XXVIII. SuPERMiND, Mind and the Overmind Maya . . 249

BOOK TWO— PART I

I. Indeterminates, Cosmic Determinations and the

Indeterminable 269

II. Brahman, Purusha, Ishwara — Maya, Prakriti,

Shakti 292

III. The Eternal and the Individual 330

IV. The Divine and the Undivine 350

V. The Cosmic Illusion:

Mind, Dream and Hallucination 371

VI. Reality and the Cosmic Illusion 394

VII. The Knowledge and the Ignorance . . . .431

VIII. Memory, Self-Consciousness and the Ignorance 448

IX. Memory, Ego and Self-Experience 457

X. Knowledge by Identity and Separative Knowl-
edge 469

XL The Boundaries of the Ignorance 494

XII. The Origin of the Ignorance 505

XIII. Exclusive Concentration of Consciousness-Force

AND THE Ignorance 518

XIV. The Origin and Remedy of Falsehood, Error,

Wrong and Evil 531

BOOK TWO— PART II

XV. Reality and the Integral Knowledge

565

XVI. The Integral Knowledge and the Aim of Life:

Four Theories of Existence 586

CONTENTS

Chapter

xvri.

XVIII.

XIX.

XX.

XXI.

XXII.

XXIII.

XXIV.

XXV.

XXVI.

XXVII.

XXVIII.

IX

Page

The Progress to Knowledge — God, Man and Na-
ture 609

The Evolutionary Process — Ascent and Integra-
tion 626

Out of the Sevenfold Ignorance Towards the

Sevenfold Knowledge 647'

The Philosophy of Rebirth 661

The Order of the Worlds 682

Rebirth and Other Worlds ; Karma, the Soul and

Immortality 706

Man and the Evolution 734

The Evolution of the Spiritual Man . . . . 755

The Triple Transformation 791

The Ascent towards Supermind 817

The Gnostic Being 856

The Divine Life 900

Index 949

Book One

OMNIPRESENT REALITY

AND

THE UNIVERSE

CHAPTER I

THE HUMAN ASPIRATION

She follows to the goal of those that are passmg on be-
yond, she is the first in the eternal succession of the dawns
that are coming, — Usha widens bringing out that which
lives, awakening someone who was dead. . . . What is her
scope when she harmonises with the dawns that shone out
before and those that now must shine? She desires the an-
cient mornings and fulfils their light; projecting forwards
her illumination she enters into communion with the rest
that are to come.

Kutsa Angirasa — Rig Veda}

Threefold are those supreme births of this divine force
that is in the world, they are true, they are desirable; he
moves there wide-overt within the Infinite and shines pure,
luminous and fulfilling. . . . That which is immortal in
mortals and possessed of the truth, is a god and established
inwardly as an energy working out in our divine powers.
. . . Become high-uplifted, O Strength, pierce all veils, man-
ifest in us the things of the Godhead.

Vamadeva — Rig Veda^

THE earliest preoccupation of man in his awakened thoughts and, as
it seems, his inevitable and ultimate preoccupation, — for it sur-
vives the longest periods of scepticism and returns after every banish-
ment,— is also the highest which his thought can envisage. It manifests
itself in the divination of Godhead, the impulse towards perfection, the
search after pure Truth and unmixed Bliss, the sense of a secret immor-
tality. The ancient dawns of human knowledge have left us their wit-
ness to this constant aspiration; today we see a humanity satiated but
not satisfied by victorious analysis of the externalities of Nature pre-
paring to return to its primeval longings. The earliest formula of Wis-
dom promises to be its last, — God, Light, Freedom, Immortality.

These persistent ideals of the race are at once the contradiction
of its normal experience and the affirmation of higher and deeper experi-
ences which are abnormal to humanity and onl}^ to be attained, in their

^I. 113. 8, 10. nv. I. 7; IV. 2. i; IV. 4. s.

4 THE LIFE DIVINE

organised entirety, by a revolutionary individual effort or an evolution-
ary general progression. To know, possess and be the divine being in
an animal and egoistic consciousness, to convert our twilit or obscure
physical mentality into the plenary supramental illumination, to build
peace and a self-existent bliss where there is only a stress of transitory
satisfactions besieged by physical pain and emotional suffering, to
establish an infinite freedom in a world which presents itself as a group
of mechanical necessities, to discover and realise the immortal life in a
body subjected to death and constant mutation, — this is offered to us
as the manifestation of God in Matter and the goal of Nature in her
terrestrial evolution. To the ordinary material intellect which takes its
present organisation of consciousness for the limit of its possibilities,
the direct contradiction of the unrealised ideals with the realised fact is
a final argument against their validity. But if we take a more deliberate
view of the world's workings, that direct opposition appears rather as
a part of Nature's profoundest method and the seal of her completest
sanction.

For all problems of existence are essentially problems of harmony.
They arise from the perception of an unsolved discord and the instinct
of an undiscovered agreement or unity. To rest content with an un-
solved discord is possible for the practical and more animal part of
man, but impossible for his fully awakened mind, and usually even his
practical parts only escape from the general necessity either by shut-
ting out the problem or by accepting a rough, utilitarian and unillumined
compromise. For essentially, all Nature seeks a harmony, life and
matter in their own sphere as much as mind in the arrangement of its
perceptions. The greater the apparent disorder of the materials offered
or the apparent disparateness, even to irreconcilable opposition, of the
elements that have to be utilised, the stronger is the spur, and it drives
towards a more subtle and puissant order than can normally be the
result of a less difficult endeavour. The accordance of active Life with
a material of form in which the condition of activity itself seems to be
inertia, is one problem of opposites that Nature has solved and seeks
always to solve better with greater complexities; for its perfect solu-
tion would be the material immortality of a fully organised mind-sup-
porting animal body. The accordance of conscious mind and conscious
will with a form and a life in themselves not overtly self-conscious and
capable at best of a mechanical or subconscious will is another prob-
lem of opposites in which she has produced astonishing results and aims

THE HUMAN ASPIRATION 5

always at higher marvels; for there her ultimate miracle would be an
animal consciousness no longer seeking but possessed of Truth and Light,
with the practical omnipotence which would result from the possession
of a direct and perfected knowledge. Not only, then, is the upward im-
pulse of man towards the accordance of yet higher opposites rational in
itself, but it is the only logical completion of a rule and an effort that
seem to be a fundamental method of Nature and the very sense of her
universal strivings.

We speak of the evolution of Life in Matter, the evolution of Mind
in Matter ; but evolution is a word which merely states the phenomenon
without explaining it. For there seems to be no reason why Life should
evolve out of material elements or Mind out of living form, unless we
accept the Vedantic solution that Life is already involved in Matter
and Mind in Life because in essence Matter is a form of veiled Life,
Life a form of veiled Consciousness. And then there seems to be little
objection to a farther step in the series and the admission that mental
consciousness may itself be only a form and a veil of higher states which
are beyond Mind. In that case, the unconquerable impulse of man
towards God, Light, Bliss, Freedom, Immortality presents itself in its
right place in the chain as simply the imperative impulse by which
Nature is seeking to evolve beyond Mind, and appears to be as natural,
true and just as the impulse towards Life which she has planted in
forms of Matter or the impulse towards Mind which she has planted in
certain forms of Life. As there, so here, the impulse exists more or less
obscurely in her different vessels with an ever-ascending series in the
power of its will-to-be; as there, so here, it is gradually evolving and
bound fully to evolve the necessary organs and faculties. As the impulse
towards Mind ranges from the more sensitive reactions of Life in the
metal and the plant up to its full organisation in man, so in man himself
there is the same ascending series, the preparation, if nothing more, of
a higher and divine life. The animal is a living laboratory in which
Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be a
thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious co-
operation she wills to work out the superman, the god. Or shall we not
say, rather, to manifest God? For if evolution is the progressive man-
ifestation by Nature of that which slept or worked in her, involved, it
is also the overt realisation of that which she secretly is. We cannot,
then, bid her pause at a given stage of her evolution, nor have we the
right to condemn with the religionist as perverse and presumptuous or

6 THE LIFE DIVINE

with the rationalist as a disease or hallucination any intention she may
evince or effort she may make to go beyond. If it be true that Spirit is
involved in Matter and apparent Nature is secret God, then the mani-
festation of the divine in himself and the realisation of God within and
without are the highest and most legitimate aim possible to man upon
earth.

Thus the eternal paradox and eternal truth of a divine life in an
animal body, an immortal aspiration or reality inhabiting a mortal tene-
ment, a single and universal consciousness representing itself in limited
minds and divided egos, a transcendent, indefinable, timeless and space-
less Being who alone renders time and space and cosmos possible, and
in all these the higher truth realisable by the lower term, justify them-
selves to the deliberate reason as well as to the persistent instinct or
intuition of mankind. Attempts are sometimes made to have done
finally with questionings which have so often been declared insoluble
by logical thought and to persuade men to limit their mental activities
to the practical and immediate problems of their material existence in
the universe; but such evasions are never permanent in their effect.
Mankind returns from them with a more vehement impulse of inquiry
or a more violent hunger for an immediate solution. By that hunger
mysticism profits and new religions arise to replace the old that have
been destroyed or stripped of significance by a scepticism which itself
could not satisfy because, although its business was inquiry, it was
unwilling sufficiently to inquire. The attempt to deny or stifle a truth
because it is yet obscure in its outward workings and too often repre-
sented by obscurantist superstition or a crude faith, is itself a kind of
obscurantism. The will to escape from a cosmic necessity because it is
arduous, difficult to justify by immediate tangible results, slow in regu-
lating its operations, must turn out eventually to have been no accept-
ance of the truth of Nature but a revolt against the secret, mightier
will of the great Mother. It is better and more rational to accept what
she will not allow us as a race to reject and lift it from the sphere of
blind instinct, obscure intuition and random aspiration into the light of
reason and an instructed and consciously self-guiding will. And if there
is any higher light of illumined intuition or self-revealing truth which
is now in man either obstructed and inoperative or works with inter-
mittent glancings as if from behind a veil or with occasional displays as
of the northern lights in our material skies, then there also we need not

THE HUMAN ASPIRATION 7

fear to aspire. For it is likely that such is the next higher state of
consciousness of which Mind is only a form and veil, and through the
splendours of that light may lie the path of our progressive self-enlarge-
ment into whatever highest state is humanity's ultimate resting-place.

CHAPTER II

THE TWO NEGATIONS

The Materialist Denial

He energised conscious-force (in the austerity of
thought) and came to the knowledge that Matter is the
Brahman. For from Matter all existences are born; born,
by Matter they increase and enter into Matter in their
passing hence. Then he went to Varuna, his father, and
said, "Lord, teach me of the Brahman." But he said to him:
"Energise (again) the conscious-energy in thee; for the En-
ergy is Brahman."

Taittiriya Vpanishad}

THE affirmation of a divine life upon earth and an immortal sense
in mortal existence can have no base unless we recognise not only
eternal Spirit as the inhabitant of this bodily mansion, the wearer of
this mutable robe, but accept Matter of which it is made, as a fit and
noble material out of which He weaves constantly His garbs, builds
recurrently t*he unending series of His mansions.

Nor is this, even, enough to guard us against a recoil from life in
the body unless, with the Upanishads, perceiving behind their appear-
ances the identity in essence of these two extreme terms of existence,
we are able to say in the very language of those ancient writings, "Mat-
ter also is Brahman," and to give its full value to the vigorous figure by
which the physical universe is described as the external body of the
Divine Being. Nor, — so far divided apparently are these two extreme
terms, — is that identification convincing to the rational intellect if we
refuse to recognise a series of ascending terms (Life, Mind, Supermind
and the grades that link Mind to Supermind) between Spirit and Mat-
ter. Otherwise the two must appear as irreconcilable opponents bound
together in an unhappy wedlock and their divorce the one reasonable
solution. To identify them, to represent each in the terms of the other,

*III. 1. 2.

THE TWO NEGATIONS 9

becomes an artificial creation of Thought opposed to the logic of facts
and possible only by an irrational mysticism.

If we assert only piire Spirit and a mechanical unintelligent sub-
stance or energy, calling one God or Soul and the other Nature, the
inevitable end will be that we shall either deny God or else turn from
Nature. For both Thought and Life, a choice then becomes imperative.
Thought comes to deny the one as an illusion of the imagination or the
other as an illusion of the senses; Life comes to fix on the immaterial
and flee from itself in a disgust or a self-forgetting ecstasy, or else to
deny its own immortality and take its orientation away from God and
towards the animal. Purusha and Prakriti, the passively luminous Soul
of the Sankhyas and their mechanically active Energy, have nothing in
common, not even their opposite modes of inertia; their antinomies can
only be resolved by the cessation of the inertly driven Activity into
the immutable Repose upon which it has been casting in vain the sterile
procession of its images. Shankara's wordless, inactive Self and his
Maya of many names and forms are equally disparate and irreconcil-
able entities; their rigid antagonism can terminate only by the disso-
lution of the multitudinous illusion into the sole Truth of an eternal
Silence.

The materialist has an easier field; it is possible for him by deny-
ing Spirit to arrive at a more readily convincing simplicity of statement,
a real Monism, the Monism of Matter or else of Force. But in this
rigidity of statement it is impossible for him to persist permanently.
He too ends by positing an unknowable as inert, as remote from the
known universe as the passive Purusha or the silent Atman. It serves
no purpose but to put off by a vague concession the inexorable demands
of Thought or to stand as an excuse for refusing to extend the limits of
inquiry.

Therefore, in these barren contradictions the human mind cannot
rest satisfied. It must seek always a complete affirmation ; it can find it
only by a luminous reconciHation. To reach that reconciliation it must
traverse the degrees which our inner consciousness imposes on us and,
whether by objective method of analysis applied to Life and j\Iind as to
Matter or by subjective synthesis and illumination, arrive at the repose
of the ultimate unity without denying the energy of the expressive
multiplicity. Only in such a complete and catholic affirmation can all
the multiform and apparently contradictory data of existence be har-
monised and the manifold conflicting forces which govern our thought

10 THE LIFE DIVINE

and life discover the central Truth which they are here to symbolise
and variously fulfil. Then only can our Thought, having attained a true
centre, ceasing to wander in circles, work like the Brahman of the
Upanishad, fixed and stable even in its play and its worldwide coursing,
and our life, knowing its aim, serve it with a serene and settled joy and
light as well as with a rhythmically discursive energy.

But when that rhythm has once been disturbed, it is necessary
and helpful that man should test separately, in their extreme assertion,
each of the two great opposites. It is the mind's natural way of return-
ing more perfectly to the affirmation it has lost. On the road it may
attempt to rest in the intervening degrees, reducing all things into the
terms of an original Life-Energy or of sensation or of Ideas; but these
exclusive solutions have always an air of unreality. They may satisfy
for a time the logical reason which deals only with pure ideas, but they
cannot satisfy the mind's sense of actuality. For the mind knows that
there is something behind itself which is not the Idea; it knows, on the
other hand, that there is something within itself which is more than the
vital Breath. Either Spirit or Matter can give it for a time some sense
of ultimate reality; not so any of the principles that intervene. It must,
therefore, go to the two extremes before it can return fruitfully upon
the whole. For by its very nature, served by a sense that can perceive
with distinctness only the parts of existence and by a speech that, also,
can achieve distinctness only when it carefully divides and limits, the
intellect is driven, having before it this multiplicity of elemental prin-
ciples, to seek unity by reducing all ruthlessly to the terms of one. It
attempts practically, in order to assert this one, to get rid of the others.
To perceive the real source of their identity without this exclusive
process, it must either have overleaped itself or must have completed
the circuit only to find that all equally reduce themselves to That
which escapes definition or description and is yet not only real but attain-
able. By whatever road we may travel. That is always the end at which
we arrive and we can only escape it by refusing to complete the journey.

It is therefore of good augury that after many experiments and
verbal solutions we should now find ourselves standing today in the
presence of the two that have alone borne for long the most rigorous tests
of experience, the two extremes, and that at the end of the experience
both should have come to a result which the universal instinct in man-
kind, that veiled judge, sentinel and representative of the universal
Spirit of Truth, refuses to accept as right or as satisfying. In Europe

THE TWO NEGATIONS II

and in India, respectively, the negation of the materialist and the re-
fusal of the ascetic have sought to assert themselves as the sole truth
and to dominate the conception of Life. In India, if the result has been
a great heaping up of the treasures of the Spirit, — or of some of them, —
it has also been a great bankruptcy of Life; in Europe, the fullness of
riches and the triumphant mastery of this world's powers and pos-
sessions have progressed towards an equal bankruptcy in the things of
the Spirit. Nor has the intellect, which sought the solution of all prob-
lems in the one term of Matter, found satisfaction in the answer that
it has received.

Therefore the time grows ripe and the tendency of the world moves
towards a new and comprehensive affirmation in thought and in inner
and outer experience and to its corollary, a new and rich self-fulfilment
in an integral human existence for the individual and for the race.

From the difference in the relations of Spirit and Matter to the
Unknowable which they both represent, there arises also a difference of
effectiveness in the material and the spiritual negations. The denial of
the materialist, although more insistent and immediately successful,
more facile in its appeal to the generality of mankind, is yet less endur-
ing, less effective finally than the absorbing and perilous refusal of the
ascetic. For it carries within itself its own cure. Its most powerful ele-
ment is the Agnosticism which, admitting the Unknowable behind all
manifestation, extends the limits of the unknowable until it comprehends
all that is merely unknown. Its premise is that the physical senses are
our sole means of Knowledge and that Reason, therefore, even in its
most extended and vigorous flights, cannot escape beyond their domain ;
it must deal always and solely with the facts which they provide or sug-
gest; and the suggestions themselves must always be kept tied to their
origins; we cannot go beyond, we cannot use them as a bridge leading
us into a domain where more powerful and less limited faculties come
into play and another kind of inquiry has to be instituted.

A premise so arbitrary pronounces on itself its own sentence of
insufficiency. It can only be maintained by ignoring or explaining away
all that vast field of evidence and experience which contradicts it, dem^-
ing or disparaging noble and useful faculties, active consciously or ob-
scurely or at worst latent in all human beings, and refusing to investigate
supraphysical phenomena except as manifested in relation to matter and
its movements and conceived as a subordinate activity of material forces.
As soon as we begin to investigate the operations of mind and of super-

12 THE LIFE DIVINE

mind, in themselves and without the prejudgment that is determined
from the beginning to see in them only a subordinate term of Matter, we
come into contact with a mass of phenomena which escape entirely from
the rigid hold, the limiting dogmatism of the materialist formula. And
the moment we recognise, as our enlarging experience compels us to
recognise, that there are in the universe knowable realities beyond the
range of the senses and in man powers and faculties which determine
rather than are determined by the material organs through which they
hold themselves in touch with the world of the senses, — that outer shell
of our true and complete existence, — the premise of materialistic Agnos-
ticism disappears. We are ready for a large statement and an ever-
developing inquiry.

But, first, it is well that we should recognise the enormous, the indis-
pensable utility of the very brief period of rationalistic Materialism
through which humanity has been passing. For that vast field of evidence
and experience which now begins to reopen its gates to us, can only be
safely entered when the intellect has been severely trained to a clear aus-
terity; seized on by unripe minds, it lends itself to the most perilous
distortions and misleading imaginations and actually in the past en-
crusted a real nucleus of truth with such an accretion of perverting
superstitions and irrationalising dogmas that all advance in true knowl-
edge was rendered impossible. It became necessary for a time to make
a clean sweep at once of the truth and its disguise in order that the road
might be clear for a new departure and a surer advance. The rational-
istic tendency of Materialism has done mankind this great service.

For the faculties that transcend the senses, by the very fact of their
being immeshed in Matter, missioned to work in a physical body, put in
harness to draw one car along with the emotional desires and nervous
impulses, are exposed to a mixed functioning in which they are in danger
of illuminating confusion rather than clarifying truth. Especially is this
mixed functioning dangerous when men with unchastened minds and un-
purified sensibilities attempt to rise into the higher domains of spiritual
experience. In what regions of unsubstantial cloud and semi-brilliant
fog or a murk visited by flashes which blind more than they enlighten,
do they not lose themselves by that rash and premature adventure! An
adventure necessary indeed in the way in which Nature chooses to effect
her advance, — for she amuses herself as she works, — but still, for the
Reason, rash and premature.

It is necessary, therefore, that advancing Knowledge should base

THE TWO NEGATIONS I3

herself on a clear, pure and disciplined intellect. It is necessary, too, that
she should correct her errors sometimes by a return to the restraint of
sensible fact, the concrete realities of the physical world. The touch of
Earth is always reinvigorating to the son of Earth, even when he seeks a
supraphysical Knowledge. It may even be said that the supraphysical
can only be really mastered in its fullness — to its heights we can always
reach — when we keep our feet firmly on the physical. "Earth is His
footing," ^ says the Upanishad whenever it images the Self that manifests
in the universe. And it is certainly the fact that the wider we extend and
the surer we make our knowledge of the physical world, the wider and
surer becomes our foundation for the higher knowledge, even for the
highest, even for the Brahmavidya.

In emerging, therefore, out of the materialistic period of human
Knowledge we must be careful that we do not rashly condemn what we
are leaving or throw away even one tittle of its gains, before we can
summon perceptions and powers that are well grasped and secure, to
occupy their place. Rather we shall observe with respect and wonder the
work that Atheism has done for the Divine and admire the services that
Agnosticism has rendered in preparing the illimitable increase of knowl-
edge. In our world error is continually the handmaid and pathfinder of
Truth ; for error is really a half-truth that stumbles because of its limi-
tations; often it is Truth that wears a disguise in order to arrive unob-
served near to its goal. Well, if it could always be^ as it has been in the
great period we are leaving, the faithful handmaid, severe, conscientious,
clean-handed, luminous within its limits, a half-truth and not a reckless
and presumptuous aberration.

A certain kind of Agnosticism is the final truth of all knowledge.
For when we come to the end of whatever path, the universe appears
as only a symbol or an appearance of an unknowable Reality which
translates itself here into different systems of values, physical values,
vital and sensational values, intellectual, ideal and spiritual values. The
more That becomes real to us, the more it is seen to be always beyond
defining thought and beyond formulating expression. "Mind attains not
there, nor speech."^ And yet as it is possible to exaggerate, with the
Illusionists, the unreality of the appearance, so it is possible to exagger-
ate the unknowableness of the Unknowable. When we speak of It as

^"Padhhydm prthvi." — Mundaka Upanishad. II. i. 4.

"Prthivi pdjasyam." — Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. I. i. i.
' Kena Upanishad. I. 3.

14 THE LIFE DIVINE

unknowable, we mean, really, that It escapes the grasp of our thought
and speech, instruments which proceed always by the sense of difference
and express by the way of definition; but if not knowable by thought,
It is attainable by a supreme effort of consciousness. There is even a
kind of Knowledge which is one with Identity and by which, in a sense,
It can be known. Certainly, that Knowledge cannot be reproduced
successfully in the terms of thought and speech, but when we have
attained to it, the result is a revaluation of That in the symbols of our
cosmic consciousness, not only in one but in all the ranges of symbols,
which results in a revolution of our internal being and, through the
internal, of our external life. Moreover, there is also a kind of Knowl-
edge through which That does reveal itself by all these names and
forms of phenomenal existence which to the ordinary intelligence only
conceal It. It is this higher but not highest process of Knowledge to
which we can attain by passing the limits of the materialistic formula
and scrutinising Life, Mind and Supermind in the phenomena that are
characteristic of them and not merely in those subordinate movements
by which they link themselves to Matter.

The Unknown is not the Unknowable;^ it need not remain the
unknown for us, unless we choose ignorance or persist in our first limi-
tations. For to all things that are not unknowable, all things in the
universe, there correspond in that universe faculties which can take
cognisance of them, and in man, the microcosm, these faculties are
always existent and at a certain stage capable of development. We may
choose not to develop them; where they are partially developed, we
may discourage and impose on them a kind of atrophy. But, funda-
mentally, all possible knowledge is knowledge within the power of
humanity. And since in man there is the inalienable impulse of Nature
towards self-realisation, no struggle of the intellect to limit the action
of our capacities within a determined area can for ever prevail. When
we have proved Matter and realised its secret capacities, the very knowl-
edge which has found its convenience in that temporary limitation,
must cry to us, like the Vedic Restrainers, ''Forth now and push forward
also in other fields." ^

If modern Materialism were simply an unintelligent acquiescence
in the material life, the advance might be indefinitely delayed. But
since its very soul is the search for Knowledge, it will be unable to cry

* Other is That than the Known ; also it is above the Unknown. — Kena
Upanishad. I. 3. ^ Rig Veda. I. 4. 5.

THE TWO NEGATIONS 1 5

a halt; as it reaches the barriers of sense-knowledge and of the reason-
ing from sense-knowledge, its very rush will carry it beyond and the
rapidity and sureness with which it has embraced the visible universe
is only an earnest of the energy and success which we may hope to see
repeated in the conquest of what lies beyond, once the stride is taken
that crosses the barrier. We see already that advance in its obscure
beginnings.

Not only in the one final conception, but in the great line of its
general results Knowledge, by whatever path it is followed, tends to
become one. Nothing can be more remarkable and suggestive than the
extent to which modern Science confirms in the domain of Matter the
conceptions and even the very formulae of language which were arrived
at, by a very different method, in the Vedanta, — the original Vedanta,
not of the schools of metaphysical philosophy, but of the Upanishads.
And these, on the other hand, often reveal their full significance, their
richer contents only when they are viewed in the new light shed by the
discoveries of modern Science, — for instance, that Vedantic expression
which describes things in the Cosmos as one seed arranged by the
universal Energy in multitudinous forms.^ Significant, especially, is the
drive of Science towards a Monism which is consistent with multi-
plicity, towards the Vedic idea of the one essence with its many
becomings. Even if the dualistic appearance of Matter and Force be
insisted on, it does not really stand in the way of this Monism. For it
will be evident that essential Matter is a thing non-existent to the senses
and only, like the Pradhana of the Sankhyas, a conceptual form of sub-
stance; and in fact the point is increasingly reached where only an
arbitrary distinction in thought divides form of substance from form of
energy.

Matter expresses itself eventually as a formulation of some un-
known Force. Life, too, that yet unfathomed mystery, begins to re-
veal itself as an obscure energy of sensibility imprisoned in its material
formulation; and when the dividing ignorance is cured which gives us
the sense of a gulf between Life and Matter, it is difficult to suppose
that Mind, Life and Matter will be found to be anything else than one
Energy triply formulated, the triple world of the Vedic seers. Nor will
the conception then be able to endure of a brute material Force as the
mother of Mind. The Energy that creates the world can be nothing
^ Swetaswatara Upanishad. VI. 12.

1 6 THE LIFE DIVINE

else than a Will, and Will is only consciousness applying itself to a
work and a result.

What is that work and result, if not a self-involution of Conscious-
ness in form and a self-evolution out of form so as to actualise some
mighty possibility in the universe which it has created? And what is
its will in Man if not a will to unending Life, to unbounded Knowledge,
to unfettered Power? Science itself begins to dream of the physical con-
quest of death, expresses an insatiable thirst for knowledge, is working
out something like a terrestrial omnipotence for humanity. Space and
Time are contracting to the vanishing-point in its works, and it strives
in a hundred ways to make man the master of circumstance and so
lighten the fetters of causality. The idea of limit, of the impossible
begins to grow a little shadowy and it appears instead that whatever
man constantly wills, he must in the end be able to do; for the con-
sciousness in the race eventually finds the means. It is not in the indi-
vidual that this omnipotence expresses itself, but the collective Will
of mankind that works out with the individual as a means. And yet
when we look more deeply, it is not any conscious Will of the col-
lectivity, but a superconscious Might that uses the individual as a
centre and means, the collectivity as a condition and field. What is this
but the God in man, the infinite Identity, the multitudinous Unity, the
Omniscient, the Omnipotent, who having made man in His own image,
with the ego as a centre of working, with the race, the collective Nara-
yana,^ the visvamdnava^ as the mould and circumscription, seeks to ex-
press in them some image of the unity, omniscience, omnipotence which
are the self-conception of the Divine? "That which is immortal in
mortals is a God and established inwardly as an energy working out in
our divine powers." ^ It is this vast cosmic impulse which the modern
world, without quite knowing its own aim, yet serves in all its activities
and labours subconsciously to fulfil.

But there is always a limit and an encumbrance, — the limit of the
material field in the Knowledge, the encumbrance of the material ma-
chinery in the Power. But here also the latest trend is highly significant
of a freer future. As the outposts of scientific Knowledge come more
and more to be set on the borders that divide the material from the
immaterial, so also the highest achievements of practical Science are

'A name of Vishnu, who, as the God in man, lives constantly associated in a
dual unity with Nara, the human being.

®The universal man. ^ Rig Veda. IV. 2. i.

THE TWO NEGATIONS 1 7

those which tend to simplify and reduce to the vanishing-point the
machinery by which the greatest effects are produced. Wireless teleg-
raphy is Nature's exterior sign and pretext for a new orientation. The
sensible physical means for the intermediate transmission of the physi-
cal force is removed; it is only preserved at the points of impulsion and
reception. Eventually even these must disappear; for when the laws
and forces of the supraphysical are studied with the right starting-point,
the means will infallibly be found for Mind directly to seize on the
physical energy and speed it accurately upon its errand. There, once
we bring ourselves to recognise it, lie the gates that open upon the
enormous vistas of the future.

Yet even if we had full knowledge and control of the worlds im-
mediately above Matter, there would still be a limitation and still a
beyond. The last knot of our bondage is at that point where the exter-
nal draws into oneness with the internal, the machinery of ego itself
becomes subtilised to the vanishing-point and the law of our action is
at last unity embracing and possessing multiplicity and no longer, as
now, multiplicity struggling towards some figure of unity. There is the
central throne of cosmic Knowledge looking out on her widest domin-
ion; there the empire of oneself with the empire of one's world ;^^
there the life^^ in the eternally consummate Being and the realisation
of His divine nature^^ in our human existence.

'^^ Svdrdjya and Sdmrdjya, the double aim proposed to itself by the positive
Yoga of the ancients.

" Sdlokya-mukti, liberation by conscious existence in one world of being with
the Divine.

^^ Sddharmya-mukii, hberation by assumption of the Divine Nature.

CHAPTER III

THE TWO NEGATIONS

The Refusal of the Ascetic

All this is the Brahman; this Self is the Brahman and
the Self is fourfold.

Beyond relation, featureless, unthinkable, in which all
is still.

Mandukya Upanishad.^

A ND still there is a beyond.
-/^ For on the other side of the cosmic consciousness there is, at-
tainable to us, a consciousness yet more transcendent, — transcendent
not only of the ego, but of the Cosmos itself, — against which the uni-
verse seems to stand out like a petty picture against an immeasurable
background. That supports the universal activity, — or perhaps only tol-
erates it; It embraces Life with Its vastness, — or else rejects it from Its
infinitude.

If the materialist is justified from his point of view in insisting on
Matter as reality, the relative world as the sole thing of which we can
in some sort be sure and the Beyond as wholly unknowable, if not
indeed non-existent, a dream of the mind, an abstraction of Thought
divorcing itself from reality, so also is the Sannyasin, enamoured of
that Beyond, justified from his point of view in insisting on pure Spirit
as the reality, the one thing free from change, birth, death, and the
relative as a creation of the mind and the senses, a dream, an ab-
straction in the contrary sense of Mentality withdrawing from the pure
and eternal Knowledge.

What justification, of logic or of experience, can be asserted in sup-
port of the one extreme which cannot be met by an equally cogent logic
and an equally valid experience at the other end? The world of Matter
is affirmed by the experience of the physical senses which, because they

^Verses 2, 7.

18

THE TWO NEGATIONS 1 9

are themselves unable to perceive anything immaterial or not organised
as gross Matter, would persuade us that the suprasensible is the unreal.
This vulgar or rustic error of our corporeal organs does not gain in
validity by being promoted into the domain of philosophical reason-
ing. Obviously, their pretension is unfounded. Even in the world of
Matter there are existences of which the physical senses are incapable
of taking cognisance. Yet the denial of the suprasensible as neces-
sarily an illusion or a hallucination depends on this constant sensuous
association of the real with the materially perceptible, which is itself
a hallucination. Assuming throughout what it seeks to establish, it has
the vice of the argument in a circle and can have no validity for an
impartial reasoning.

Not only are there physical realities which are suprasensible, but,
if evidence and experience are at all a test of truth, there are also
senses which are supraphysical ^ and can not only take cognisance cf
the realities of the material world without the aid of the corporeal sense-
organs, but can bring us into contact with other realities, supraphysical
and belonging to another world — included, that is to say, in an organi-
sation of conscious experiences that are dependent on some other princi-
ple than the gross Matter of which our suns and earths seem to be
made.

Constantly asserted by human experience and belief since the ori-
gins of thought, this truth, now that the necessity of an exclusive pre-
occupation with the secrets of the material world no longer exists, begins
to be justified by new-born forms of scientific research. The increasing
evidences, of which only the most obvious and outward are established
under the name of telepathy with its cognate phenomena, can not long
be resisted except by minds shut up in the brilliant shell of the past, by
intellects limited in spite of their acuteness through the limitation of
their field of experience and inquiry, or by those who confuse enlighten-
ment and reason with the faithful repetition of the formulas left to us
from a bygone century and the jealous conservation of dead or dying
intellectual dogmas.

It is true that the glimpse of supraphysical realities acquired by
methodical research has been imperfect and is yet ill-affirmed; for the
methods used are still crude and defective. But these rediscovered
subtle senses have at least been found to be true witnesses to physical

^ Suksma indriya, subtle organs, existing in the subtle body {suksma deha),
and the means of subtle vision and experience {siiksnia drsti).

20 THE LIFE DIVINE

facts beyond the range of the corporeal organs. There is no justifi-
cation, then, for scouting them as false witnesses when they testify to
supraphysical facts beyond the domain of the material organisation of
consciousness. Like all evidence, like the evidence of the physical senses
themselves, their testimony has to be controlled, scrutinised and ar-
ranged by the reason, rightly translated and rightly related, and their
field, laws and processes determined. But the truth of great ranges
of experience whose objects exist in a more subtle substance and are
perceived by more subtle instruments than those of gross physical
Matter, claims in the end the same validity as the truth of the material
universe. The worlds beyond exist: they have their universal rhythm,
their grand lines and formations, their self-existent laws and mighty
energies, their just and luminous means of knowledge. And here on our
physical existence and in our physical body they exercise their influ-
ences; here also they organise their means of manifestation and com-
mission their messengers and their witnesses.

But the worlds are only frames for our experience, the senses only
instruments of experience and conveniences. Consciousness is the great
underlying fact, the universal witness for whom the world is a field, the
senses instruments. To that witness the worlds and their objects appeal
for their reality and for the one world or the many, for the physical
equally with the supraphysical we have no other evidence that they
exist. It has been argued that this is no relation peculiar to the con-
stitution of humanity and its outlook upon an objective world, but the
very nature of existence itself; all phenomenal existence consists of an
observing consciousness and an active objectivity, and the Action can-
not proceed without the Witness because the universe exists only in or
for the consciousness that observes and has no independent reality. It
has been argued in reply that the material universe enjoys an eternal
self-existence; it was here before life and mind made their appearance:
it will survive after they have disappeared and no longer trouble with
their transient strivings and limited thoughts the eternal and inconscient
rhythm of the suns. The difference, so metaphysical in appearance, is
yet of the utmost practical import, for it determines the whole outlook
of man upon life, the goal that he shall assign for his efforts and the
field in which he shall circumscribe his energies. For it raises the ques-
tion of the reality of cosmic existence and, more important still, the
question of the value of human life.

THE TWO NEGATIONS 21

If we push the materialist conclusion far enough, we arrive at an
insignificance and unreality in the life of the individual and the race
which leaves us, logically, the option between either a feverish effort
of the individual to snatch what he may from a transient existence, to
''live his life," as it is said, or a dispassionate and objectless service of
the race and the individual, knowing well that the latter is a transient
fiction of the nervous mentality and the former only a little more long-
lived collective form of the same regular nervous spasm of Matter. We
work or enjoy under the impulsion of a material energy which deceives
us with the brief delusion of life or with the nobler delusion of an ethical
aim and a mental consummation. Materialism like spiritual 3,Ionism
arrives at a Maya that is and yet is not, — is, for it is present and com-
pelling, is not, for it is phenomenal and transitory in its works. At the
other end, if we stress too much the unreality of the objective world, we
arrive by a different road at similar but still more trenchant conclusions,
— the fictitious character of the individual ego, the unreality and pur-
poselessness of human existence, the return into the Non-Being or the
relationless Absolute as the sole rational escape from the meaningless
tangle of phenomenal life.

And yet the question cannot be solved by logic arguing on the data
of our ordinary physical existence; for in those data there is always a
hiatus of experience which renders all argument inconclusive. We have,
normally, neither any definitive experience of a cosmic mind or super-
mind not bound up with the life of the individual body, nor, on the
other hand, any firm limit of experience which would justify us in sup-
posing that our subjective self really depends upon the physical frame
and can neither survive it nor enlarge itself beyond the individual body.
Only by an extension of the field of our consciousness or an unhoped-for
increase in our instruments of knowledge can the ancient quarrel be
decided.

The extension of our consciousness, to be satisfying, must neces-
sarily be an inner enlargement from the individual into the cosmic exist-
ence. For the Witness, if he exists, is not the individual embodied mind
born in the world, but that cosmic Consciousness embracing the universe
and appearing as an immanent Intelligence in all its works to which
either world subsists eternally and really as Its own active existence or
else from which it is born and into which it disappears by an act of
knowledge or by an act of conscious power. Not organised mind, but

22 THE LIFE DIVINE

that which, calm and eternal, broods equally in the living earth and the
living human body and to which mind and senses are dispensable instru-
ments, is the Witness of cosmic existence and its Lord.

The possibility of a cosmic consciousness in humanity is coming
slowly to be admitted in modern Psychology, like the possibility of more
elastic instruments of knowledge, although still classified, even when
its value and power are admitted, as a hallucination. In the psychology
of the East it has always been recognised as a reality and the aim
of our subjective progress. The essence of the passage over to this goal
is the exceeding of the limits imposed on us by the ego-sense and at
least a partaking, at most an identification with the self-knowledge
which broods secret in all life and in all that seems to us inanimate.

Entering into that Consciousness, we may continue to dwell, like
It, upon universal existence. Then we become aware — for all our terms
of consciousness and even our sensational experience begin to change,
— of Matter as one existence and of bodies as its formations in which
the one existence separates itself physically in the single body from
itself in all others and again by physical means establishes commu-
nication between these multitudinous points of its being. Mind we
experience similarly, and Life also, as the same existence one in its mul-
tiplicity, separating and reuniting itself in each domain by means appro-
priate to that movement. And, if we choose, we can proceed farther
and, after passing through many linking stages, become aware of a super-
mind whose universal operation is the key to all lesser activities. Nor
do we become merely conscious of this cosmic existence, but likev/ise
conscious in it, receiving it in sensation, but also entering into it in
awareness. In it we live as we lived before in the ego-sense, active, more
and more in contact, even unified more and more with other minds,
other lives, other bodies than the organism we call ourselves, producing
effects not only on our own moral and mental being and on the sub-
jective being of others, but even on the physical world and its events by
means nearer to the divine than those possible to our egoistic capacity.

Real then to the man who has had contact with it or lives in it, is
this cosmic consciousness, with a greater than the physical reality; real
in itself, real in its effects and works. And as it is thus real to the world
which is its own total expression, so is the world real to it; but not as an
independent existence. For in that higher and less hampered experience
we perceive that consciousness and being are not different from each
other, but all being is a supreme consciousness, all consciousness is self-

THE TWO NEGATIONS 2$

existence, eternal in itself, real in its works and neither a dream nor an
evolution. The world is real precisely because it exists only in conscious-
ness; for it is a Conscious Energy one with Being that creates it. It is
the existence of material form in its own right apart from the self-
illumined energy which assumes the form, that would be a contradiction
of the truth of things, a phantasmagoria, a nightmare, an impossible
falsehood.

But this conscious Being which is the truth of the infinite super-
mind, is more than the universe and lives independently in Its own inex-
pressible infinity as well as in the cosmic harmonies. World lives by
That; That does not live by the world. And as we can enter into the
cosmic consciousness and be one with all cosmic existence, so we can
enter into the world-transcending consciousness and become superior to
all cosmic existence. And then arises the question which first occurred
to us, whether this transcendence is necessarily also a rejection. What
relation has this universe to the Beyond?

For at the gates of the Transcendent stands that mere and perfect
Spirit described in the Upanishads, luminous, pure, sustaining the world
but inactive in it, without sinews of energy, without flaw of duaHty,
without scar of division, unique, identical, free from all appearance of
relation and of multiplicity, — the pure Self of the Adwaitins,^ the in-
active Brahman, the transcendent Silence. And the mind when it passes
those gates suddenly, without intermediate transitions, receives a sense
of the unreality of the world and the sole reality of the Silence which
is one of the most powerful and convincing experiences of which the
human mind is capable. Here, in the perception of this pure Self or of
the Non-Being behind it, we have the starting-point for a second nega-
tion,— ^parallel at the other pole to the materialistic, but more complete,
more final, more perilous in its effects on the individuals or collectivities
that hear its potent call to the wilderness, — the refusal of the ascetic.

It is this revolt of Spirit against Matter that for two thousand
years, since Buddhism disturbed the balance of the old Aryan world,
has dominated increasingly the Indian mind. Not that the sense of the
cosmic illusion is the whole of Indian thought; there are other philo-
sophical statements, other religious aspirations. Nor has some attempt
at an adjustment between the two terms been wanting even from the
most extreme philosophies. But all have lived in the shadow of the great
Refusal and the final end of life for all is the garb of the ascetic. The

*The Vedantic Monists.

24 THE LIFE DIVINE

general conception of existence has been permeated with the Buddhistic
theory of the chain of Karma and with the consequent antinomy of
bondage and liberation, bondage by birth, liberation by cessation from
birth. Therefore all voices are joined in one great consensus that not in
this world of the dualities can there be our kingdom of heaven, but
beyond, whether in the joys of the eternal Vrindavan* or the high be-
atitude of Brahmaloka^ beyond all manifestations in some ineffable
Nirvana^ or where all separate experience is lost in the featureless unity
of the indefinable Existence. And through many centuries a great army
of shining witnesses, saints and teachers, names sacred to Indian mem-
ory and dominant in Indian imagination, have borne always the same
witness and swelled always the same lofty and distant appeal, — renun-
ciation the sole path of knowledge, acceptation of physical life the act
of the ignorant, cessation from birth the right use of human birth, the
call of the Spirit, the recoil from Matter.

For an age out of sympathy with the ascetic spirit — and through-
out all the rest of the world the hour of the Anchorite may seem to have
passed or to be passing — it is easy to attribute this great trend to the
failing of vital energy in an ancient race tired out by its burden, its once
vast share in the common advance, exhausted by its many-sided con-
tribution to the sum of human effort and human knowledge. But we
have seen that it corresponds to a truth of existence, a state of conscious
realisation which stands at the very summit of our possibility. In prac-
tice also the ascetic spirit is an indispensable element in human per-
fection and even its separate affirmation cannot be avoided so long as
the race has not at the other end liberated its intellect and its vital
habits from subjection to an always insistent animalism.

We seek indeed a larger and completer affirmation. We perceive
that in the Indian ascetic ideal the great Vedantic formula, ''One with-
out a second," has not been read sufficiently in the light of that other
formula equally imperative, "All this is the Brahman." The passion-
ate aspiration of man upward to the Divine has not been sufficiently re-
lated to the descending movement of the Divine leaning downward to
embrace eternally Its manifestation. Its meaning in Matter has not
been so well understood as Its truth in the Spirit. The reality which the

* Goloka, the Vaishnava heaven of eternal Beauty and Bliss.

^The highest state of pure existence, consciousness and beatitude attainable by
the soul without complete extinction in the Indefinable.

'Extinction, not necessarily of all being, but of being as we know it; ex-
tinction of ego, desire and egoistic action and mentality.

THE TWO NEGATIONS 25

Sannyasin seeks has been grasped in its full height, but not, as by the
ancient Vedantins, in its full extent and comprehensiveness. But in our
completer affirmation we must not minimise the part of the pure spiritual
impulse. As we have seen how greatly Materialism has served the ends
of the Divine, so we must acknowledge the still greater service rendered
by Asceticism to Life. We shall preserve the truths of material Science
and its real utilities in the final harmony, even if many or even if all of
its existing forms have to be broken or left aside. An even greater
scruple of right preservation must guide us in our dealing with the
legacy, however actually diminished or depreciated, of the Aryan past.

CHAPTER IV

REALITY OMNIPRESENT

If one knows Him as Brahman the Non-Being, he be-
comes merely the non-existent. If one knows that Brahman
Is, then is he known as the real in existence.

Taittiriya Upanishad}

SINCE, then, we admit both the claim of the pure Spirit to manifest
in us its absolute freedom and the claim of universal Matter to be
the mould and condition of our manifestation, we have to find a truth
that can entirely reconcile these antagonists and can give to both their
due portion in Life and their due justification in Thought, amercing
neither of its rights, denying in neither the sovereign truth from which
even its errors, even the exclusiveness of its exaggerations draw so con-
stant a strength. For wherever there is an extreme statement that makes
such a powerful appeal to the human mind, we may be sure that we
are standing in the presence of no mere error, superstition or halluci-
nation, but of some sovereign fact disguised which demands our fealty
and will avenge itself if denied or excluded. Herein lies the difficulty
of a satisfying solution and the source of that lack of finality which
pursues all mere compromises between Spirit and Matter. A compro-
mise is a bargain, a transaction of interests between two conflicting
powers; it is not a true reconciliation. True reconciliation proceeds
always by a mutual comprehension leading to some sort of intimate
oneness. It is therefore through the utmost possible unification of Spirit
and Matter that we shall best arrive at their reconciling truth and so
at some strongest foundation for a reconciling practice in the inner life
of the individual and his outer existence.

We have found already in the cosmic consciousness a meeting-
place where Matter becomes real to Spirit, Spirit becomes real to
Matter. For in the cosmic consciousness Mind and Life are intermedi-
aries and no longer, as they seem in the ordinary egoistic mentality,
agents of separation, fomenters of an artificial quarrel between the

' II. 6.

26

REALITY OMNIPRESENT 27

positive and negative principles of the same unknowable Reality, At-
taining to the cosmic consciousness Mind, illuminated by a knowledge
that perceives at once the truth of Unity and the truth of Multiplicity
and seizes on the formulae of their interaction, finds its own discords at
once explained and reconciled by the divine Harmony; satisfied, it con-
sents to become the agent of that supreme union between God and Life
towards which we tend. Matter reveals itself to the realising thought
and to the subtilised senses as the figure and body of Spirit, — Spirit in
its self-formative extension. Spirit reveals itself through the same con-
senting agents as the soul, the truth, the essence of Matter. Both admit
and confess each other as divine, real and essentially one. Mind and
Life are disclosed in that illumination as at once figures and instruments
of the supreme Conscious Being by which It extends and houses Itself
in material form and in that form unveils Itself to Its multiple centres
of consciousness. Mind attains its self-fulfilment when it becomes a
pure mirror of the Truth of Being which expresses itself in the symbols
of the universe; Life, when it consciously lends its energies to the per-
fect self-figuration of the Divine in ever-new forms and activities of the
universal existence.

In the light of this conception we can perceive the possibility of a
divine life for man in the world which will at once justify Science by
disclosing a living sense and intelligible aim for the cosmic and the
terrestrial evolution and realise by the transfiguration of the human
soul into the divine the great ideal dream of all high religions.

But what then of that silent Self, inactive, pure, self-existent, self-
enjoying, which presented itself to us as the abiding justification of the
ascetic? Here also harmony and not irreconcilable opposition must be
the illuminative truth. The silent and the active Brahman are not dif-
ferent, opposite and irreconcilable entities, the one denying, the other
affirming a cosmic illusion; they are one Brahman in two aspects, posi-
tive and negative, and each is necessary to the other. It is out of this
Silence that the Word which creates the worlds for ever proceeds; for
the Word expresses that which is self-hidden in the Silence. It is an
eternal passivity which makes possible the perfect freedom and omnip-
otence of an eternal divine activity in innumerable cosmic systems. For
the becomings of that activity derive their energies and their illimitable
potency of variation and harmony from the impartial support of the
immutable Being, its consent to this infinite fecundity of its own dy-
namic Nature.

28 THE LIFE DIVINE

Man, too, becomes perfect only when he has found within himself
that absolute calm and passivity of the Brahman and supports by it
with the same divine tolerance and the same divine bliss a free and
inexhaustible activity. Those who have thus possessed the calm within
can perceive always welling out from its silence the perennial supply of
the energies that work in the universe. It is not, therefore, the truth of
the Silence to say that it is in its nature a rejection of the cosmic activity.
The apparent incompatibility of the two states is an error of the limited
Mind which, accustomed to trenchant oppositions of affirmation and
denial and passing suddenly from one pole to the other, is unable to
conceive of a comprehensive consciousness vast and strong enough to
include both in a simultaneous embrace. The Silence does not reject
the world; it sustains it. Or rather it supports with an equal impar-
tiality the activity and the withdrawal from the activity and approves
also the reconciliation by which the soul remains free and still even
while it lends itself to all action.

But, still, there is the absolute withdrawal, there is the Non-Being.
Out of the Non-Being, says the ancient Scripture, Being appeared.^
Then into the Non-Being it must surely sink again. If the infinite
indiscriminate Existence permits all possibilities of discrimination and
multiple realisation, does not the Non-Being at least, as primal state and
sole constant reality, negate and reject all possibility of a real universe?
The Nihil of certain Buddhist schools would then be the true ascetic
solution; the Self, like the ego, would be only an ideative formation by
an illusory phenomenal consciousness.

But again we find that we are being misled by words, deceived by
the trenchant oppositions of our limited mentality with its fond reliance
on verbal distinctions as if they perfectly represented ultimate truths
and its rendering of our supramental experiences in the sense of those
intolerant distinctions. Non-Being is only a word. When we examine
the fact it represents, we can no longer be sure that absolute non-ex-
istence has any better chance than the infinite Self of being more than
an ideative formation of the mind. We really mean by this Nothing
something beyond the last term to which we can reduce our purest con-
ception and our most abstract or subtle experience of actual being as
we know or conceive it while in this universe. This Nothing then is

''In the beginning all this was the Non-Being. It was thence that Being was
born. — Taittiriya Upanishad. II. 7.

REALITY OMNIPRESENT 29

merely a something beyond positive conception. We erect a fiction of
nothingness in order to overpass, by the method of total exclusion, all
that we can know and consciously are. Actually when we examine closely
the Nihil of certain philosophies, we begin to perceive that it is a zero
which is All or an indefinable Infinite which appears to the mind a
blank, because mind grasps only finite constructions, but is in fact the
only true Existence.^

And when we say that out of Non-Being Being appeared, we per-
ceive that we are speaking in terms of Time about that which is beyond
Time. For what was that portentous date in the history of eternal
Nothing on which Being was born out of it or when will come that other
date equally formidable on which an unreal all will relapse into the per-
petual void? Sat and Asat, if they have both to be affirmed, must be
conceived as if they obtained simultaneously. They permit each other
even though they refuse to mingle. Both, since we must speak in terms
of Time, are eternal. And who shall persuade eternal Being that it does
not really exist and only eternal Non-Being is? In such a negation of
all experience how shall we find the solution that explains all experience?

Pure Being is the affirmation by the Unknowable of Itself as the
free base of all cosmic existence. We give the name of Non-Being to a
contrary affirmation of Its freedom from all cosmic existence, — free-
dom, that is to say, from all positive terms of actual existence which
consciousness in the universe can formulate to itself, even from the
most abstract, even from the most transcendent. It does not deny them
as a real expression of Itself, but It denies Its limitation by all expres-
sion or any expression whatsoever. The Non-Being permits the Being,
even as the Silence permits the Activity. By this simultaneous negation
and affirmation, not mutually destructive, but complementary to each
other like all contraries, the simultaneous awareness of conscious Self-
being as a reality and the Unknowable beyond as the same Reality
becomes realisable to the awakened human soul. Thus was it possible
for the Buddha to attain the state of Nirvana and yet act puissantly

^Another Upanishad rejects the birth of being out of Non-Being as an im-
possibility; Being, it says, can only be born from Being. But if we take Non-
Being in the sense, not of an inexistent Nihil but of an x which exceeds our idea
or experience of existence, — a sense applicable to the Absolute Brahman of the
Adwaita as well as the Void or Zero of the Buddhists, the impossibility disappears,
for That may very well be the source of being, whether by a conceptual or forma-
tive Maya or a manifestation or creation out of itself.

30 THE LIFE DIVINE

in the world, impersonal in his inner consciousness, in his action the
most powerful personality that we know of as having lived and pro-
duced results upon earth.

When we ponder on these things, we begin to perceive how feeble
in their self-assertive violence and how confusing in their misleading
distinctness are the words that we use. We begin also to perceive that
the limitations we impose on the Brahman arise from a narrowness of ex-
perience in the individual mind which concentrates itself on one aspect
of the Unknowable and proceeds forthwith to deny or disparage all the
rest. We tend always to translate too rigidly what we can conceive or
know of the Absolute into the terms of our own particular relativity.
We affirm the One and Identical by passionately discriminating and
asserting the egoism of our own opinions and partial experiences against
the opinions and partial experiences of others. It is wiser to wait, to
learn, to grow, and, since we are obliged for the sake of our self-perfection
to speak of these things which no human speech can express, to search
for the widest, the most flexible, the most catholic affirmation possible
and found on it the largest and most comprehensive harmony.

We recognise, then, that it is possible for the consciousness in the
individual to enter into a state in which relative existence appears to be
dissolved and even Self seems to be an inadequate conception. It is
possible to pass into a Silence beyond the Silence. But this is not the
whole of our ultimate experience, nor the single and all-excluding truth.
For we find that this Nirvana, this self-extinction, while it gives an ab-
solute peace and freedom to the soul within is yet consistent in practice
with a desireless but effective action without. This possibility of an en-
tire motionless impersonality and void Calm within doing outwardly
the works of the eternal verities, Love, Truth and Righteousness, was
perhaps the real gist of the Buddha's teaching, — this superiority to ego
and to the chain of personal workings and to the identification with
mutable form and idea, not the petty ideal of an escape from the trouble
and suffering of the physical birth. In any case, as the perfect man
would combine in himself the silence and the activity, so also would the
completely conscious soul reach back to the absolute freedom of the Non-
Being without therefore losing its hold on Existence and the universe. It
would thus reproduce in itself perpetually the eternal miracle of the
divine Existence, in the universe, yet always beyond it and even, as it
were, beyond itself. The opposite experience could only be a concen-
tration of mentality in the individual upon Non-existence with the re-

REALITY OMNIPRESENT 3 1

suit of an oblivion and personal withdrawal from a cosmic activity still
and always proceeding in the consciousness of the Eternal Being.

Thus, after reconciling Spirit and Matter in the cosmic conscious-
ness, we perceive the reconciliation, in the transcendental consciousness,
of the final assertion of all and its negation. We discover that all affirma-
tions are assertions of status or activity in the Unknowable ; all the cor-
responding negations are assertions of Its freedom both from and in that
status or activity. The Unknowable is Something to us supreme, wonder-
ful and ineffable which continually formulates Itself to our consciousness
and continually escapes from the formulation It has made. This it does
not as some malicious spirit or freakish magician leading us from false-
hood to greater falsehood and so to a final negation of all things, but as
even here the Wise beyond our wisdom guiding us from reality to ever
profounder and vaster reality until we find the profoundest and vastest of
which we are capable. An omnipresent reality is the Brahman, not an
omnipresent cause of persistent illusions.

If we thus accept a positive basis for our harmony — and on what
other can harmony be founded? — the various conceptual formulations
of the Unknowable, each of them representing a truth beyond concep-
tion, must be understood as far as possible in their relation to each other
and in their effect upon life, not separately, not exclusively, not so af-
firmed as to destroy or unduly diminish all other affirmations. The real
Monism, the true Adwaita, is that which admits all things as the one
Brahman and does not seek to bisect Its existence into two incompat-
ible entities, an eternal Truth and an eternal Falsehood, Brahman and
not-Brahman, Self and not-Self, a real Self and an unreal, yet perpetual
Maya. If it be true that the Self alone exists, it must be also true that
all is the Self. And if this Self, God or Brahman is no helpless state, no
bounded power, no limited personality, but the self-conscient All, there
must be some good and inherent reason in it for the manifestation, to
discover which we must proceed on the hypothesis of some potency,
some wisdom, some truth of being in all that is manifested. The discord
and apparent evil of the world must in their sphere be admitted, but not
accepted as our conquerors. The deepest instinct of humanity seeks
always and seeks wisely wisdom as the last word of the universal mani-
festation, not an eternal mockery and illusion, — a secret and finally tri-
umphant good, not an all-creative and invincible evil, — an ultimate vic-
tory and fulfilment, not the disappointed recoil of the soul from its great
adventure.

32 THE LIFE DIVINE

For we cannot suppose that the sole Entity is compelled by some-
thing outside or other than Itself, since no such thing exists. Nor can we
suppose that It submits unwillingly to something partial within Itself
which is hostile to its whole Being, denied by It and yet too strong for
It; for this would be only to erect in other language the same contradic-
tion of an All and something other than the All. Even if we say that
the universe exists merely because the Self in its absolute impartiality
tolerates all things alike, viewing with indifference all actualities and all
possibilities, yet is there something that wills the manifestation and sup-
ports it, and this cannot be something other than the All. Brahman is in-
divisible in all things and whatever is willed in the world has been ulti-
mately willed by the Brahman. It is only our relative consciousness,
alarmed or baffled by the phenomena of evil, ignorance and pain in the
cosmos, that seeks to deliver the Brahman from responsibility for Itself
and its workings by erecting some opposite principle, Maya or Mara,
conscious Devil or self-existent principle of evil. There is one Lord and
Self and the many are only His representations and becomings.

If then the world is a dream or an illusion or a mistake, it is a dream
originated and willed by the Self in its totality and not only originated
and willed, but supported and perpetually entertained. Morever, it is
a dream existing in a Reality and the stuff of which it is made is that
Reality, for Brahman must be the material of the world as well as its
base and continent. If the gold of which the vessel is made is real, how
shall we suppose that the vessel itself is a mirage? We see that these
words, dream, illusion, are tricks of speech, habits of our relative con-
sciousness; they represent a certain truth, even a great truth, but they
also misrepresent it. Just as Non-Being turns out to be other than mere
nullity, so the cosmic Dream turns out to be other than mere phantasm
and hallucination of the mind. Phenomenon is not phantasm; phenom-
enon is the substantial form of a Truth.

We start, then, with the conception of an omnipresent Reality of
which neither the Non-Being at the one end nor the universe at the
other are negations that annul; they are rather different states of the
Reality, obverse and reverse affirmations. The highest experience of this
Reality in the universe shows it to be not only a conscious Existence,
but a supreme Intelligence and Force and a self-existent Bliss; and be-
yond the universe it is still some other unknowable existence, some utter
and ineffable Bliss. Therefore we are justified in supposing that even the
dualities of the universe, when interpreted not as now by our sensational

REALITY OMNIPRESENT 33

and partial conceptions, but by our liberated intelligence and experience,
will be also resolved into those highest terms. While we still labour un-
der the stress of the dualities, this perception must no doubt constantly
support itself on an act of faith, but a faith which the highest Reason,
the widest and most patient reflection do not deny, but rather affirm.
This creed is given, indeed, to humanity to support it on its journey,
until it arrives at a stage of development when faith will be turned into
knowledge and perfect experience and Wisdom will be justified of her
works.

CHAPTER V

THE DESTINY OF THE INDIVIDUAL

By the Ignorance they cross beyond Death and by the
Knowledge enjoy Immortality. ... By the Non-Birth they
cross beyond Death and by the Birth enjoy Immortality.

Isha U panishad^

AN OMNIPRESENT Reality is the truth of all life and existence
-/^ whether absolute or relative, whether corporeal or incorporeal,
whether animate or inanimate, whether intelligent or unintelligent; and
in all its infinitely varying and even constantly opposed self-expressions,
from the contradictions nearest to our ordinary experience to those
remotest antinomies which lose themselves on the verges of the In-
effable, the Reality is one and not a sum or concourse. From that all
variations begin, in that all variations consist, to that all variations re-
turn. All affirmations are denied only to lead to a wider affirmation
of the same Reality. All antinomies confront each other in order to
recognise one Truth in their opposed aspects and embrace by the way
of conflict their mutual Unity. Brahman is the Alpha and the Omega.
Brahman is the One besides whom there is nothing else existent.

But this unity is in its nature indefinable. When we seek to en-
visage it by the mind we are compelled to proceed through an infinite
series of conceptions and experiences. And yet in the end we are
obliged to negate our largest conceptions, our most comprehensive experi-
ences in order to affirm that the Reality exceeds all definitions. We
arrive at the formula of the Indian sages, neti neti, "It is not this, It is
not that," there is no experience by which we can limit It, there is no
conception by which It can be defined.

An Unknowable which appears to us in many states and attributes
of being, in many forms of consciousness, in many activities of energy,
this is what Mind can ultimately say about the existence which we
ourselves are and which we see in all that is presented to our thought
and senses. It is in and through those states, those forms, those activ-

^ Verses ii, 14.

34

THE DESTINY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 35

ities that we have to approach and know the Unknowable. But if in
our haste to arrive at a Unity that our mind can seize and hold, if in
our insistence to confine the Infinite in our embrace we identify the
Reality with any one definable state of being however pure and eternal,
with any particular attribute however general and comprehensive, with
any fixed formulation of consciousness however vast in its scope, with
any energy or activity however boundless its application, and if we
exclude all the rest, then our thoughts sin against Its unknowableness
and arrive not at a true unity but at a division of the Indivisible.

So strongly was this truth perceived in the ancient times that
the Vedantic Seers, even after they had arrived at the crowning
idea, the convincing experience of Sachchidananda as the highest posi-
tive expression of the Reality to our consciousness, erected in their
speculations or went on in their perceptions to an Asat, a Non-Being
beyond, which is not the ultimate existence, the pure consciousness,
the infinite bliss of which all our experiences are the expression or
the deformation. If at all an existence, a consciousness, a bliss, it is
beyond the highest and purest positive form of these things that here
we can possess and other therefore than what here we know by these
names. Buddhism, somewhat arbitrarily declared by the theologians
to be an un-Vedic doctrine because it rejected the authority of the
Scriptures, yet goes back to this essentially Vedantic conception.
Only, the positive and synthetic teaching of the Upanishads beheld
Sat and Asat not as opposites destructive of each other, but as the
last antinomy through which we look up to the Unknowable. And in
the transactions of our positive consciousness, even Unity has to make
its account with Multiplicity; for the Many also are Brahman. It is
by Vidya, the Knowledge of the Oneness, that we know God; without
it Avidya, the relative and multiple consciousness, is a night of dark-
ness and a disorder of Ignorance. Yet if we exclude the field of that
Ignorance, if we get rid of Avidya as if it were a thing non-existent
and unreal, then Knowledge itself becomes a sort of obscurity and a
source of imperfection. We become as men blinded by a light so that
we can no longer see the field which that light illumines.

Such is the teaching, calm, wise and clear, of our most ancient
sages. They had the patience and the strength to find and to know;
they had also the clarity and humility to admit the limitation of our
knowledge. They perceived the borders where it has to pass into some-
thing beyond itself. It was a later impatience of heart and mind, vehe-

36 THE LIFE DIVINE

ment attraction to an ultimate bliss or high masterfulness of pure ex-
perience and trenchant intelligence which sought the One to deny the
Many and because it had received the breath of the heights scorned
or recoiled from the secret of the depths. But the steady eye of the
ancient wisdom perceived that to know God really, it must know Him
everywhere equally and without distinction, considering and valuing
but not mastered by the oppositions through which He shines.

We will put aside then the trenchant distinctions of a partial logic
which declares that because the One is the reality, the Many are an
illusion, and because the Absolute is Sat, the one existence, the relative
is Asat and non-existent. If in the Many we pursue insistently the One,
it is to return with the benediction and the revelation of the One con-
firming itself in the Many.

We will guard ourselves also against the excessive importance that
the mind attaches to particular points of view at which it arrives in
its more powerful expansions and transitions. The perception of the
spiritualised mind that the universe is an unreal dream can have no
more absolute a value to us than the perception of the materialised
mind that God and the Beyond are an illusory idea. In the one case the
mind, habituated only to the evidence of the senses and associating
reality with corporeal fact, is either unaccustomed to use other means
of knowledge or unable to extend the notion of reality to a supraphysi-
cal experience. In the other case the same mind, passing beyond to
the overwhelming experience of an incorporeal reality, simply transfers
the same inability and the same consequent sense of dream or hallucina-
tion to the experience of the senses. But we perceive also the truth
that these two conceptions disfigure. It is true that for this world of
form in which we are set for our self-realisation, nothing is entirely
valid until it has possessed itself of our physical consciousness and mani-
fested on the lowest levels in harmony with its manifestation on the
highest summits. It is equally true that form and matter asserting
themselves as a self-existent reality are an illusion of Ignorance. Form
and matter can be valid only as shape and substance of manifestation
for the incorporeal and immaterial. They are in their nature an act of
divine consciousness, in their aim the representation of a status of the
Spirit.

In other words, if Brahman has entered into form and represented
Its being in material substance, it can only be to enjoy self-manifesta-
tion in the figures of relative and phenomenal consciousness. Brahman

THE DESTINY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 37

is in this world to represent Itself in the values of Life. Life exists in
Brahman in order to discover Brahman in itself. Therefore man's im-
portance in the world is that he gives to it that development of con-
sciousness in which its transfiguration by a perfect self-discovery be-
comes possible. To fulfil God in life is man's manhood. He starts from
the animal vitality and its activities, but a divine existence is his ob-
jective.

But as in Thought, so in Life, the true rule of self-realisation is
a progressive comprehension. Brahman expresses Itself in many suc-
cessive forms of consciousness, successive in their relation even if
coexistent in being or coeval in Time, and Life in its self-unfolding
must also rise to ever-new provinces of its own being. But if in pass-
ing 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 spir-
itual, 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 of nature. Brahman is integral and unifies many states
of consciousness at a time; we also, manifesting the nature of Brahman,
should become integral and all-embracing.

Besides the recoil from the physical life, there is another exag-
geration of the ascetic impulse which this ideal of an integral mani-
festation corrects. The nodus of Life is the relation between three
general forms of consciousness, the individual, the universal and the
transcendent or supracosmic. In the ordinary distribution of life's ac-
tivities the individual regards himself as a separate being included
in the universe and both as dependent upon that which transcends
alike the universe and the individual. It is to this Transcendence
that we give currently the name of God, who thus becomes to our con-
ceptions not so much supracosmic as extra-cosmic. The belittling and
degradation of both the individual and the universe is a natural con-
sequence of this division: the cessation of both cosmos and individual
by the attainment of the Transcendence would be logically its supreme
conclusion.

38 THE LIFE DIVINE

The integral view of the unity of Brahman avoids these conse-
quences. Just as we need not give up the bodily life to attain to the
mental and spiritual, so we can arrive at a point of view where the
preservation of the individual activities is no longer inconsistent with
our comprehension of the cosmic consciousness or .our attainment to
the transcendent and supracosmic. For the World-Transcendent em-
braces 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 centre of the whole universal consciousness; the
universe is a form and definition which is occupied by the entire im-
manence of the Formless and Indefinable.

This is always the true relation, veiled from us by our ignorance
or our wrong consciousness of things. When we attain to knowledge
or right consciousness, nothing essential in the eternal relation is
changed, but only the inview and the outview from the individual centre
is profoundly modified and consequently also the spirit and effect of
its activity. The individual is still necessary to the action of the
Transcendent in the universe and that action in him does not cease
to be possible by his illumination. On the contrary, since the con-
scious manifestation of the Transcendent in the individual is the means
by which the collective, the universal is also to become conscious
of itself, the continuation of the illumined individual in the action of
the world is an imperative need of the world-play. 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. And such a world can only be a ruthless ordeal
or a mechanical illusion.

It is so that ascetic philosophy tends to conceive it. But individual
salvation can have no real sense if existence in the cosmos is itself an
illusion. In the Monistic view the individual soul is one with the
Supreme, its sense of separateness an ignorance, escape from the
sense of separateness and identity with the Supreme its salvation. But
who then profits by this escape? Not the supreme Self, for it is
supposed to be always and inalienably free, still, silent, pure. Not the
world, for that remains constantly in the bondage and is not freed
by the escape of any individual soul from the universal Illusion. It is
the individual soul itself which effects its supreme good by escaping
from the sorrow and the division into the peace and the bliss. There

THE DESTINY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 39

would seem then to be some kind of reality of the individual soul as
distinct from the world and from the Supreme even in the event of
freedom and illumination. But for the Illusionist the individual soul
is an illusion and non-existent except in the inexplicable mystery of
Maya. Therefore we arrive at the escape of an illusory non-existent
soul from an illusory non-existent bondage in an illusory non-existent
world as the supreme good which that non-existent soul has to pursue!
For this is the last word of the Knowledge, "There is none bound,
none freed, none seeking to be free." Vidya turns out to be as much
a part of the Phenomenal as Avidya; Maya meets us even in our
escape and laughs at the triumphant logic which seemed to cut the
knot of her mystery.

These things, it is said, cannot be explained; they are the initial
and insoluble miracle. They are for us a practical fact and have to
be accepted. We have to escape by a confusion out of a confusion.
The individual soul can only cut the knot of ego by a supreme act
of egoism, an exclusive attachment to its own individual salvation
which amounts to an absolute assertion of its separate existence in
Maya. We are led to regard other souls as if they were figments of
our mind and their salvation unimportant, our soul alone as if it were
entirely real and its salvation the one thing that matters. I come to
regard my personal escape from bondage as real while other souls who
are equally myself remain behind in the bondage!

It is only when we put aside all irreconcilable antinomy between
Self and the world that things fall into their place by a less paradoxical
logic. We must accept the many-sidedness of the manifestation even
while we assert the unity of the Manifested. And is not this after all
the truth that pursues us wherever we cast our eyes, unless seeing we
choose not to see? Is not this after all the perfectly natural and simple
mystery of Conscious Being that It is bound neither by its unity nor
by its multiplicity? It is "absolute" in the sense of being entirely free
to include and arrange in Its own way all possible terms of Its self-
expression. There is none bound, none freed, none seeking to be free,
— for always That is a perfect freedom. It is so free that it is not even
bound by its liberty. It can play at being bound without incurring a
real bondage. Its chain is a self-imposed convention. Its limitation in
the ego a transitional device that it uses in order to repeat its tran-
scendence and universality in the scheme of the individual Brahman.

The Transcendent, the Supracosmic is absolute and free in Itself

40 THE LIFE DIVINE

beyond Time and Space and beyond the conceptual opposites of finite
and infinite. But in cosmos It uses Its liberty of self-formation, Its
Maya, to make a scheme of Itself in the complementary terms of unity
and multiplicity, and this multiple unity It establishes in the three
conditions of the subconscient, the conscient and the superconscient.
For actually we see that the Many objectivised in form in our material
universe start with a subconscious unity which expresses itself openly
enough in cosmic action and cosmic substance, but of which they are not
themselves superficially aware. In the conscient the ego becomes the
superficial point at which the awareness of unity can emerge; but it
applies its perception of unity to the form and surface action and, fail-
ing to take account of all that operates behind, fails also to realise
that it is not only one in itself but one with others. This limitation of
the universal "I" in the divided ego-sense constitutes our imperfect
individualised personality. But when the ego transcends the personal
consciousness, it begins to include and be overpowered by that which is
to us superconscious; it becomes aware of the cosmic unity and enters
into the Transcendent Self which here cosmos expresses by a multiple
oneness.

The liberation of the individual soul is therefore the keynote of
the definite divine action ; it is the primary divine necessity and the pivot
on which all else turns. It is the point of Light at which the intended
complete self-manifestation in the Many begins to emerge. But the
liberated soul extends its perception of unity horizontally as well as
vertically. Its unity with the transcendent One is incomplete without
its unity with the cosmic Many. And that lateral unity translates itself
by multiplication, a reproduction of its own liberated state at other
points in the Multiplicity. The divine soul reproduces itself in similar
liberated souls as the animal reproduces itself in similar bodies. There-
fore, whenever even a single soul is liberated, there is a tendency to
an extension and even to an outburst of the same divine self-conscious-
ness in other individual souls of our terrestrial humanity and, — ^who
knows? — ^perhaps even beyond the terrestrial consciousness. Where
shall we fix the limit of that extension? Is it altogether a legend which
says of the Buddha that as he stood on the threshold of Nirvana, of
the Non-Being, his soul turned back and took the vow never to make
the irrevocable crossing so long as there was a single being upon earth
undelivered from the knot of the suffering, from the bondage of the
ego?

THE DESTINY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 4I

But we can attain to the highest without blotting ourselves out
from the cosmic extension. Brahman preserves always Its two terms
of liberty within and of formation without, of expression and of free-
dom from the expression. We also, being That, can attain to the same
divine self-possession. The harmony of the two tendencies is the con-
dition of all life that aims at being really divine. Liberty pursued
by exclusion of the thing exceeded leads along the path of negation to
the refusal of that which God has accepted. Activity pursued by ab-
sorption in the act and the energy leads to an inferior affirmation
and the denial of the Highest. But what God combines and synthetises,
wherefore should man insist on divorcing? To be perfect as He is per-
fect is the condition of His integral attainment.

Through Avidya, the Multiplicity, lies our path out of the transi-
tional egoistic self-expression in which death and suffering predominate ;
through Vidya consenting with Avidya by the perfect sense of oneness
even in that multiplicity, we enjoy integrally the immortality and the
beatitude. By attaining to the Unborn beyond all becoming we are
liberated from this lower birth and death; by accepting the Becoming
freely as the Divine, we invade mortality with the immortal beatitude
and become luminous centres of its conscious self-expression in hu-
manity.

CHAPTER VI

MAN IN THE UNIVERSE

The Soul of man, a traveller, wanders in this cycle of
Brahman, huge, a totality of lives, a totality of states, think-
ing itself different from the Impeller of the journey. Ac-
cepted by Him, it attains its goal of Immortality.

Swetaswatara Upanishad}

THE progressive revelation of a great, a transcendent, a luminous
Reality with the multitudinous relativities of this world that we
see and those other worlds that we do not see as means and material,
condition and field, this would seem then to be the meaning of the uni-
verse,— since meaning and aim it has and is neither a purposeless illu-
sion nor a fortuitous accident. For the same reasoning which leads us
to conclude that world-existence is not a deceptive trick of Mind, justi-
fies equally the certainty that it is no blindly and helplessly self-existent
mass of separate phenomenal existences clinging together and struggling
together as best they can in their orbit through eternity, no tremendous
self-creation and self-impulsion of an ignorant Force without any secret
Intelligence within aware of its starting-point and its goal and guiding
its process and its motion. An existence, wholly self-aware and there-
fore entirely master of itself, possesses the phenomenal being in which
it is involved, realises itself in form, unfolds itself in the individual.

That luminous Emergence is the dawn which the Aryan fore-
fathers worshipped. Its fulfilled perfection is that highest step of the
world-pervading Vishnu which they beheld as if an eye of vision ex-
tended in the purest heavens of the Mind. For it exists already as
an all-revealing and all-guiding Truth of things which watches over
the world and attracts mortal man, first without the knowledge of his
conscious mind, by the general march of Nature, but at last consciously
by a progressive awakening and self-enlargement, to his divine ascen-
sion. The ascent to the divine Life is the human journey, the Work
of works, the acceptable Sacrifice. This alone is man's real business
in the world and the justification of his existence, without which he

^1.6.

42

MAN IN THE UNIVERSE 43

would be only an insect crawling among other ephemeral insects on a
speck of surface mud and water which has managed to form itself amid
the appalling immensities of the physical universe.

This Truth of things that has to emerge out of the phenomenal
world's contradictions is declared to be an infinite Bliss and self-con-
scious Existence, the same everywhere, in all things, in all times and
beyond Time, and aware of itself behind all these phenomena by whose
intensest vibrations of activity or by whose largest totality it can never
be entirely expressed or in any way limited ; for it is self-existent and does
not depend for its being upon its manifestations. They represent it, but
do not exhaust it; point to it, but do not reveal it. It is revealed only
to itself within their forms. The conscious existence involved in the
form comes, as it evolves, to know itself by intuition, by self-vision,
by self-experience. It becomes itself in the world by knowing itself;
it knows itself by becoming itself. Thus possessed of itself inwardly,
it imparts also to its forms and modes the conscious delight of Sachchi-
dananda. This becoming of the infinite Bliss-Existence-Consciousness
in mind and life and body, — for independent of them it exists
eternally, — is the transfiguration intended and the utility of individual
existence. Through the individual it manifests in relation even as of
itself it exists in identity.

The Unknowable knowing itself as Sachchidananda is the one
supreme affirmation of Vedanta; it contains all the others or on it they
depend. This is the one veritable experience that remains when all ap-
pearances have been accounted for negatively by the elimination of
their shapes and coverings or positively by the reduction of their names
and forms to the constant truth that they contain. For fulfilment of life
or for transcendence of life, and whether purity, calm and freedom
in the spirit be our aim or puissance, joy and perfection, Sachchida-
nanda is the unknown, omnipresent, indispensable term for which the
human consciousness, whether in knowledge and sentiment or in sensa-
tion and action, is eternally seeking.

The universe and the individual are the two essential appearances
into which the Unknowable descends and through which it has to be
approached; for other intermediate collectivities are born only of their
interaction. This descent of the supreme Reality is in its nature a self-
concealing; and in the descent there are successive levels, in the
concealing successive veils. Necessarily, the revelation takes the form
of an ascent; and necessarily also the ascent and the revelation are

44 THE LIFE DIVINE

both progressive. For each successive level in the descent of the
Divine is to man a stage in an ascension; each veil that hides the
unknown God becomes for the God-lover and God-seeker an instru-
ment of His unveiling. Out of the rhythmic slumber of material
Nature unconscious of the Soul and the Idea that maintain the ordered
activities of her energy even in her dumb and mighty material trance,
the world struggles into the more quick, varied and disordered rhythm
of Life labouring on the verges of self-consciousness. Out of Life it
struggles upward into Mind in which the unit becomes awake to itself
and its world, and in that awakening the universe gains the leverage
it required for its supreme work, it gains self-conscious individuality.
But Mind takes up the work to continue, not to complete it. It is
a labourer of acute but limited intelligence who takes the confused
materials offered by Life and, having improved, adapted, varied,
classified according to its power, hands them over to the supreme
Artist of our divine manhood. That Artist dwells in supermind; for
supermind is superman. Therefore our world has yet to climb beyond
Mind to a higher principle, a higher status, a higher dynamism in
which universe and individual become aware of and possess that which
they both are and therefore stand explained to each other, in harmony
with each other, unified.

The disorders of life and mind cease by discerning the secret of a
more perfect order than the physical. Matter below life and mind
contains in itself the balance between a perfect poise of tranquillity and
the action of an immeasurable energy, but does not possess that which
it contains. Its peace wears the dull mask of an obscure inertia, a
sleep of unconsciousness or rather of a drugged and imprisoned con-
sciousness. Driven by a force which is its real self but whose sense it
cannot yet seize nor share, it has not the awakened joy of its own
harmonious energies.

Life and mind awaken to the sense of this want in the form of
a striving and seeking ignorance and a troubled and baffled desire
which are the first steps towards self-knowledge and self-fulfilment. But
where then is the kingdom of their self-fulfilling? It comes to them
by the exceeding of themselves. Beyond life and mind we recover
consciously in its divine truth that which the balance of material
Nature grossly represented, — a tranquillity which is neither inertia
nor a sealed trance of consciousness but the concentration of an abso-
lute force and an absolute self-awareness, and an action of immeas-

MAN IN THE UNIVERSE 45

urable energy which is at the same time an out-thrilling of ineffable
bliss because its every act is the expression, not of a want and an igno-
rant straining, but of an absolute peace and self-mastery. In that
attainment our ignorance realises the light of which it was a darkened
or a partial reflection; our desires cease in the plenitude and fulfilment
towards which even in their most brute material forms they were an
obscure and fallen aspiration.

The universe and the individual are necessary to each other in
their ascent. Always indeed they exist for each other and profit by each
other. Universe is a diffusion of the divine All in infinite Space and
Time, the individual its concentration within limits of Space and
Time. Universe seeks in infinite extension the divine totality it feels
itself to be but cannot entirely realise; for in extension existence drives
at a pluralistic sum of itself which can neither be the primal nor the
final unit, but only a recurring decimal without end or beginning.
Therefore it creates in itself a self-conscious concentration of the All
through which it can aspire. In the conscious individual Prakriti turns
back to perceive Purusha, World seeks after Self; God having entirely
become Nature, Nature seeks to become progressively God.

On the other hand it is by means of the universe that the indi-
vidual is impelled to realise himself. Not only is it his foundation, his
means, his field, the stuff of the divine Work; but also, since the concen-
tration of the universal Life which he is takes place within limits and is
not like the intensive unity of Brahman free from all conception of
bound and term, he must necessarily universalise and impersonalise
himself in order to manifest the divine All which is his reality. Yet is
he called upon to preserve, even when he most extends himself in uni-
versality of consciousness, a mysterious transcendent something of
which his sense of personality gives him an obscure and egoistic repre-
sentation. Otherwise he has missed his goal, the problem set to him
has not been solved, the divine work for which he accepted birth has
not been done.

The universe comes to the individual as Life, — a, dynamism the
entire secret of which he has to master and a mass of coUiding results,
a whirl of potential energies out of which he has to disengage some
supreme order and some yet unrealised harmony. This is after all the
real sense of man's progress. It is not merely a restatement in slightly
different terms of what physical Nature has already accomplished.
Nor can the ideal of human life be simply the animal repeated on a

46 THE LIFE DIVINE

higher scale of mentality. Otherwise, any system or order which as-
sured a tolerable well-being and a moderate mental satisfaction would
have stayed our advance. The animal is satisfied with a modicum
of necessity; the gods are content with their splendours. But man
cannot rest permanently until he reaches some highest good. He is
the greatest of living beings because he is the most discontented, be-
cause he feels most the pressure of limitations. He alone, perhaps,
is capable of being seized by the divine frenzy for a remote ideal.

To the Life-Spirit, therefore, the individual in whom its potentiali-
ties centre is pre-eminently Man, the Purusha. It is the Son of Man
who is supremely capable of incarnating God. This Man is the Manu,
the thinker, the Manomaya Purusha, mental person or soul in mind
of the ancient sages. No mere superior mammal is he, but a conceptive
soul basing itself on the animal body in Matter. He is conscious
Name or Numen accepting and utilising form as a medium through
which Person can deal with substance. The animal life emerging out
of Matter is only the inferior term of his existence. The life of thought,
feeling, will, conscious impulsion, that which we name in its totality
Mind, that which strives to seize upon Matter and its vital energies
and subject them to the law of its own progressive transformation, is the
middle term in which he takes his effectual station. But there is equally
a supreme term which Mind in man searches after so that having found
he may affirm it in his mental and bodily existence. This practical
affirmation of something essentially superior to his present self is the
basis of the divine life in the human being.

Awakened to a profounder self-knowledge than his first mental
idea of himself, Man begins to conceive some formula and to perceive
some appearance of the thing that he has to affirm. But it appears to
him as if poised between two negations of itself. If, beyond his
present attainment, he perceives or is touched by the power, light, bliss
of a self-conscious infinite existence and translates his thought or his
experience of it into terms convenient for his mentality, — Infinity,
Omniscience, Omnipotence, Immortality, Freedom, Love, Beatitude,
God, — ^yet does this sun of his seeing appear to shine between a double
Night, — a darkness below, a mightier darkness beyond. For when he
strives to know it utterly, it seems to pass into something which neither
any one of these terms nor the sum of them can at all represent. His
mind at last negates God for a Beyond, or at least it seems to find
God transcending Himself, denying Himself to the conception. Here

MAN IN THE UNIVERSE 47

also, in the world, in himself, and around himself, he is met always by
the opposites of his affirmation. Death is ever with him, limitation in-
vests his being and his experience, error, inconscience, weakness, inertia,
grief, pain, evil are constant oppressors of his effort. Here also he is
driven to deny God, or at least the Divine seems to negate or to hide
itself in some appearance or outcome which is other than its true
and eternal reality.

And the terms of this denial are not, like that other and remoter
negation, inconceivable and therefore naturally mysterious, unknow-
able to his mind, but appear to be knowable, known, definite, — and still
mysterious. He knows not what they are, why they exist, how they
came into being. He sees their processes as they affect and appear to
him; he cannot fathom their essential reality.

Perhaps they are unfathomable, perhaps they also are really un-
knowable in their essence? Or, it may be, they have no essential reality,
— are an illusion, Asat, non-being. The superior Negation appears to us
sometimes as a Nihil, a Non-Existence ; this inferior negation may also
be, in its essence, a Nihil, a non-existence. But as we have already put
away from us this evasion of the difficulty with regard to that higher,
so also we discard it for this inferior Asat. To deny entirely its reality
or to seek an escape from it as a mere disastrous illusion is to put away
from us the problem and to shun our work. For Life, these things that
seem to deny God, to be the opposites of Sachchidananda, are real, even
if they turn out to be temporary. They and their opposites, good,
knowledge, joy, pleasure, life, survival, strength, power, increase, are the
very material of her workings.

It is probable indeed that they are the result or rather the insepara-
ble accompaniments, not of an illusion, but of a wrong relation, wrong
because it is founded on a false view of what the individual is in the uni-
verse and therefore a false attitude both towards God and Nature, to-
wards self and environment. Because that which he has become is out
of harmony both with what the world of his habitation is and what he
himself should be and is to be, therefore man is subject to these contra-
dictions of the secret Truth of things. In that case they are not the
punishment of a fall, but the conditions of a progress. They are the
first elements of the work he has to fulfil, 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.

48 THE LIFE DIVINE

For out of these false relations and by their aid the true have to
be found. By the Ignorance we have to cross over death. So too the
Veda speaks cryptically of energies that are like women evil in impulse,
wandering from the path, doing hurt to their Lord, which yet, though
themselves false and unhappy, build up in the end "this vast Truth,"
the Truth that is the Bliss. It would be, then, not when he has excised
the evil in Nature out of himself by an act of moral surgery or parted
with life by an abhorrent recoil, but when he has turned Death into a
more perfect life, lifted the small things of the 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
their secret truth that the sacrifice will be accomplished, the journey
done and Heaven and Earth equalised join hands in the bliss of the
Supreme.

Yet how can such contraries pass into each other? By what alchemy
shall this lead of mortality be turned into that gold of divine Being?
But if they are not in their essence contraries? If they are manifesta-
tions of one Reality, identical in substance? Then indeed a divine trans-
mutation becomes conceivable.

We have seen that the Non-Being beyond may well be an incon-
ceivable existence and perhaps an ineffable Bliss. At least the Nirvana
of Buddhism which formulated one most luminous effort of man to reach
and to rest in this highest Non-Existence, represents itself in the psy-
chology of the liberated yet upon earth as an unspeakable peace and
gladness; its practical effect is the extinction of all suffering through the
disappearance of all egoistic idea or sensation and the nearest we can
get to a positive conception of it is that it is some inexpressible Beatitude
(if the name or any name can be applied to a peace so void of contents)
into which even the notion of self-existence seems to be swallowed up
and disappear. It is a Sachchidananda to which we dare no longer apply
even the supreme terms of Sat, of Chit and of Ananda. For all terms are
annulled and all cognitive experience is over-passed.

On the other hand, we have hazarded the suggestion that since all
is one Reality, this inferior negation also, this other contradiction or
non-existence of Sachchidananda is none other than Sachchidananda it-
self. It is capable of being conceived by the intellect, perceived in the
vision, even received through the sensations as verily that which it seems
to deny, and such would it always be to our conscious experience if things
were not falsified by some great fundamental error, some possessing and

MAN IN THE UNIVERSE 49

compelling Ignorance, Maya or Avidya. In this sense a solution might
be sought, not perhaps a satisfying metaphysical solution for the logical
mind, — for we are standing on the borderline of the unknowable, the
ineffable and straining our eyes beyond, — but a sufficient basis in expe-
rience for the practice of the divine life.

To do this we must dare to go below the clear surfaces of things on
which the mind loves to dwell, to tempt the vast and obscure, to pene-
trate the unfathomable depths of consciousness and identify ourselves
with states of being that are not our own. Human language is a poor
help in such a search, but at least we may find in it some symbols and
figures, return with some just expressible hints which will help the light
of the soul and throw upon the mind some reflection of the ineffable
design.

CHAPTER VII

THE EGO AND THE DUALITIES

The soul seated on the same tree of Nature is absorbed
and deluded and has sorrow because it is not the Lord, but
when it sees and is in union with that other self and great-
ness of it which is the Lord, then sorrow passes away from
it.

Swetaswatara Upanishad}

IF ALL is in truth Sachchidananda, death, suffering, evil, limitation
can only be the creations, positive in practical effect, negative in
essence, of a distorting consciousness which has fallen from the total
and unifying knowledge of itself into some error of division and partial
experience. This is the fall of man typified in the poetic parable of the
Hebrew Genesis. That fall is his deviation from the full and pure ac-
ceptance of God and himself, or rather of God in himself, into a dividing
consciousness which brings with it all the train of the dualities, life and
death, good and evil, joy and pain, completeness and want, the fruit of
a divided being. This is the fruit which Adam and Eve, Purusha and
Prakriti, the soul tempted by Nature, have eaten. The redemption comes
by the recovery of the universal in the individual and of the spiritual
term in the physical consciousness. Then alone the soul in Nature can
be allowed to partake of the fruit of the tree of life and be as the Divine
and live for ever. For then only can the purpose of its descent into ma-
terial consciousness be accomplished, when the knowledge of good and
evil, joy and suffering, life and death has been accomplished tlirough the
recovery by the human soul of a higher knowledge which reconciles and
identifies these opposites in the universal and transforms their divisions
into the image of the divine Unity.

To Sachchidananda extended in all things in widest commonalty
and impartial universality, death, suffering, evil and limitation can only
be at the most reverse terms, shadow-forms of their luminous opposites.
As these things are felt by us, they are notes of a discord. They formu-
late separation where there should be a unity, miscomprehension where

'IV. 7.

so

THE EGO AND THE DUALITIES 5 1

there should be an understanding, an attempt to arrive at independent
harmonies where there should be a self-adaptation to the orchestral
whole. All totality, even if it be only in one scheme of the universal vi-
brations, even if it be only a totality of the physical consciousness with-
out possession of all that is in movement beyond and behind, must be to
that extent a reversion to harmony and a reconciliation of jarring op-
posites. On the other hand, to Sachchidananda transcendent of the forms
of the universe the dual terms themselves, even so understood, can no
longer be justly applicable. Transcendence transfigures ; it does not rec-
oncile, but rather transmutes opposites into something surpassing them
that effaces their oppositions.

At first, however, we must strive to relate the individual again to
the harmony of the totality. There it is necessary for us — otherwise
there is no issue from the problem — to realise that the terms in which
our present consciousness renders the values of the universe, though prac-
tically justified for the purposes of human experience and progress, are
not the sole terms in which it is possible to render them and may not be
the complete, the right, the ultimate formulas. Just as there may be
sense-organs or formations of sense-capacity which see the physical world
differently and it may well be better, because more completely, than our
sense-organs and sense-capacity, so there may be other mental and su-
pramental envisagings of the universe which surpass our own. States of
consciousness there are in which Death is only a change in immortal Life,
pain a violent backwash of the waters of universal delight, limitation a
turning of the Infinite upon itself, evil a circling of the good around its
own perfection; and this not in abstract conception only, but in actual
vision and in constant and substantial experience. To arrive at such
states of consciousness may, for the individual, be one of the most im-
portant and indispensable steps of his progress towards self-perfection.

Certainly, the practical values given us by our senses and by the
dualistic sense-mind must hold good in their field and be accepted as the
standard for ordinary life-experience until a larger harmony is ready
into which they can enter and transform themselves without losing hold
of the realities which they represent. To enlarge the sense-faculties
without the knowledge that would give the old sense-values their right
interpretation from the new standpoint might lead to serious disorders
and incapacities, might unfit for practical life and for the orderly and
disciplined use of the reason. Equally, an enlargement of our mental
consciousness out of the experience of the egoistic dualities into an un-

52 THE LIFE DIVINE

regulated unity with some form of total consciousness might easily bring
about a confusion and incapacity for the active life of humanity in the
established order of the world's relativities. This, no doubt, is the root
of the iBJunction imposed in the Gita on the man who has the knowledge
not to disturb the life-basis and thought-basis of the ignorant; for, im-
pelled by his example but unable to comprehend the principle of his
action, they would lose their own system of values without arriving at
a higher foundation.

Such a disorder and incapacity may be accepted personally and are
accepted by many great souls as a temporary passage or as the price to be
paid for the entry into a wider existence. But the right goal of human
progress must be always an effective and synthetic reinterpretation by
which the law of that wider existence may be represented in a new order
of truths and in a more just and puissant working of the faculties on
the life-material of the universe. For the senses the sun goes round the
earth; that was for them the centre of existence and the motions of life
are arranged on the basis of a misconception. The truth is the very
opposite, but its discovery would have been of little use if there were
not a science that makes the new conception the centre of a reasoned and
ordered knowledge putting their right values on the perceptions of the
senses. So also for the mental consciousness God moves round the per-
sonal ego and all His works and ways are brought to the judgment of
our egoistic sensations, emotions and conceptions and are there given
values and interpretations which, though a perversion and inversion
of the truth of things, are yet useful and practically sufficient in a cer-
tain development of human life and progress. They are a rough prac-
tical systematisation of our experience of things valid so long as we dwell
in a certain order of ideas and activities. But they do not represent the
last and highest state of human life and knowledge. "Truth is the path
and not the falsehood." The truth is not that God moves round the ego
as the centre of existence and can be judged by the ego and its view of
the dualities, but that the Divine is itself the centre and that the ex-
perience of the individual only finds its own true truth when it is known
in the terms of the universal and the transcendent. Nevertheless, to
substitute this conception for the egoistic without an adequate base of
knowledge may lead to the substitution of new but still false and ar-^
bitrary ideas for the old and bring about a violent instead of a settled
disorder of right values. Such a disorder often marks the inception of
new philosophies and religions and initiates useful revolutions. But the

THE EGO AND THE DUALITIES 53

true goal is only reached when we can group round the right central
conception a reasoned and effective knowledge in which the egoistic life
shall rediscover all its values transformed and corrected. Then we shall
possess that new order of truths which will make it possible for us to
substitute a more divine life for the existence which we now lead and to
effectualise a more divine and puissant use of our faculties on the life-
material of the universe.

That new life and power of the human integer must necessarily re-
pose on a realisation of the great verities which translate into our mode of
conceiving things the nature of the divine existence. It must proceed
through a renunciation by the ego of its false standpoint and false
certainties, through its entry into a right relation and harmony with
the totalities of which it forms a part and with the transcendences from
which it is a descent, and through its perfect self-opening to a truth and
a law that exceed its own conventions, — a truth that shall be its ful-
filment and a law that shall be its deliverance. Its goal must be the
abolition of those values which are the creations of the egoistic view of
things; its crown must be the transcendence of limitation, ignorance,
death, suffering and evil.

The transcendence, the abolition are not possible here on earth and
in our human life if the terms of that life are necessarily bound to our
present egoistic valuations. If life is in its nature individual phenomenon
and not representation of a universal existence and the breathing of a
mighty Life-Spirit, if the dualities which are the response of the indi-
vidual to its contacts are not merely a response but the very essence and
condition of all living, if limitation is the inalienable nature of the
substance of which our mind and body are formed, disintegraton of
death the first and last condition of all life, its end and its beginning,
pleasure and pain the inseparable dual stuff of all sensation, joy and
grief the necessary light and shade of all emotion, truth and error
the two poles between which all knowledge must eternally move, then
transcendence is only attainable by the abandonment of human life in
a Nirvana beyond all existence or by attainment to another world, a
heaven quite otherwise constituted than this material universe.

It is not very easy for the customary mind of man, always attached
to its past and present associations, to conceive of an existence still
human, yet radically changed in what are now our fixed circumstances.
We are in respect to our possible higher evolution much in the position
of the original Ape of the Darwinian theory. It would have been im-

54 THE LIFE DIVINE

possible for that Ape leading his instinctive arboreal life in primeval
forests to conceive that there would be one day an animal on the earth
who would use a new faculty called reason upon the materials of his
inner and outer existence, who would dominate by that power his in-
stincts and habits, change the circumstances of his physical life, build
for himself houses of stone, manipulate Nature's forces, sail the seas,
ride the air, develop codes of conduct, evolve conscious methods for
his mental and spiritual development. And if such a conception had
been possible for the Ape-mind, it would still have been difficult for him
to imagine that by any progress of Nature or long effort of Will and
tendency he himself could develop into that animal. Man, because he
has acquired reason and still more because he has indulged his power
of imagination and intuition, is able to conceive an existence higher
than his own and even to envisage his personal elevation beyond his
present state into that existence. His idea of the supreme state is an
absolute of all that is positive to his own concepts and desirable to his
own instinctive aspiration, — Knowledge without its negative shadow of
error. Bliss without its negation in experience of suffering, Power without
its constant denial by incapacity, purity and plenitude of being without
the opposing sense of defect and limitation. It is so that he conceives
his gods; it is so that he constructs his heavens. But it is not so that
his reason conceives of a possible earth and a possible humanity. His
dream of God and Heaven is really a dream of his own perfection; but
he finds the same difficulty in accepting its practical realisation here for
his ultimate aim as would the ancestral Ape if called upon to believe
in himself as the future Man. His imagination, his religious aspirations
may hold that end before him; but when his reason asserts itself, re-
jecting imagination and transcendent intuition, he puts it by as a bril-
liant superstition contrary to the hard facts of the material universe. It
becomes then only his inspiring vision of the impossible. All that is
possible is a conditioned, limited and precarious knowledge, happiness,
power and good.

Yet in the principle of reason itself there is the assertion of a
Transcendence. For reason is in its whole aim and essence the pursuit
of Knowledge, the pursuit, that is to say, of Truth by the elimination of
error. Its view, its aim is not that of a passage from a greater to a lesser
error, but it supposes a positive, pre-existent Truth towards which
through the dualities of right knowledge and wrong knowledge we can

THE EGO AND THE DUALITIES 55

progressively move. If our reason has not the same instinctive certitude
with regard to the other aspirations of humanity, it is because it lacks
the same essential illumination inherent in its own positive activity. We
can just conceive of a positive or absolute realisation of happiness, be-
cause the heart to which that instinct for happiness belongs has its own
form of certitude, is capable of faith, and because our minds can
envisage the elimination of unsatisfied want which is the apparent cause
of suffering. But how shall we conceive of the elimination of pain from
nervous sensation or of death from the life of the body? Yet the re-
jection of pain is a sovereign instinct of the sensations, the rejection of
death a dominant claim inherent in the essence of our vitality. But
these things present themselves to our reason as instinctive aspirations,
not as realisable potentialities.

Yet the same law should hold throughout. The error of the prac-
tical reason is an excessive subjection to the apparent fact which it can
immediately feel as real and an insufficient courage in carrying pro-
founder facts of potentiality to their logical conclusion. What is, is
the realisation of an anterior potentiality ; present potentiality is a clue
to future realisation. And here potentiality exists; for the mastery of
phenomena depends upon a knowledge of their causes and processes
and if we know the causes of error, sorrow, pain, death, we may labour
with some hope towards their elimination. For knowledge is power
and mastery.

In fact, we do pursue as an ideal, so far as we may, the elimination
of all these negative or adverse phenomena. We seek constantly to mini-
mise the cause of error, pain and suffering. Science, as its knowledge
increases, dreams of regulating birth and of indefinitely prolonging life,
if not of effecting the entire conquest of death. But because we envisage
only external or secondary causes, we can only think of removing them
to a distance and not of eliminating the actual roots of that against which
we struggle. And we are thus limited because we strive towards sec-
ondary perceptions and not towards root-knowledge, because we know
processes of things, but not their essence. We thus arrive at a more
powerful manipulation of circumstances, but not at essential control.
But if we could grasp the essential nature and the essential cause of error,
suffering and death, we might hope to arrive at a mastery over them
which should be not relative but entire. We might hope even to eliminate
them altogether and justify the dominant instinct of our nature by the

56 THE LIFE DIVINE

conquest of that absolute good, bliss, knowledge and immortality which
our intuitions perceive as the true and ultimate condition of the human
being.

The ancient Vedanta presents us with such a solution in the concep-
tion and experience of Brahman as the one universal and essential fact
and of the nature of Brahman as Sachchidananda.

In this view the essence of all life is the movement of a universal
and immortal existence, the essence of all sensation and emotion is the
play of a universal and self-existent delight in being, the essence of all
thought and perception is the radiation of a universal and all-pervading
truth, the essence of all activity is the progression of a universal and
self-effecting good.

But the play and movement embodies itself in a multiplicity of
forms, a variation of tendencies, an interplay of energies. Multiplicity
permits of the interference of a determinative and temporarily deforma-
tive factor, the individual ego ; and the nature of the ego is a self -limita-
tion of consciousness by a willed ignorance of the rest of its play and
its exclusive absorption in one form, one combination of tendencies, one
field of the movement of energies. Ego is the factor which determines
the reactions of error, sorrow, pain, evil, death ; for it gives these values
to movements which would otherwise be represented in their right re-
lation to the one Existence, Bliss, Truth and Good. By recovering the
right relation we may eliminate the ego-determined reactions, reduc-
ing them eventually to their true values; and this recovery can be ef-
fected by the right participation of the individual in the consciousness
of the totality and in the consciousness of the transcendent which the
totality represents.

Into later Vedanta there crept and arrived at fixity the idea that
the limited ego is not only the cause of the dualities, but the essential
condition for the existence of the universe. By getting rid of the ig-
norance of the ego and its resultant limitations we do indeed eliminate
the dualities, but we eliminate along with them our existence in the
cosmic movement. Thus we return to the essentially evil and illusory
nature of human existence and the vanity of all effort after perfection
in the life of the world. A relative good linked always to its opposite
is all that here we can seek. But if we adhere to the larger and pro-
founder idea that the ego is only an intermediate representation of some-
thing beyond itself, we escape from this consequence and are able to
apply Vedanta to fulfilment of life and not only to the escape from life.

THE EGO AND THE DUALITIES 57

The essential cause and condition of universal existence is the Lord,
Ishwara or Purusha, manifesting and occupying individual and uni-
versal forms. The limited ego is only an intermediate phenojnenon of
consciousness necessary for a certain line of development. Following
this line the individual can arrive at that which is beyond himself, that
which he represents, and can yet continue to represent it, no longer
as an obscured and limited ego, but as a centre of the Divine and of the
universal consciousness embracing, utilising and transforming into har-
mony with the Divine all individual determinations.

We have then the manifestation of the divine Conscious Being
in the totality of physical Nature as the foundation of human existence
in the material universe. We have the emergence of that Conscious Be-
ing in an involved and inevitably evolving Life, Mind and Supermind
as the condition of our activities; for it is this evolution which has
enabled man to appear in Matter and it is this evolution which will
enable him progressively to manifest God in the body, — the universal
Incarnation. We have in egoistic formation the intermediate and de-
cisive factor which allows the One to emerge as the conscious Many out
of that indeterminate totality general, obscure and formless which we call
the subconscient, — hrdya samudra, the ocean heart in things of the
Rig Veda. We have the dualities of life and death, joy and sorrow,
pleasure and pain, truth and error, good and evil as the first formations
of egoistic consciousness, the natural and inevitable outcome of its at-
tempt to realise unity in an artificial construction of itself exclusive
of the total truth, good, life and delight of being in the universe. We
have the dissolution of this egoistic construction by the self-opening of
the individual to the universe and to God as the means of that supreme
fulfilment to which egoistic life is only a prelude even as animal life
was only a prelude to the human. We have the realisation of the All
in the individual by the transformation of the limited ego into a con-
scious centre of the divine unity and freedom as the term at which the
fulfilment arrives. And we have the outflowing of the infinite and ab-
solute Existence, Truth, Good and Delight of being on the Many in the
world as the divine result towards which the cycles of our evolution
move. This is the supreme birth which maternal Nature holds in her-
self; of this she strives to be delivered.

CHAPTER VIII

THE METHODS OF VEDANTIC
KNOWLEDGE

This secret Self in all beings is not apparent, but it is
seen by means of the supreme reason, the subtle, by those
who have the subtle vision.

Katha Upanishad}

BUT what then is the working of this Sachchidananda in the world
and by what process of things are the relations between itself and
the ego which figures it first formed, then led to their consummation?
For on those relations and on the process they follow depend the whole
philosophy and practice of a divine life for man.

We arrive at the conception and at the knowledge of a divine exist-
ence by exceeding the evidence of the senses and piercing beyond the
walls of the physical mind. So long as we confine ourselves to sense-
evidence and the physical consciousness, we can conceive nothing and
know nothing except the material world and its phenomena. But certain
faculties in us enable our mentality to arrive at conceptions which we
may indeed deduce by ratiocination or by imaginative variation from
the facts of the physical worlds as we see them, but which are not
warranted by any purely physical data or any physical experience.
The first of these instruments is the pure reason.

Human reason has a double action, mixed or dependent, pure or
sovereign. Reason accepts a mixed action when it confines itself to the
circle of our sensible experience, admits its law as the final truth and
concerns itself only with the study of phenomenon, that is to say, with
the appearances of things in their relations, processes and utilities. This
rational action is incapable of knowing what is, it only knows what ap-
pears to be, it has no plummet by which it can sound the depths of be-
ing, it can only survey the field of becoming. Reason, on the other hand,
asserts its pure action, when accepting our sensible experiences as a start-
ing-point but refusing to be limited by them it goes behind, judges,

' III. 12.

58

THE METHODS OF VEDANTIC KNOWLEDGE 59

works in its own right and strives to arrive at general and unalterable
concepts which attach themselves not to the appearances of things, but to
that which stands behind their appearances. It may arrive at its result
by direct judgment passing immediately from the appearance to that
which stands behind it and in that case the concept arrived at may
seem to be a result of the sensible experience and dependent upon it
though it is really a perception of reason working in its own right.
But the perceptions of the pure reason may also — and this is their
more characteristic action — use the experience from which they start
as a mere excuse and leave it far behind before they arrive at their
result, so far that the result may seem the direct contrary of that
which our sensible experience wishes to dictate to us. This movement
is legitimate and indispensable, because our normal experience not only
covers only a small part of universal fact, but even in the limits of its
own field uses instruments that are defective and gives us false weights
and measures. It must be exceeded, put away to a distance and its insist-
ences often denied if we are to arrive at more adequate conceptions of
the truth of things. To correct the errors of the sense-mind by the use
of reason is one of the most valuable powers developed by man and the
chief cause of his superiority among terrestrial beings.

The complete use of pure reason brings us finally from physical to
metaphysical knowledge. But the concepts of metaphysical knowledge
do not in themselves fully satisfy the demand of our integral being.
They are indeed entirely satisfactory to the pure reason itself, because
they are the very stuff of its own existence. But our nature sees things
through two eyes always, for it views them doubly as idea and as fact
and therefore every concept is incomplete for us and to a part of our
nature almost unreal until it becomes an experience. But the truths
which are now in question, are of an order not subject to our normal
experience. They are, in their nature, "beyond the perception of the
senses but seizable by the perception of the reason." Therefore, some
other faculty of experience is necessary by which the demand of our
nature can be fulfilled and this can only come, since we are dealing with
the supraphysical, by an extension of psychological experience.

In a sense all our experience is psychological since even what we
receive by the senses, has no meaning or value to us till it is translated
into the terms of the sense-mind, the Manas of Indian philosophical
terminology. Manas, say our philosophers, is the sixth sense. But we
may even say that it is the only sense and that the others, vision, hear-

60 THE LIFE DIVINE

ing, touch, smell, taste are merely specialisations of the sense-mind
which, although it normally uses the sense-organs for the basis of its
experience, yet exceeds them and is capable of a direct experience proper
to its own inherent action. As a result psychological experience, like
the cognition? of the reason, is capable in man of a double action, mixed
or dependent, pure or sovereign. Its mixed action takes place usually
when the mind seeks to become aware of the external world, the object;
the pure action when it seeks to become aware of itself, the subject. In
the former activity, it is dependent on the senses and forms its percep-
tions in accordance with their evidence ; in the latter it acts in itself and is
aware of things directly by a sort of identity with them. We are thus
aware of our emotions; we are aware of anger, as has been acutely said,
because we become anger. We are thus aware also of our own existence ;
and here the nature of experience as knowledge by identity becomes ap-
parent. In reality, all experience is in its secret nature knowledge by
identity; but its true character is hidden from us because we have
separated ourselves from the rest of the world by exclusion, by the
distinction of ourself as subject and everything else as object, and we
are compelled to develop processes and organs by which we may again
enter into communion with all that we have excluded. We have to re-
place direct knowledge through conscious identity by an indirect knowl-
edge which appears to be caused by physical contact and mental sym-
pathy. This Hmitation is a fundamental creation of the ego and an
instance of the manner in which it has proceeded throughout, starting
from an original falsehood and covering over the true truth of things by
contingent falsehoods which become for us practical truths of relation.
From this nature of mental and sense knowledge as it is at present
organised in us, it follows that there is no inevitable necessity in our
existing limitations. They are the result of an evolution in which mind
has accustomed itself to depend upon certain physiological functionings
and their reactions as its normal means of entering into relation with the
material universe. Therefore, although it is the rule that when we seek
to become aware of the external world, we have to do so indirectly
through the sense-organs and can experience only so much of the truth
about things and men as the senses convey to us, yet this rule is merely
the regularity of a dominant habit. It is possible for the mind — and it
would be natural for it, if it could be persuaded to liberate itself from
its consent to the domination of matter, — to take direct cognisance of
the objects of sense without the aid of the sense-organs. This is what.

THE METHODS OF VEDANTIC KNOWLEDGE 6 1

happens in experiments of hypnosis and cognate psychological phenom-
ena. Because our waking consciousness is determined and limited by
the balance between mind and matter worked out by life in its evolution,
this direct cognisance is usually impossible in our ordinary waking state
and has therefore to be brought about by throwing the waking mind
into a state of sleep which liberates the true or subliminal mind. Mind
is then able to assert its true character as the one and all-sufficient sense
and free to apply to the objects of sense its pure and sovereign instead
of its mixed and dependent action. Nor is this extension of faculty
really impossible but only more difficult in our waking state, — as is
known to all who have been able to go far enough in certain paths of
psychological experiment.

The sovereign action of the sense-mind can be employed to develop
other senses besides the five which we ordinarily use. For instance, it is
possible to develop the power of appreciating accurately without physi-
cal means the weight of an object which we hold in our hands. Here
the sense of contact and pressure is merely used as a starting-point, just
as the data of sense-experience are used by the pure reason, but it is not
really the sense of touch which gives the measure of the weight to the
mind ; that finds the right value through its own independent perception
and uses the touch only in order to enter into relation with the object.
And as with the pure reason, so with the sense-mind, the sense-experience
can be used as a mere first point from which it proceeds to a knowledge
that has nothing to do with the sense-organs and often contradicts their
evidence. Nor is the extension of faculty confined only to outsides and
superficies. It is possible, once we have entered by any of the senses
into relation with an external object, so to apply the Manas as to be-
come aware of the contents of the object, for example, to receive or to
perceive the thoughts or feelings of others without aid from their utter-
ance, gesture, action or facial expressions and even in contradiction of
these always partial and often misleading data. Finally, by an utilisa-
tion of the inner senses, — that is to say, of the sense-powers, in them-
selves, in their purely mental or subtle activity as distinguished from
the physical which is only a selection for the purposes of outward life
from their total and general action, — we are able to take cognition of
sense-experiences, of appearances and images of things other than those
which belong to the organisation of our material environment. All these
extensions of faculty, though received with hesitation and incredulity
by the physical mind because they are abnormal to the habitual scheme

62 THE LIFE DIVINE

of our ordinary life and experience, difficult to set in action, still more
difficult to systematise so as to be able to make of them an orderly and
serviceable set of instruments, must yet be admitted, since they are the
invariable result of any attempt to enlarge the field of our superficially
active consciousness whether by some kind of untaught effort and casual
ill-ordered effect or by a scientific and well-regulated practice.

None of them, however, leads to the aim we have in view, the
psychological experience of those truths that are "beyond perception
by the sense but seizable by the perceptions of the reason," buddhigrd-
hyam atindriyam?- They give us only a larger field of phenomena and
more effective means for the observation of phenomena. The truth of
things always escapes beyond the sense. Yet is it a sound rule inherent
in the very constitution of universal existence that where theer are truths
attainable by the reason, there must be somewhere in the organism
possessed of that reason a means of arriving at or verifying them by
experience. The one means we have left in our mentality is an exten-
sion of that form of knowledge by identity which gives us the awareness
of our own existence. It is really upon a self-awareness more or less
conscient, more or less present to our conception that the knowledge
of the contents of our self is based. Or to put it in a more general for-
mula, the knowledge of the contents is contained in the knowledge of
the continent. If then we can extend our faculty of mental self-aware-
ness to awareness of the Self beyond and outside us, Atman or Brahman
of the Upanishads, we may become possessors in experience of the truths
which form the contents of the Atman or Brahman in the universe. It is
on this possibility that Indian Vedanta has based itself. It has sought
through knowledge of the Self the knowledge of the universe.

But always mental experience and the concepts of the reason have
been held by it to be even at their highest a reflection in mental identifi-
cations and not the supreme self-existent identity. We have to go beyond
the mind and the reason. The reason active in our waking conscious-
ness is only a mediator between the subconscient All that we come from
in our evolution upwards and the superconscient All towards which
we are impelled by that evolution. The subconscient and the super-
conscient are two different formulations of the same All. The master-
word of the subconscient is Life, the master-word of the superconscient
is Light. In the subconscient knowledge or consciousness is involved
in action, for action is the essence of Life. In the superconscient action

^Gita, VI. 21.

THE METHODS OF VEDANTIC KNOWLEDGE 63

re-enters into Light and no longer contains involved knowledge but is
itself contained in a supreme consciousness. Intuitional knowledge is
that which is common between them and the foundation of intuitional
knowledge is conscious or effective identity between that which knows
and that which is known; it is that state of common self-existence in
which the knower and the known are one through knowledge. But in
the subconscient the intuition manifests itself in the action, in effec-
tivity, and the knowledge or conscious identity is either entirely or more
or less concealed in the action. In the superconscient, on the contrary,
Light being the law and the principle, the intuition manifests itself in
its true nature as knowledge emerging out of conscious identity, and
effectivity of action is rather the accompaniment or necessary conse-
quent and no longer masks as the primary fact. Between these two
states reason and mind act as intermediaries which enable the being to
liberate knowledge out of its imprisonment in the act and prepare it
to resume its essential primacy. When the self-awareness in the mind
applied, both to continent and content, to own-self and other-self, exalts
itself into the luminous self-manifest identity, the reason also converts
itself into the form of the self-luminous intuitional ^ knowledge. This is
the highest possible state of our knowledge when mind fulfils itself in
the supramental.

Such is the scheme of the human understanding upon which the
conclusions of the most ancient Vedanta were built. To develop the
results arrived at on this foundation by the ancient sages is not my ob-
ject, but it is necessary to pass briefly in review some of their principal
conclusions so far as they affect the problem of the divine Life with
which alone we are at present concerned. For it is in those ideas that
we shall find the best previous foundation of that which we seek now
to rebuild and although, as with all knowledge, old expression has to be
replaced to a certain extent by new expression suited to a later men-
tality and old light has to merge itself into new light as dawn succeeds
dawn, yet it is with the old treasure as our initial capital or so much of it
as we can recover that we shall most advantageously proceed to accumu-
late the largest gains in our new commerce with the ever-changeless and
ever-changing Infinite.

I use the word "intuition" for want of a better. In truth, it is a makeshift
and inadequate to the connotation demanded of it. The same has to be said of the
word "consciousness" and many others which our poverty compels us to extend
illegitimately in their significance.

64 THE LIFE DIVINE

Sad Brahman, Existence pure, indefinable, infinite, absolute, is the
last concept at which Vedantic analysis arrives in its view of the uni-
verse, the fundamental Reality which Vedantic experience discovers
behind all the movement and formation which constitute the apparent
reality. It is obvious that when we posit this conception, we go en-
tirely beyond what our ordinary consciousness, our normal experience
contains or warrants. The senses and sense-mind know nothing whatever
about any pure or absolute existence. All that our sense-experience tells
us of, is form and movement. Forms exist, but with an existence that is
not pure, rather always mixed, combined, aggregated, relative. When
we go within ourselves, we may get rid of precise form, but we cannot
get rid of movement, of change. Motion of Matter in Space, motion of
change in Time seem to be the condition of existence. We may say in-
deed, if we like, that this is existence and that the idea of existence in
itself corresponds to no discoverable reality. At the most in the phe-
nomenon of self-awareness or behind it, we get sometimes a glimpse
of something immovable and immutable, something that we vaguely per-
ceive or imagine that we are beyond all life and death, beyond all change
and formation and action. Here is the one door in us that sometimes
swings open upon the splendour of a truth beyond and, before it shuts
again, allows a ray to touch us, — a luminous intimation which, if we
have the strength and firmness, we may hold to in our faith and make a
starting-point for another play of consciousness than that of the sense-
mind, for the play of Intuition.

For if we examine carefully, we shall find that Intuition is our first
teacher. Intuition always stands veiled behind our mental operations.
Intuition brings to man those brilliant messages from the Unknown
which are the beginning of his higher knowledge. Reason only comes
in afterwards to see what profit it can have of the shining harvest.
Intuition gives us that idea of something behind and beyond all that we
know and seem to be which pursues man always in contradiction of his
lower reason and all his normal experience and impels him to formulate
that formless perception in the more positive ideas of God, Immortality,
Heaven and the rest by which we strive to express it to the mind. For
Intuition is as strong as Nature herself from whose very soul it has
sprung and cares nothing for the contradictions of reason or the denials
of experience. It knows what is because it is, because itself it is of that
and has come from that, and will not yield it to the judgment of what
merely becomes and appears. What the Intuition tells us of, is not so

THE METHODS OF VEDANTIC KNOWLEDGE 65

much Existence as the Existent, for it proceeds from that one point of
light in us which gives it its advantage, that sometimes opened door in
our own self-awareness. Ancient Vedanta seized this message of the
Intuition and formulated it in the three great declarations of the Upan-
ishads, "I am He," "Thou art That, O Swetaketu," "All this is the
Brahman ; this Self is the Brahman."

But Intuition by the very nature of its ^tion in man, working as
it does from behind the veil, active principally in his more unenlightened,
less articulate parts, served in front of the veil, in the narrow light
which is our waking conscience, only by instruments that are unable
fully to assimilate its messages, — Intuition is unable to give us the truth
in that ordered and articulated- form which our nature demands. Before
it could effect any such completeness of direct knowledge in us, it would
have to organise itself in our surface being and take possession there of
the leading part. But in our surface being it is not the Intuition, it is
the Reason which is organised and helps us to order our perceptions,
thoughts and actions. Therefore the age of intuitive knowledge, repre-
sented by the early Vedantic thinking of the Upanishads, had to give
place to the age of rational knowledge ; inspired Scripture made room for
metaphysical philosophy, even as afterwards metaphysical philosophy
had to give place to experimental Science. Intuitive thought which is a
messenger from the superconscient and therefore our highest faculty, was
supplanted by the pure reason which is only a sort of deputy and belongs
to the middle heights of our being; pure reason in its turn was sup-
planted for a time by the mixed action of the reason which lives on our
plains and lower elevations and does not in its view exceed the horizon of
the experience that the physical mind and senses or such aids as we can
invent for them can bring to us. And this process which seems to be a
descent, is really a circle of progress. For in each case the lower faculty
is compelled to take up as much as it can assimilate of what the higher
had already given and to attempt to re-establish it by its own methods.
By the attempt it is itself enlarged in its scope and arrives eventually
at a more supple and a more ample self-accommodation to the higher
faculties. Without this succession and attempt to separate assimilation
we should be obliged to remain under the exclusive domination of a part
of our nature while the rest remained either depressed and unduly sub-
jected or separate in its field and therefore poor in its development.
With this succession and separate attempt the balance is righted; a
more complete harmony of our parts of knowledge is prepared.

66 THE LIFE DIVINE

We see this succession in the Upanishads and the subsequent Indian
philosophies. The sages of the Veda and Vedanta relied entirely upon
intuition and spiritual experience. It is by an error that scholars some-
times speak of great debates or discussions in the Upanishad. Where-
ever there is the appearance of a controversy, it is not by discussion, by
dialectics or the use of logical reasoning that it proceeds, but by a com-
parison of intuitions and experiences in which the less luminous gives
place to the more luminous, the narrower, faultier or less essential to
the more comprehensive, more perfect, more essential. The question
asked by one thinker of another is "What dost thou know?", not "What
dost thou think?" nor "To what conclusion has thy reasoning arrived?"
Nowhere in the Upanishads do we find any trace of logical reasoning
urged in support of the truths of Vedanta. Intuition, the sages seem
to have held, must be corrected by a more perfect intuition; logical
reasoning cannot be its judge.

And yet the human reason demands its own method of satisfaction.
Therefore when the age of rationalistic speculation began, Indian philos-
ophers, respectful of the heritage of the past, adopted a double attitude
towards the Truth they sought. They recognised in the Sruti, the
earlier results of Intuition or, as they preferred to call it, of inspired
Revelation, an authority superior to Reason. But at the same time they
started from Reason and tested the results it gave them, holding only
those conclusions to be valid which were supported by the supreme
authority. In this way they avoided to a certain extent the besetting sin
of metaphysics, the tendency to battle in the clouds because it deals
with words as if they were imperative facts instead of symbols which
have always to be carefully scrutinised and brought back constantly to
the sense of that which they represent. Their speculations tended at
first to keep near at the centre to the highest and profoundest experience
and proceeded with the united consent of the two great authorities,
Reason and Intuition. Nevertheless, the natural trend of Reason to
assert its own supremacy triumphed in effect over the theory of its
subordination. Hence the rise of conflicting schools each of which
founded itself in theory on the Veda and used its texts as a weapon
against the others. For the highest intuitive Knowledge sees things in the
whole, in the large and details only as sides of the indivisible whole; its
tendency is towards immediate synthesis and the unity of knowledge.
Reason, on the contrary, proceeds by analysis and division and assem-
bles its facts to form a whole ; but in the assemblage so formed there are

THE METHODS OF VEDANTIC KNOWLEDGE 67

opposites, anomalies, logical incompatibilities, and the natural tendency
of Reason is to affirm some and to negate others which conflict with its
chosen conclusions so that it may form a flawlessly logical system.
The unity of the first intuitional knowledge was thus broken up and the
ingenuity of the logicians was always able to discover devices, methods
of interpretation, standards of varying value by which inconvenient
texts of the Scripture could be practically annulled and an entire free-
dom acquired for their metaphysical speculation.

Nevertheless, the main conceptions of the earlier Vedanta remained
in parts in the various philosophical systems and efforts were made from
time to time to recombine them into some image of the old catholicity
and unity of intuitional thought. And behind the thought of all, vari-
ously presented, survived as the fundamental conception, Purusha,
Atman or Sad Brahmao, the pure Existent of the Upanishads, often
rationalised into an idea or psychological state, but still carrying some-
thing of its old burden of inexpressible reality. What may be the re-
lation of the movement of becoming which is what we call the world to
this absolute Unity and how the ego, whether generated by the move-
ment or cause of the movement, can return to that true Self, Divinity or
Reality declared by the Vedanta, these were the questions speculative
and practical which have always occupied the thought of India.

CHAPTER IX

THE PURE EXISTENT

One indivisible that is pure existence.

Chhandogya U panishad}

W'HEN we withdrew our gaze from its egoistic preoccupation with
limited and fleeting interests and look upon the world with dis-
passionate and curious eyes that search only for the Truth, our first
result is the perception of a boundless energy .of infinite existence, in-
finite movement, infinite activity pouring itself out in limitless Space,
in eternal Time, an existence that surpasses infinitely our ego or any
ego or any collectivity of egos, in whose balance the grandiose products
of aeons are but the dust of a moment and in whose incalculable sum
numberless myriads count only as a petty swarm. We instinctively act
and feel and weave our life thoughts as if this stupendous world move-
ment were at work around us as centre and for our benefit, for our help
or harm, or as if the justification of our egoistic cravings, emotions,
ideas, standards were its proper business even as they are our own chief
concern. When we begin to see, we perceive that it exists for itself, not
for us, has its own gigantic aims, its own complex and boundless idea,
its own vast desire or delight that it seeks to fulfil, its own immense and
formidable standards which look down as if with an indulgent and ironic
smile at the pettiness of ours. And yet let us not swing over to the other
extreme and form too positive an idea of our own insignificance. That
too would be an act of ignorance and the shutting of our eyes to the
great facts of the universe.

For this boundless Movement does not regard us as unimportant
to it. Science reveals to us how minute is the care, how cunning the
device, how intense the absorption it bestows upon the smallest of its
works even as on the largest. This mighty energy is an equal and impar-
tial mother, samam Brahma, in the great term of the Gita, and its in-
tensity and force of movement is the same in the formation and upholding
of a system of suns and the organisation of the life of an ant-hill. It is

'VI. 2. I.

68

THE PURE EXISTENT 69

the illusion of size, of quantity that induces us to look on the one as
great, the other as petty. If we look, on the contrary, not at mass of
quantity but force of quality, we shall say that the ant is greater than
the solar system it inhabits and man greater than all inanimate Nature
put together. But this again is the illusion of quality. When we go be-
hind and examine only the intensity of the movement of which quality
and quantity are aspects, we realise that this Brahman dwells equally in
all existences. Equally partaken of by all in its being, we are tempted
to say, equally distributed to all in its energy. But this too is an illu-
sion of quantity. Brahman dwells in all, indivisible, yet as if divided
and distributed. If we look again with an observing perception not
dominated by intellectual concepts, but informed by intuition and cul-
minating in knowledge by identity, we shall see that the consciousness
of this infinite Energy is other than our mental consciousness, that it is
indivisible and gives, not an equal part of itself, but its whole self at
one and the same time to the solar system and to the ant-hill. To Brah-
man there are no whole and parts, but each thing is all itself and benefits
by the whole of Brahman. Quality and quantity differ, the self is equal.
The form and manner and result of the force of action vary infinitely,
but the eternal, primal, infinite energy is the same in all. The force of
strength that goes to make the strong man is no whit greater than the
force of weakness that goes to make the weak. The energy spent is as
great in repression as in expression, in negation as in affirmation, in si-
lence as in sound.

Therefore the first reckoning we have to mend is that between this
infinite Movement, this energy of existence which is the world and our-
selves. At present we keep a false account. We are infinitely important
to the All, but to us the All is negligible ; we alone are important to our-
selves. This is the sign of the original ignorance which is the root of
the ego, that it can only think with itself as centre as if it were the All,
and of that which is not itself accepts only so much as it is mentally dis-
posed to acknowledge or as it is forced to recognise by the shocks of its
environment. Even when it begins to philosophise, does it not assert
that the world only exists in and by its consciousness? Its own state of
consciousness or mental standards are to it the test of reality ; all outside
its orbit or view tends to become false or non-existent. This mental
self-sufficiency of man creates a system of false accountantship which
prevents us from drawing the right and full value from life. There
is a sense in which these pretensions of the human mind and ego repose

70 THE LIFE DIVINE

on a truth, but this truth only emerges when the mind has learned its
ignorance and the ego has submitted to the All and lost in it its separate
self-assertion. To recognise that we, or rather the results and appear-
ances we call ourselves, are only a partial movement of this infinite
Movement and that it is that infinite which we have to know, to be con-
sciously and to fulfil faithfully, is the commencement of true living.
To recognise that in our true selves we are one with the total movement
and not minor or subordinate is the other side of the account, and its
expression in the manner of our being, thought, emotion and action is
necessary to the culmination of a true or divine living.

But to settle the account we have to know what is this All, this
infinite and omnipotent energy. And here we come to a fresh compli-
cation. For it is asserted to us by the pure reason and it seems to be
asserted to us by Vedanta that as we are subordinate and an aspect of
this Movement, so the movement is subordinate and an aspect of some-
thing other than itself, of a great timeless, spaceless Stability, sthdnu,
which is immutable, inexhaustible and unexpended, not acting though
containing all this action, not energy, but pure existence. Those who
see only this world-energy can declare indeed that there is no such
thing: our idea of an eternal stability, an immutable pure existence is
a fiction of our intellectual conceptions starting from a false idea of the
stable: for there is nothing that is stable; all is movement and our
conception of the stable is only an artifice of our mental consciousness
by which we secure a standpoint for dealing practically with the move-
ment. It is easy to show that this is true in the movement itself.
There is nothing there that is stable. All that appears to be station-
ary is only a block of movement, a formulation of energy at work
which so affects our consciousness that it seems to be still, some-
what as the earth seems to us to be still, somewhat as a train in which we
are travelling seems to be still in the midst of a rushing landscape.
But is it equally true that underlying this movement, supporting it,
there is nothing that is moveless and immutable? Is it true that exist-
ence consists only in the action of energy? Or is it not rather that
energy is an output of Existence?

We see at once that if such an Existence is, it must be, like the
Energy, infinite. Neither reason nor experience nor intuition nor im-
agination bears witness to us of the possibility of a final terminus. All
end and beginning presuppose something beyond the end or beginning.
An absolute end, an absolute beginning is not only a contradiction in

THE PURE EXISTENT 7 1

terms, but a contradiction of the essence of things, a violence, a fiction.
Infinity imposes itself upon the appearances of the finite by its in-
effugable self-existence.

But this is infinity with regard to Time and Space, an eternal
duration, interminable extension. The pure Reason goes farther and
looking in its own colourless and austere light at Time and Space points
out that these two are categories of our consciousness, conditions under
which we arrange our perception of phenomenon. When we look at
existence in itself. Time and Space disappear. If there is any extension,
it is not a spatial but a psychological extension; if there is any duration,
it is not a temporal but a psychological duration; and it is then easy
to see that this extension and duration are only symbols which represent
to the mind something not translatable into intellectual terms, an eternity
which seems to us the same all-containing ever-new moment, an infinity
which seems to us the same all-containing all-pervading point with-
out magnitude. And this conflict of terms, so violent, yet accurately
expressive of something we do perceive, shows that mind and speech
have passed beyond their natural limits and are striving to express a
Reality in which their own conventions and necessary oppositions dis-
appear into an ineffable identity.

But is this a true record? May it not be that Time and Space so
disappear merely because the existence we are regarding is a fiction of
the intellect, a fantastic Nihil created by speech, which we strive to
erect into a conceptual reality? We regard again that Existence-in-itself
and we say. No. There is something behind the phenomenon not only
infinite but indefinable. Of no phenomenon, of no totality of phenom-
ena can we say that absolutely it is. Even if we reduce all phenomena
to one fundamental, universal irreduciWe phenomenon of movement
or energy, we get only an indefinable phenomenon. The very concep-
tion of movement carries with it the potentiality of repose and betrays it-
self as an activity of some existence; the very idea of energy in action
carries with it the idea of energy abstaining from action; and an abso-
lute energy not in action is simply and purely absolute existence. We
have only these two alternatives, either an indefinable pure existence
or an indefinable energy in action and, if the latter alone is true, without
any stable base or cause, then the energy is a result and phenomenon
generated by the action, the movement which alone is. We have then
no Existence, or we have the Nihil of the Buddhists with existence as
only an attribute of an eternal phenomenon, of Action, of Karma, of

72 THE LIFE DIVINE

Movement. This, asserts the pure reason, leaves my perceptions un-
satisfied, contradicts my fundamental seeing, and therefore cannot be.
For it brings us to a last abruptly ceasing stair of an ascent which
leaves the whole staircase without support, suspended in the Void.

If this indefinable, infinite, timeless, spaceless Existence is, it is
necessarily a pure absolute.. It cannot be summed up in any quantity or
quantities, it cannot be composed of any quality or combination of
qualities. It is not an aggregate of forms or a formal substratum of
forms. If all forms, quantities, qualities were to disappear, this would
remain. Existence without quantity, without quality, without form is
not only conceivable, but it is the one thing we can conceive behind
these phenomena. Necessarily, when we say it is without them, we
mean that it exceeds them, that it is something into which they pass in
such a way as to cease to be what we call form, quality, quantity and out
of which they emerge as form, quality and quantity in the movement.
They do not pass away into one form, one quality, one quantity which
is the basis of all the rest, — for there is none such, — but into something
which cannot be defined by any of these terms. So all things that are
conditions and appearances of the movement pass into That from which
they have come and there, so far as they exist, become something that
can no longer be described by the terms that are appropriate to them
in the movement. Therefore we say that the pure existence is an Absolute
and in itself unknowable by our thought although we can go back to
it in a supreme identity that transcends the terms of knowledge. 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. The relation of the phenomena of
Nature to the fundamental ether which is contained in them, constitutes
them, contains them and yet is so different from them that entering into
it they cease to be what they now are, is the illustration given by the
Vedanta as most nearly representing this identity in difference between
the Absolute and the relative.

Necessarily, when we speak of things passing into that from which
they have come, we are using the language of our temporal conscious-
ness and must guard ourselves against its illusions. The emergence of
the movement from the Immutable is an eternal phenomenon and it
is only because we cannot conceive it in that beginningless, endless,
ever-new moment which is the eternity of the Timeless that our notions
and perceptions are compelled to place it in a temporal eternity of sue-

THE PURE EXISTENT 73

cessive duration to which are attached the ideas of an always recurrent
beginning, middle and end.

But all this, it may be said, is valid only so long as we accept the
concepts of pure reason and remain subject to them. But the concepts
of reason have no obligatory force. We must judge of existence not by
what we mentally conceive, but by what we see to exist. And the purest,
freest form of insight into existence as it is shows us nothing but move-
ment. Two things alone exist, movement in Space, movement in Time,
the former objective, the latter subjective. Extension is real, duration
is real, Space and Time are real. Even if we can go behind extension in
Space and perceive it as a psychological phenomenon, as an attempt
of the mind to make existence manageable by distributing the indivisible
whole in a conceptual Space, yet we cannot go behind the movement
of succession and change in Time. For that is the very stuff of our
consciousness. We are and the world is a movement that continually
progresses and increases by the inclusion of all the successions of the
past in a present which represents itself to us as the beginning of all the
successions of the future, — a beginning, a present that always eludes us
because it is not, for it has perished before it is born. What is, is the
eternal, indivisible succession of Time carrying on its stream a progres-
sive movement of consciousness also indivisible.^ Duration then, eter-
nally successive movement and change in Time, is the sole absolute.
Becoming is the only being.

In reality, this opposition of actual insight into being to the con-
ceptual fictions of the pure Reason is fallacious. If indeed intuition in
this matter were really opposed to intelligence, we could not confidently
support a merely conceptual reasoning against fundamental insight. But
this appeal to intuitive experience is incomplete. It is valid only so far
as it proceeds and it errs by stopping short of the integral experience.
So long as the intuition fixes itself only upon that which we become, we
see ourselves as a continual progression of movement and change in con-
sciousness in the eternal succession of Time. We are the river, the flame
of the Buddhist illustration. But there is a supreme experience and su-
preme intuition by which we go back behind our surface self and find

^ Indivisible in the totality of the movement. Each moment of Time or Con-
sciousness may be considered as separate from its predecessor and successor, each
successive action of Energy as a new quantum or new creation; but this does not
abrogate continuity without which there would be no duration of Time or co-
herence of consciousness, A man's steps as he walks or runs or leaps are separate,
but there is something that takes the steps and makes the movement continuous.

74 THE LIFE DIVINE

that this becoming, change, succession are only a mode of our being and
that there is that in us which is not involved at all in the becoming. Not
only can we have the intuition of this that is stable and eternal in us,
not only can we have the glimpse of it in experience behind the veil of
continually fleeting becomings, but we can draw back into it and live in
it entirely, so effecting an entire change in our external life, and in our
attitude, and in our action upon the movement of the world. And this
stability in which we can so live is precisely that which the pure Reason
has already given us, although it can be arrived at without reasoning at
all, without knowing previously what it is, — it is pure existence, eternal,
infinite, indefinable, not affected by the succession of Time, not involved
in the extension of Space, beyond form, quantity, quality, — Self only and
absolute.

The pure existent is then a fact and no mere concept; it is the fun-
damental reality. But, let us hasten to add, the movement, the energy,
the becoming are also a fact, also a reality. The supreme intuition and
its corresponding experience may correct the other, may go beyond, may
suspend, but do not abolish it. We have therefore two fundamental facts
of pure existence and of world-existence, a fact of Being, a fact of Be-
coming. To deny one or the other is easy; to recognise the facts of con-
sciousness and find out their relation is the true and fruitful wisdom.

Stability and movement, we must remember, are only our psycho-
logical representations of the Absolute, even as are oneness and multi-
tude. The Absolute is beyond stability and movement as it is beyond
unity and multiplicity. But it takes its eternal poise in the one and the
stable and whirls round itself infinitely, inconceivably, securely in the
moving and multitudinous. World-existence is the ecstatic dance of
Shiva which multiplies the body of the God numberlessly to the view: it
leaves that white existence precisely where and what it was, ever is and
ever will be ; its sole absolute object is the joy of the dancing.

But as we cannot describe or think out the Absolute in itself, be-
yond stability and movement, beyond unity and multitude, — nor is that
at all our business, — ^we must accept the double fact, admit both Shiva
and Kali and seek to know what is this measureless Movement in Time
and Space with regard to that timeless and spaceless pure Existence,
one and stable, to which measure and measurelessness are inapplicable.
We have seen what pure Reason, intuition and experience have to say
about pure Existence, about Sat; what have they to say about Force,
about Movement, about Shakti?

THE PURE EXISTENT 75

And the first thing we have to ask ourselves is whether that Force
is simply force, simply an unintelligent energy of movement or whether
the consciousness which seems to emerge out of it in this material world
we live in, is not merely one of its phenomenal results but rather its own
true and secret nature. In Vedantic terms, is Force simply Prakriti, only
a movement of action and process, or is Prakriti really power of Chit, in
its nature force of creative self-conscience? On this essential problem all
the rest hinges.

CHAPTER X

CONSCIOUS FORCE

They beheld the self-force of the Divine Being deep
hidden by its own conscious modes of working.

Swetaswatara Upanisnad}

This is he that is awake in those who sleep.

Katha Upanishad?

A LL phenomenal existence resolves itself into Force, into a move-
-^A. ment of energy that assumes more or less material, more or less
gross or subtle forms for self-presentation to its own experience. In the
ancient images by which human thought attempted to make this origin
and law of being intelligible and real to itself, this infinite existence of
Force was figured as a sea, initially at rest and therefore free from
forms, but the first disturbance, the first initiation of movement necessi-
tates the creation of forms and is the seed of a universe.

Matter is the presentation of force which is most easily intelligible
to our intelligence, moulded as it is by contacts in Matter to which a
mind involved in material brain gives the response. The elementary state
of material Force is, in the view of the old Indian physicists, a condition
of pure material extension in Space of which the peculiar property is
vibration typified to us by the phenomenon of sound. But vibration in
this state of ether is not sufficient to create forms. There must first be
some obstruction in the flow of the Force ocean, some contraction and
expansion, some interplay of vibrations, some impinging of force upon
force so as to create a beginning of fixed relations and mutual effects.
Material Force modifying its first ethereal status assumes a second,
called in the old language the aerial, of which the special property is con-
tact between force and force, contact that is the basis of all material
relations. Still we have not as yet real forms but only varying forces.
A sustaining principle is needed. This is provided by a third self-modifi-
cation of the primitive Force of which the principle of light, electricity,
fire and heat is for us the characteristic manifestation. Even then, we

*I. 3. 'V. 8.

76

CONSCIOUS FORCE 77

can have forms of force preserving their own character and peculiar
action, but not stable forms of Matter. A fourth state characterised by
diffusion and a first medium of permanent attractions and repulsions,
termed picturesquely water or the liquid state, and a fifth of cohesion,
termed earth or the solid state, complete the necessary elements.

All forms of Matter of which we are aware, all physical things even
to the most subtle, are built up by the combination of these five elements.
Upon them also depends all our sensible experience ; for by reception of
vibration comes the sense of sound; by contact of things in a world of
vibrations of Force the sense of touch ; by the action of light in the forms
hatched, outlined, sustained by the force of light and fire and heat the
sense of sight; by the fourth element the sense of taste; by the fifth the
sense of smell. All is essentially response to vibratory contacts between
force and force. In this way the ancient thinkers bridged the gulf be-
tween pure Force and its final modifications and satisfied the difficulty
which prevents the ordinary human mind from understanding how all
these forms which are to his senses so real, solid and durable can be in
truth only temporary phenomena and a thing like pure energy, to the
senses non-existent, intangible and almost incredible, can be the one
permanent cosmic reality.

The problem of consciousness is not solved by this theory; for it
does not explain how the contact of vibrations of Force should give rise
to conscious sensations. The Sankhyas or analytic thinkers posited
therefore behind these five elements two principles which they called
Mahat and Ahankara, principles which are really non-material; for the
first is nothing but the vast cosmic principle of Force and the other the
divisional principle of Ego-formation. Nevertheless, these two principles,
as also the principle of intelligence, become active in consciousness not
by virtue of Force itself, but by virtue of an inactive Conscious-Soul or
souls in which its activities are reflected and by that reflection assume
the hue of consciousness.

Such is the explanation of things offered by the school of Indian
philosophy which comes nearest to the modern materialistic ideas and
which carried the idea of a mechanical or unconscious Force in Nature
as far as was possible to a seriously reflective Indian mind. Whatever
its defects, its main idea was so indisputable that it came to be generally
accepted. However the phenomenon of consciousness may be explained,
whether Nature be an inert impulse or a conscious principle, it is cer-
tainly Force; the principle of things is a formative movement of energies,

78 THE LIFE DIVINE

all forms are born of meeting and mutual adaptation between unshaped
forces, all sensation and action is a response of something in a form of
Force to the contacts of other forms of Force. This is the world as we
experience it and from this experience we must always start.

Physical analysis of Matter by modern Science has come to the
same general conclusion, even if a few last doubts still linger. Intuition
and experience confirm this concord of Science and Philosophy. Pure
reason finds in it the satisfaction of its own essential conceptions. For
even in the view of the world as essentially an act of consciousness, an
act is implied and in the act movement of Force, play of Energy. This
also, when we examine from within our own experience, proves to be the
fundamental nature of the world. All our activities are the play of the
triple force of the old philosophies, knowledge-force, desire-force, action-
force, and all these prove to be really three streams of one original and
identical Power, Adya Shakti. Even our states of rest are only equable
state or equilibrium of the play of her movement.

Movement of Force being admitted as the whole nature of the Cos-
mos, two questions arise. And first, how did this movement come to
take place at all in the bosom of existence? If we suppose it to be not
only eternal but the very essence of all existence, the question does not
arise. But we have negatived this theory. We are aware of an existence
which is not compelled by the movement. How then does this movement
alien to its eternal repose come to take place in it? by what cause? by
what possibility? by what mysterious impulsion?

The answer most approved by the ancient Indian mind was that
Force is inherent in Existence. Shiva and Kali, Brahman and Shakti
are one and not two who are separable. Force inherent in existence may
be at rest or it may be in motion, but when it is at rest, it exists none
the less and is not abolished, diminished or in any way essentially altered.
This reply is so entirely rational and in accordance with the nature of
things that we need not hesitate to accept it. For it is impossible, because
contradictory of reason, to suppose that Force is a thing alien to the one
and infinite existence and entered into it from outside or was non-
existent and arose in it at some point in Time. Even the Illusionist
theory must admit that Maya, the power of self-illusion in Brahman, is
potentially eternal in eternal Being and then the sole question is its
manifestation or non-manifestation. The Sankhya also asserts the
eternal coexistence of Prakriti and Purusha, Nature and Conscious-Soul,

CONSCIOUS FORCE 79

and the alternative states of rest or equilibrium of Prakriti and movement
or disturbance of equilibrium.

But since Force is thus inherent in existence and it is the nature of
Force to have this double or alternative potentiality of rest and move-
ment, that is to say, of self-concentration in Force and self-diffusion in
Force, the question of the how of the movement, its possibility, initiating
impulsion or impelling cause does not arise. For we can easily, then,
conceive that this potentiality must translate itself either as an alterna-
tive rhythm of rest and movement succeeding each other in Time or else
as an eternal self-concentration of Force in immutable existence with a
superficial play of movement, change and formation like the rising and
falling of waves on the surface of the ocean. And this superficial play —
we are necessarily speaking in inadequate images — may be either coeval
with the self-concentration and itself also eternal or it may begin and
end in Time and be resumed by a sort of constant rhythm; it is then
not eternal in continuity but eternal in recurrence.

The problem of the how thus eliminated, there presents itself the
question of the why. Why should this possibility of a play of movement
of Force translate itself at all? why should not Force of existence remain
eternally concentrated in itself, infinite, free from all variation and for-
mation? This question also does not arise if we assume Existence to be
non-conscious and consciousness only a development of material energy
which we wrongly suppose to be immaterial. For then we can say simply
that this rhythm is the nature of Force in existence and there is abso-
lutely no reason to seek for a why, a cause, an initial motive or a final
purpose for that which is in its nature eternally self-existent. We cannot
put that question to eternal self-existence and ask it either why it exists
or how it came into existence; neither can we put it to self-force of
existence and its inherent nature of impulsion to movement. All that
we can then inquire into is its manner of self-manifestation, its principles
of movement and formation, its process of evolution. Both Existence
and Force being inert, — inert status and inert impulsion, — both of them
unconscious and unintelligent, there cannot be any purpose or final goal
in evolution or any original cause or intention.

But if we suppose or find Existence to be conscious Being, the
problem arises. We may indeed suppose a conscious Being which is
subject to its nature of Force, compelled by it and without option as to
whether it shall manifest in the universe or remain unmanifest. Such is

80 THE LIFE DIVINE

the cosmic God of the Tantriks and the Mayavadins who is subject to
Shakti or Maya, Purusha involved in Maya or controlled by Shakti. But
it is obvious that such a God is not the supreme infinite Existence with
which we have started. Admittedly, it is only a formulation of Brahman
in the cosmos by the Brahman which is itself logically anterior to Shakti
or Maya and takes her back into its transcendental being when she ceases
from her works. In a conscious existence which is absolute, independent
of its formations, not determined by its works, we must suppose an
inherent freedom to manifest or not to manifest the potentiality of
movement. A Brahman compelled by Prakriti is not Brahman, but an
inert Infinite with an active content in it more powerful than the conti-
nent, a conscious holder of Force of whom his Force is master. If we
say that it is compelled by itself as Force, by its own nature, we do not
get rid of the contradiction, the evasion of our first postulate. We have
got back to an Existence which is really nothing but Force, Force at
rest or in movement, absolute Force perhaps, but not absolute Being.
It is then necessary to examine into the relation between Force and
Consciousness. But what do we mean by the latter term? Ordinarily
we mean by it our first obvious idea of a mental waking consciousness
such as is possessed by the human being during the major part of his
bodily existence, when he is not asleep, stunned or otherwise deprived
of his physical and superficial methods of sensation. In this sense it is
plain enough that consciousness is the exception and not the rule in the
order of the material universe. We ourselves do not always possess it.
But this vulgar and shallow idea of the nature of consciousness, though
it still colours our ordinary thought and associations, must now definitely
disappear out of philosophical thinking. For we know that there is
something in us which is conscious when we sleep, when we are stunned
or drugged or in a swoon, in all apparently unconscious states of our
physical being. Not only so, but we may now be sure that the old
thinkers were right when they declared that even in our waking state
what we call then our consciousness is only a small selection from our
entire conscious being. It is a superficies, it is not even the whole of our
mentality. Behind it, much vaster than it, there is a subliminal or sub-
conscient mind which is the greater part of ourselves and contains heights
and profundities which no man has yet measured or fathomed. This
knowledge gives us a starting-point for the true science of Force and its
workings; it delivers us definitely from circumscription by the material
and from the illusion of the obvious.

CONSCIOUS FORCE 8l

Materialism indeed insists that, whatever the extension of con-
sciousness, it is a material phenomenon inseparable from our physical
organs and not their utiliser but their result. This orthodox contention,
however, is no longer able to hold the field against the tide of increasing
knowledge. Its explanations are becoming more and more inadequate
and strained. It is becoming always clearer that not only does the ca-
pacity of our total consciousness far exceed that of our organs, the
senses, the nerves, the brain but that even for our ordinary thought and
consciousness these organs are only their habitual instruments and not
their generators. Consciousness uses the brain which its upward strivings
have produced, brain has not produced nor does it use the consciousness.
There are even abnormal instances which go to prove that our organs
are not entirely indispensable instruments, — that the heart-beats are
not absolutely essential to life, any more than is breathing, nor the
organised brain-cells to thought. Our physical organism no more causes
or explains thought and consciousness than the construction of an engine
causes or explains the motive-power of steam or electricity. The force
is anterior, not the physical instrument.

Momentous logical consequences follow. In the first place we may
ask whether, since even mental consciousness exists where we see inani-
mation and inertia, it is not possible that even in material objects a
universal subconscient mind is present although unable to act or com-
municate itself to its surfaces for want of organs. Is the material state
an emptiness of consciousness, or is it not rather only a sleep of con-
sciousness— even though from the point of view of evolution an original
and not an intermediate sleep? And by sleep the human example teaches
us that we mean not a suspension of consciousness, but its gathering
inward away from conscious physical response to the impacts of external
things. And is not this what all existence is that has not yet developed
means of outward communication with the external physical world? Is
there not a Conscious Soul, a Purusha who wakes for ever even in all
that sleeps?

We may go farther. When we speak of subconscious mind, we
should mean by the phrase a thing not different from the outer mentality,
but only acting below the surface, unknown to the waking man, in the
same sense if perhaps with a deeper plunge and a larger scope. But the
phenomena of the subliminal self far exceed the limits of any such
definition. It includes an action not only immensely superior in capacity,
but quite different in kind from what we know as mentality in our

82 THE LIFE DIVINE

waking self. We have therefore a right to suppose that there is a super-
conscient in us as well as a subconscient, a range of conscious faculties
and therefore an organisation of consciousness which rise high above
that psychological stratum to which we give the name of mentality.
And since the subliminal self in us thus rises in superconscience above
mentality, may it not also sink in subconscience below mentality? Are
there not in us and in the world forms of consciousness which are sub-
mental, to which we can give the name of vital and physical conscious-
ness? If so, we must suppose in the plant and the metal also a force to
which we can give the name of consciousness although it is not the
human or animal mentality for which we have hitherto preserved the
monopoly of that description.

Not only is this probable but, if we will consider things dispassion-
ately, it is certain. In ourselves there is such a vital consciousness which
acts in the cells of the body and the automatic vital functions so that we
go through purposeful movements and obey attractions and repulsions
to which our mind is a stranger. In animals this vital consciousness is
an even more important factor. In plants it is intuitively evident. The
seekings and shrinkings of the plant, its pleasure and pain, its sleep and
its wakefulness and all that strange life whose truth an Indian scientist
has brought to light by rigidly scientific methods, are all movements of
consciousness, but, as far as we can see, not of mentality. There is then
a sub-mental, a vital consciousness which has precisely the same initial
reactions as the mental, but is different in the constitution of its self-
experience, even as that which is superconscient is in the constitution of
its self-experience different from the mental being.

Does the range of what we can call consciousness cease with the
plant, with that in which we recognise the existence of a sub-animal life?
If so, we must then suppose that there is a force of life and consciousness
originally alien to Matter which has yet entered into and occupied
Matter, — perhaps from another world.^ For whence, otherwise, can it
have come? The ancient thinkers believed in the existence of such other
worlds, which perhaps sustain life and consciousness in ours or even call
it out by their pressure, but do not create it by their entry. Nothing
can evolve out of Matter which is not therein already contained.

•The curious speculation is now current that Life entered earth not from
another world, but from another planet. To the thinker that would explam noth-
ing. The essential question is how Life comes into Matter at all and not how it
enters into the matter of a particular planet.

CONSCIOUS FORCE 83

But there is no reason to suppose that the gamut of life and con-
sciousness fails and stops short in that which seems to us purely material.
The development of recent research and thought seems to point to a sort
of obscure beginning of life and perhaps a sort of inert or suppressed
consciousness in the metal and in the earth and in other "inanimate"
forms, or at least the first stuff of what becomes consciousness in us may
be there. Only while in the plant we can dimly recognise and conceive
the thing that I have called vital consciousness, the consciousness of
Matter, of the inert form, is difficult indeed for us to understand or
imagine, and what we find it difficult to understand or imagine we
consider it our right to deny. Nevertheless, when one has pursued con-
sciousness so far into the depths, it becomes incredible that there should
be this sudden gulf in Nature. Thought has a right to suppose a unity
where that unity is confessed by all other classes of phenomena and in
one class only, not denied, but merely more concealed than in others.
And if we suppose the unity to be unbroken, we then arrive at the
existence of consciousness in all forms of the Force which is at work in
the world. Even if there be no conscient or superconscient Purusha
inhabiting all forms, yet is there in those forms a conscious force of
being of which even their outer parts overtly or inertly partake.

Necessarily, in such a view, the word consciousness changes its
meaning. It is no longer synonymous with mentality but indicates a self-
aware force of existence of which mentality is a middle term; below
mentality it sinks into vital and material movements which are for us
subconscient ; above, it rises into the supramental which is for us the
superconscient. But in all it is one and the same thing organising itself
differently. This is, once more, the Indian conception of Chit which,
as energy, creates the worlds. Essentially, we arrive at that unity which
materialistic Science perceives from the other end when it asserts that
Mind cannot be another force than Matter, but must be merely devel-
opment and outcome of material energy. Indian thought at its deepest
affirms on the other hand that Mind and Matter are rather different
grades of the same energy, different organisations of one conscious Force
of Existence.

But what right have we to assume consciousness as the just de-
scription for this Force? For consciousness implies some kind of intelli-
gence, purposefulness, self-knowledge, even though they may not take
the forms habitual to our mentality. Even from this point of view
everything supports rather than contradicts the idea of a universal con-

84 THE LIFE DIVINE

scious Force. We see, for instance, in the animal, operations of a perfect
purposefulness and an exact, indeed a scientifically minute knowledge
which are quite beyond the capacities of the animal mentality and
which man himself can only acquire by long culture and education and
even then uses with a much less sure rapidity. We are entitled to see in
this general fact the proof of a conscious Force at work in the animal
and the insect which is more intelligent, more purposeful, more aware
of its intention, its ends, its means, its conditions than the highest men-
tality yet manifested in any individual form on earth. And in the oper-
ations of inanimate Nature we find the same pervading characteristic
of a supreme hidden intelligence, '^hidden in the modes of its own
workings."

The only argument against a conscious and intelligent source for
this purposeful work, this work of intelligence, of selection, adaption
and seeking is that large element in Nature's operations to which we
give the name of waste. But obviously this is an object based on the
limitations of our human intellect which seeks to impose its own par-
ticular rationality, good enough for limited human ends, on the general
operations of the World-Force. We see only part of Nature's purpose
and all that does not subserve that part we call waste. Yet even our own
human action is full of an apparent waste, so appearing from the indi-
vidual point of view, which yet, we may be sure, subserves well enough
the large and universal purpose of things. That part of her intention
which we can detect. Nature gets done surely enough in spite of, perhaps
really by virtue of her apparent waste. We may well trust to her in the
rest which we do not yet detect.

For the rest, it is impossible to ignore the drive of set purpose,
the guidance of apparent blind tendency, the sure eventual or immedi-
ate coming to the target sought, which characterise the operations of
World-Force in the animal, in the plant, in inanimate things. So long
as Matter was Alpha and Omega to the scientific mind, the reluctance
to admit intelligence as the mother of intelligence was an honest scruple.
But now it is no more than an outworn paradox to affirm the emergence
of human consciousness, intelligence and mastery out of an unintelli-
gent, blindly driving unconsciousness in which no form or substance of
them previously existed. Man's consciousness can be nothing else than
a form of Nature's consciousness. It is there in other involved forms
below Mind, it emerges in Mind, it shall ascend into yet superior forms

CONSCIOUS FORCE 85

beyond Mind. For the Force that builds the worlds is a conscious Force,
the Existence which manifests itself in them is conscious Being and a
perfect emergence of its potentialities in form is the sole object which
we can rationally conceive for its manifestation of this world of forms.

CHAPTER XI

DELIGHT OF EXISTENCE: THE PROBLEM

For who could live or breathe if there were not this
delight of existence as the ether in which we dwell?

From Delight all these beings are born, by Delight they
exist and grow, to Delight they return.

Taittiriya U panishad}

BUT even if we accept this pure Existence, this Brahman, this Sat
as the absolute beginning, end and continent of things and in Brah-
man an inherent self-consciousness inseparable from its being and
throwing itself out as a force of movement of consciousness which is
creative of forces, forms and worlds, we have yet no answer to the
question "Why should Brahman, perfect, absolute, infinite, needing noth-
ing, desiring nothing, at all, throw out force of consciousness to create
in itself these worlds of forms?" For we have put aside this solution
that it is compelled by its own nature of Force to create, obliged by its
own potentiality of movement and formation to move into forms. It is
true that it has this potentiality, but it is not limited, bound or compelled
by it; it is free. If, then, being free to move or remain eternally still, to
throw itself into forms or retain the potentiality of form in itself, it
indulges its power of movement and formation, it can be only for one
reason, for delight.

This primary, ultimate and eternal Existence, as seen by the Vedan-
tins, is not merely bare existence, or a conscious existence whose con-
sciousness is crude force or power; it is a conscious existence the very
term of whose being, the very term of whose consciousness is bliss. As in
absolute existence there can be no nothingness, no night of inconscience,
no deficiency, that is to say, no failure of Force, — for if there were any
of these things, it would not be absolute, — so also there can be no suffer-
ing, no negation of delight. Absoluteness of conscious existence is il-
limitable bliss of conscious existence ; the two are only different phrases
for the same thing. All illimitableness, all infinity, all absoluteness is
pure delight. Even our relative humanity has this experience that all

^11. 7; HI. 6.

86

DELIGHT OF EXISTENCE: THE PROBLEM 87

dissatisfaction means a limit, an obstacle, — satisfaction comes by reali-
sation of something withheld, by the surpassing of the limit, the over-
coming of the obstacle. This is because our original being is the absolute
in full possession of its infinite and illimitable self-consciousness and self-
power; a self-possession whose other name is self-delight. And in pro-
portion as the relative touches upon that self-possession, it moves to-
wards satisfaction, touches delight.

The self-delight of Braliman is not limited, however, by the still and
motionless possession of its absolute self-being. Just as its force of con-
sciousness is capable of throwing itself into forms infinitely and with an
endless variation, so also its self-delight is capable of movement, of varia-
tion, of revelling in that infinite flux and mutability of itself represented
by numberless teeming universes. To loose forth and enjoy this infinite
movement and variation of its self-delight is the object of its extensive
or creative play of Force.

In other words, that which has thrown itself out into forms is a
triune Existence-Consciousness-Bliss, Sachchidananda, whose conscious-
ness is in its nature a creative or rather a self-expressive Force capable
of infinite variation in phenomenon and form of its self-conscious being
and endlessly enjoying the delight of that variation. It follows that all
things that exist are what they are as terms of that existence, terms of
that conscious force, terms of that delight of being. Just as we find all
things to be mutable forms of one immutable being, finite results of one
infinite force, so we shall find that all things are variable self-expression
of one invariable and all-embracing delight of self-existence. In every-
thing that is, dwells the conscious force and it exists and is what it is by
virtue of that conscious force; so also in everything that is, there is the
delight of existence and it exists and is what it is by virtue of that delight.

This ancient Vedantic theory of cosmic origin is immedately con-
fronted in the human mind by two powerful contradictions, the emotional
and sensational consciousness of pain and the ethical problem of evil.
For if the world be an expression of Sachchidananda, not only of exist-
ence that is conscious-force, — for that can easily be admitted, — but of
existence that is also infinite self-delight, how are we to account for the
universal presence of grief, of suffering, of pain? For this world appears
to us rather as a world of suffering than as a world of the delight of ex-
istence. Certainly, that view of the world is an exaggeration, an error
of perspective. If we regard it dispassionately and with a sole view to
accurate and unemotional appreciation, we shall find that the sum of the

88 THE LIFE DIVINE

pleasure of existence far exceeds the sum of the pain of existence, — ap-
pearances and individual cases to the contrary notwithstanding, — and
that the active or passive, surface or underlying pleasure of existence is
the normal state of nature, pain a contrary occurrence temporarily sus-
pending or overlaying that normal state. But for that very reason the
lesser sum of pain affects us more intensely and often looms larger than
the greater sum of pleasure; precisely because the latter is normal, we
do not treasure it, hardly even observe it unless it intensifies into some
acuter form of itself, into a wave of happiness, a crest of joy or ecstasy.
It is these things that we call delight and seek and the normal satisfaction
of existence which is always there regardless of event and particular
cause or object, affects us as something neutral which is neither pleasure
nor pain. It is there, a great practical fact, for without it there would
not be the universal and overpowering instinct of self-preservation, but
it is not what we seek and therefore we do not enter it into our balance
of emotional and sensational profit and loss. In that balance we enter
only positive pleasures on one side and discomfort and pain on the other ;
pain affects us more intensely because it is abnormal to our being, con-
trary to our natural tendency and is experienced as an outrage on our
existence, an offence and external attack on what we are and seek to be.

Nevertheless the abnormality of pain or its greater or lesser sum
does not affect the philosophical issue ; greater or less, its mere presence
constitutes the whole problem. All being Sachchidananda, how can pain
and suffering at all exist? This, the real problem, is often farther con-
fused by a false issue starting from the idea of a personal extra-cosmic
God and a partial issue, the ethical difficulty.

Sachchidananda, it may be reasoned, is God, is a conscious Being
who is the author of existence; how then can God have created a world
in which He inflicts suffering on His creatures, sanctions pain, permits
evil? God being All-Good, who created pain and evil? If we say that
pain is a trial and an ordeal, we do not solve the moral problem, we ar-
rive at an immoral or non-moral God, — ^an excellent world-mechanist
perhaps, a cunning psychologist, but not a God of Good and of Love
whom we can worship, only a God of Might to whose law we must submit
or whose caprice we may hope to propitiate. For one who invents torture
as a means of test or ordeal, stands convicted either of deliberate cruelty
or of moral insensibility and, if a moral being at all, is inferior to the
highest instinct of his own creatures. And if to escape this moral diffi-
culty, we say that pain is an inevitable result and natural punishment of

DELIGHT OF EXISTENCE.* THE PROBLEM 89

moral evil, — an explanation which will not even square with the facts
of life unless we admit the theory of Karma and rebirth by which the
soul suffers now for antenatal sins in other bodies, — we still do not es-
cape the very root of the ethical problem, — who created or why or whence
was created that moral evil which entails the punishment of pain and
suffering? And seeing that moral evil is in reality a form of mental dis-
ease or ignorance, who or what created this law or inevitable connection
which punishes a mental disease or act of ignorance by a recoil so ter-
rible, by tortures often so extreme and monstrous? The inexorable law
of Karma is irreconcilable with a supreme moral and personal Deity, and
therefore the clear logic of Buddha denied the existence of any free and
all-governing personal God; all personality he declared to be a creation
of ignorance and subject to Karma.

In truth, the difficulty thus sharply presented arises only if we as-
sume the existence of an extra-cosmic personal God, not Himself the
universe, one who has created good and evil, pain and suffering for His
creatures, but Himself stands above and unaffected by them, watching,
ruling, doing His will with a suffering and struggling world or, if not
doing His will, if allowing the world to be driven by an inexorable law,
unhelped by Him or inefficiently helped, then not God, not omnipotent,
not all-good and all-loving. On no theory of an extra-cosmic moral God,
can evil and suffering be explained, — the creation of evil and suffering, —
except by an unsatisfactory subterfuge which avoids the question at is-
sue instead of answering it or a plain or implied Manicheanism which
practically annuls the Godhead in attempting to justify its ways or ex-
cuse its works. But such a God is not the Vedantic Sachchidananda.
Sachchidananda of the Vedanta is one existence without a second; all
that is, is He. If then evil and suffering exist, it is He that bears the evil
and suffering in the creature in whom He has embodied Himself. The
problem then changes entirely. The question is no longer how came God
to create for His creatures a suffering and evil of which He is Himself
incapable and therefore immune, but how came the sole and infinite Ex-
istence-Consciousness-Bliss to admit into itself that which is not bliss,
that which seems to be its positive negation.

Half of the moral difficulty — that difficulty in its one unanswerable
form disappears. It no longer arises, can no longer be put. Cruelty to
others, I remaining immune or even participating in their sufferings by
subsequent repentance or belated pity, is one thing; self-infliction of
suffering, I being the sole existence, is quite another. Still the ethical dif-

90 THE LIFE DIVINE

ficulty may be brought back in a modified form; All-Delight being nec-
essarily all-good and all-love, how can evil and suffering exist in Sachchi-
dananda, since he is not mechanical existence, but free and conscious
being, free to condemn and reject evil and suffering? We have to recog-
nise that the issue so stated is also a false issue because it applies the
terms of a partial statement as if they were applicable to the whole. For
the ideas of good and of love which we thus bring into the concept of the
All-Delight spring from a dualistic and divisional conception of things;
they are based entirely on the relations between creature and creature
yet we persist in applying them to a problem which starts, on the con-
trary, from the assumption of One who is all. We have to see first how
the problem appears or how it can be solved in its original purity, on the
basis of unity in difference ; only then can we safely deal with its parts
and its developments, such as the relations between creature and crea-
ture on the basis of division and duality.

We have to recognise, if we thus view the whole, not limiting our-
selves to the human difficulty and the human standpoint, that we do not
live in an ethical world. The attempt of human thought to force an ethi-
cal meaning into the whole of Nature is one of those acts of wilful and
obstinate self-confusion, one of those pathetic attempts of the human
being to read himself, his limited habitual human self into all things and
judge them from the standpoint he has personally evolved, which most
effectively prevent him from arriving at real knowledge and complete
sight. Material Nature is not ethical ; the law which governs it is a co-
ordination of fixed habits which take no cognisance of good and evil, but
only of force that creates, force that arranges and preserves, force that
disturbs and destroys impartially, non-ethically, according to the secret
Will in it, according to the mute satisfaction of that Will in its own self-
formations and self-dissolutions. Animal or vital Nature is also non-
ethical, although as it progresses it manifests the crude material out of
which the higher animal evolves the ethical impulse. We do not blame
the tiger because it slays and devours its prey any more than we blame
the storm because it destroys or the fire because it tortures and kills;
neither does the conscious-force in the storm, the fire or the tiger blame
or condemn itself. Blame and condemnation, or rather self-blame and
self-condemnation, are the beginning of true ethics. When we blame
others without applying the same law to ourselves, we are not speaking
with a true ethical judgment, but only applying the language ethics has

DELIGHT OF EXISTENCE! THE PROBLEM 9 1

evolved for us to an emotional impulse of recoil from or dislike of that
which displeases or hurts us.

This recoil or dislike is the primary origin of ethics, but is not itself
ethical. The fear of the deer for the tiger, the rage of the strong creature
against its assailant is a vital recoil of the individual delight of existence
from that which threatens it. In the progress of the mentality it refines
itself into repugnance, dislike, disapproval. Disapproval of that which
threatens and hurts us, approval of that which flatters and satisfies re-
fine into the conception of good and evil to oneself, to the community,
to others than ourselves, to other communities than ours, and finally
into the general approval of good, the general disapproval of evil. But,
throughout^ the fundamental nature of the thing remains the same. Man
desires self-expression, self-development, in other words, the progress-
ing play in himself of the conscious- force of existence ; that is his funda-
mental delight. Whatever hurts that self-expression, self-development,
satisfaction of his progressing self, is for him evil ; whatever helps, con-
firms, raises, aggrandises, ennobles it is his good. Only, his conception
of the self-development changes, becomes higher and wider, begins to
exceed his limited personality, to embrace others, to embrace all in its
scope.

In other words, ethics is a stage in evolution. That which is com-
mon to all stages is the urge of Sachchidananda towards self-expression.
The urge is at first non-ethical, then infra-ethical in the animal, then in
the intelligent animal even anti-ethical for it permits us to approve hurt
done to others which we disapprove when done to ourselves. In this re-
spect man even now is only half-ethical. And just as all below us is infra-
ethical, so there may be that above us whither we shall eventually ar-
rive, which is supra-ethical, has no need of ethics. The ethical impulse
and attitude, so all-important to humanity, is a means by which it strug-
gles out of the lower harmony and universality based upon inconscience
and broken up by Life into individual discords towards a higher har-
mony and universality based upon conscient oneness with all existences.
Arriving at that goal, this means will no longer be necessary or even pos-
sible, since the qualities and oppositions on which it depends will natu-
rally dissolve and disappear in the final reconciliation.

If, then, the ethical standpoint applies only to a temporary though
all-important passage from one universality to another, we cannot apply
it to the total solution of the problem of the universe, but can only ad-

92 THE LIFE DIVINE

mit it as one element in that solution. To do otherwise is to run into the
peril of falsifying all the facts of the universe, all the meaning of the
evolution behind and beyond us in order to suit a temporary outlook and
a half-evolved view of the utility of things. The world has three layers,
infra-ethical, ethical and supra-ethical. We have to find that which is
common to all ; for only so can we resolve the problem.

That which is common to all is, we have seen, the satisfaction of
conscious-force of existence developing itself into forms and seeking in
that development its delight. From that satisfaction or delight of self-
existence it evidently began; for it is that which is normal to it, to which
it clings, which it makes its base; but it seeks new forms of itself and in
the passage to higher forms there intervenes the phenomenon of pain
and suffering which seems to contradict the fundamental nature of its
being. This and this alone is the root-problem.

How shall we solve it? Shall we say that Sachchidananda is not the
beginning and end of things, but the beginning and end is Nihil, an im-
partial void, itself nothing but containing all potentialities of existence or
non-existence, consciousness or non-consciousness, delight or undelight?
We may accept this answer if we choose ; but although we seek thereby
to explain nothing, we have only included everything. A Nothing which
is full of all potentialities is the most complete opposition of terms and
things possible and we have therefore only explained a minor contradic-
tion by a major, by driving the self-contradiction of things to their maxi-
mum. Nihil is the void, where there can be no potentialities ; an impar-
tial indeterminate of all potentialities is Chaos, and all that we have done
is to put Chaos into the Void without explaining how it got there. Let
us return, then, to our original conception of Sachchidananda and see
whether on that foundation a completer solution is not possible.

We must first make it clear to ourselves that just as when we speak
of universal consciousness we meant something different from, more es-
sential and wider than the waking mental consciousness of the human
being, so also when we speak of universal delight of existence we mean
something different from, more essential and wider than the ordinary
emotional and sensational pleasure of the individual human creature.
Pleasure, joy and delight, as man uses the words, are limited and occa-
sional movements which depend on certain habitual causes and emerge,
like their opposites pain and grief which are equally limited and occa-
sional movements, from a background other than themselves. Delight
of being is universal, inimitable and self-existent, not dependent on par-

DELIGHT OF EXISTENCE: THE PROBLEM 93

ticular causes, the background of all backgrounds, from which pleasure,
pain and other more neutral experiences emerge. When delight of being
seeks to realise itself as delight of becoming, it moves in the movement
of force and itself takes different forms of movement of which pleasure
and pain are positive and negative currents. Subconscient in Matter,
superconscient beyond Mind this delight seeks in Mind and Life to real-
ise itself by emergence in the becoming, in the increasing self-conscious-
ness of the movement. Its first phenomena are dual and impure, move
between the poles of pleasure and pain, but it aims at its self-revelation
in the purity of a supreme delight of being which is self-existent and in-
dependent of objects and causes. Just as Sachchidananda moves towards
the realisation of the universal existence in the individual and of the
form-exceeding consciousness in the form of body and mind, so it moves
towards the realisation of universal, self-existent and objectless delight
in the flux of particular experiences and objects. Those objects we now
seek as stimulating causes of a transient pleasure and satisfaction ; free,
possessed of self, we shall not seek but shall possess them as reflectors
rather than causes of a delight which eternally exists.

In the egoistic human being, the mental person emergent out of the
dim shell of matter, delight of existence is neutral, semi-latent, still in
the shadow of the subconscious, hardly more than a concealed soil of
plenty covered by desire with a luxuriant growth of poisonous weeds and
hardly less poisonous flowers, the pains and pleasures of our egoistic ex-
istence. When the divine conscious-force working secretly in us has de-
voured these growths of desire, when in the image of the Rig Veda the
fire of God has burnt up the shoots of earth, that which is concealed at
the roots of these pains and pleasures, their cause and secret being, the
sap of delight in them, will emerge in new forms not of desire, but of
self-existent satisfaction which will replace mortal pleasure by the Im-
mortal's ecstasy. And this transformation is possible because these
growths of sensation and emotion are in their essential being, the pains
no less than the pleasures, that delight of existence which they seek but
fail to reveal, — fail because of division, ignorance of self and egoism.

CHAPTER XII

DELIGHT OF EXISTENCE: THE SOLUTION

The name of That is the Delight; as the Dehght we
must worship and seek after It.

Kena Upanishad}

IN THIS conception of an inalienable underlying delight of existence
of which all outward or surface sensations are a positive, negative
or neutral play, waves and foamings of that infinite deep, we arrive at
the true solution of the problem we are examining. The self of things is
an infinite indivisible existence; of that existence the essential nature
or power is an infinite imperishable force of self-conscious being; and
of that self-consciousness the essential nature or knowledge of itself is,
again, an infinite inalienable delight of being. In formlessness and in all
forms, in the eternal awareness of infinite and indivisible being and in
the multiform appearances of finite division this self-existence preserves
perpetually its self-delight. As in the apparent inconscience of Matter
our soul, growing out of its bondage to its own superficial habit and par-
ticular mode of self-conscious existence, discovers that infinite Conscious-
Force constant, immobile, brooding, so in the apparent non-sensation of
Matter it comes to discover and attune itself to an infinite conscious
Delight imperturbable, ecstatic, all-embracing. This delight is its own
delight, this self is its own self in all; but to our ordinary view of self
and things which awakes and moves only upon surfaces, it remains hid-
den, profound, subconscious. And as it is within all forms, so it is within
all experiences whether pleasant, painful or neutral. There too hidden,
profound, subsconscious, it is that which enables and compels things to
remain in existence. It is the reason of that clinging to existence, that
overmastering will-to-be, translated vitally as the instinct of self-preser-
vation, physically as the imperishability of matter, mentally as the sense
of immortality which attends the formed existence through all its phases
of self-development and of which even the occasional impulse of self-
destruction is only a reverse form, an attraction to other state of being

^IV. 6.

94

DELIGHT OF EXISTENCE: THE SOLUTION 95

and a consequent recoil from present state of being. Delight is existence,
Delight is the secret of creation, Delight is the root of birth. Delight is
the cause of remaining in existence. Delight is the end of birth and that
into which creation ceases. "From Ananda" says the Upanishad "all
existences are born, by Ananda they remain in being and increase, to
Ananda they depart."

As we look at these three aspects of essential Being, one in reality,
triune to our mental view, separable only in appearance, in the phenom-
ena of the divided consciousness, we are able to put in their right place
the divergent formulae of the old philosophies so that they unite and be-
come one, ceasing from their agelong controversy. For if we regard
world-existence only in its appearances and only in its relation to pure,
infinite, indivisible, immutable Existence, we are entitled to regard it,
describe it and realise it as Maya. Maya in its original sense meant
a comprehending and containing consciousness capable of embracing,
measuring and limiting and therefore formative; it is that which out-
lines, measures out, moulds forms in the formless, psychologises and
seems to make knowable the Unknowable, geometrises and seems to make
measurable the limitless. Later the word came from its original sense of
knowledge, skill, intelligence to acquire a pejorative sense of cunning,
fraud or illusion, and it is in the figure of an enchantment or illusion
that it is used by the philosophical systems.

World is Maya. World is not unreal in the sense that it has no sort
of existence; for even if it were only a dream of the Self, still it would
exist in It as a dream, real to It in the present even while ultimately un-
real. Nor ought we to say that world is unreal in the sense that it has no
kind of eternal existence ; for although particular worlds and particular
forms may or do dissolve physically and return mentally from the con-
sciousness of manifestation into the non-manifestation, yet Form in it-
self. World in itself are eternal. From the non-manifestation they return
inevitably into manifestation ; they have an eternal recurrence if not an
eternal persistence, an eternal immutability in sum and foundation along
with an eternal mutability in aspect and apparition. Nor have we any
surety that there ever was or ever will be a period in Time when no form
of universe, no play of being is represented to itself in the eternal Con-
scious-Being, but only an intuitive perception that the world that we
know can and does appear from That and return into It perpetually.

Still world is Maya because it is not the essential truth of infinite
existence, but only a creation of self-conscious being, — not a creation

96 THE LIFE DIVINE

in the void, not a creation in nothing and out of nothing, but in the eter-
nal Truth and out of the eternal Truth of that Self-being ; its continent,
origin and substance are the essential, real Existence, its forms are mu-
table formations of That to Its own conscious perception, determined by
Its own creative conscious-force. They are capable of manifestation,
capable of non-manifestation, capable of other-manifestation. We may,
if we choose, call them therefore illusions of the infinite consciousness,
thus audaciously flinging back a shadow of our mental sense of subjec-
tion to error and incapacity upon that which, being greater than Mind,
is beyond subjection to falsehood and illusion. But seeing that the es-
sence and substance of Existence is not a lie and that all errors and de-
formations of our divided consciousness represent some truth of the in-
divisible self-conscious Existence, we can only say that the world is not
essential truth of That, but phenomenal truth of Its free multiplicity and
infinite superficial mutability and not truth of Its fundamental and im-
mutable Unity.

If, on the other hand, we look at world-existence in relation to con-
sciousness only and to force of consciousness, we may regard, describe
and realise it as a movement of Force obeying some secret will or else
some necessity imposed on it by the very existence of the Consciousness
that possesses or regards it. It is then the play of Prakriti, the executive
Force, to satisfy Purusha, the regarding and enjoying Conscious-Being
or it is the play of Purusha Teflected in the movements of Force and with
them identifying himself. World, then, is the play of the Mother of
things moved to cast Herself for ever into infinite forms and avid of
eternally outpouring experiences.

Again if we look at World-Existence rather in its relation to the
self-delight of eternally existent being, we may regard, describe and re-
alise it as Lila, the play, the child's joy, the poet's joy, the actor's joy,
the mechanician's joy of the Soul of things eternally young, perpetually
inexhaustible, creating and re-creating Himself in Himself for the sheer
bliss of that self-creation, of that self-representation,^Himself the play.
Himself the player. Himself the playground. These three generalisations
of the play of existence in its relation to the eternal and stable, the im-
mutable Sachchidananda, starting from the three conceptions of Maya,
Prakriti and Lila and representing themselves in our philosophical sys-
tems as mutually contradictory philosophies, are in reality perfectly con-
sistent with each other, complementary and necessary in their totality
to an integral view of life and the world. The world of which we are a

DELIGHT OF EXISTENCE: THE SOLUTION 97

part is in its most obvious view a movement of Force; but that Force,
when we penetrate its appearances, proves to be a constant and yet al-
ways mutable rhythm of creative consciousness casting up, projecting
in itself phenomenal truths of its own infinite and eternal being; and
this rhythm is in its essence, cause and purpose a play of the infinite
delight of being ever busy with its own innumerable self-representations.
This triple or triune view must be the starting-point for all our under-
standing of the universe.

Since, then, eternal and immutable delight of being moving out into
infinite and variable delight of becoming is the root of the whole matter,
we have to conceive one indivisible conscious Being behind all our ex-
periences supporting them by its inalienable delight and effecting by its
movement the variations of pleasure, pain and neutral indifference in
our sensational existence. That is our real self; the mental being subject
to the triple vibration can only be a representation of our real self put
in front for the purposes of that sensational experience of things which
is the first rhythm of our divided consciousness in its response and re-
action to the multiple contacts of the universe. It is an imperfect re-
sponse, a tangled and discordant rhythm preparing and preluding the
full and unified play of the conscious Being in us ; it is not the true and
perfect symphony that may be ours if we can once enter into sympathy
with the One in all variations and attune ourselves to the absolute and
universal diapason.

If this view be right, then certain consequences inevitably impose
themselves. In the first place, since in our depths we ourselves are that
One, since in the reality of our being we are the indivisible All-Conscious-
ness and therefore the inalienable All-Bliss, the disposition of our sensa-
tional experience in the three vibrations of pain, pleasure and indiffer-
ence can only be a superficial arrangement created by that limited part
of ourselves which is uppermost in our waking consciousness. Behind
there must be something in us, — ^much vaster, profounder, truer than
the superficial consciousness, — which takes delight impartially in all ex-
periences; it is that delight which secretly supports the superficial men-
tal being and enables it to persevere through all labours, sufferings and
ordeals in the agitated movement of the Becoming. That which we call
ourselves is only a trembling ray on the surface; behind is all the vast
subconscient, the vast superconscient profiting by all these surface ex-
periences and imposing them on its external self which it exposes as a
sort of sensitive covering to the contacts of the world; itself veiled, it

98 THE LIFE DIVINE

receives these contacts and assimilates them into the values of a truer,
a profounder, a mastering and creative experience. Out of its depths it
returns them to the surface in forms of strength, character, knowledge,
impulsion whose roots are mysterious to us because our mind moves and
quivers on the surface and has not learned to concentrate itself and live
in the depths.

In our ordinary life this truth is hidden from us or only dimly
glimpsed at times or imperfectly held and conceived. But if we learn to
live within, we infallibly awaken to this presence within us which is our
more real self, a presence profound, calm, joyous and puissant of which
the world is not the master — a presence which, if it is not the Lord Him-
self, is the radiation of the Lord within. We are aware of it within sup-
porting and helping the apparent and superficial self and smiling at its
pleasures and pains as at the error and passion of a little child. And if
we can go back into ourselves and identify ourselves, not with our super-
ficial experience, but with that radiant penumbra of the Divine, we can
live in that attitude towards the contacts of the world and, standing back
in our entire consciousness from the pleasures and pains of the body,
vital being and mind, possess them as experiences whose nature being
superficial does not touch or impose itself on our core and real being.
In the entirely expressive Sanskrit terms, there is an Anandamaya be-
hind the Manomaya, a vast Bliss-Self behind the limited mental self, and
the latter is only a shadowy image and disturbed reflection of the for-
mer. The truth of ourselves lies within and not on the surface.

Again this triple vibration of pleasure, pain, indifference, being
superficial, being an arrangement and result of our imperfect evolution,
can have in it no absoluteness, no necessity. There is no real obligation
on us to return to a particular contact a particular response of pleasure,
pain or neutral reaction, there is only an obligation of habit. We feel
pleasure or pain in a particular contact because that is the habit our
nature has formed, because that is the constant relation the recipient has
established with the contact. It is within our competence to return quite
the opposite response, pleasure where we used to have pain, pain where
we used to have pleasure. It is equally within our competence to accus-
tom the superficial being to return instead of the mechanical reactions
of pleasure, pain and indifference that free reply of inalienable delight
which is the constant experience of the true and vast Bliss-Self within
us. And this is a greater conquest, a still deeper and more complete self-
possession than a glad and detached reception in the depths of the ha-

DELIGHT OF EXISTENCE: THE SOLUTION 99

bitual reactions on the surface. For it is no longer a mere acceptance
without subjection, a free acquiescence in imperfect values of experi-
ence, but enables us to convert imperfect into perfect, false into true
values, — the constant but veritable delight of the Spirit in things taking
the place of the dualities experienced by the mental being.

In the things of the mind this pure habitual relativity of the reac-
tions of pleasure and pain is not difficult to perceive. The nervous being
in us, indeed, is accustomed to a certain fixedness, a false impression of
absoluteness in these things. To it victory, success, honour, good for-
tune of all kinds are pleasant things in themselves, absolutely, and must
produce joy as sugar must taste sweet; defeat, failure, disappointment,
disgrace, evil fortune of all kinds are unpleasant things in themselves,
absolutely, and must produce grief as wormwood must taste bitter.
To vary these responses is to it a departure from fact, abnormal and
morbid ; for the nervous being is a thing enslaved to habit and in itself
means devised by Nature for fixing constancy of reaction, sameness of
experience, the settled scheme of man's relations to life. The mental
being on the other hand is free, for it is the means she has devised
for flexibility and variation, for change and progress; it is subject only
so long as it chooses to remain subject, to dwell in one mental habit
rather than in another or so long as it allows itself to be dominated
by its nervous instrument. It is not bound to be grieved by defeat, dis-
grace, loss: it can meet these things and all things with a perfect in-
difference; it can even meet them with a perfect gladness. Therefore
man finds that the more he refuses to be dominated by his nerves and
body, the more he draws back from implication of himself in his physi-
cal and vital parts, the greater is his freedom. He becomes the master
of his responses to the world's contacts, no longer the slave of external
touches.

In regard to physical pleasure and pain, it is more difficult to apply
the universal truth; for this is the very domain of the nerves and the
body, the centre and seat of that in us whose nature is to be dominated
by external contact and external pleasure. Even here, however, we have
glimpses of the truth. We see it in the fact that according to the habit
the same physical contact can be either pleasurable or painful, not only
to different individuals, but to the same individual under different
conditions or at different stages of his development. We see it in the
fact that men in periods of great excitement or high exaltation remain
physically indifferent to pain or unconscious of pain under contacts

100 THE LIFE DIVINE

which ordinarily would inflict severe torture or suffering. In many cases
it is only when the nerves are able to reassert themselves and remind the
mentality of its habitual obligation to suffer that the sense of suffering
returns. But this return to the habitual obligation is not inevitable; it
is only habitual. We see that in the phenomena of hypnosis not only
can the hypnotised subject be successfully forbidden to feel the pain
of a wound or puncture when in the abnormal state, but can be pre-
vented with equal success from returning to his habitual reaction of
suffering when he is awakened. The reason of this phenomenon is per-
fectly simple; it is because the h5^notiser suspends the habitual waking
consciousness which is the slave of nervous habits and is able to appeal
to the subliminal mental being in the depths, the inner mental being who
is master, if he wills, of the nerves and the body. But this freedom
which is effected by hypnosis abnormally, rapidly, without true pos-
session, by an alien will, may equally be won normally, gradually, with
true possession, by one's own will so as to effect partially or completely
a victory of the mental being over the habitual nervous reactions of the
body.

Pain of mind and body is a device of Nature, that is to say, ot
Force in her works, meant to subserve a definite transitional end in her
upward evolution. The world is from the point of view of the individual
a play and complex shock of multitudinous forces. In the midst of
this complex play the individual stands as a limited constructed being
with a limited amount of force exposed to numberless shocks which may
wound, maim, break up or disintegrate the construction which he calls
himself. Pain is in the nature of a nervous and physical recoil from a
dangerous or harmful contact; it is a part of what the Upanishad calls
jugupsd, the shrinking of the limited being from that which is not him-
self and not S3anpathetic or in harmony with himself, its impulse of
self-defence against "others." It is from this point of view, an indica-
tion by Nature of that which has to be avoided or, if not successfully
avoided, has to be remedied. It does not come into being in the purely
physical world so long as life does not enter it; for till then mechanical
methods are sufficient. Its office begins when life with its frailty and im-
perfect possession of Matter enters on the scene; it grows with the
growth of Mind in life. Its office continues so long as Mind is bound in
the life and body which it is using, dependent upon them for its knowl-
edge and means of action, subjected to their limitations and to the ego-
istic impulses and aims which are born of those limitations. But if and

DELIGHT OF EXISTENCE: THE SOLUTION lOI

when Mind and man becomes capable of being free, unegoistic, in har-
mony with all other beings and with the play of the universal forces,
the use and office of suffering diminishes, its raison d'etre must finally
cease to be and it can only continue as an atavism of Nature, a habit
that has survived its use, a persistence of the lower in the as yet im-
perfect organisation of the higher. Its eventual elimination must be an
essential point in the destined conquest of the soul over subjection
to Matter and egoistic limitation in Mind.

This elimination is possible because pain and pleasure themselves
are currents, one imperfect, the other perverse, but still currents of the
delight of existence. The reason for this imperfection and this perver-
sion is the self-division of the being in his consciousness by measuring
and limiting Maya and in consequence an egoistic and piecemeal instead
of a universal reception of contacts by the individual. For the universal
soul all things and all contacts of things carry in them an essence of de-
light best described by the Sanskrit aesthetic term, rasa, which means
at once sap or essence of a thing and its taste. It is because we do not
seek the essence of the thing in its contact with us, but look only to
the manner in which it affects our desires and fears, our cravings and
shrinkings that grief and pain, imperfect and transient pleasure or in-
difference, that is to say, blank inability to seize the essence, are the
forms taken by the Rasa. If we could be entirely disinterested in mind
and heart and impose that detachment on the nervous being, the pro-
gressive elimination of these imperfect and perverse forms of Rasa would
be possible and the true essential taste of the inalienable delight of
existence in all its variations would be within our reach. We attain
to something of this capacity for variable but universal delight in the
aesthetic reception of things as represented by Art and Poetry, so that
we enjoy there the Rasa or taste of the sorrowful, the terrible, even
the horrible or repellent;^ and the reason is because we are detached,
disinterested, not thinking of ourselves or of self-defence (jugupsd), but
only of the thing and its essence. Certainly, this aesthetic reception of
contacts is not a precise image or reflection of the pure delight which
is supramental and supra-aesthetic; for the latter would eliminate sor-
row, terror, horror and disgust with their cause while the former admits
them: but it represents partially and imperfectly one stage of the pro-
gressive delight of the universal Soul in things in its manifestation
and it admits us in one part of our nature to that detachment from

*So termed in Sanskrit Rhetoric, the karuna, bhaydnaka and bibhatsa Rasas.

102 THE LIFE DIVINE

egoistic sensation and that universal attitude through which the one
Soul sees harmony and beauty where we divided beings experience
rather chaos and discord. The full liberation can come to us only by
a similar liberation in all our parts, the universal aesthesis, the uni-
versal standpoint of knowledge, the universal detachment from all things
and yet sympathy with all in our nervous and emotional being.

Since the nature of suffering is a failure of the conscious-force
in us to meet the shocks of existence and a consequent shrinking and
contraction and its root is an inequality of that receptive and possess-
ing force due to our self-limitation by egoism consequent on the ig-
norance of our true Self, of Sachchidananda, the elimination of suffer-
ing must first proceed by the substitution of titiksd, the facing, enduring
and conquest of all shocks of existence for jugupsd, the shrinking and
contraction: by this endurance and conquest we proceed to an equality
which may be either an equal indifference to all contacts or an equal
gladness in all contacts; and this equality again must find a firm foun-
dation in the substitution of the Sachchidananda consciousness which
is All-Bliss for the ego-consciousness which enjoys and suffers. The
Sachchidananda consciousness may be transcendent of the universe and
aloof from it, and to this state of distant Bliss the path is equal indif-
ference; it is the path of the ascetic. Or the Sachchidananda con-
sciousness may be at once transcendent and universal; and to this
state of present and all-embracing Bliss the path is surrender and loss
of the ego in the universal and possession of an all-pervading equal de-
light; it is the path of the ancient Vedic sages. But neutrality to the
imperfect touches of pleasure and the perverse touches of pain is the
first direct and natural result of the soul's self-discipline and the con-
version to equal delight can, usually, come only afterwards. The direct
transformation of the triple vibration into Ananda is possible, but less
easy to the human being.

Such then is the view of the universe which arises out of the in-
tegral Vedantic affirmation. An infinite, indivisible existence all-bliss-
ful in its pure self-consciousness moves out of its fundamental purity
into the varied play of Force that is consciousness, into the movement
of Prakriti which is the play of Maya. The delight of its existence
is at first self-gathered, absorbed, subconscious in the basis of the
physical universe; then emergent in a great mass of neutral movement
which is not yet what we call sensation ; then further emergent with the
growth of mind and ego in the triple vibration of pain, pleasure and in-

DELIGHT OF EXISTENCE: THE SOLUTION 103

difference originating from the limitation of the force of consciousness
in the form and from its exposure to shocks of the universal Force which
it finds alien to it and out of harmony with its own measure and stand-
ard; finally, the conscious emergence of the full Sachchidananda in its
creations by universality, by equality, by self-possession and conquest
of Nature. This is the course and movement of the world.

If it then be asked why the One Existence should take delight in
such a movement, the answer lies in the fact that all possibilities are
inherent in Its infinity and that the delight of existence — in its mutable
becoming, not in its immutable being, — lies precisely in the variable
realisation of its possibilities. And the possibility worked out here in
the universe of which we are a part, begins from the concealment of
Sachchidananda in that which seems to be its own opposite and its
self-finding even amid the terms of that opposite. Infinite being loses
itself in the appearance of non-being and emerges in the appearance
of a finite Soul; infinite consciousness loses itself in the appearance of
a vast indeterminate inconscience and emerges in the appearance of
a superficial limited consciousness; infinite self-sustaining Force loses
itself in the appearance of a chaos of atoms and emerges in the ap-
pearance of the insecure balance of a world; infinite Delight loses itself
in the appearance of an insensible Matter and emerges in the appearance
of a discordant rhythm of varied pain, pleasure and neutral feeling, love,
hatred and indifference; infinite unity loses itself in the appearance of
a chaos of multiplicity and emerges in a discord of forces and beings
which seek to recover unity by possessing, dissolving and devouring
each other. In this creation the real Sachchidananda has to emerge.
Man, the individual, has to become and to live as a universal being;
his limited mental consciousness has to widen to the superconscient
unity in which each embraces all; his narrow heart has to learn the
infinite embrace and replace its lusts and discords by universal love and
his restricted vital being to become equal to the whole shock of the
universe upon it and capable of universal delight; his very physical
being has to know itself as no separate entity but as one with and sus-
taining in itself the whole flow of the indivisible Force that is all things;
his whole nature has to reproduce in the individual the unity, the har-
mony, the oneness-in-all of the supreme Existence-Consciousness-Bliss.

Through all this play the secret reality is always one and the same
delight of existence, — the same in the delight of the subconscious sleep
before the emergence of the individual, in the delight of the struggle and

104 THE LIFE DIVINE

all the varieties, vicissitudes, perversions, conversions, reversions of the
effort to find itself amid the mazes of the half-conscious dream of which
the individual is the centre, and in the delight of the eternal super-
conscient self-possession into which the individual must wake and there
become one with the indivisible Sachchidananda. This is the play of the
One, the Lord, the All as it reveals itself to our liberated and enlight-
ened knowledge from the conceptive standpoint of this material uni-
verse.

CHAPTER XIII

THE DIVINE MAYA

By the Names of the Lord and hers they shaped and
measured the force of the Mother of Light; wearing might
after might of that Force as a robe the lords of Maya
shaped out Form in this Being.

The Masters of Maya shaped all by His Maya; the Fa-
thers who have divine vision set Him within as a child that
is to be born.

Rig Veda}

EXISTENCE that acts and creates by the power and from the pure
delight of its conscious being is the reahty that we are, the self of
all our modes and moods, the cause, object and goal of all our doing,
becoming and creating. As the poet, artist or musician when he cre-
ates does really nothing but develop some potentiality in his unmani-
fested self into a form of manifestation and as the thinker, statesman,
mechanist only bring out into a shape of things that which lay hidden
in themselves, was themselves, is still themselves when it is cast into
form, so is it with the world and the Eternal. All creation or becom-
ing is nothing but this self-manifestation. Out of the seed there evolves
that which is already in the seed, pre-existent in being, predestined in
its will to become, prearranged in the delight of becoming. The original
plasm held in itself in force of being the resultant organism. For it is
always that secret, burdened, self-knowing force which labours under
its own irresistible impulse to manifest the form of itself with which it
is charged. Only, the individual who creates or develops out of himself,
makes a distinction between himself, the force that works in him and
the material in which he works. In reality the force is himself, the
individualised consciousness which it instrumentalises is himself, the
material which it uses is himself, the resultant form is himself. In other
words it is one existence, one force, one delight of being which concen-
trates itself at various points, says of each "This is I" and works in it
by a various play of self-force for a various play of self-formation.

^IIL 38. 7; IX. 83. 3.

105

I06 THE LIFE DIVINE

What it produces is itself and can be nothing other than itself;
it is working out a play, a rhythm, a development of its own existence,
force of consciousness and delight of being. Therefore whatever comes
into the world, seeks nothing but this, to be, to arrive at the intended
form, to enlarge its self-existence in that form, to develop, manifest,
increase, realise infinitely the consciousness and the power that is in it,
to have the delight of coming into manifestation, the delight of the
form of being, the delight of the rhythm of consciousness, the delight
of the play of force and to aggrandise and perfect that delight by what-
ever means is possible, in whatever direction, through whatever idea of
itself may be suggested to it by the Existence, the Conscious-Force,
the Delight active within its deepest being.

And if there is any goal, any completeness towards which things
tend, it can only be the completeness — in the individual and in the
whole which the individuals constitute — of its self-existence, of its
power and consciousness and of its delight of being. But such com-
pleteness is not possible in the individual consciousness concentrated
within the limits of the individual formation; absolute completeness is
not feasible in the finite because it is alien to the self-conception of the
finite. Therefore the only final goal possible is the emergence of the in-
finite consciousness in the individual; it is his recovery of the truth of
himself by self-knowledge and by self-realisation, the truth of the Infinite
in being, the Infinite in consciousness, the Infinite in delight repossessed
as his own Self and Reality of which the finite is only a mask and an in-
strument for various expression.

Thus by the very nature of the world-play as it has been realised
by Sachchidananda in the vastness of His existence extended as Space
and Time, we have to conceive first of an involution and a self-absorption
of conscious being into the density and infinite divisibility of substance,
for otherwise there can be no finite variation ; next, an emergence of the
self-imprisoned force into formal being, living being, thinking being;
and finally a release of the formed thinking being into the free realisa-
tion of itself as the One and the Infinite at play in the world and by the
release its recovery of the boundless existence-consciousness-bliss that
even now it is secretly, really and eternally. This triple movement is
the whole key of the world-enigma.

It is so that the ancient and eternal truth of Vedanta receives into
itself and illumines, justifies and shows us all the meaning of the modern
and phenomenal truth of evolution in the universe. .And it is so only

THE DIVINE MAYA IO7

that this modern truth of evolution which is the old truth of the Uni-
versal developing itself successively in Time, seen opaquely through
the study of Force and Matter, can find its own full sense and justi-
fication,— by illuminating itself with the Light of the ancient and
eternal truth still preserved for us in the Vedantic Scriptures. To this
mutual self-discovery and self-illumination by the fusion of the old
Eastern and the new Western knowledge the thought of the world
is already turning.

Still, when we have found that all things are Sachchidananda,
all has not yet been explained. We know the Reality of the universe,
we do not yet know the process by which that Reality has turned itself
into this phenomenon. We have the key of the riddle, we have still to
find the lock in which it will turn. For this Existence, Conscious-Force,
Delight does not work directly or with a sovereign irresponsibility like
a magician building up worlds and universes by the mere fiat of its
word. We perceive a process, we are aware of a Law.

It is true that this Law when we analyse it, seems to resolve itself
into an equilibrium of the play of forces and a determination of that play
into fixed lines of working by the accident of development and the
habit of past realised energy. But this apparent and secondary truth
is final to us only so long as we conceive of Force solely. When we
perceive that Force is a self-expression of Existence, we are bound to
perceive also that this line which Force has taken, corresponds to some
self-truth of that Existence which governs and determines its constant
curve and destination. And since consciousness is the nature of the
original Existence and the essence of its Force, this truth must be a
self-perception in Conscious-Being and this determination of the line
taken by Force must result from a power of self-directive knowledge
inherent in Consciousness which enables it to guide its own Force in-
evitably along the logical line of the original self-perception. It is then
a self-determining power in universal consciousness, a capacity in self-
awareness of infinite existence to perceive a certain Truth in itself and
direct its force of creation along the line of that Truth, which has
presided over the cosmic manifestation.

But why should we interpose any special power or faculty between
the infinite Consciousness itself and the result of its workings? IMay
not this Self-awareness of the Infinite range freely creating forms which
afterwards remain in play so long as there is not the fiat that bids them
cease, — even as the old Semitic Revelation tells us, "God said. Let there

I08 THE LIFE DIVINE

be Light, and there was Light"? But when we say, "God said, Let there
be Light," we assume the act of a power of consciousness which deter-
mines Hght out of everything else that is not light; and when we say
"and there was Light" we presume a directing faculty, an active power
corresponding to the original perceptive power, which brings out the
phenomenon and, working out Light according to the line of the or-
iginal perception, prevents it from being overpowered by all the in-
finite possibilities that are other than itself. Infinite consciousness in its
infinite action can produce only infinite results; to settle upon a fixed
Truth or order of truths and build a world in conformity with that
which is fixed, demands a selective faculty of knowledge commissioned
to shape finite appearance out of the infinite Reality.

This power was known to the Vedic seers by the name of Maya.
Maya meant for them the power of infinite consciousness to compre-
hend, contain in itself and measure out, that is to say, to form — for form
is delimitation — Name and Shape out of the vast illimitable Truth
of infinite existence. It is by Maya that static truth of essential being
becomes ordered truth of active being, — or, to put it in more meta-
physical language, out of the supreme being in which all is all without
barrier of separative consciousness emerges the phenomenal being in
which all is in each and each is in all for the play of existence with
existence, consciousness with consciousness, force with force, delight with
delight. This play of all in each and each in all is concealed at first
from us by the mental play or the illusion of Maya which persuades
each that he is in all but not all in him and that he is in all as a separated
being not as a being always inseparably one with the rest of existence.
Afterwards we have to emerge from this error into the supramental
play or the truth of Maya where the "each" and the "all" coexist in the
inseparable unity of the one truth and the multiple symbol. The lower,
present and deluding mental Maya has first to be embraced, then to be
overcome; for it is God's play with division and darkness and limita-
tion, desire and strife and suffering in which He subjects Himself to
the Force that has come out of Himself and by her obscure suffers Him-
self to be obscured. That other Maya concealed by this mental has to
be overpassed, then embraced; for it is God's play of the infinities of
existence, the splendours of knowledge, the glories of force mastered
and the ecstasies of love illimitable where He emerges out of the hold
of Force, holds her instead and fulfils in her illumined that for which
she went out from Him at the first.

THE DIVINE MAYA IO9

This distinction between the lower and the higher Maya is the
link in thought and in cosmic Fact which the pessimistic and illusionist
philosophies miss or neglect. To them the mental Maya, or perhaps an
Overmind, is the creatrix of the world, and a world created by mental
Maya would indeed be an inexplicable paradox and a fixed yet float-
ing nightmare of conscious existence which could neither be classed
as an illusion nor as a reality. We have to see that the mind is only an
intermediate term between the creative governing knowledge and the
soul imprisoned in its works. Sachchidananda, involved by one of His
lower movements in the self-oblivious absorption of Force that is lost
in the form of her own workings, returns towards Himself out of the self-
oblivion; Mind is only one of His instruments in the descent and the
ascent. It is an instrument of the descending creation, not the secret
creatrix, — a, transitional stage in the ascent, not our high original source
and the consummate term of cosmic existence.

The philosophies which recognise Mind alone as the creator of the
worlds or accept an original principle with Mind as the only mediator
between it and the forms of the universe, may be divided into the purely
noumenal and the idealistic. The purely noumenal recognise in the
cosmos only the work of Mind, Thought, Idea: but Idea may be purely
arbitrary and have no essential relation to any real Truth of existence;
or such Truth, if it exists, may be regarded as a mere Absolute aloof
from all relations and irreconcilable with a world of relations. The ideal-
istic interpretation supposes a relation between the Truth behind and
the conceptive phenomenon in front, a relation which is not merely that
of an antinomy and opposition. The view I am presenting goes farther
in idealism; it sees the creative Idea as Real-Idea, that is to say, a
power of Conscious Force expressive of real being, born out of real
being and partaking of its nature and neither a child of the Void nor
a weaver of fictions. It is conscious Reality throwing itself into mu-
table forms of its own imperishable and immutable substance. The
world is therefore not a figment of conception in the universal Mind,
but a conscious birth of that which is beyond Mind into forms of itself.
A Truth of conscious being supports these forms and expresses itself
in them, and the knowledge corresponding to the truth thus expressed
reigns as a supramental Truth-consciousness^ organising real ideas in a

^ I take the phrase from the Rig Veda, — rta-cit, which means the consciousness
of essential truth of being (satyam), of ordered truth of active being (rtam) and
the vast self-awareness (brhat) in which alone this consciousness is possible.

no THE LIFE DIVINE

perfect harmony before they are cast into the mental-vital-material
mould. Mind, Life and Body are an inferior consciousness and a par-
tial expression which strives to arrive in the mould of a various evolu-
tion at that superior expression of itself already existent to the Beyond-
Mind. That which is in the Beyond-Mind is the ideal which in its own
conditions it is labouring to realise.

From our ascending point of view we may say that the Real is
behind all that exists; it expresses itself intermediately in an Ideal which
is a harmonised truth of itself; the Ideal throws out a phenomenal
reality of variable conscious-being which, inevitably drawn towards its
own essential Reality, tries at last to recover it entirely whether by a
violent leap or normally through the Ideal which put it forth. It is this
that explains the imperfect reality of human existence as seen by the
Mind, the instinctive aspiration in the mental being towards a perfecti-
bility ever beyond itself, towards the concealed harmony of the Ideal, and
the supreme surge of the spirit beyond the ideal to the transcendental.
The very facts of our consciousness, its constitution and its necessity
presuppose such a triple order; they negate the dual and irreconcilable
antithesis of a mere Absolute to a mere relativity.

Mind is not sufficient to explain existence in the universe. Infinite
Consciousness must first translate itself into infinite faculty of Knowl-
edge or, as we call it from our point of view, omniscience; But Mind
is not a faculty of knowledge nor an instrument of omniscience; it is a
faculty for the seeking of knowledge, for expressing as much as it can
gain of it in certain forms of a relative thought and for using it towards
certain capacities of action. Even when it finds, it does not possess;
it only keeps a certain fund of current coin of Truth — not Truth itself
— in the bank of Memory to draw upon according to its needs. For
Mind is that which does not know, which tries to know and which
never knows except as in a glass darkly. It is the power which inter-
prets truth of universal existence for the practical uses of a certain order
of things; it is not the power which knows and guides that existence
and therefore it cannot be the power which created or manifested it.

But if we suppose an infinite Mind which would be free from our
limitations, that at least might well be the creator of the universe? But
such a Mind would be something quite different from the definition of
mind as we know it: it would be something beyond mentality; it
would be the supramental Truth. An infinite Mind constituted in the
terms of mentality as we know it could only create an infinite chaos,

THE DIVINE MAYA III

a vast clash of chance, accident, vicissitude wandering towards an in-
determinate end after which it would be always tentatively groping
and aspiring. An infinite, omniscient, omnipotent Mind would not be
mind at all, but supramental knowledge.

Mind, as we know it, is a reflective mirror which receives presen-
tations or images of a pre-existent Truth or Fact, either external to or
at least vaster than itself. It represents to itself from moment to mo-
ment the phenomenon that is or has been. It possesses also the faculty
of constructing in itself possible images other than those of the actual
fact presented to it; that is to say, it represents to itself not only phe-
nomenon that has been but also phenomenon that may be: it cannot, be
it noted, represent to itself phenomenon that assuredly will be, except
when it is an assured repetition of what is or has been. It has, finally,
the faculty of forecasting new modifications which it seeks to construct
out of the meeting of what has been and what may be, out of the fulfilled
possibility and the unfulfilled, something that it sometimes succeeds in
constructing more or less exactly, sometimes fails to realise, but usually
finds cast into other forms than it forecasted and turned to other ends
than it desired or intended.

An infinite Mind of this character might possibly construct an ac-
cidental cosmos of conflicting possibilities and it might shape it into
something shifting, something always transient, something ever un-
certain in its drift, neither real nor unreal, possessed of no definite end
or aim but only an endless succession of momentary aims leading —
since there is no superior directing power of knowledge — eventually
nowhither. Nihilism or lUusionism or some kindred philosophy is the
only logical conclusion of such a pure noumenalism. The cosmos so
constructed would be a presentation or reflection of something not itself,
but always and to the end a false presentation, a distorted reflection;
all cosmic existence would be a Mind struggling to work out fully its
imaginations, but not succeeding, because they have no imperative basis
of self-truth, overpowered and carried forward by the stream of its
own past energies, it would be borne onward indeterminately for ever
without issue unless or until it can either slay itself or fall into an
eternal stillness. That traced to its roots is Nihilism and Illusionism and
it is the only wisdom if we suppose that our human mentality or any-
thing at all like it represents the highest cosmic force and the original
conception at work in the universe.

But the moment we find in the original power of knowledge a higher

112 THE LIFE DIVINE

force than that which is represented by our human mentality, this con-
ception of the universe becomes insufficient and therefore invahd. It
has its truth but it is not the whole truth. It is law of the immediate
appearance of the universe, but not of its original truth and ultimate
fact. For we perceive behind the action of Mind, Life and Body, some-
thing that is not embraced in the stream of Force but embraces and
controls it; something that is not born into a world which it seeks to
interpret, but has created in its being a world of which it has the omnis-
cience; something that does not labour perpetually to form something
else out of itself while it drifts in the over-mastering surge of past
energies it can no longer control, but has already in its consciousness a
perfect Form of itself and is here gradually unfolding it. The world
expresses a foreseen Truth, obeys a predetermining Will, realises an
original formative self-vision, — it is the growing image of a divine crea-
tion.

So long as we work only through the mentality governed by ap-
pearances, this something beyond and behind and yet always immanent
can be only an inference or a presence vaguely felt. We perceive a law
of cyclic progress and infer an ever-increasing perfection of somewhat
that is somewhere foreknown. For everywhere we see Law founded
in self-being and, when we penetrate within into the rationale of its
process, we find that Law is the expression of an innate knowledge, a
knowledge inherent in the existence which is expressing itself and im-
plied in the force that expresses it; and Law developed by Knowledge
so as to allow of progression implies a divinely seen goal towards which
the motion is directed. We see too that our reason seeks to emerge out
of and dominate the helpless drift of our mentality and we arrive at
the perception that Reason is only a messenger, a representative or a
shadow of a greater consciousness beyond itself which does not need to
reason because it is all and knows all that it is. And we can then pass
to the inference that this source of Reason is identical with the Knowl-
edge that acts as Law in the world. This Knowledge determines its
own law sovereignly because it knows what has been, is and will be and
it knows because it is eternally, and infinitely cognises itself. Being
that is infinite consciousness, infinite consciousness that is omnipotent
force, when it makes a world — that is to say, a harmony of itself — its
object of consciousness, becomes seizable by our thought as a cosmic
existence that knows its own truth and realises in forms that which
it knows.

THE DIVINE MAYA II3

But it is only when we cease to reason and go deep into ourselves,
into that secrecy where the activity of mind is stilled, that this other
consciousness becomes really manifest to us — however imperfectly ow-
ing to our long habit of mental reaction and mental limitation. Then
we can know surely in an increasing illumination that which we had
uncertainly conceived by the pale and flickering light of Reason. Knowl-
edge waits seated beyond mind and intellectual reasoning, throned in
the luminous vast of illimitable self-vision.

CHAPTER XIV

THE SUPERMIND AS CREATOR

All things are self-deployings of the Divine Knowledge.

Vishnu Purana}

A PRINCIPLE of active Will and Knowledge superior to Mind and
creatrix of the worlds is then the intermediary power and state
of being between that self-possession of the One and this flux of the
Many. This principle is not entirely alien to us; it does not belong
solely and incommunicably to a Being who is entirely other than our-
selves or to a state of existence from which we are mysteriously projected
into birth, but also rejected and unable to return. If it seems to us
to be seated on heights far above us, yet are they the heights of our own
being and accessible to our tread. We can not only infer and glimpse
that Truth, but we are capable of realising it. We may by a progressive
expanding or a sudden luminous self-transcendence mount up to these
summits in unforgettable moments or dwell on them during hours or
days of greatest superhuman experience. When we descend again, there
are doors of communication which we can keep always open or reopen
even though they should constantly shut. But to dwell there perma-
nently on this last and highest summit of the created and creative being
is in the end the supreme ideal for our evolving human consciousness
when it seeks not self-annulment but self-perfection. For, as we have
seen, this is the original Idea and the final harmony and truth to which
our gradual self-expression in the world returns and which it is meant
to achieve.

Still, we may doubt whether it is possible, now or at all, to give
any account of this state to the human intellect or to utilise in any
communicable and organisable way its divine workings for the elevation
of our human knowledge and action. The doubt does not arise solely
from the rarity or dubiety of any known phenomena that would be-
tray a human working of this divine faculty, or from the remoteness

^11. 12. 39.

114

THE SXJPERMIND AS CREATOR II5

which separates this action from the experience and verifiable knowl-
edge of ordinary humanity; it is strongly suggested also by the ap-
parent contradiction in both essence and operation between human
mentality and the divine Supermind.

And certainly, if this consciousness had no relation at all to mind
nor anywhere any identity with the mental being, it would be quite
impossible to give any account of it to our human notions. Or, if it
were in its nature only vision in knowledge and not at all dynamic power
of knowledge, we could hope to attain by its contact a beatific state of
mental illumination, but not a greater light and power for the works
of the world. But since this consciousness is creatrix of the world,
it must be not only state of knowledge, but power of knowledge, and
not only a Will to light and vision, but a Will to power and works. And
since Mind too is created out of it. Mind must be a development by
limitation out of this primal faculty and this mediatory act of the su-
preme Consciousness and must therefore be capable of resolving itself
back into it through a reverse development by expansion. For always
Mind must be identical with Supermind in essence and conceal in itself
the potentiality of Supermind, however different or even contrary it
may have become in its actual forms and settled modes of operation.
It may not then be an irrational or unprofitable attempt to strive by the
method of comparison and contrast towards some idea of the Supermind
from the standpoint and in the terms of our intellectual knowledge. The
idea, the terms may well be inadequate and yet still serve as a finger of
light pointing us onward on a way which to some distance at least we
may tread. Moreover it is possible for Mind to rise beyond itself into
certain heights or planes of consciousness which receive into themselves
some modified light or power of the supramental consciousness and know
that by an illumination, intuition or a direct contact or experience, al-
though to live in it and see and act from it is a victory that has not
yet been made humanly possible.

And first we may pause a moment and ask ourselves whether no
light can be found from the past which will guide us towards these
ill-explored domains. We need a name, and we need a starting-point.
For we have called this state of consciousness the Supermind; but the
word is ambiguous since it may be taken in the sense of mind itself
super-eminent and lifted above ordinary mentality but not radically
changed, or on the contrary it may bear the sense of all that is beyond
mind and therefore assume a too extensive comprehensiveness which

Il6 THE LIFE DIVINE

would bring in even the Ineffable itself. A subsidiary description is
required which will more accurately limit its significance.

It is the cryptic verses of the Veda that help us here; for they con-
tain, though concealed, the gospel of the divine and immortal Super-
mind and through the veil some illumining flashes come to us. We can
see through these utterances the conception of this Supermind as a vast-
ness beyond the ordinary firmaments of our consciousness in which
truth of being is luminously one with all that expresses it and assures
inevitably truth of vision, formulation, arrangement, word, act and
movement and therefore truth also of result of movement, result of ac-
tion and expression, infallible ordinance or law. Vast all-comprehensive-
ness; luminous truth and harmony of being in that vastness and not a
vague chaos or self-lost obscurity; truth of law and act and knowledge
expressive of that harmonious truth of being: these seem to be the
essential terms of the Vedic description. The Gods, who in their highest
secret entity are powers of this Supermind, born of it, seated in it as
in their proper home, are in their knowledge "truth-conscious" and in
their action possessed of the "seer-will." Their conscious-force turned
towards works and creation is possessed and guided by a perfect and
direct knowledge of the thing to be done and its essence and its law, —
a knowledge which determines a wholly effective will-power that does
not deviate or falter in its process or in its result, but expresses and
fulfils spontaneously and inevitably in the act that which has been seen
in the vision. Light is here one with Force, the vibrations of knowledge
with the rhythm of the will and both are one, perfectly and without seek-
ing, groping or effort, with the assured result. The divine Nature has
a double power, a spontaneous self-formulation and self-arrangement
which wells naturally out of the essence of the thing manifested and
expresses its original truth, and a self-force of light inherent in the thing
itself and the source of its spontaneous and inevitable self-arrange-
ment.

There are subordinate, but important details. The Vedic seers seem
to speak of two primary faculties of the "truth-conscious" soul; they are
Sight and Hearing, by which is intended direct operations of an in-
herent Knowledge describable as truth-vision and truth-audition and
reflected from far-off in our human mentality by the faculties of
revelation and inspiration. Besides, a distinction seems to be made in
the operations of the Supermind between knowledge by a comprehending
and pervading consciousness which is very near to subjective knowl-

THE SUPERMIND AS CREATOR II7

edge by identity and knowledge by a projecting, confronting, appre-
hending consciousness which is the beginning of objective cognition.
These are the Vedic clues. And we may accept from this ancient ex-
perience the subsidiary term "truth-consciousness" to delimit the con-
notation of the more elastic phrase, Supermind.

We see at once that such a consciousness, described by such char-
acteristics, must be an intermediate formulation which refers back to
a term above it and forward to another below it; we see at the same
time that it is evidently the link and means by which the inferior
develops out of the superior and should equally be the link and means
by which it may develop back again towards its source. The term
above is the unitarian or indivisible consciousness of pure Sachchi-
dananda in which there are no separating distinctions; the term below
is the analytic or dividing consciousness of Mind which can only know
by separation and distinction and has at the most a vague and second-
ary apprehension of unity and infinity, — for, though it can synthetise
its divisions, it cannot arrive at a true totality. Between them is this
comprehensive and creative consciousness, by its power of pervading
and comprehending knowledge the child of that self-awareness by iden-
tity which is the poise of the Brahman and by its power of projecting,
confronting, apprehending knowledge parent of that awareness by dis-
tinction which is the process of the Mind.

Above, the formula of the One eternally stable and immutable;
below, the formula of the Many which, eternally mutable, seeks but
hardly finds in the flux of things a firm and immutable standing-point;
between, the seat of all trinities, of all that is biune, of all that becomes
Many-in-One and yet remains One-in-Many because it was originally
One that is always potentially Many. This intermediary term is there-
fore the beginning and end of all creation and arrangement, the Alpha
and the Omega, the starting-point of all differentiation, the instrument
of all unification, originative, executive and consummative of all realised
or realisable harmonies. It has the knowledge of the One, but is able to
draw out of the One its hidden multitudes; it manifests the ^lany, but
does not lose itself in their differentiations. And shall we not say that
its very existence points back to Something beyond our supreme per-
ception of the ineffable Unity, — Something ineffable and mentally in-
conceivable not because of its unity and indivisibility, but because of
its freedom from even these formulations of our mind, — Something
beyond both unity and multiplicity? That would be the utter Abso-

Il8 THE LIFE DIVINE

lute and Real which yet justifies to us both our knowledge of God and
our knowledge of the world.

But these terms are large and difficult to grasp ; let us come to pre-
cisions. We speak of the One as Sachchidananda ; but in the very
description we posit three entities and unite them to arrive at a trinity.
We say "Existence, Consciousness, Bliss," and then we say, "they are
one." It is a process of the mind. But for the unitarian consciousness
such a process is inadmissible. Existence is Consciousness and there
can be no distinction between them; Consciousness is Bliss and there
can be no distinction between them. And since there is not even this
differentiation, there can be no world. If that is the sole reality, then
world is not and never existed, can never have been conceived; for
indivisible consciousness is undividing consciousness and cannot orig-
inate division and differentiation. But this is a reductio ad absurdum;
we cannot admit it unless we are content to base everything upon an im-
possible paradox and an unreconciled antithesis.

On the other hand. Mind can conceive with precision divisions as
real ; it can conceive a synthetic totality or the finite extending itself in-
definitely; it can grasp aggregates of divided things and the samenesses
underlying them; but the ultimate unity and absolute infinity are to
its conscience of things abstract notions and unseizable quantities, not
something that is real to its grasp, much less something that is alone
real. Here is therefore the very opposite term to the unitarian con-
sciousness; we have, confronting the essential and indivisible unity, an
essential multiplicity which cannot arrive at unity without abolishing
itself and in the very act confessing that it could never really have
existed. Yet it was; for it is this that has found unity and abolished
itself. And again we have a reductio ad absurdum repeating the violent
paradox which seeks to convince thought by stunning it and the irrecon-
ciled and irreconcilable antithesis.

The difficulty, in its lower term, disappears if we realise that Mind
is only a preparatory form of our consciousness. Mind is an instru-
ment of analysis and synthesis, but not of essential knowledge. Its func-
tion is to cut out something vaguely from the unknown Thing in itself
and call this measurement or delimitation of it the whole, and again to
analyse the whole into its parts which it regards as separate mental ob-
jects. It is only the parts and accidents that the Mind can see definitely
and, after its own fashion, know. Of the whole its only definite idea
is an assemblage of parts or a totality of properties and accidents. The

THE SUPERMIND AS CREATOR II9

whole not seen as a part of something else or in its own parts, properties
and accidents is to the mind no more than a vague perception; only
when it is analysed and put by itself as a separate constituted object,
a totality in a larger totality, can Mind say to itself, "This now I know."
And really it does not know. It knows only its own analysis of the ob-
ject and the idea it has formed of it by a synthesis of the separate parts
and properties that it has seen. There its characteristic power, its sure
function ceases, and if we would have a greater, a profounder and a
real knowledge, — a knowledge and not an intense but formless sentiment
such as comes sometimes to certain deep but inarticulate parts of our
mentality, — Mind has to make room for another consciousness which
will fulfil Mind by transcending it or reverse and so rectify its opera-
tions after leaping beyond it: the summit of mental knowledge is only
a vaulting-board from which that leap can be taken. The utmost mis-
sion of Mind is to train our obscure consciousness which has emerged
out of the dark prison of Matter, to enlighten its blind instincts, random
intuitions, vague perceptions till it shall become capable of this greater
light and this higher ascension. Mind is a passage, not a culmination.
On the other hand, the unitarian consciousness or indivisible Unity
cannot be that impossible entity, a thing without contents out of which
all contents have issued and into which they disappear and become an-
nihilated. It must be an original self-concentration in which all is con-
tained but in another manner than in this temporal and spatial mani-
festation. That which has thus concentrated itself, is the utterly
ineffable and inconceivable Existence which the Nihilist images to his
mind as the negative Void of all that we know and are but the Transcen-
dentalist with equal reason may image to his mind as the positive but
indistinguishable Reality of all that we know and are. "In the begin-
ning," says the Vedanta, "was the one Existence without a second,"
but before and after the beginning, now, for ever and beyond Time
is that which we cannot describe even as the One, even when we say
that nothing but That is. What we can be aware of is, first, its original
self-concentration which we endeavour to realise as the indivisible One ;
secondly, the diffusion and apparent disintegration of all that was con-
centrated in its unity which is the Mind's conception of the universe;
and thirdly, its firm self-extension in the Truth-consciousness which
contains and upholds the diffusion and prevents it from being a real
disintegration, maintains unity in utmost diversity and stability in ut-
most mutability, insists on harmony in the appearance of an all-per-

120 THE LIFE DIVINE

vading strife and collision, keeps eternal cosmos where Mind would
arrive only at a chaos eternally attempting to form itself. This is the
Supermind, the Truth-consciousness, the Real-Idea which knows itself
and all that it becomes.

Supermind is the vast self-extension of the Brahman that contains
and develops. By the Idea it develops the triune principle of existence,
consciousness and bliss out of their indivisible unity. It differentiates
them, but it does not divide. It establishes a Trinity, not arriving like
the Mind from the three to the One, but manifesting the three out of the
One — for it manifests and develops — and yet maintaining them in the
unity — for it knows and contains. By the differentiation it is able to
bring forward one or other of them as the effective Deity which contains
the others involved or explicit in itself and this process it makes the
foundation of all other differentiations. And it acts by the same oper-
ation on all the principles and possibilities which it evolves out of this
all-constituent trinity. It possesses the power of development, of evo-
lution, of making explicit, and that power carries with it the other power
of involution, of envelopment, of making implicit. In a sense, the whole
of creation may be said to be a movement between two involutions. Spirit
in which all is involved and out of which all evolves downward to the
other pole of Matter, Matter in which also all is involved and out of
which all evolves upwards to the other pole of Spirit.

Thus the whole process of differentiation by the Real-Idea creative
of the universe is a putting forward of principles, forces, forms which
contain for the comprehending consciousness all the rest of existence
within them and front the apprehending consciousness with all the rest
of existence implicit behind them. Therefore all is in each as well as
each in all. Therefore every seed of things implies in itself all the infinity
of various possibilities, but is kept to one law of process and result by
the Will, that is to say, by the Knowledge- Force of the Conscious-Being
who is manifesting himself and who, sure of the Idea in himself, pre-
determines by it his own forms and movements. The seed is the Truth
of its own being which this Self-Existence sees in itself, the resultant of
that seed of self-vision is the Truth of self-action, the natural law of
development, formation and functioning which follows inevitably upon
the self-vision and keeps to the processes involved in the original Truth.
All Nature is simply, then, the Seer-Will, the Knowledge- Force of the
Conscious-Being at work to evolve in force and form all the inevitable
truth of the Idea into which it has originally thrown itself.

THE SUPERMIND AS CREATOR 121

This conception of the Idea points us to the essential contrast
between our mental consciousness and the Truth-consciousness. We
regard thought as a thing separate from existence, abstract, unsub-
stantial, different from reality, something which appears one knows not
whence and detaches itself from objective reality in order to observe,
understand and judge it; for so it seems and therefore is to our all-di-
viding, all-analysing mentality. The first business of Mind is to render
"discrete," to make fissures much more than to discern, and so it has
made this paralysing fissure between thought and reality. But in Super-
mind all being is consciousness, all consciousness is of being, and the
idea, a pregnant vibration of consciousness, is equally a vibration of
being pregnant of itself; it is an initial coming out, in creative self-
knowledge, of that which lay concentrated in uncreative self-awareness.
It comes out as the Idea that is a reality, and it is that reality of the
Idea which evolves itself, always by its own power and consciousness of
itself, always self-conscious, always self-developing by the will inherent
in the Idea, always self-realising by the knowledge ingrained in its every
impulsion. This is the truth of all creation, of all evolution.

In Supermind being, consciousness of knowledge and consciousness
of will are not divided as they seem to be in our mental operations ; they
are a trinity, one movement with three effective aspects. Each has its
own effect. Being gives the effect of substance, consciousness the effect
of knowledge, of the self-guiding and shaping idea, of comprehension
and apprehension; will gives the effect of self-fulfilling force. But the
idea is only the light of the reality illumining itself; it is not mental
thought nor imagination, but effective self-awareness. It is Real-Idea.

In Supermind knowledge in the Idea is not divorced from will in
the Idea, but one with it — just as it is not different from being or sub-
stance, but is one with the being, luminous power of the substance. As
the power of burning light is not different from the substance of the fire,
so the power of the Idea is not different from the substance of the Being
which works itself out in the Idea and its development. In our mentality
all are different. We have an idea and a will according to the idea or an
impulsion of will and an idea detaching itself from it; but we dift'er-
entiate effectually the idea from the will and both from ourselves. I am;
the idea is a mysterious abstraction that appears in me, the will is an-
other mystery, a force nearer to concreteness, though not concrete, but
always something that is not myself, something that I have or get or am
seized with, but am not. I make a gulf also between my will, its means

122 THE LIFE DIVINE

and the effect, for these I regard as concrete realities outside and other
than myself. Therefore neither myself nor the idea nor the will in me
are self-effective. The idea may fall away from me, the will may fail,
the means may be lacking, I myself by any or all of these lacunae may
remain unfulfilled.

But in the Supermind there is no such paralysing division, because
knowledge is not self-divided, force is not self-divided, being is not self-
divided as in the mind; they are neither broken in themselves, nor di-
vorced from each other. For the Supermind is the Vast; it starts from
unity, not division, it is primarily comprehensive, differentiation is only
its secondary act. Therefore whatever be the truth of being expressed,
the idea corresponds to it exactly, the will-force to the idea, — force being
only power of the consciousness, — and the resul^t to the will. Nor does
the idea clash with other ideas, the will or force with other will or force
as in man and his world; for there is one vast Consciousness which
contains and relates all ideas in itself as its own ideas, one vast Will
which contains and relates all energies in itself as its own energies. It
holds back this, advances that other, but according to its own precon-
ceiving Idea- Will.

This is the justification of the current religious notions of the omni-
presence, omniscience and omnipotence of the Divine Being. Far from
being an irrational imagination they are perfectly rational and in no
way contradict either the logic of a comprehensive philosophy or the
indications of observation and experience. The error is to make an
unbridgeable gulf between God and man. Brahman and the world. That
error elevates an actual and practical differentiation in being, conscious-
ness and force into an essential division. But this aspect of the question
we shall touch upon afterwards. At present we have arrived at an
affirmation and some conception of the divine and creative Supermind
in which all is one in being, consciousness, will and delight, yet with an
infinite capacity of differentiation that deploys but does not destroy the
unity, — in which Truth is the substance and Truth rises in the Idea and
Truth comes out in the form and there is one truth of knowledge and
will, one truth of self- fulfilment and therefore of delight; for all self-
fulfilment is satisfaction of being. Therefore, always, in all mutations
and combinations a self-existent and inalienable harmony.

CHAPTER XV

THE SUPREME TRUTH-CONSCIOUSNESS

One seated in the sleep qf Superconscience, a massed
Intelligence, blissful and the enjoyer of Bliss. . . . This is
the omnipotent, this is the omniscient, this is the inner con-
trol, this is the source of all.

Mandukya Upanishad}

WE HAVE to regard therefore this all-containing, all-originating,
all-consummating Supermind as the nature of the Divine Being,
not indeed in its absolute self-existence, but in its action as the Lord
and Creator of its own worlds. This is the truth of that which we call
God. Obviously this is not the too personal and limited Deity, the
magnified and supernatural Man of the ordinary occidental conception ;
for that conception erects a too human Eidolon of a certain relation
between the creative Supermind and the ego. We must not indeed ex-
clude the personal aspect of the Deity, for the impersonal is only one
face of existence; the Divine is All-existence, but it is also the one
Existent, — it is the sole Conscious-Being, but still a Being. Neverthe-
less, with this aspect we are not concerned at present; it is the imper-
sonal psychological truth of the divine Consciousness that we are seeking
to fathom: it is this that we have to fix in a large and clarified conception.
The Truth-Consciousness is ever5n?7here present in the universe as
an ordering self-knowledge by which the One manifests the harmonies of
its infinite potential multiplicity. Without this ordering self-knowledge
the manifestation would be merely a shifting chaos, precisely because
the potentiality is infinite which by itself might lead only to a play of
uncontrolled unbounded Chance. If there were only infinite potentiality
without any law of guiding truth and harmonious self-vision, without
any predetermining Idea in the very seed of things cast out for evo-
lution, the world could be nothing but a teeming, amorphous, confused
uncertainty. But the knowledge that creates, because what it creates or
releases are forms and powers of itself and not things other than itself,
possesses in its own being the vision of the truth and law that governs

* Verses $, 6.

123

124 THE LIFE DIVINE

each potentiality, and along with that an intrinsic awareness of its re-
lation to other potentialities and the harmonies that are possible between
them; it holds all this prefigured in the general determining harmony
which the whole rhythmic Idea of a universe must contain in its very
birth and self-conception and which must therefore inevitably work out
by the interplay of its constituents. It is the source and keeper of Law
in the world; for that law is nothing arbitrary — it is the expression of
a self-nature which is determined by the compelling truth of the real
idea that each thing is in its inception. Therefore from the beginning
the whole development is predetermined in its self-knowledge and at
every moment in its self- working: it is what it must be at each moment
by its own original inherent Truth; it moves to what it must be at the
next, still by its own original inherent Truth; it will be at the end that
which was contained and intended in its seed.

This development and progress of the world according to an original
truth of its own being implies a succession of Time, a relation in Space
and a regulated interaction of related things in Space to which the
succession of Time gives the aspect of Causality. Time and Space, ac-
cording to the metaphysician, have only a conceptual and not a real
existence ; but since all things and not these only are forms assumed by
Conscious-Being in its own consciousness, the distinction is of no
great importance. Time and Space are that one Conscious-Being viewing
itself in extension, subjectively as Time, objectively as Space. Our
mental view of these two categories is determined by the idea of measure
which is inherent in the action of the analytical dividing movement of
Mind. Time is for the Mind a mobile extension measured out by the
succession of the past, present and future in which Mind places itself
at a certain standpoint whence it looks before and after. Space is a
stable extension measured out by divisibility of substance; at a certain
point in that divisible extension Mind places itself and regards the dis-
position of substance around it.

In actual fact Mind measures Time by event and Space by Matter ;
but it is possible in pure mentality to disregard the movement of event
and the disposition of substance and realise the pure movement of Con-
scious-Force which constitutes Space and Time; these two are then
merely two aspects of the universal force of Consciousness which in their
intertwined interaction comprehend the warp and woof of its action upon
itself. And to a consciousness higher than Mind which should regard
our past, present and future in one view, containing and not contained

THE SUPREME TRUTH-CONSCIOUSNESS 12$

in them, not situated at a particular moment of Time for its point of
prospection, Time might well offer itself as an eternal present. And to
the same consciousness not situated at any particular point of Space,
but containing all points and regions in itself, Space also might well offer
itself as a subjective and indivisible extension, — no less subjective than
Time. At certain moments we become aware of such an indivisible
regard upholding by its immutable self-conscious unity the variations
of the universe. But we must not now ask how the contents of Time
and Space would present themselves there in their transcendent truth
for this our mind cannot conceive, — and it is even ready to deny to this
Indivisible any possibility of knowing the world in any other way than
that of our mind and senses.

What we have to realise and can to a certain extent conceive is the
one view and all-comprehending regard by which the Supermind em-
braces and unifies the successions of Time and the divisions of Space.
And first, if there were not this factor of the successions of Time, there
would be no change or progression; a perfect harmony would be per-
petually manifest, coeval with other harmonies in a sort of eternal
moment, not successive to them in the movement from past to future.
We have instead the constant succession of a developing harmony in
which one strain rises out of another that preceded it and conceals in
itself that which it has replaced. Or, if the self-manifestation were to
exist without the factor of divisible Space, there would be no mutable
relation of forms or intershock of forces; all would exist and not be
worked out, — a spaceless self-consciousness purely subjective would
contain all things in an infinite subjective grasp as in the mind of a
cosmic poet or dreamer, but would not distribute itself through all in an
indefinite objective self-extension. Or again, if Time alone were real,
its successions would be a pure development in which one strain would
rise out of another in a subjective free spontaneity as in a series of
musical sounds or a succession of poetical images. We have instead a
harmony worked out by Time in terms of forms and forces that stand
related to one another in an all-containing spatial extension ; an incessant
succession of powers and figures of things and happenings in our vision
oif existence.

Different potentialities are embodied, placed, related in this field
of Time and Space, each with its powers and possibilities fronting other
powers and possibilities, and as a result the successions of Time become
in their appearance to the mind a working out of things by shock and

126 THE LIFE DIVINE

Struggle and not a spontaneous succession. In reality, there is a spon-
taneous working out of things from within and the external shock and
struggle are only the superficial aspect of this elaboration. For the
inner and inherent law of the one and whole, which is necessarily a
harmony, governs the outer and processive laws of the parts or forms
which appear to be in collision; and to the supramental vision this
greater and profounder truth of harmony is always present. That which
is an apparent discord to the mind because it considers each thing sepa-
rately in itself, is an element of the general ever-present and ever-devel-
oping harmony to the Supermind because it views all things in a multiple
unity. Besides, the mind sees only a given time and space and views
many possibilities pell-mell as all more or less realisable in that time
and space ; the divine Supermind sees the whole extension of Time and
Space and can embrace all the mind's possibilities and very many more
not visible to the mind, but without any error, groping or confusion;
for it perceives each potentiality in its proper force, essential necessity,
right relation to the others and the time, place and circumstance both
of its gradual and its ultimate realisation. To see things steadily and see
them whole is not possible to the mind; but it is the very nature of the
transcendent Supermind.

This Supermind in its conscious vision not only contains all the
forms of itself which its conscious force creates, but it pervades them as
an indwelling Presence and a self-revealing Light. It is present, even
though concealed, in every form and force of the universe; it is that
which determines sovereignly and spontaneously form, force and func-
tioning; it limits the variations it compels; it gathers, disperses, modi-
fies the energy which it uses; and all this is done in accord with the
first laws^ that its self-knowledge has fixed in the very birth of the form,
at the very starting-point of the force. It is seated within everything
as the Lord in the heart of all existences, — he who turns them as on an
engine by the power of his Maya; ^ it is within them and embraces
them as the divine Seer who variously disposed and ordained objects,
each rightly according to the thing that it is, from years sempiternal.^

Each thing in Nature, therefore, whether animate or inanimate,
mentally self-conscious or not self-conscious, is governed in its being
and in its operations by an indwelling Vision and Power, to us subcon-

^A Vedic expression. The gods act according to the first laws, original and
therefore supreme, which are the law of the truth of things.

^Gita, XVIII. 6i. *Isha Upanishad, Verse 8.

THE SUPREME TRUTH-CONSCIOUSNESS 12 7

scient or inconscient because we are not conscious of it, but not incon-
scient to itself, rather profoundly and universally conscient. Therefore
each thing seems to do the works of intelligence, even without pos-
sessing intelligence, because it obeys, whether subconsciously as in the
plant and animal or half-consciously as in man, the real-idea of the
divine Supermind within it. But it is not a mental Intelligence that
informs and governs all things; it is a self-aware Truth of being in which
self-knowledge is inseparable from self-existence: it is this Truth-con-
sciousness which has not to think out things but works them out with
knowledge according to the impeccable self-vision and the inevitable
force of a sole and self-fulfilling Existence. Mental intelligence thinks out
because it is merely a reflecting force of consciousness which does not
know, but seeks to know; it follows in Time step by step the working of
a knowledge higher than itself, a knowledge that exists always, one and
whole, that holds Time in its grasp, that sees past, present and future in
a single regard.

This, then, is the first operative principle of the divine Supermind;
it is a cosmic vision which is all-comprehensive, all-pervading, all-in-
habiting. Because it comprehends all things in being and static self-
awareness, subjective, timeless, spaceless, therefore it comprehends all
things in dynamic knowledge and governs their objective self-embodi-
ment in Space and Time.

In this consciousness the knower, knowledge and the known are
not different entities, but fundamentally one. Our mentality makes a
distinction between these three because without distinctions it cannot
proceed; losing its proper means and fundamental law of action, it be-
comes motionless and inactive. Therefore, even when I regard myself
mentally, I have still to make this distinction. I am, as the knower;
what I observe in myself, I regard as the object of my knowledge, myself
yet not myself; knowledge is an operation by which I link the knower
to the known. But the artificiality, the purely practical and utilitarian
character of this operation is evident; it is evident that it does not repre-
sent the fundamental truth of things. In reality, I the knower, am the
consciousness which knows ; the knowledge is that consciousness, myself,
operating; the known is also myself, a form or movement of the same
consciousness. The three are clearly one existence, one movement, in-
divisible though seeming to be divided, not distributed between its forms
although appearing to distribute itself and to stand separate in each. But
this is a knowledge which the mind can arrive at, can reason out, can

128 THE LIFE DIVINE

feel, but cannot readily make the practical basis of its intelligent opera-
tions. And with regard to objects external to the form of consciousness
which I call myself, the difficulty becomes almost insuperable; even to
feel unity there is an abnormal effort and to retain it, to act upon it con-
tinually would be a new and foreign action not properly belonging to
the Mind. Mind can at most hold it as an understood truth so as to
correct and modify by it its own normal activities which are still based
upon division, somewhat as we know intellectually that the earth moves
round the sun and are able to correct by it but not abolish the artificial
and physically practical arrangement by which the senses persist in re-
garding the sun as in motion round the earth.

But the Supermind possesses and acts always, fundamentally, on
this truth of unity which to the mind is only a secondary or acquired pos-
session and not the very grain of its seeing. Supermind sees the universe
and its contents as itself in a single indivisible act of knowledge, an act
which is its life, which is the very movement of its self-existence. There-
fore this comprehensive divine consciousness in its aspect of Will does not
so much guide or govern the development of cosmic life as consummate
it in itself by an act of power which is inseparable from the act of knowl-
edge and from the movement of self-existence, is indeed one and the
same act. For we have seen that universal force and universal conscious-
ness are one — cosmic force is the operation of cosmic consciousness.
So also divine Knowledge and divine Will are one; they are the same
fundamental movement or act of existence.

This indivisibility of the comprehensive Supermind which contains
all multiplicity without derogating from its own unity, is a truth upon
which we have always to insist, if we are to understand the cosmos and
get rid of the initial error of our analytic mentality. A tree evolves out
of the seed in which it is already contained, the seed out of the tree;
a fixed law, an invariable process reigns in the permanence of the form
of manifestation which we call a tree. The mind regards this phenom-
enon, this birth, life and reproduction of a tree, as a thing in itself and
on that basis studies, classes and explains it. It explains the tree by the
seed, the seed by the tree; it declares a law of Nature. But it has ex-
plained nothing; it has only analysed and recorded the process of a mys-
tery. Supposing even that it comes to perceive a secret conscious force
as the soul, the real being of this form and the rest as merely a settled
operation and manifestation of that force, still it tends to regard the form
as a separate existence with its separate law of nature and process of

THE SUPREME TRUTH-CONSCIOUSNESS 1 29

development. In the animal and in man with his conscious mentality
this separative tendency of the Mind induces it to regard itself also as
a separate existence, the conscious subject, and other forms as separate
objects of its mentality. This useful arrangement, necessary to life and
the first basis of all its practice, is accepted by the mind as an actual
fact and thence proceeds all the error of the ego.

But the Supermind works otherwise. The tree and its process
would not be what they are, could not indeed exist, if it were a separate
existence; forms are what they are by the force of the cosmic existence,
they develop as they do as a result of their relation to it and to all its
other manifestations. The separate law of their nature is only an ap-
plication of the universal law and truth of all Nature; their particular
development is determined by their place in the general development.
The tree does not explain the seed, nor the seed the tree ; cosmos explains
both and God explains cosmos. The Supermind, pervading and inhabit-
ing at once the seed and the tree and all objects, lives in this greater
knowledge which is indivisible and one though with a modified and not
an absolute indivisibility and unity. In this comprehensive knowledge
there is no independent centre of existence, no individual separated ego
such as we see in ourselves ; the whole of existence is to its self-awareness
an equable extension, one in oneness, one in multiplicity, one in all con-
ditions and everywhere. Here the All and the One are the same exist-
ence; the individual being does not and cannot lose the consciousness
of its identity with all beings and with the One Being ; for that identity
is inherent in supramental cognition, a part of the supramental self-
evidence.

In that spacious equality of oneness the Being is not divided and
distributed; equably self-extended, pervading its extension as One, in-
habiting as One the multiplicity of forms, it is everywhere at once the
single and equal Brahman. For this extension of the Being in Time and
Space and this pervasion and indwelling is in intimate relation with the
absolute Unity from which it has proceeded, with that absolute In-
divisible in which there is no centre or circumference but only the time-
less and spaceless One. That high concentration of unity in the unex-
tended Brahman must necessarily translate itself in the extension by
this equal pervasive concentration, this indivisible comprehension of all
things, this universal undistributed immanence, this unity which no play
of multiplicity can abrogate or diminish. "Brahman is in all things,
all things are in Brahman, all things are Brahman," is the triple formula

130 THE LIFE DIVINE

of the comprehensive Supermind, a single truth of self-manifestation in
three aspects which it holds together and inseparably in its self-view as
the fundamental knowledge from which it proceeds to the play of the
cosmos.

But what then is the origin of mentality and the organisation of this
lower consciousness in the triple terms of Mind, Life and Matter which
is our view of the universe? For since all things that exist must proceed
from the action of the all-efficient Supermind, from its operation in the
three original terms of Existence, Conscious-Force and Bliss, there must
be some faculty of the creative Truth-Consciousness which so operates
as to cast them into these new terms, into this inferior trio of mentality,
vitality and physical substance. This faculty we find in a secondary
power of the creative knowledge, its power of a projecting, confronting
and apprehending consciousness in which knowledge centralises itself
and stands back from its works to observe them. And when we speak
of centralisation, we mean, as distinguished from the equable concentra-
tion of consciousness of which we have hitherto spoken, an unequal con-
centration in which there is the beginning of self-division — or of its
phenomenal appearance.

First of all the Knower holds himself concentrated in knowledge
as subject and regards his Force of consciousness as if continually pro-
ceeding from him into the form of himself, continually working in it,
continually drawing back into himself, continually issuing forth again.
From this single act of self-modification proceed all the practical dis-
tinctions upon which the relative view and the relative action of the
universe is based. A practical distinction has been created between the
Knower, Knowledge and the Known, between the Lord, His force and
the children and works of the Force, between the Enjoyer, the Enjoyment
and the Enjoyed, between the Self, Maya and the becomings of the
Self.

Secondly, this conscious Soul concentrated in knowledge, this
Purusha observing and governing the Force that has gone forth from
him, his Shakti or Prakriti, repeats himself in every form of himself.
He accompanies, as it were, his Force of consciousness into its works
and reproduces there the act of self-division from which this apprehend-
ing consciousness is born. In each form this Soul dwells with his Nature
and observes himself in other forms from that artificial and practical
centre of consciousness. In all it is the same Soul, the same divine Be-
ing; the multiplication of centres is only a practical act of consciousness

THE SUPREME TRUTH-CONSCIOUSNESS I31

intended to institute a play of difference, of mutuality, mutual knowl-
edge, mutual shock of force, mutual enjoyment, a difference based upon
essential unity, a unity realised on a practical basis of difference.

We can speak of this new status of the all-pervading Supermind
as a further departure from the unitarian truth of things and from the
indivisible consciousness which constitutes inalienably the unity essential
to the existence of the cosmos. We can see that pursued a little farther
it may become truly Avidya, the great Ignorance which starts from
multiplicity as the fundamental reality and in order to travel back to
real unity has to commence with the false unity of the ego. We can see
also that once the individual centre is accepted as the determining stand-
point, as the knower, mental sensation, mental intelligence, mental action
of will and all their consequences cannot fail to come into being. But
also we have to see that so long as the soul acts in the Supermind,
Ignorance has not yet begun; the field of knowledge and action is still
the truth-consciousness, the basis is still the unity.

For the Self still regards itself as one in all and all things as becom-
ings in itself and of itself; the Lord still knows his Force as himself in
act and every being as himself in soul and himself in form; it is still
his own being that the Enjoyer enjoys, even though in a multiplicity.
The one real change has been an unequal concentration of consciousness
and a multiple distribution of force. There is a practical distinction in
consciousness, but there is no essential difference of consciousness or
true division in its vision of itself. The Truth-consciousness has arrived
at a position which prepares our mentality, but is not yet that of our
mentality. And it is this that we must study in order to seize Mind at
its origin, at the point where it makes its great lapse from the high and
vast wideness of the Truth-consciousness into the division and the ig-
norance. Fortunately, this apprehending Truth-consciousness^ is much
more facile to our grasp by its nearness to us, by its foreshadowing of
our mental operations than the remoter realisation that we have hitherto
been struggling to express in our inadequate language of the intellect.
The barrier that has to be crossed is less formidable.

" Prajndna.

CHAPTER XVI

THE TRIPLE STATUS OF SUPERMIND

My self is that which supports all beings and consti-
tutes their existence. ... I am the self which abides within
all beings.

Gita.^

Three powers of Light uphold three luminous worlds
divine.

Rig Veda."

BEFORE we pass to this easier understanding of the world we in-
habit from the standpoint of an apprehending Truth-consciousness
which sees things as would an individual soul freed from the limitations
of mentality and admitted to participate in the action of the Divine
Supermind, we must pause and resume briefly what we have realised or
can yet realise of the consciousness of the Lord, the Ishwara as He
develops the world by His Maya out of the original concentrated unity
of His being.

We have started with the assertion of all existence as one Being
whose essential nature is Consciousness, one Consciousness whose active
nature is Force or Will; and this Being is Delight, this Consciousness
is Delight, this Force or Will is Delight. Eternal and inalienable Bliss
of Existence, Bliss of Consciousness, Bliss of Force or Will whether
concentrated in itself and at rest or active and creative, this is God and
this is ourselves in our essential, our non-phenomenal being. Concen-
trated in itself, it possesses or rather is the essential, eternal, inalienable
Bliss; active and creative, it possesses or rather becomes the delight of
the play of existence, the play of consciousness, the play of force and
will. That play is the universe and that delight is the sole cause, motive
and object of cosmic existence. The Divine Consciousness possesses that
play and delight eternally and inalienably; our essential being, our real
self which is concealed from us by the false self or mental ego, also
enjoys that play and delight eternally and inalienably and cannot indeed
do otherwise since it is one in being with the Divine Consciousness.

^IX. s; X. 20. *V. 29. I.

132

THE TRIPLE STATUS OF SUPERMIND 1 33

If we aspire therefore to a divine life, we cannot attain to it by any
other way than by unveiling this veiled self in us, by mounting from our
present status in the false self or mental ego to a higher status in the
true self, the Atman, by entering into that unity with the Divine Con-
sciousness which something superconscient in us always enjoys, — other-
wise we could not exist, — but which our conscious mentality has for-
feited.

But when we thus assert this unity of Sachchidananda on the one
hand and this divided mentality on the other, we posit two opposite
entities one of which must be false if the other is to be held as true, one
of which must be abolished if the other is to be enjoyed. 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. We must abandon cosmic existence utterly as an illusion
in order to enjoy or re-become the Transcendent. From this solution
there is no escape unless there be an intermediate link between the two
which can explain them to each other and establish between them such
a relation as will make it possible for us to realise the one Existence,
Consciousness, Delight in the mould of the mind, life and body.

The intermediate link exists. We call it the Supermind or the
Truth-Consciousness, because it is a principle superior to mentality and
exists, acts and proceeds in the fundamental truth and unity of things
and not like the mind in their appearances and phenomenal divisions.
The existence of the supermind is a logical necessity arising directly
from the position with which we have started. For in itself Sachchi-
dananda must be a spaceless and timeless absolute of conscious existence
that is bliss; but the world is, on the contrary, an extension in Time
and Space and a movement, a working out, a development of relations
and possibilities by causality — or what so appears to us — in Time and
Space. The true name of this Causality is Divine Law and the essence
of that Law is an inevitable self-development of the truth of the thing
that is, as Idea, in the very essence of what is developed; it is a pre-
viously fixed determination of relative movements out of the stuff of
infinite possibility. That which thus develops all things must be a
Knowledge-Will or Conscious- Force ; for all manifestation of universe
is a play of the Conscious- Force which is the essential nature of exist-
ence. But the developing Knowledge- Will cannot be mental; for mind
does not know, possess or govern this Law, but is governed by it, is one

134 THE LIFE DIVINE

of its results, moves in the phenomena of the self-development and not
at its root, observes as divided things the results of the development
and strives in vain to arrive at their source and reality. Moreover this
Knowledge-Will which develops all must be in possession of the unity
of things and must out of it manifest their multiplicity; but mind is not
in possession of that unity, it has only an imperfect possession of a
part of the multiplicity.

Therefore there must be a principle superior to the Mind which
satisfies the conditions in which Mind fails. No doubt, it is Sachchi-
dananda itself that is this principle, but Sachchidananda not resting in
its pure infinite invariable consciousness, but proceeding out of this
primal poise, or rather upon it as a base and in it as a continent, into
a movement which is its form of Energy and instrument of cosmic
creation. Consciousness and Force are the twin essential aspects of the
pure Power of existence; Knowledge and Will must therefore be the
form which that Power takes in creating a world of relations in the ex-
tension of Time and Space. This Knowledge and this Will must be
one, infinite, all-embracing, all-possessing, all-forming, holding eternally
in itself that which it casts into movement and form. The Supermind
then is Being moving out into a determinative self-knowledge which
perceives certain truths of itself and wills to realise them in a temporal
and spatial extension of its own timeless and spaceless existence. What-
ever is in its own being, takes form as self-knowledge, as Truth-Con-
sciousness, as Real-Idea, and, that self-knowledge being also self-force,
fulfils or realises itself inevitably in Time and Space.

This, then, is the nature of the Divine Consciousness which creates
in itself all things by a movement of its conscious- force and governs their
development through a self-evolution by inherent knowledge-will of the
truth of existence or real-idea which has formed them. The Being that
is thus conscient is what we call God ; and He must obviously be omni-
present, omniscient, omnipotent. Omnipresent, for all forms are forms
of His conscious being created by its force of movement in its own
extension as Space and Time; omniscient, for all things exist in His
conscious-being, are formed by it and possessed by it; omnipotent, for
this all-possessing consciousness is also an all-possessing Force and all-
informing Will. And this Will and Knowledge are not at war with each
other as our will and knowledge are capable of being at war with each
other, because they are not different but are one movement of the same
being. Nor can they be contradicted by any other will, force or con-

THE TRIPLE STATUS OF SUPERMIND I35

sciousness from outside or within; for there is no consciousness or
force external to the One, and all energies and formations of knowl-
edge within are not other than it, but are merely play of the one all-
determining Will and the one all-harmonising Knowledge. What we see
as a clash of wills and forces, because we dwell in the particular and
divided and cannot see the whole, the Supermind envisages as the con-
spiring elements of a predetermined harmony which is always present
to it because the totality of things is eternally subject to its gaze.

Whatever be the poise or form its action takes, this will always be
the Nature of the divine Consciousness. But, its existence being absolute
in itself, its power of existence is also absolute in its extension, and it is
not therefore limited to one poise or one form of action. We, human
beings, are phenomenally a particular form of consciousness, subject to
Time and Space, and can only be, in our surface consciousness which is
all we know of ourselves, one thing at a time, one formation, one poise
of being, one aggregate of experience; and that one thing is for us the
truth of ourselves which we acknowledge; all the rest is either not true
or no longer true, because it has disappeared into the past out of our
ken, or not yet true, because it is waiting in the future and not yet in
our ken. But the Divine Consciousness is not so particularised, nor so
limited; it can be many things at a time and take more than one
enduring poise even for all time. We find that in the principle of Super-
mind itself it has three such general poises or sessions of its world-
founding consciousness. The first founds the inalienable unity of things,
the second modifies that unity so as to support the manifestation of the
Many in One and One in Many; the third further modifies it so as to
support the evolution of a diversified individuality which, by the action
of Ignorance, becomes in us at a lower level the illusion of the separate
ego.

We have seen what is the nature of this first and primary poise of
the Supermind which founds the inalienable unity of things. It is not
the pure unitarian consciousness; for that is a timeless and spaceless
concentration of Sachchidananda in itself, in which Conscious Force does
not cast itself out into any kind of extension and, if it contains the
universe at all, contains it in eternal potentiality and not in temporal
actuality. This, on the contrary, is an equal self-extension of Sachchi-
dananda all-comprehending, all-possessing, all-constituting. But this all
is one, not many; there is no individualisation. It is when the reflection
of this Supermind falls upon our stilled and purified self that we lose

136 THE LIFE DIVINE

all sense of individuality; for there is no concentration of consciousness
there to support an individual development. All is developed in unity
and as one; all is held by this Divine Consciousness as forms of its
existence, not as in any degree separate existences. Somewhat as the
thoughts and images that occur in our mind are not separate existences
to us, but forms taken by our consciousness, so are all names and forms
to this primary Supermind. It is the pure divine ideation and formation
in the Infinite, — only an ideation and formation that is organised not
as an unreal play of mental thought, but as a real play of conscious
being. The divine soul in this poise would make no difference between
Conscious-Soul and Force-Soul, for all force would be action of con-
sciousness, nor between Matter and Spirit since all mould would be
simply form of Spirit.

In the second poise of the Supermind the Divine Consciousness
stands back in the idea from the movement which it contains, realising
it by a sort of apprehending consciousness, following it, occupying and
inhabiting its works, seeming to distribute itself in its forms. In each
name and form it would realise itself as the stable Conscious-Self, the
same in all ; but also it would realise itself as a concentration of Con-
scious-Self following and supporting the individual play of movement
and upholding its differentiation from the other play of movement, — the
same everjn^vhere in soul-essence, but varying in soul-form. This con-
centration supporting the soul-form would be the individual Divine or
Jivatman as distinguished from the universal Divine or one all-consti-
tuting self. There would be no essential difference, but only a practical
differentiation for the play which would not abrogate the real unity.
The universal Divine would know all soul-forms as itself and yet es-
tablish a different relation with each separately and in each with all the
others. The individual Divine would envisage its existence as a soul-
form and soul-movement of the One and, while by the comprehending
action of consciousness it would enjoy its unity with the One and with
all soul-forms, it would also by a forward or frontal apprehending action
support and enjoy its individual movement and its relations of a free
difference in unity both with the One and with all its forms. If our
purified mind were to reflect this secondary poise of Supermind, our
soul could support and occupy its individual existence and yet even
there realise itself as the One that has become all, inhabits all, contains
all, enjoying even in its particular modification its unity with God and
its fellows. In no other circumstance of the supramental existence would

THE TRIPLE STATUS OF SUPERMIND I37

there be any characteristic change ; the only change would be this play
of the One that has manifested its multiplicity and of the Many that
are still one, with all that is necessary to maintain and conduct the play.

A third poise of the Supermind would be attained if the supporting
concentration were no longer to stand at the back, as it were, of the
movement, inhabiting it with a certain superiority to it and so following
and enjoying, but were to project itself into the movement and to be
in a way involved in it. Here, the character of the play would be altered,
but only in so far as the individual Divine would so predominantly make
the play of relations with the universal and with its other forms the
practical field of its conscious experience that the realisation of utter
unity with them would be only a supreme accompaniment and constant
culmination of all experience; but in the higher poise unity would be the
dominant and fundamental experience and variation would be only a
play of the unity. This tertiary poise would be therefore that of a sort of
fundamental blissful dualism in unity — no longer unity qualified by a
subordinate dualism — between the individual Divine and its universal
source, with all the consequences that would accrue from the mainte-
nance and operation of such a dualism.

It may be said that the first consequence would be a lapse into
the ignorance of Avidya which takes the Many for the real fact of
existence and views the One only as a cosmic sum of the Many. But
there would not necessarily be any such lapse. For the individual Divine
would still be conscious of itself as the result of the One and of its
power of conscious self-creation, that is to say, of its multiple self-
centration conceived so as to govern and enjoy manifoldly its manifold
existence in the extension of Time and Space; this true spiritual indi-
vidual would not arrogate to itself an independent or separate existence.
It would only affirm the truth of the differentiating movement along
with the truth of the stable unity, regarding them as the upper and lower
poles of the same truth, the foundation and culmination of the same
divine play; and it would insist on the joy of the differentiation as
necessary to the fullness of the joy of the unity.

Obviously, these three poises would be only different ways of dealing
with the same Truth; the Truth of existence enjoyed would be the
same, the way of enjoying it or rather the poise of the soul in enjoying
it would be different. The delight, the Ananda would vary, but would
abide always within the status of the Truth-consciousness and involve
no lapse into the Falsehood and the Ignorance. For the secondary and

138 THE LIFE DIVINE

tertiary Supermind would only develop and apply in the terms of the
divine multiplicity what the primary Supermind had held in the terms
of the divine unity. We cannot stamp any of these three poises with the
stigma of falsehood and illusion. The language of the Upanishads, the
supreme ancient authority for these truths of a higher experience, when
they speak of the Divine existence which is manifesting itself, implies
the validity of all these experiences. We can only assert the priority
of the oneness to the multiplicity, a priority not in time but in relation
of consciousness, and no statement of supreme spiritual experience, no
Vedantic philosophy denies this priority or the eternal dependence of the
Many on the One. It is because in Time the Many seem not to be
eternal but to manifest out of the One and return into it as their essence
that their reality is denied; but it might equally be reasoned that the
eternal persistence or, if you will, the eternal recurrence of the manifesta-
tion in Time is a proof that the divine multiplicity is an eternal fact of
the Supreme beyond Time no less than the divine unity; otherwise it
could not have this characteristic of inevitable eternal recurrence in
Time.

It is indeed only when our human mentality lays an exclusive em-
phasis on one side of spiritual experience, affirms that to be the sole
eternal truth and states it in the terms of our all-dividing mental logic
that the necessity for mutually destructive schools of philosophy arises.
Thus, emphasising the sole truth of the unitarian consciousness, we ob-
serve the play of the divine unity, erroneously rendered by our men-
tality into the terms of real difference, but, not satisfied with correcting
this error of the mind by the truth of a higher principle, we assert that
the play itself is an illusion. Or, emphasising the play of the One in the
Many, we declare a qualified unity and regard the individual soul as a
soul-form of the Supreme, but would assert the eternity of this qualified
existence and deny altogether the experience of a pure consciousness in
an unqualified oneness. Or, again, emphasising the play of difference,
we assert that the Supreme and the human soul are eternally different
and reject the validity of an experience which exceeds and seems to
abolish that difference. But the position that we have now firmly taken
absolves us from the necessity of these negations and exclusions: we
see that there is a truth behind all these affirmations, but at the same
time an excess which leads to an ill-founded negation. Affirming, as we
have done, the absolute absoluteness of That, not limited by our ideas
of unity, not limited by our ideas of multiplicity, affirming the unity as

THE TRIPLE STATUS OF SUPERMIND I39

a basis for the manifestation of the multipHcity and the multiplicity
as the basis for the return to oneness and the enjoyment of unity in the
divine manifestation, we need not burden our present statement with
these discussions or undertake the vain labour of enslaving to our mental
distinctions and definitions the absolute freedom of the Divine Infinite.

CHAPTER XVII

THE DIVINE SOUL

He whose self has become all existences, for he has the
knowledge, how shall he be deluded, whence shall he have
grief, he who sees everywhere oneness?

Isha Upanishad}

BY THE conception we have formed of the Supermind, by its oppo-
sition to the mentality on which our human existence is based, we
are able not only to form a precise instead of a vague idea of divinity
and the divine life, — expressions which we are otherwise condemned
to use with looseness and as the vague wording of a large but almost
impalpable aspiration, — but also to give these ideas a firm basis of
philosophical reasoning, to put them into a clear relation with the
humanity and the human life which is all we at present enjoy and to
justify our hope and aspiration by the very nature of the world and of
our own cosmic antecedents and the inevitable future of our evolution.
We begin to grasp intellectually what is the Divine, the eternal Reality,
and to understand how out of it the world has come. We begin also to
perceive how inevitably that which has come out of the Divine must re-
turn to the Divine. We may now ask with profit and a chance of clearer
reply how we must change and what we must become in order to arrive
there in our nature and our life and our relations with others and not
only through a solitary and ecstatic realisation in the profundities of our
being. Certainly, there is still a defect in our premisses; for we have
so far been striving to define for ourselves what the Divine is in its
descent towards limited Nature, whereas what we ourselves actually are
is the Divine in the individual ascending back out of limited Nature
to its own proper divinity. This difference of movement must involve
a difference between the life of the gods who have never known the fall
and the life of man redeemed, conqueror of the lost godhead and bearing
within him the experience and it may be the new riches gathered by him
from his acceptance of the utter descent. Nevertheless, there can be no
difference of essential characteristics, but only of mould and colouring.

^ Verse 7.

140

THE DIVINE SOUL I4I

We can already ascertain on the basis of the conclusions at which we
have arrived the essential nature of the divine life towards which we
aspire.

What then would be the existence of a divine soul, not descended
into the ignorance by the fall of Spirit into Matter and the eclipse of
soul by material Nature? What would be its consciousness, living in
the original Truth of things, in the inalienable unity, in the world of its
own infinite being, like the Divine Existence itself, but able by the play
of the Divine Maya and by the distinction of the comprehending and
apprehending Truth-Consciousness to enjoy also difference from God
at the same time as unity with Him and to embrace difference and yet
oneness with other divine souls in the infinite play of the self-multiplied
Identical?

Obviously, the existence of such a soul would be always self-con-
tained in the conscious play of Sachchidananda. It would be pure and
infinite self-existence in its being; in its becoming it would be a free
play of immortal life uninvaded by death and birth and change of body
because unclouded by ignorance and not involved in the darkness of
our material being. It would be a pure and unlimited consciousness in
its energy, poised in an eternal and luminous tranquillity as its founda-
tion, yet able to play freely with forms of knowledge and forms of con-
scious power, tranquil, unaffected by the stumblings of mental error and
the misprisions of our striving will because it never departs from truth
and oneness, never falls from the inherent light and the natural harmony
of its divine existence. It would be, finally, a pure and inalienable de-
light in its eternal self-experience and in Time a free variation of bliss
unaffected by our perversions of dislike, hatred, discontent and suffer-
ing because undivided in being, unbaffled by erring self-will, unper-
verted by the ignorant stimulus of desire.

Its consciousness would not be shut out from any part of the in-
finite truth, nor limited by any poise or status that it might assume in
its relations with others, nor condemned to any loss of self-knowledge
by its acceptance of a purely phenomenal individuality and the play of
practical differentiation. It would in its self-experience live eternally in
the presence of the Absolute. To us the Absolute is only an intellec-
tual conception of indefinable existence. The intellect tells us simply
that there is a Brahman higher than the highest,- an Unknowable that
knows itself in other fashion than that of our knowledge; but the in-

* Pardtpara.

142 THE LIFE DIVINE

tellect cannot bring us into its presence. The divine soul living in the
Truth of things would, on the contrary, always have the conscious sense
of itself as a manifestation of the Absolute. Its immutable existence it
would be aware of as the original "self-form" ^ of that Transcendent, —
Sachchidananda ; its play of conscious being it would be aware of as
manifestation of That in forms of Sachchidananda. In its every state
or act of knowledge it would be aware of the Unknowable cognising itself
by a form of variable self-knowledge ; in its every state or act of power,
will or force aware of the Transcendence possessing itself by a form of
conscious power of being and knowledge; in its every state or act of
delight, joy or love aware of the Transcendence embracing itself by a
form of conscious self-enjoyment. This presence of the Absolute would
not be with it as an experience occasionally glimpsed or finally arrived
at and held with difficulty or as an addition, acquisition or culmination
superimposed on its ordinary state of being: it would be the very foun-
dation of its being both in the unity and the differentiation ; it would be
present to it in all its knowing, willing, doing, enjoying; it would be
absent neither from its timeless self nor from any moment of Time, nei-
ther from its spaceless being nor from any determination of its extended
existence, neither from its unconditioned purity beyond all cause and
circumstance nor from any relation of circumstance, condition and
causality. This constant presence of the Absolute would be the basis
of its infinite freedom and delight, ensure its security in the play and
provide the root and sap and essence of its divine being.

Moreover such a divine soul would live simultaneously in the two
terms of the eternal existence of Sachchidananda, the two inseparable
poles of the self-unfolding of the Absolute which we call One and the
Many. All being does really so live; but to our divided self-awareness
there is an incompatibility, a gulf between the two driving us towards
a choice, to dwell either in the multiplicity exiled from the direct and
entire consciousness of the One or in the unity repellent of the con-
sciousness of the Many. But the divine soul would not be enslaved to
this divorce and duality. It would be aware in itself at once of the in-
finite self-concentration and the infinite self-extension and diffusion.
It would be aware simultaneously of the One in its unitarian conscious-
ness holding the innumerable multiplicity in itself as if potential, un-
expressed and therefore to our mental experience of that state non-exist-
ent and of the One in its extended consciousness holding the multiplicity

^ Svarupa.

THE DIVINE SOUL 1 43

thrown out and active as the play of its own conscious being, will and
delight. It would equally be aware of the Many ever drawing down to
themselves the One that is the eternal source and reality of their exist-
ence and of the Many ever mounting up attracted to the One that is
the eternal culmination and blissful justification of all their play of
difference. This vast view of things is the mould of the Truth-Conscious-
ness, the foundation of the large Truth and Right hymned by the Vedic
seers; this unity of all these terms of opposition is the real Adwaita, the
supreme comprehending word of the knowledge of the Unknowable.

The divine soul will be aware of all variation of being, consciousness,
will and delight as the outflowing, the extension, the diffusion of that
self-concentrated Unity developing itself, not into difference and division,
but into another, an extended form of infinite oneness. It will itself
always be concentrated in oneness in the essence of its being, always
manifested in variation in the extension of its being. All that takes form
in itself will be the manifested potentialities of the One, the Word or
Name vibrating out of the nameless Silence, the Form realising the
formless essence, the active Will or Power proceeding out of the tran-
quil Force, the ray of self-cognition gleaming out from the sun of time-
less self-awareness, the wave of becoming rising up into shape of self-
conscious existence out of the eternally self-conscious Being, the joy
and love welling for ever out of the eternal still Delight. It will be the
Absolute biune in its self-unfolding, and each relativity in it will be ab-
solute to itself because aware of itself as the Absolute manifested but
without that ignorance which excludes other relativities as alien to its
being or less complete than itself.

In the extension the divine soul will be aware of the three grades of
the supramental existence, not as we are mentally compelled to regard
them, not as grades, but as a triune fact of the self-manifestation of
Sachchidananda. It will be able to embrace them in one and the same
comprehensive self-realisation, — for a vast comprehensiveness is the
foundation of the truth-conscious supermind. It will be able divinely
to conceive, perceive and sense all things as the Self, its own self, one
self of all, one Self-being and Self-becoming, but not divided in its be-
comings which have no existence apart from its own self-consciousness.
It will be able divinely to conceive, perceive and sense all existences as
soul-forms of the One which have each its own being in the One, its own
standpoint in the One, its own relations with all the other existences that
people the infinite unity, but all dependent on the One, conscious form

144 THE LIFE DIVINE

of Him in His own infinity. It will be able divinely to conceive, perceive
and sense all these existences in their individuality, in their separate
standpoint living as the individual Divine, each with the One and Su-
preme dwelling in it and each therefore not altogether a form of eidolon,
not really an illusory part of a real whole, a mere foaming wave on the
surface of an immobile Ocean, — for these are after all no more than
inadequate mental images, — but a whole in the whole, a truth that re-
peats the infinite Truth, a wave that is all the sea, a relative that proves
to be the Absolute itself when we look behind form and see it in its
completeness.

For these three are aspects of the one Existence. The first is based
upon that self-knowledge which, in our human realisation of the Divine,
the Upanishad describes as the Self in us becoming all existences; the
second on that which is described as seeing all existences in the Self;
the third on that which is described as seeing the Self in all existences.
The Self becoming all existences is the basis of our oneness with all ; the
Self containing all existences is the basis of our oneness in difference;
the Self inhabiting all is the basis of our individuality in the universal.
If the defect of our mentality, if its need of exclusive concentration com-
pels it to dwell on any one of these aspects of self-knowledge to the
exclusion of the others, if a realisation imperfect as well as exclusive
moves us always to bring in a human element of error into the very
Truth itself and of conflict and mutual negation into the all-compre-
hending unity, yet to a divine supramental being, by the essential char-
acter of the supermind which is a comprehending oneness and infinite
totaUty, they must present themselves as a triple and indeed a triune
realisation.

If we suppose this soul to take its poise, its centre in the conscious-
ness of the individual Divine living and acting in distinct relation with
the "others," still it will have in the foundation of its consciousness the
entire unity from which all emerges and it will have in the background
of that consciousness the extended and the modified unity and to any of
these it will be capable of returning and of contemplating from them its
individuality. In the Veda all these poises are asserted of the gods. In
essence the gods are one existence which the sages call by different
names; but in their action founded in and proceeding from the large
Truth and Right Agni or another is said to be all the other gods, he is the
One that becomes all ; at the same time he is said to contain all the gods
in himself as the nave of a wheel contains the spokes, he is the One that

THE DIVINE SOUL 1 45

contains all ; and yet as Agni he is described as a separate deity, one who
helps all the others, exceeds them in force and knowledge, yet is inferior
to them in cosmic position and is employed by them as messenger, priest
and worker, — the creator of the world and father, he is yet the son born
of our works, he is, that is to say, the original and the manifested in-
dwelling Self or Divine, the One that inhabits all.

All the relations of the divine soul with God or its supreme Self and
with its other selves in other forms will be determined by this com-
prehensive self-knowledge. These relations will be relations of being,
of consciousness and knowledge, of will and force, of love and delight.
Infinite in their potentiality of variation, they need exclude no possible
relation of soul with soul that is compatible with the preservation of the
inalienable sense of unity in spite of every phenomenon of difference.
Thus in its relations of enjoyment the divine soul will have the delight
of all its own experience in itself; it will have the delight of all its ex-
perience of relation with others as a communion with other selves in
other forms created for a varied play in the universe ; it will have too the
delight of the experiences of its other selves as if they were its own —
as indeed they really are. And all this capacity it will have because it
will be aware of its own experiences, of its relations with others and of
the experiences of others and their relations with itself as all the joy or
Ananda of the One, the supreme Self, its own self, differentiated by its
separate habitation of all these forms comprehending in its own being
but still one in difference. Because this unity is the basis of all its ex-
perience, it will be free from the discords of our divided consciousness,
divided by ignorance and a separatist egoism; all these selves and their
relations will play consciously into each other's hands; they will part
and melt into each other as the numberless notes of an eternal harmony.

And the same rule will apply to the relations of its being, knowl-
edge, will with the being, knowledge and will of others. For all its experi-
ence and delight will be the play of a self -blissful conscious force of
being in which, by obedience to this truth of unity, will cannot be at
strife with knowledge nor either of them with delight. Nor will the
knowledge, will and delight of one soul clash with the knowledge, will
and delight of another, because by their awareness of their unity what
is clash and strife and discord in our divided being will be there the meet-
ing, entwining and mutual interplay of the different notes of one infinite
harmony.

In its relations with its supreme Self, with God, the divine soul will

146 THE LIFE DIVINE

have this sense of the oneness of the transcendent and universal Divine
with its own being. It will enjoy that oneness of God with itself in its
own individuality and with its other selves in the universality. Its rela-
tions of knowledge will be the play of the divine omniscience, for God
is Knowledge, and what is ignorance with us will be there only the hold-
ing back of knowledge in the repose of conscious self-awareness so that
certain forms of that self -awareness may be brought forward into ac-
tivity of Light. Its relations of will will be there the play of the divine
omnipotence, for God is Force, Will and Power, and what with us is
weakness and incapacity will be the holding back of will in tranquil con-
centrated force so that certain forms of divine conscious-force may
realise themselves brought forward into form of Power. Its relations of
love and delight will be the play of the divine ecstasy, for God is Love
and Delight, and what with us would be denial of love and delight will
be the holding back of joy in the still sea of Bliss so that certain forms
of divine union and enjoyment may be brought in front in an active up-
welling of waves of the Bliss. So also all its becoming will be forma-
tion of the divine being in response to these activities and what is with
us cessation, death, annihilation will be only rest, transition or holding
back of the joyous creative Maya in the eternal being of Sachchidananda.
At the same time this oneness will not preclude relations of the divine
soul with God, with its supreme Self, founded on the joy of difference
separating itself from unity to enjoy that unity otherwise; it will not
annul the possibility of any of those exquisite forms of God-enjoyment
which are the highest rapture of the God-lover in his clasp of the Di-
vine.

But what will be the conditions in which and by which this nature
of the life of the divine soul will realise itself? All experience in relation
proceeds through certain forces of being formulating themselves by an
instrumentation to which we give the name of properties, qualities, ac-
tivities, faculties. As, for instance. Mind throws itself into various forms
of mind-power, such as judgment, observation, memory, sympathy,
proper to its own being, so must the Truth-consciousness or Supermind
effect the relations of soul with soul by forces, faculties, functionings
proper to supramental being; otherwise there would be no play of dif-
ferentiation. What these functionings are, we shall see when we come
to consider the psychological conditions of the divine Life; at present
we are only considering its metaphysical foundations, its essential nature
and principles. Suffice it at present to observe that the absence or abo-

THE DIVINE SOUL I47

lition of separatist egoism and of effective division in consciousness is
the one essential condition of the divine Life, and therefore their pres-
ence in us is that which constitutes our mortality and our fall from
the Divine. This is our "original sin," or rather let us say in a more
philosophical language, the deviation from the Truth and Right of the
Spirit, from its oneness, integrality and harmony that was the necessary
condition for the great plunge into the Ignorance which is the soul's
adventure in the world and from which was born our suffering and
aspiring humanity.

CHAPTER XVIII

MIND AND SUPERMIND

He discovered that Mind was the Brahman.

Taittiriya Upanishad^

Indivisible, but as if divided in beings.

Gita.''

THE conception which we have so far been striving to form is that
of the essence only of the supramental life which the divine soul
possesses securely in the being of Sachchidananda, but which the hu-
man soul has to manifest in this body of Sachchidananda formed here
into the mould of a mental and physical living. But so far as we have
been able yet to envisage this supramental existence, it does not seem to
have any connection or correspondence with life as we know it, life active
between the two terms of our normal existence, the two firmaments of
mind and body. It seems rather to be a state of being, a state of con-
sciousness, a state of active relation and mutual enjoyment such as dis-
embodied souls might possess and experience in a world without physical
forms, a world in which differentiation of souls had been accomplished
but not differentiation of bodies, a world of active and joyous infinities,
not of form-imprisoned spirits. Therefore it might reasonably be doubted
whether such a divine living would be possible with this limitation of
bodily form and this limitation of form-imprisoned mind and form-tram-
melled force which is what we now know as existence.

In fact, we have striven to arrive at some conception of that su-
preme infinite being, conscious-force and self-delight of which our world
is a creation and our mentality a perverse figure ; we have tried to give
ourselves an idea of what this divine Maya may be, this Truth-con-
sciousness, this Real-Idea by which the conscious force of the transcend-
ent and universal Existence conceives, forms and governs the universe,
the order, the cosmos of its manifested delight of being. But we have
not studied the connections of these four great and divine terms with the

^III. 4. =^XIII. 17.

148

MIND AND SUPERMIND 1 49

three others with which our human experience is alone familiar, — mind,
life and body. We have not scrutinised this other and apparently un-
divine Maya which is the root of all our striving and suffering or seen
how precisely it develops out of the divine reality or the divine Maya.
And till we have done this, till we have woven the missing cords of con-
nection, our world is still unexplained to us and the doubt of a possible
unification between that higher existence and this lower life has still a
basis. We know that our world has come forth from Sachchidananda and
subsists in His being; we conceive that He dwells in it as the Enjoyer
and Knower, Lord and Self; we have seen that our dual terms of sensa-
tion, mind, force, being can only be representations of His delight. His
conscious force. His divine existence. But it would seem that they are
actually so much the opposite of what He really and supernally is that
we cannot while dwelling in the cause of these opposites, cannot while
contained in the lower triple term of existence attain to the divine living.
We must either exalt this lower being into that higher status or exchange
body for that pure existence, life for that pure condition of conscious-
force, sensation and mentality for that pure delight and knowledge
which live in the truth of the spiritual reality. And must not this mean
that we abandon all earthly or limited mental existence for something
which is its opposite, — either for some pure state of the Spirit or else
for some world of the Truth of things, if such exists, or other worlds, if
such exist, of divine Bliss, divine Energy, divine Being? In that case
the perfection of humanity is elsewhere than in humanity itself; the
summit of its earthly evolution can only be a fine apex of dissolving men-
tality whence it takes the great leap either into formless being or into
worlds beyond the reach of embodied Mind.

But in reality all that we call undivine can only be an action of the
four divine principles themselves, such action of them as was necessary
to create this universe of forms. Those forms have been created not out-
side but in the divine existence, conscious-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 cannot be any real play of
the higher divine consciousness in a world of forms or that forms and
their immediate supports, mental consciousness, energy of vital force
and formal substance, must necessarily distort that which they repre-
sent. It is possible, even probable that mind, body and life are to be
found in their pure forms in the divine Truth itself, are there in fact as
subordinate activities of its consciousness and part of the complete in-

150 THE LIFE DIVINE

strumentation by which the supreme Force always works. Mind, life and
body must then be capable of divinity; their form and working in
that short period out of possibly only one cycle of the terrestrial evo-
lution which Science reveals to us, need not represent all the potential
workings of these three principles in the living body. They work as
they do because they are by some means separated in consciousness from
the divine Truth from which they proceed. Were this separation once
abrogated by the expanding energy of the Divine in humanity, their
present functioning might well be converted, would indeed naturally
be converted by a supreme evolution and progression into that purer
working which they have in the Truth-consciousness.

In that case not only would it be possible to manifest and inaintain
the divine consciousness in the human mind and body but, even, that di-
vine consciousness might in the end, increasing its conquests, remould
mind, life and body themselves into a more perfect image of its eternal
Truth and realise not only in soul but in substance its kingdom of heaven
upon earth. The first of these victories, the internal, has certainly been
achieved in a greater or less degree by some, perhaps by many, upon
earth; the other, the external, even if never more or less realised in past
aeons as a first type for future cycles and still held in the subconscious
memory of the earth-nature, may yet be intended as a coming victorious
achievement of God in humanity. This earthly life need not be neces-
sarily and for ever a wheel of half-joyous half-anguished effort ; attain-
ment may also be intended and the glory and joy of God made manifest
upon earth.

What Mind, Life and Body are in their supreme sources and what
therefore they must be in the integral completeness of the divine mani-
festation when informed by the Truth and not cut off from it by the
separation and the ignorance in which presently we live, — this then is
the problem that we have next to consider. For there they must have
already their perfection towards which we here are growing, — ^we who
are only the first shackled movement of the Mind which is evolving in
Matter, we who are not yet liberated from the conditions and effects of
that involution of spirit in form, that plunge of Light into its own shadow
by which the darkened material consciousness of physical Nature was
created. The type of all perfection towards which we grow, the terms
of our highest evolution must already be held in the divine Real-Idea;
they must be there formed and conscious for us to grow towards and
into them: for that pre-existence in the divine knowledge is what our

MIND AND SUPERMIND 151

human mentality names and seeks as the Ideal. The Ideal is an eternal
Reality which we have not yet realised in the conditions of our own be-
ing, not a non-existent which the Eternal and Divine has not yet grasped
and only we imperfect beings have glimpsed and mean to create.

Mind, first, the chained and hampered sovereign of our human liv-
ing. Mind in its essence is a consciousness which measures, limits, cuts
out forms of things from the indivisible whole and contains them as if
each were a separate integer. Even with what exists only as obvious parts
and fractions, Mind establishes this fiction of its ordinary commerce that
they are things with which it can deal separately and not merely as as-
pects of a whole. For, even when it knows that they are not things in
themselves, it is obliged to deal with them as if they were things in them-
selves ; otherwise it could not subject them to its own characteristic ac-
tivity. It is this essential characteristic of Mind which conditions the
workings of all its operative powers, whether conception, perception,
sensation or the dealings of creative thought. It conceives, perceives,
senses things as if rigidly cut out from a background or a mass and em-
ploys them as fixed units of the material given to it for creation or pos-
session. All its action and enjo5mient deal thus with wholes that form
part of a greater whole, and these subordinate wholes again are broken
up into parts which are also treated as wholes for the particular pur-
poses they serve. Mind may divide, multiply, add, subtract, but it can-
not get beyond the limits of this mathematics. If it goes beyond and
tries to conceive a real whole, it loses itself in a foreign element; it falls
from its own firm ground into the ocean of the intangible, into the abysms
of the infinite where it can neither perceive, conceive, sense nor deal with
its subject for creation and enjoyment. For if Mind appears sometimes
to conceive, to perceive, to sense or to enjoy with possession the infinite,
it is only in seeming and always in a figure of the infinite. What it does
thus vaguely possess is simply a formless Vast and not the real spaceless
infinite. The moment it tries to deal with that, to possess it, at once the
inalienable tendency to delimitation comes in and the Mind finds itself
again handling images, forms and words. Mind cannot possess the in-
finite, it can only suffer it or be possessed by it ; it can only lie blissfully
helpless under the luminous shadow of the Real cast down on it from
planes of existence beyond its reach. The possession of the Infinite can-
not come except by an ascent to those supramental planes, nor the knowl-
edge of it except by an inert submission of IMind to the descending mes-
sages of the Truth-conscious Reality.

152 THE LIFE DIVINE

This essential faculty and the essential limitation that accompanies
it are the truth of Mind and fix its real nature and action, svabhdva and
svadharma; here is the mark of the divine fiat assigning it its office in
the complete instrumentation of the supreme Maya, — the office deter-
mined by that which it is in its very birth from the eternal self-concep-
tion of the Self-existent. That office is to translate always infinity into
the terms of the finite, to measure off, limit, depiece. Actually it does
this in our consciousness to the exclusion of all true sense of the Infinite ;
therefore Mind is the nodus of the great Ignorance, because it is that
which originally divides and distributes, and it has even been mistaken
for the cause of the universe and for the whole of the divine Maya. But
the divine Maya comprehends Vidya as well as Avidya, the Knowledge
as well as the Ignorance. For it is obvious that since the finite is only
an appearance of the Infinite, a result of its action, a play of its concep-
tion and cannot exist except by it, in it, with it as a background, itself
form of that stuff and action of that force, there must be an original con-
sciousness which contains and views both at the same time and is inti-
mately conscious of all the relations of the one with the other. In that
consciousness there is no ignorance, because the infinite is known and
the finite is not separated from it as an independent reality; but still
there is a subordinate process of delimitation, — otherwise no world could
exist, — a process by which the ever dividing and reuniting consciousness
of Mind, the ever divergent and convergent action of Life and the infi-
nitely divided and self -aggregating substance of Matter come, all by one
principle and original act, into phenomenal being. This subordinate
process of the eternal Seer and Thinker, perfectly luminous, perfectly
aware of Himself and all, knowing well what He does, conscious of the
infinite in the finite which He is creating, may be called the divine
Mind. And it is obvious that it must be a subordinate and not really a
separate working of the Real-Idea, of the Supermind, and must operate
through what we have described as the apprehending movement of the
Truth-consciousness.

That apprehending consciousness, the Prajnana, places, as we have
seen, the working of the indivisible All, active and formative, as a process
and object of creative knowledge before the consciousness of the same
All, originative and cognisant as the possessor and witness of its own
working, — somewhat as a poet views the creations of his own conscious-
ness placed before him in it as if they were things other than the creator
and his creative force, yet all the time they are really no more than the

MIND AND SUPERMIND 1 53

play of self-formation of his own being in itself and are indivisible there
from their creator. Thus Prajnana makes the fundamental division
which leads to all the rest, the division of the Purusha, the conscious
soul who knows and sees and by his vision creates and ordains, and the
Prakriti, the Force-Soul or Nature-Soul which is his knowledge and his
vision, his creation and his all-ordaining power. Both are one Being, one
existence, and the forms seen and created are multiple forms of that
Being which are placed by Him as knowledge before Himself as knower,
by Himself as Force before Himself as Creator. The last action of this
apprehending consciousness takes place when the Purusha pervading the
conscious extension of his being, present at every point of himself as
well as in his totality, inhabiting every form, regards the whole as if
separately, from each of the standpoints he has taken; he views and
governs the relations of each soul-form of himself with other soul-forms
from the standpoint of will and knowledge appropriate to each particular
form.

Thus the elements of division have come into being. First, the in-
finity of the One has translated itself into an extension in conceptual
Time and Space; secondly, the omnipresence of the One in that self-
conscious extension translates itself into a multiplicity of the conscious
soul, the many Purushas of the Sankhya; thirdly, the multiplicity of
soul-forms has translated itself into a divided habitation of the extended
unity. This divided habitation is inevitable the moment these multiple
Purushas do not each inhabit a separate world of its own, do not each
possess a separate Prakriti building a separate universe, but rather all
enjoy the same Prakriti, — as they must do, being only soul-forms of the
One presiding over the multiple creations of His power, — yet have rela-
tions with each other in the one world of being created by the one Prak-
riti. The Purusha in each form actively identifies himself with each ; he
delimits himself in that and sets off his other forms against it in his con-
sciousness as containing his other selves which are identical with him in
being but different in relation, different in the various extent, various
range of movement and various view of the one substance, force, con-
sciousness, delight which each is actually deploying at any given moment
of Time or in any given field of Space. Granted that in the divine Exist-
ence, perfectly aware of itself, this is not a binding limitation, not an
identification to which the soul becomes enslaved and which it cannot
exceed as we are enslaved to our self-identification with the body and
unable to exceed the limitation of our conscious ego, unable to escape

154 THE LIFE DIVINE

from a particular movement of our consciousness in Time determining
our particular field in Space ; granted all this, still there is a free identi-
fication from moment to moment which only the inalienable self-knowl-
edge of the divine soul prevents from fixing itself in an apparently rigid
chain of separation and Time succession such as that in which our con-
sciousness seems to be fixed and chained.

Thus the depiecing is already there; the relation of form with form
as if they were separate beings, of will-of-being with will-of-being as if
they were separate forces, of knowledge-of-being with knowledge-of-
being as if they were separate consciousnesses has already been founded.
It is as yet only "as if"; for the divine soul is not deluded, it is aware
of all as phenomenon of being and keeps hold of its existence in the
reality of being; it does not forfeit its unity: it uses mind as a subordi-
nate action of the infinite knowledge, a definition of things subordinate
to its awareness of infinity, a delimitation dependent on its awareness of
essential totality — not that apparent and pluralistic totality of sum and
collective aggregation which is only another phenomenon of Mind. Thus
there is no real limitation; the soul uses its defining power for the play
of well-distinguished forms and forces and is not used by that power.

A new factor, a new action of conscious force is therefore needed
to create the operation of a helplessly limited as opposed to a freely limit-
ing mind, — that is to say, of mind subject to its own play and deceived
by it as opposed to mind master of its own play and viewing it in its
truth, the creature mind as opposed to the divine. That new factor is
Avidya, the self-ignoring faculty which separates the action of mind from
the action of the supermind that originated and still governs it from be-
hind the veil. Thus separated. Mind perceives only the particular and
not the universal, or conceives only the particular in an unpossessed
universal and no longer both particular and universal as phenomena of
the Infinite. Thus we have the limited mind which views every phe-
nomenon as a thing-in-itself, separate part of a whole which again exists
separately in a greater whole and so on, enlarging always its aggregates
without getting back to the sense of a true infinity.

Mind, being an action of the Infinite, depieces as well as aggregates
ad infinitum. It cuts up being into wholes, into ever smaller wholes, into
atoms and those atoms into primal atoms, until it would, if it could, dis-
solve the primal atom into nothingness. But it cannot, because behind
this dividing action is the saving knowledge of the supramental which
knows every whole, every atom to be only a concentration of all-force.

MIND AND SUPERMIND 1 55

of all-consciousness, of all-being into phenomenal forms of itself. The
dissolution of the aggregate into an infinite nothingness at which Mind
seems to arrive, is to the Supermind only the return of the self-concentrat-
ing conscious-being out of its phenomenon into its infinite existence.
Whichever way its consciousness proceeds, by the way of infinite division
or by the way of infinite enlargement, it arrives only at itself, at its own
infinite unity and eternal being. And when the action of the mind is
consciously subordinate to this knowledge of the supermind, the truth of
the process is known to it also and not at all ignored; there is no real
division but only an infinitely multiple concentration into forms of being
and into arrangements of the relation of those forms of being to each
other in which division is a subordinate appearance of the whole process
necessary to their spatial and temporal play. For divide as you will, get
down to the most infinitesimal atom or form the most monstrous possible
aggregate of worlds and systems, you cannot get by either process to a
thing-in-itself ; all are forms of a Force which alone is real in itself while
the rest are real only as self-imagings or manifesting self-forms of the
eternal Force-consciousness.

Whence then does the limiting Avidya, the fall of mind from Super-
mind and the consequent idea of real division originally proceed? ex-
actly from what perversion of the supramental functioning? It proceeds
from the individualised soul viewing everything from its own standpoint
and excluding all others; it proceeds, that is to say, by an exclusive con-
centration of consciousness, an exclusive self-identification of the soul
with a particular temporal and spatial action which is only a part of its
own play of being; it starts from the soul's ignoring the fact that all
others are also itself, all other action its own action and all other states
of being and consciousness equally its own as well as the action of the one
particular moment in Time and one particular standing-point in Space
and the one particular form it presently occupies. It concentrates on the
moment, the field, the form, the movement so as to lose the rest ; it has
then to recover the rest by linking together the succession of moments,
the succession of points of Space, the succession of forms in Time and
Space, the succession of movements in Time and Space. It has thus lost
the truth of the indivisibility of Time, the indivisibility of Force and
Substance. It has lost sight even of the obvious fact that all minds are
one Mind taking many standpoints, all lives one Life developing many
currents of activity, all body and form one substance of Force and Con-
sciousness concentrating into many apparent stabilities of force and con-

156 THE LIFE DIVINE

sciousness; but in truth all these stabilities are really only a constant
whorl of movement repeating a form while it modifies it ; they are noth-
ing more. For the Mind tries to clamp everything into rigidly fixed forms
and apparently unchanging or unmoving external factors, because other-
wise it cannot act; it then thinks it has got what it wants: in reality all
is a flux of change and renewal and there is no fixed form-in-itself and
no unchanging external factor. Only the eternal Real-Idea is firm and
maintains a certain ordered constancy of figures and relations in the
flux of things, a constancy which the Mind vainly attempts to imitate by
attributing fixity to that which is always inconstant. These truths Mind
has to rediscover; it knows them all the time, but only in the hidden
back of its consciousness, in the secret light of its self-being; and that
light is to it a darkness because it has created the ignorance, because it
has lapsed from the dividing into the divided mentality, because it has
become involved in its own workings and in its own creations.

This ignorance is farther deepened for man by his self-identification
with the body. To us mind seems to be determined by the body, because
it is preoccupied with that and devoted to the physical workings which
it uses for its conscious superficial action in this gross material world.
Employing constantly that operation of the brain and nerves which it
has developed in the course of its own development in the body, it is too
absorbed in observing what this physical machinery gives to it to get
back from it to its own pure workings; those are to it mostly subcon-
scious. Still we can conceive a life mind or life being which has got be-
yond the evolutionary necessity of this absorption and is able to see
and even experience itself assuming body after body and not created
separately in each body and ending with it; for it is only the physical
impress of mind on matter, only the corporeal mentality that is so
created, not the whole mental being. This corporeal mentality is merely
our surface of mind, merely the front which it presents to physical ex-
perience. Behind, even in our terrestrial being, there is this other, sub-
conscious or subliminal to us, which knows itself as more than the body
and is capable of a less materialised action. To this we owe immediately
most of the larger, deeper and more forceful dynamic action of our sur-
face mind ; this, when we become conscious of it or of its impress on us,
is our first idea or our first realisation of a soul or inner being, Purusha.^

But this life mentality also, though it may get free from the error
of body, does not make us free from the whole error of mind; it is still

^ Perceived as the life being or vital being, prdnamaya purusa.

MIND AND SUPERMIND 1 57

subject to the original act of ignorance by which the individualised soul
regards everything from its own standpoint and can see the truth of
things only as they present themselves to it from outside or else as they
rise up to its view from its separate temporal and spatial consciousness,
forms and results of past and present experience. It is not conscious of its
other selves except by the outward indications they give of their exist-
ence, indications of communicated thought, speech, action, result of ac-
tions, or subtler indications — not felt directly by the physical being — of
vital impact and relation. Equally is it ignorant of itself ; for it knows of
its self only through a movement in Time and a succession of lives in
which it has used its variously embodied energies. As our physical in-
strumental mind has the illusion of the body, so this subconscious dy-
namic mind has the illusion of life. In that it is absorbed and concen-
trated, by that it is limited, with that it identifies its being. Here we do
not yet get back to the meeting-place of mind and supermind and the
point at which they originally separated.

But there is still another clearer reflective mentality behind the dy-
namic and vital which is capable of escaping from this absorption in life
and views itself as assuming life and body in order to image out in active
relations of energy that which it perceives in will and thought. It is the
source of the pure thinker in us; it is that which knows mentality in it-
self and sees the world not in terms of life and body but of mind; it is
that* which, when we get back to it, we sometimes mistake for the pure
spirit as we mistake the dynamic mind for the soul. This higher mind is
able to perceive and deal with other souls as other forms of its pure self;
it is capable of sensing them by pure mental impact and communication
and no longer only by vital and nervous impact and physical indication ;
it conceives too a mental figure of unity, and in its activity and its will
it can create and possess more directly — not only indirectly as in the
ordinary physical life — and in other minds and lives as well as its own.
But still even this pure mentality does not escape from the original error
of mind. For it is still its separate mental self which it makes the judge,
witness and centre of the universe and through it alone strives to arrive
at its own higher self and reality; all others are "others" grouped to it
around itself: when it wills to be free, it has to draw back from life and
mind in order to disappear into the real unity. For there is still the veil
created by Avidya between the mental and supramental action ; an image
of the Truth gets through, not the Truth itself.

*The mental being, manomaya purusa.

158 THE LIFE DIVINE

It is only when the veil is rent and the divided mind overpowered,
silent and passive to a supramental action that mind itself gets back to
the Truth of things. There we find a luminous mentality reflective,
obedient and instrumental to the divine Real-Idea. There we perceive
what the world really is ; we know in every way ourselves in others and
as others, others as ourselves and all as the universal and self-multiplied
One. We lose the rigidly separate individual standpoint which is the
source of all limitation and error. Still, we perceive also that all that
the ignorance of Mind took for the truth was in fact truth but truth de-
flected, mistaken and falsely conceived. We still perceive the division,
the individualising, the atomic creation, but we know them and our-
selves for what they and we really are. And so we perceive that the Mind
was really a subordinate action and instrumentation of the Truth-con-
sciousness. So long as it is not separated in self-experience from the en-
veloping Master-consciousness and does not try to set up house for itself,
so long as it serves passively as an instrumentation and does not attempt
to possess for its own benefit. Mind fulfils luminously its function which
is in the Truth to hold forms apart from each other by a phenomenal, a
purely formal delimitation of their activity behind which the governing
universality of the being remains conscious and untouched. It has to
receive the truth of things and distribute it according to the unerring
perception of a supreme and universal Eye and Will. It has to uphold
an individualisation of active consciousness, delight, force, substance
which derives all its power, reality and joy from an inalienable universal-
ity behind. It has to turn the multiplicity of the One into an apparent
division by which relations are defined and held off against each other
so as to meet again and join. It has to establish the delight of separation
and contact in the midst of an eternal unity and intermiscence. It has
to enable the One to behave as if He were an individual dealing with
other individuals but always in His own unity, and this is what the
world really is. The mind is the final operation of the apprehending
Truth-consciousness which makes all this possible, and what we call
the Ignorance does not create a new thing and absolute falsehood but
only misrepresents the Truth. The Ignorance is the Mind separated in
knowledge from its source of knowledge and giving a false rigidity and
a mistaken appearance of opposition and conflict to the harmonious
play of the supreme Truth in its universal manifestation.

The fundamental error of the Mind is, then, this fall from self-
knowledge by which the individual soul conceives of its individuality

MIND AND SUPERMIND 1 59

as a separate fact instead of as a form of Oneness and makes itself the
centre of its own universe instead of knowing itself as one concentration
of the universal. From that original error all its particular ignorances
and limitations are contingent results. For, viewing the flux of things
only as it flows upon and through itself, it makes a limitation of being
from which proceeds a limitation of consciousness and therefore of
knowledge, a limitation of conscious force and will and therefore of
power, a limitation of self-enjoyment and therefore of delight. It is
conscious of things and knows them only as they present themselves to
its individuality and therefore it falls into an ignorance of the rest and
thereby into an erroneous conception even of that which it seems to
know: for since all being is interdependent, the knowledge either of the
whole or of the essence is necessary for the right knowledge of the part.
Hence there is an element of error in all human knowledge. Similarly
our will, ignorant of the rest of the all-will, must fall into error of work-
ing and a greater or less degree of incapacity and impotence; the soul's
self-delight and delight of things, ignoring the all-bliss and by defect of
will and knowledge unable to master its world, must fall into incapacity
of possessive delight and therefore into suffering. Self-ignorance is
therefore the root of all the perversity of our existence, and that per-
versity stands fortified in the self-limitation, the egoism which is the
form taken by that self-ignorance.

Yet is all ignorance and all perversity only the distortion of the
truth and right of things and not the play of an absolute falsehood. It
is the result of Mind viewing things in the division it makes, avidydydm
antare, instead of viewing itself and its divisions as instrumentation and
phenomenon of the play of the truth of Sachchidananda. If it gets back
to the truth from which it fell, it becomes again the final action of the
Truth-consciousness in its apprehensive operation, and the relations it
helps to create in that light and power will be relations of the Truth
and not of the perversity. They will be the straight things and not the
crooked, to use the expressive distinction of the Vedic Rishis, — ^Truths,
that is to say, of divine being with its self-possessive consciousness, will
and delight moving harmoniously in itself. Now we have rather the
warped and zigzag movement of mind and life, the contortions created
by the struggle of the soul once grown oblivious of its true being to find
itself again, to resolve back all error into the truth which both our truth
and our error, our right and our wrong limit or distort, all incapacity
into the strength which both our power and our weakness are a struggle

l60 THE LIFE DIVINE

of force to grasp, all suffering into the delight which both our joy and
our pain are a convulsive effort of sensation to realise, all death into the
immortality to which both our life and our death are a constant effort
of being to return.

CHAPTER XIX
LIFE

Pranic energy is the life of creatures; for that is said
to be the universal principle of life.

Taittiriya Upanishad}

WE PERCEIVE, then, what Mind is in its divine origin and how
it is related to the Truth-consciousness, — Mind, the highest of the
three lower principles which constitute our human existence. It is a
special action of the divine consciousness, or rather it is the final strand
of its whole creative action. It enables the Purusha to hold apart the
relations of different forms and forces of himself to each other; it cre-
ates phenomenal differences which to the individual soul fallen from
the Truth-consciousness take the appearance of radical divisions, and
is by that original perversion the parent of all the resultant perversions
which impress us as the contrary dualities and oppositions proper to
the life of the Soul in the Ignorance. But so long as it is not separated
from the Supermind, it supports, not perversions and falsehoods, but
the various working of the universal Truth.

Mind thus appears as a creative cosmic agency. This is not the
impression which we normally have of our mentality; rather we regard
it primarily as a perceptive organ, perceptive of things already created
by Force working in Matter, and the only origination we allow to it is a
secondary creation of new combined forms from those already developed
by Force in Matter. But the knowledge we are now recovering, aided
by the last discoveries of Science, begins to show us that in this Force
and in this Matter there is a subconscious Mind at work which is cer-
tainly responsible for its own emergence, first in the forms of life and
secondly in the forms of mind itself, first in the nervous consciousness
of plant-life and the primitive animal, secondly in the ever-developing
mentality of the evolved animal and of man. And as we have already
discovered that Matter is only substance-form of Force, so we shall

^11.3.

161

1 62 THE LIFE DIVINE

discover that material Force is only energy-form of Mind. Material
force is, in fact, a subconscious operation of Will; Will that works in
us in what seems to be light, though it is in truth no more than a half-
light, and material Force that works in what to us seems to be a darkness
of unintelligence, are yet really and in essence the same, as materialistic
thought has always instinctively felt from the wrong or lower end of
things and as spiritual knowledge working from the summit has long
ago discovered. We may say, therefore, that it is a subconscious Mind
or Intelligence which, manifesting Force as its driving-power, its execu-
tive Nature, its Prakriti, has created this material world.

But since, as we have now found. Mind is no independent and orig-
inal entity but only a final operation of the Truth-consciousness or Super-
mind, therefore wherever Mind is, there Supermind must be. Supermind
or the Truth-consciousness is the real creative agency of the universal
Existence. Even when Mind is in its own darkened consciousness sepa-
rated from its source, yet is that larger movement always there in the
workings of Mind; forcing them to preserve their right relation, evolv-
ing from them the inevitable results they bear in themselves, producing
the right tree from the right seed, it compels even the operations of so
brute, inert and darkened a thing as material Force to result in a world
of Law, of order, of right relation and not, as it would otherwise be, of
hurtling chance and chaos. Obviously, this order and right relation can
only be relative and not the supreme order and supreme right which
would reign if Mind were not in its own consciousness separated from
Supermind; it is an arrangement, an order of the results right and proper
to the action of dividing Mind and its creation of separative oppositions,
its dual contrary sides of the one Truth. The Divine Consciousness, hav-
ing conceived and thrown into operation the Idea of this dual or divided
representation of Itself, deduces from it in real-idea and educes prac-
tically from it in substance of life, by the governing action of the whole
Truth-consciousness behind it, its own inferior truth or inevitable result
of various relation. For this is the nature of Law or Truth in the world
that it is the just working and bringing out of that which is contained
in being, implied in the essence and nature of the thing itself, latent in
its self-being and self-law, svabhdva and svadharma, as seen by the di-
vine Knowledge. To use one of those wonderful formulas of the Upani-
shad ^ which contain a world of knowledge in a few revealing words, it is

^Kavir manisi paribhuh svayambhur ydthdtathyato'rthdn vyadadhdt sds-
vatlbhyah samdbhyah. — Isha Upanishad, Verse 8.

LIFE 163

the Self-existent who as the seer and thinker becoming everywhere has
arranged in Himself all things rightly from years eternal according to
the truth of that which they are.

Consequently, the triple world that we live in, the world of Mind-
Life-Body, is triple only in its actual accomplished evolution. Life in-
volved in Matter has emerged in the form of thinking and mentally
conscious life. But with Mind, involved in it and therefore in Life and
Matter, is the Supermind, which is the origin and ruler of the other three,
and this also must emerge. We seek for an intelligence at the root of the
world, because intelligence is the highest principle of which we are aware
and that which seems to us to govern and explain all our own action and
creation and, therefore, if there is a Consciousness at all in the universe,
we presume that it must be an Intelligence, a mental Consciousness.
But intelligence only perceives, reflects and uses within the measure of
its capacity the work of a Truth of being superior to itself; the power
behind that works must therefore be another and superior form of Con-
sciousness proper to that Truth. We have, accordingly, to mend our con-
ception and affirm that not a subconscious Mind or Intelligence, but an
involved Supermind, which puts Mind in front of it as the immediately
active special form of its knowledge-will subconscious in Force and uses
material Force or Will subconscious in substance of being as its execu-
tive Nature or Prakriti, has created this material universe.

But we see that here Mind is manifested in a specialisation of
Force to which we give the name of Life. What then is Life? and what
relation has it to Supermind, to this supreme trinity of Sachchidananda
active in creation by means of the Real-Idea or Truth-consciousness?
From what principle in the Trinity does it take its birth? or by what
necessity, divine or undivine, of the Truth or the illusion, does it come
into being? Life is an evil, rings down the centuries the ancient cry, a
delusion, a delirium, an insanity from which we have to flee into the re-
pose of eternal being. Is it so? and why then is it so? W^hy has the
Eternal wantonly inflicted this evil, brought this delirium or insanity
upon Himself or else upon the creatures brought into being by His ter-
rible all-deluding Maya? Or is it rather some divine principle that thus
expresses itself, some power of the Delight of eternal being that had to
express and has thus thrown itself into Time and Space in this constant
outburst of the million and million forms of life which people the count-
less worlds of the universe?

When we study this Life as it manifests itself upon earth with Mat-

1 64 THE LIFE DIVINE

ter as its basis, we observe that essentially it is a form of the one cosmic
Energy, a dynamic movement or current of it positive and negative, a
constant act or play of the Force which builds up forms, energises them
by a continual stream of stimulation and maintains them by an unceas-
ing process of disintegration and renewal of their substance. This
would tend to show that the natural opposition we make between death
and life is an error of our mentality, one of those false oppositions — false
to inner truth though valid in surface practical experience — which, de-
ceived by appearances, it is constantly bringing into the universal unity.
Death has no reality except as a process of life. Disintegration of sub-
stance and renewal of substance, maintenance of form and change of
form are the constant process of life ; death is merely a rapid disintegra-
tion subservient to life's necessity of change and variation of formal ex-
perience. Even in the death of the body there is no cessation of Life,
only the material of one form of life is broken up to serve as material for
other forms of life. Similarly we may be sure, in the uniform law of Na-
ture, that if there is in the bodily form a mental or psychic energy, that
also is not destroyed but only breaks out from one form to assume others
by some process of metempsychosis or new ensouling of body. All re-
news itself, nothing perishes.

It could be affirmed as a consequence that there is one all-pervad-
ing Life or dynamic energy — the material aspect being only its outer-
most movement — that creates all these forms of the physical universe,
Life imperishable and eternal which, even if the whole figure of the uni-
verse were quite abolished, would itself still go on existing and be capable
of producing a new universe in its place, must indeed, unless it be held
back in a state of rest by some higher Power or hold itself back, inevi-
tably go on creating. In that case Life is nothing else than the Force
that builds and maintains and destroys forms in the world; it is Life
that manifests itself in the form of the earth as much as in the plant that
grows upon the earth and the animals that support their existence by
devouring the life-force of the plant or of each other. All existence here
is a universal Life that takes form of Matter. It might for that purpose
hide life-process in physical process before it emerges as submental sen-
sitivity and mentalised vitality, but still it would be throughout the same
creative Life-principle.

It will be said, however, that this is not what we mean by life; we
mean a particular result of universal force with which we are familiar
and which manifests itself only in the animal and the plant, but not in

LIFE 165

the metal, the stone, the gas, operates in the animal cell but not in the
pure physical atom. We must, therefore, in order to be sure of our
ground, examine in what precisely consists this particular result of the
play of Force which we call life and how it differs from that other result
of the play of Force in inanimate things which, we say, is not life. We
see at once that there are here on earth three realms of the play of Force,
the animal kingdom of the old classification to which we belong, the vege-
table, and lastly the mere material void, as we pretend, of life. How does
life in ourselves differ from the life of the plant, and the life of the plant
from the not-life, say, of the metal, the mineral kingdom of the old phra-
seology, or that new chemical kingdom which Science has discovered?

Ordinarily, when we speak of life, we have meant animal life, that
which moves, breathes, eats, feels, desires, and, if we speak of the life of
plants, it has been almost as a metaphor rather than a reality, for plant
life was regarded as a purely material process rather than a biological
phenomenon. Especially we have associated life with breathing; the
breath is Hfe, it was said in every language, and the formula is true if we
change our conception of what we mean by the Breath of Life. But it
is evident that spontaneous motion or locomotion, breathing, eating are
only processes of life and not life itself ; they are means for the genera-
tion or release of that constantly stimulating energy which is our vitality
and for that process of disintegration and renewal by which it supports
our substantial existence ; but these processes of our vitality can be main-
tained in other ways than by our respiration and our means of sustenance.
It is a proved fact that even human life can remain in the body and can
remain in full consciousness when breathing and the beating of the heart
and other conditions formerly deemed essential to it have been tem-
porarily suspended. And new evidence of phenomena has been brought
forward to establish that the plant, to which we can still deny any con-
scious reaction, has at least a physical life identical with our own and
even organised essentially like our own though different in its apparent
organisation. If that is proved true, we still have to make a clean sweep
of our old facile and false conceptions and get beyond symptoms and ex-
ternalities to the root of the matter.

In some recent discoveries^ which, if their conclusions are accepted,

'These considerations drawn from recent scientific researches are brought in
here as illustrative, not probative of the nature and process of Life in Matter as
they are developed here. Science and metaphysics (whether founded on pure in-
tellectual speculation or, as in India, ultimately on a spiritual vision of things and

1 66 THE LIFE DIVINE

must throw an intense light on the problem of Life in Matter, a great
Indian physicist has pointed attention to the response to stimulus as an
infallible sign of the existence of life. It is especially the phenomenon of
plant-life that has been illumined by his data and illustrated in all its
subtle f unctionings ; but we must not forget that in the essential point the
same proof of vitality, the response to stimulus, the positive state of life
and its negative state which we call death, have been affirmed by him in
metals as in the plant. Not indeed with the same abundance, not indeed
so as to show an essentially identical organisation of life; but it is pos-
sible that, could instruments of the right nature and sufficient delicacy
be invented, more points of similarity between the metal and plant life
could be discovered; and even if it prove not to be so, this might mean
that the same or any life organisation is absent, but the beginnings of
vitality could still be there. But if life, however rudimentary in its sjonp-
toms, exists in the metal, it must be admitted as present, involved per-
haps or elementary and elemental in the earth or other material existences
akin to the metal. If we can pursue our inquiries farther, not obliged
to stop short where our immediate means of investigation fail us, we may
be sure from our unvarying experience of Nature that investigations thus
pursued will in the end prove to us that there is no break, no rigid line
of demarcation between the earth and the metal formed in it or between
the metal and the plant and, pursuing the synthesis farther, that there is
none either between the elements and atoms that constitute the earth or
metal and the metal or earth that they constitute. Each step of this
graded existence prepares the next, holds in itself what appears in that
which follows it. Life is everywhere, secret or manifest, organised or ele-
mental, involved or evolved, but universal, all-pervading, imperishable;
only its forms and organisings differ.

We must remember that the physical response to stimulus is only an
outward sign of life, even as are breathing and locomotion in ourselves.
An exceptional stimulus is applied by the experimenter and vivid re-
sponses are given which we can at once recognise as indices of vitality

spiritual experience) have each its own province and method of inquiry. Science
cannot dictate its conclusions to metaphysics any more than metaphysics can im-
pose its conclusions on Science. Still if we accept the reasonable belief that Being
and Nature in all their states have a system of correspondences expressive of a
common Truth underlying them, it is permissible to suppose that truths of the
physical universe can throw some light on the nature as well as the process of the
Force that is active in the universe — not a complete light, for physical Science is
necessarily incomplete in the range of its inquiry and has no clue to the occult
movements of the Force.

LIFE ' 167

in the object of the experiment. But during its whole existence the plant
is responding constantly to a constant mass of stimulation from its en-
vironment; that is to say, there is a constantly maintained force in it
which is capable of responding to the application of force from its sur-
roundings. It is said that the idea of a vital force in the plant or other
living organism has been destroyed by these experiments. But when
we say that a stimulus has been applied to the plant, we mean that an
energised force, a force in dynamic movement has been directed on that
object, and when we say that a response is given, we mean that an ener-
gised force capable of dynamic movement and of sensitive vibration an-
swers to the shock. There is a vibrant reception and reply, as well as a
will to grow and be, indicative of a submental, a vital-physical organisa-
tion of consciousness-force hidden in the form of being. The fact would
seem to be, then, that as there is a constant dynamic energy in movement
in the universe which takes various material forms more or less subtle or
gross, so in each physical body or object, plant or animal or metal, there
is stored and active the same constant dynamic force; a certain inter-
change of these two gives us the phenomena which we associate with the
idea of life. It is this action that we recognise as the action of Life-En-
ergy and that which so energises itself is the Life-Force. Mind-Energy,
Life-Energy, material Energy are different dynamisms of one World-
Force.

Even when a form appears to us to be dead, this force still exists
in it in potentiality although its familiar operations of vitality are sus-
pended and about to be permanently ended. Within certain limits that
which is dead can be revived; the habitual operations, the response, the
circulation of active energy can be restored; and this proves that what
we call life was still there in the body, latent, that is to say, not active
in its usual habits, its habits of ordinary physical functioning, its habits
of nervous play and response, its habits in the animal of conscious men-
tal response. It is difficult to suppose that there is a distinct entity called
life which has gone entirely out of the body and gets into it again when it
feels — how, since there is nothing to connect it with the body? — that
somebody is stimulating the form. In certain cases, such as catalepsy, we
see that the outward physical signs and operations of life are suspended,
but the mentality is there self-possessed and conscious although unable
to compel the usual physical responses. Certainly, it is not the fact that
the man is physically dead but mentally alive or that life has gone out
of the body while mind still inhabits it, but only that the ordinary physi-
cal functioning is suspended, while the mental is still active.

l68 THE LIFE DIVINE

So also, in certain forms of trance, both the physical functionings
and the outward mental are suspended, but afterwards resume their oper-
ation, in some cases by external stimulation, but more normally by a
spontaneous return to activity from within. What has really happened
is that the surface mind-force has been withdrawn into subconscious
mind and the surface life-force into sub-active life and either the whole
man has lapsed into the subconscious existence or else he has withdrawn
his outer life into the subconscious while his inner being has been lifted
into the superconscient. But the main point for us at present is that the
Force, whatever it be, that maintains dynamic energy of life in the body,
has indeed suspended its outer operations, but still informs the organised
substance. A point comes, however, at which it is no longer possible to
restore the suspended activities; and this occurs when either such a
lesion has been inflicted on the body as makes it useless or incapable of
the habitual functionings or, in the absence of such lesion, when the
process of disintegration has begun, that is to say, when the Force that
should renew the life-action becomes entirely inert to the pressure of
the environing forces with whose mass of stimulation it was wont to keep
up a constant interchange. Even then there is Life in the body, but a Life
that is busy only with the process of disintegrating the formed substance
so that it may escape in its elements and constitute with them new forms.
The Will in the universal force that held the form together, now with-
draws from constitution and supports instead a process of dispersion.
Not till then is there the real death of the body.

Life then is the dynamic play of a universal Force, a Force in which
mental consciousness and nervous vitality are in some form or at least in
their principle always inherent and therefore they appear and organise
themselves in our world in the forms of Matter. The life-play of this
Force manifests itself as an interchange of stimulation and response to
stimulation between the different forms it has built up and in which it
keeps up its constant dynamic pulsation ; each form is constantly taking
into itself and giving out again the breath and energy of the common
Force ; each form feeds upon that and nourishes itself with it by various
means, whether indirectly by taking in other forms in which the energy
is stored or directly by absorbing the dynamic discharges it receives from
outside. All this is the play of Life ; but it is chiefly recognisable to us
where the organisation of it is sufficient for us to perceive its more out-
ward and complex movements and especially where it partakes of the
nervous type of vital energy which belongs to our own organisation. It

LIFE 169

is for this reason that we are ready enough to admit life in the plant be-
cause obvious phenomena of life are there, — and this becomes still easier
if it can be shown that it manifests symptoms of nervosity and has a vital
system not very different from our own, — but are unwilling to recognise
it in the metal and the earth and the chemical atom where these phe-
nomenal developments can with difficulty be detected or do not appar-
ently at all exist.

Is there any justification for elevating this distinction into an es-
sential difference? What, for instance, is the difference between life in
ourselves and life in the plant? We see that they differ, first, in our pos-
session of the power of locomotion which has evidently nothing to do
with the essence of vitality, and, secondly, in our possession of con-
scious sensation which is, so far as we know, not yet evolved in the plant.
Our nervous responses are largely, though by no means always or in
their entirety, attended with the mental response of conscious sensation ;
they have a value to the mind as well as to the nerve system and the body
agitated by the nervous action. In the plant it would seem that there are
symptoms of nervous sensation, including those which would be in us
rendered as pleasure and pain, waking and sleep, exhilaration, dullness
and fatigue, and the body is inwardly agitated by the nervous action,
but there is no sign of the actual presence of mentally conscious sensation.
But sensation is sensation whether mentally conscious or vitally sensitive,
and sensation is a form of consciousness. When the sensitive plant
shrinks from a contact, it appears that it is nervously affected, that some-
thing in it dislikes the contact and tries to draw away from it; there is,
in a word, a subconscious sensation in the plant, just as there are, as we
have seen, subconscious operations of the same kind in ourselves. In
the human system it is quite possible to bring these subconscious percep-
tions and sensations to the surface long after they have happened and
have ceased to affect the nervous system; and an ever-increasing mass of
evidence has irrefutably established the existence of a subconscious men-
tality in us much vaster than the conscious. The mere fact that the plant
has no superficially vigilant mind which can be awakened to the valuation
of its subconscious sensations, makes no difference to the essential iden-
tity of the phenomena. The phenomena being the same, the thing they
manifest must be the same, and that thing is a subconscious mind. And
it is quite possible that there is a more rudimentary life operation of
the subconscious sense-mind in the metal, although in the metal there is
no bodily agitation corresponding to the nervous response; but the ab-

1 70 THE LIFE DIVINE

sence of bodily agitation makes no essential difference to the presence
of vitality in the metal any more than the absence of bodily locomotion
makes an essential difference to the presence of vitality in the plant.

What happens when the conscious becomes subconscious in the
body or the subconscious becomes conscious? The real difference lies
in the absorption of the conscious energy in part of its work, its more
or less exclusive concentration. In certain forms of concentration, what
we call the mentality, that is to say, the Prajnana or apprehensive con-
sciousness almost or quite ceases to act consciously, yet the work of the
body and the nerves and the sense-mind goes on unnoticed but constant
and perfect; it has all become subconscious and only in one activity or
chain of activities is the mind luminously active. While I write, the
physical act of writing is largely or sometimes entirely done by the sub-
conscious mind; the body makes, unconsciously as we say, certain nerv-
ous movements; the mind is awake only to the thought with which it
is occupied. The whole man indeed may sink into the subconscious, yet
habitual movements implying the action of mind may continue, as in
many phenomena of sleep; or he may rise into the superconscient and
yet be active with the subliminal mind in the body, as in certain phe-
nomena of samddhi or Yoga trance. It is evident, then, that the differ-
ence between plant sensation and our sensation is simply that in the
plant the conscious Force manifesting itself in the universe has not yet
fully emerged from the sleep of Matter, from the absorption which en-
tirely divides the worker Force from its source of work in the super-
conscient knowledge, and therefore does subconsciously what it will do
consciously when it emerges in man from its absorption and begins to
wake, though still indirectly, to its knowledge-self. It does exactly the
same things but in a different way and with a different value in terms of
consciousness.

It is becoming possible now to conceive that in the very atom there
is something that becomes in us a will and a desire, there is an attraction
and repulsion which, though phenomenally other, are essentially the
same thing as liking and disliking in ourselves, but are, as we say, in-
conscient or subconscient. This essence of will and desire are evident
everywhere in Nature and, though this is not yet sufficiently envisaged,
they are associated with and indeed the expression of a subconscient or,
if you will, inconscient or quite involved sense and intelligence which are
equally pervasive. Present in every atom of Matter all this is necessarily
present in every thing which is formed by the aggregation of those

LIFE 171

atoms ; and they are present in the atom because they are present in the
Force which builds up and constitutes the atom. That Force is funda-
mentally the Chit-Tapas or Chit-Shakti of the Vedanta, consciousness-
force, inherent conscious force of conscious-being, which manifests itself
as nervous energy full of submental sensation in the plant, as desire-sense
and desire-will in the primary animal forms, as self-conscious sense and
force in the developing animal, as mental will and knowledge topping all
the rest in man. Life is a scale of the universal Energy in which the
transition from inconscience to consciousness is managed; it is an in-
termediary power of it latent or submerged in Matter, delivered by its
own force into submental being, delivered finally by the emergence of
Mind into the full possibility of its dynamis.

Apart from all other considerations, this conclusion imposes itself
as a logical necessity if we observe even the surface process of the emer-
gence in the light of the evolutionary theme. It is self-evident that Life
in the plant, even if otherwise organized than in the animal, is yet the
same power, marked by birth and growth and death, propagation by the
seed, death by decay or malady or violence, maintenance by indrawing
of nourishing elements from without, dependence on light and heat, pro-
ductiveness and sterility, even states of sleep and waking, energy and
depression of life-dynamism, passage from infancy to maturity and age;
the plant contains, moreover, the essences of the force of life and is there-
fore the natural food of animal existences. If it is conceded that it has
a nervous system and reactions to stimuli, a beginning or undercurrent
of submental or purely vital sensations, the identity becomes closer ; but
still it remains evidently a stage of life evolution intermediate between
animal existence and "inanimate" Matter. This is precisely what must
be expected if Life is a force evolving out of Matter and culminating in
Mind, and, if it is that, then we are bound to suppose that it is already
there in Matter itself submerged or latent in the material subconscious-
ness or inconscience. For from where else can it emerge? Evolution of
Life in matter supposes a previous involution of it there, unless we sup-
pose it to be a new creation magically and unaccountably introduced
into Nature. If it is that, it must either be a creation out of nothing or a
result of material operations which is not accounted for by anything in
the operations themselves or by any element in them which is of a
kindred nature; or, conceivably, it may be a descent from above, from
some supraphysical plane above the material universe. The two first
suppositions can be dismissed as arbitrary conceptions ; the last explana-

172 THE LIFE DIVINE

tion is possible and it is quite conceivable and in the occult view of things
true that a pressure from some plane of Life above the material universe
has assisted the emergence of life here. But this does not exclude the
origin of life from Matter itself as a primary and necessary movement;
for the existence of a Life-world or Life-plane above the material does not
of itself lead to the emergence of Life in matter unless that Life-plane
exists as a formative stage in a descent of Being through several grades
or powers of itself into the Inconscience with the result of an involution
of itself with all these powers in Matter for a later evolution and emer-
gence. Whether signs of this submerged life are discoverable, unorgan-
ised yet or rudimentary, in material things or there are no such signs,
because this involved Life is in a full sleep, is not a question of capital
importance. The material Energy that aggregates, forms and disaggre-
gates^ is the same Power in another grade of itself as that Life-Energy
which expresses itself in birth, growth and death, just as by its doing
of the works of Intelligence in a somnambulist subconscience it betrays
itself as the same Power that in yet another grade attains the status of
Mind ; its very character shows that it contains in itself, though not yet
in their characteristic organisation or process, the yet undelivered powers
of Mind and Life.

Life then reveals itself as essentially the same everywhere from the
atom to man, the atom containing the subconscious stuff and movement
of being which are released into consciousness in the animal, with plant
life as a midway stage in the evolution. Life is really a universal opera-
tion of Conscious- Force acting subconsciously on and in Matter; it is
the operation that creates, maintains, destroys and re-creates forms or
bodies and attempts by play of nerve-force, that is to say, by currents
of interchange of stimulating energy to awake conscious sensation in
those bodies. In this operation there are three stages; the lowest is that
in which the vibration is still in the sleep of Matter, entirely subcon-
scious so as to seem wholly mechanical ; the middle stage is that in which
it becomes capable of a response still submental but on the verge of what
we know as consciousness; the highest is that in which life develops

* Birth, growth and death of life are in their outward aspect the same process
of aggregation, formation and disaggregation, though more than that in their
inner process and significance. Even the ensoulment of the body by the psychic
being follows, if the occult view of these things is correct, a similar outward proc-
ess, for the soul as nucleus draws to itself for birth and aggregates the elements of
its mental, vital and physical sheaths and their contents, increases these formations
in life, and in its departing drops and disaggregates again these aggregates, draw-
ing back into itself its inner powers, till in rebirth it repeats the original process.

LIFE 173

conscious mentality in the form of a mentally perceptible sensation
which in this transition becomes the basis for the development of sense-
mind and intelligence. It is in the middle stage that we catch the idea of
Life as distinguished from Matter and Mind, but in reality it is the same
in all the stages and always a middle term between Mind and Matter,
constituent of the latter and instinct with the former. It is an operation
of Conscious-Force which is neither the mere formation of substance nor
the operation of mind with substance and form as its object of apprehen-
sion; it is rather an energising of conscious being which is a cause and
support of the formation of substance and an intermediate source and sup-
port of conscious mental apprehension. Life, as this intermediate energis-
ing of conscious being, liberates into sensitive action and reaction a form
of the creative force of existence which was working subsconsciently or
inconsciently, absorbed in its own substance; it supports and liberates
into action the apprehensive consciousness of existence called mind and
gives it a dynamic instrumentation so that it can work not only on its
own forms but on forms of life and matter ; it connects too, and supports,
as a middle term between them, the mutual commerce of the two, mind
and matter. This means of commerce Life provides in the continual cur-
rents of her pulsating nerve-energy which carry force of the form as a
sensation to modify Mind and bring back force of Mind as will to modify
Matter. It is therefore this nerve-energy which we usually mean when
we talk of Life; it is the Prana or Life-force of the Indian system. But
nerve-energy is only the form it takes in the animal being; the same
Pranic energy is present in all forms down to the atom, since every-
where it is the same in essence and everywhere it is the same operation
of Conscious-Force, — Force supporting and modifying the substantial
existence of its own forms, Force with sense and mind secretly active
but at first involved in the form and preparing to emerge, then finally
emerging from their involution. This is the whole significance of the
omnipresent Life that has manifested and inhabits the material universe.

CHAPTER XX

DEATH, DESIRE AND INCAPACITY

In the beginning all was covered by Hunger that is
Death ; that made for itself Mind so that it might attain to
possession of self.

Brihadaranyaka Upanishad}

This is the Power discovered by the mortal that has
the multitude of its desires so that it may sustain all things ;
it takes the taste of all foods and builds a house for the
being.

Rig Veda^

IN OUR last chapter we have considered Life from the point of view of
the material existence and the appearance and working of the vital
principle in Matter and we have reasoned from the data which this
evolutionary terrestrial existence offers. But it is evident that wherever
it may appear and however it may work, under whatsoever conditions,
the general principle must be everywhere the same. Life is universal
Force working so as to create, energise, maintain and modify, even
to the extent of dissolving and reconstructing, substantial forms with
mutual play and interchange of an overtly or secretly conscious energy
as its fundamental character. In the material world we inhabit Mind is
involved and subconscious in Life, just as Supermind is involved and
subconscious in Mind, and this Life instinct with an involved subcon-
scious Mind is again itself involved in Matter. Therefore Matter is
here the basis and the apparent beginning ; in the language of the Upani-
shads, Prithivi, the Earth-principle, is our foundation. The material
universe starts from the formal atom surcharged with energy, instinct
with the unformed stuff of a subconscious desire, will, intelligence. Out
of this Matter appajent Life manifests and it delivers out of itself by
means of the living body the Mind it contains imprisoned within it;
Mind also has still to deliver out of itself the Supermind concealed in its
workings. But we can conceive a world otherwise constituted in which
Mind is not involved at the start but consciously uses its innate energy

'I. 2. I. 'V. 7. 6.

174

DEATH, DESIRE AND INCAPACITY 1 75

to create original forms of substance and is not, as here, only subcon-
scious in the beginning. Still though the working of such a world would
be quite different from ours, the intermediate vehicle of operation of
that energy would always be Life. The thing itself would be the same,
even if the process were entirely reversed.

But then it appears immediately that as Mind is only a final opera-
tion of Supermind, so Life is only a final operation of the Consciousness-
Force of which Real-Idea is the determinative form and creative agent.
Consciousness that is Force is the nature of Being and this conscious
Being manifested as a creative Knowledge-Will is the Real-Idea or
Supermind. The supramental Knowledge-Will is Consciousness-Force
rendered operative for the creation of forms of united being in an ordered
harmony to which we give the name of world or universe; so also Mind
and Life are the same Consciousness- Force, the same Knowledge-Will,
but operating for the maintenance of distinctly individual forms in a
sort of demarcation, opposition and interchange in which the soul in each
form of being works out its own mind and life as if they were separate
from the others, though in fact they are never separate but are the play
of the one Soul, Mind, Life in different forms of its single reality. In
other words, as Mind is the final individualising operation of the all-
comprehending and all-apprehending Supermind, the process by which
its consciousness works individualised in each form from the standpoint
proper to it and with the cosmic relations which proceed from that stand-
point, so Life is the final operation by which the Force of Conscious-
Being acting through the all-possessing and all-creative Will of the uni-
versal Supermind maintains and energises, constitutes and reconstitutes
individual forms and acts in them as the basis of all the activities of the
soul thus embodied. Life is the energy of the Divine continually generat-
ing itself in forms as in a dynamo and not only playing with the outgoing
battery of its shocks on surrounding forms of things but receiving itself
the incoming shocks of all life around as they pour in upon and penetrate
the form from outside, from the environing universe.

In this view Life appears as a form of energy of consciousness in-
termediary and appropriate to the action of Mind on Matter ; in a sense,
it may be said to be an energy aspect of Mind when it creates and relates
itself no longer to ideas, but to motions of force and to forms of sub-
stance. But it must immediately be added that just as Mind is not a
separate entity, but has all Supermind behind it and it is Supermind that
creates with Mind only as its final individualising operation, so Life also

176 THE LIFE DIVINE

is not a separate entity or movement, but has all Conscious-Force behind
it in every one of its workings and it is that Conscious- Force alone which
exists and acts in created things. Life is only its final operation in-
termediary between Mind and Body. All that we say of Life must there-
fore be subject to the qualifications arising from this dependence. We
do not really know Life whether in its nature or its process unless and
until we are aware and grow conscious of that Conscious-Force working
in it of which it is only the external aspect and instrumentation. Then
only can we perceive and execute with knowledge, as individual soul-forms
and mental and bodily instruments of the Divine, the will of God in Life ;
then only can Life and Mind proceed in paths and movements of an ever-
increasing straightness of the truth in ourselves and things by a constant
diminishing of the crooked perversions of the Ignorance. Just as Mind
has to unite itself consciously with the Supermind from which it is
separated by the action of Avidya, so Life has to become aware of the
Conscious-Force which operates in it for ends and with a meaning of
which the life in us, because it is absorbed in the mere process of living
as our mind is absorbed in the mere process of mentalising life and mat-
ter, is unconscious in its darkened action so that it serves them blindly
and ignorantly and not, as it must and will in its liberation and fulfil-
ment, luminously or with a self-fulfilling knowledge, power and bliss.

In fact, our Life, because it is subservient to the darkened and di-
viding operation of Mind, is itself darkened and divided and undergoes
all that subjection to death, limitation, weakness, suffering, ignorant
functioning of which the bound and limited creature-Mind is the parent
and cause. The original source of the perversion was, we have seen, the
self-limitation of the individual soul bound to self-ignorance because it
regards itself by an exclusive concentration as a separate self-existent in-
dividuality and regards all cosmic action only as it presents itself to its
own individual consciousness, knowledge, will, force, enjoyment and
limited being instead of seeing itself as a conscious form of the One and
embracing all consciousness, all knowledge, all will, all force, all enjoy-
ment and all being as one with its own. The universal life in us, obeying
this direction of the soul imprisoned in mind, itself becomes imprisoned
in an individual action. It exists and acts as a separate life with a limited
insufficient capacity undergoing and not freely embracing the shock and
pressure of all the cosmic life around it. Thrown into the constant cos-
mic interchange of Force in the universe as a poor, limited, individual
existence. Life at first helplessly suffers and obeys the giant interplay

DEATH, DESIRE AND INCAPACITY 1 77

with only a mechanical reaction upon all that attacks, devours, enjoys,
uses, drives it. But as consciousness develops, as the light of its own be-
ing emerges from the inert darkness of the involutionary sleep, the indi-
vidual existence becomes dimly aware of the power in it and seeks first
nervously and then mentally to master, use and enjoy the play. This
awakening to the Power in it is the gradual awakening to self. For Life
is Force and Force is Power and Power is Will and Will is the working
of the Master-consciousness. Life in the individual becomes more and
more aware in its depths that it too is the Will-Force of Sachchidananda
which is master of the universe and it aspires itself to be individually
master of its own world. To realise its own power and to master as well
as to know its world is therefore the increasing impulse of all individual
life; that impulse is an essential feature of the growing self-manifesta-
tion of the Divine in cosmic existence.

But though Life is Power and the growth of individual life means
the growth of the individual Power, still the mere fact of its being a
divided individualised life and force prevents it from really becoming
master of its world. For that would mean to be master of the All-Force,
and it is impossible for a divided and individualised consciousness with
a divided, individualised and therefore limited power and will to be
master of the All- Force; only the All- Will can be that and the individual
only, if at all, by becoming again one with the All-Will and therefore with
the All-Force. Otherwise, the individual life in the individual form must
be always subject to the three badges of its limitation, Death, Desire and
Incapacity.

Death is imposed on the individual life both by the conditions of its
own existence and by its relations to the All- Force which manifests itself
in the universe. For the individual life is a particular play of energy
specialised to constitute, maintain, energise and finally to dissolve, when
its utility is over, one of myriad forms which all serve, each in its own
place, time and scope, the whole play of the universe. The energy of
life in the body has to support the attack of the energies external to it
in the universe; it has to draw them in and feed upon them and is itself
being constantly devoured by them. All Matter according to the Upani-
shad is food, and this is the formula of the material world that "the eater
eating is himself eaten." The life organised in the body is constantly ex-
posed to the possibility of being broken up by the attack of the life ex-
ternal to it or, its devouring capacity being insufficient or not properly
served or there being no right balance between the capacity of devourino;

178 THE LIFE DIVINE

and the capacity or necessity of providing food for the life outside, it is
unable to protect itself and is devoured or is unable to renew itself and
therefore wasted away or broken; it has to go through the process of
death for a new construction or renewal.

Not only so but, again in the language of the Upanishad, the life-
force is the food of the body and the body the food of the life-force ; in
other words, the life-energy in us both supplies the material by which the
form is built up and constantly maintained and renewed and is at the
same time constantly using up the substantial form of itself which it
thus creates and keeps in existence. If the balance between these two
operations is imperfect or is disturbed or if the ordered play of the dif-
ferent currents of life-force is thrown out of gear, then disease and decay
intervene and commence the process of disintegration. And the very
struggle for conscious mastery and even the growth of mind make the
maintenance of the life more difficult. For there is an increasing demand
of the life-energy on the form, a demand which is in excess of the original
system of supply and disturbs the original balance of supply and demand,
and before a new balance can be established, many disorders are intro-
duced inimical to the harmony and to the length of maintenance of the
life; in addition the attempt at mastery creates always a corresponding
reaction in the environment which is full of forces that also desire ful-
filment and are therefore intolerant of, revolt against and attack the
existence which seeks to master them. There too a balance is disturbed,
a more intense struggle is generated; however strong the mastering life,
unless either it is unlimited or else succeeds in establishing a new har-
mony with its environment, it cannot always resist and triumph but
must one day be overcome and disintegrated.

But, apart from all these necessities, there is the one fundamental
necessity of the nature and object of embodied life itself, which is to
seek infinite experience on a finite basis; and since the form, the basis
by its very organisation limits the possibility of experience, this can
only be done by dissolving it and seeking new forms. For the soul, hav-
ing once limited itself by concentrating on the moment and the field, is
driven to seek its infinity again by the principle of succession, by adding
moment to moment and thus storing up a Time-experience which it calls
its past; in that Time it moves through successive fields, successive ex-
periences or lives, successive accumulations of knowledge, capacity, enjoy-
ment, and all this it holds in subconscious or superconscious memory
as its fund of past acquisition in Time. To this process change of form is

DEATH, DESIRE AND INCAPACITY 1 79

essential, and for the soul involved in individual body change of form
means dissolution of the body in subjection to the law and compulsion
of the All-life in the material universe, to its law of supply of the material
of form and demand on the material, its principle of constant intershock
and the struggle of the embodied life to exist in a world of mutual de-
vouring. And this is the law of Death.

This then is the necessity and justification of Death, not as a denial
of Life, but as a process of Life; death is necessary because eternal
change of form is the sole immortality to which the finite living substance
can aspire and eternal change of experience the sole infinity to which the
finite mind involved in living body can attain. This change of form
cannot be allowed to remain merely a constant renewal of the same form-
tj^e such as constitutes our bodily life between birth and death; for
unless the form-type is changed and the experiencing mind is thrown into
new forms in new circumstances of time, place and environment, the
necessary variation of experience which the very nature of existence in
Time and Space demands, cannot be effectuated. And it is only the proc-
ess of Death by dissolution and by the devouring of life by Life, it is
only the absence of freedom, the compulsion, the struggle, the pain, the
subjection to something that appears to be Not-Self which makes this
necessary and salutary change appear terrible and undesirable to our
mortal mentality. It is the sense of being devoured, broken up, destroyed
or forced away which is the sting of Death and which even the belief in
personal survival of death cannot wholly abrogate.

But this process is a necessity of that mutual devouring which we
see to be the initial law of Life in Matter. Life, says the Upanishad, is
Hunger which is Death, and by this Hunger which is Death, asandyd
mrtyuh, the material world has been created. For Life here assumes as
its mould material substance, and material substance is Being infinitely
divided and seeking infinitely to aggregate itself ; between these two im-
pulses of infinite division and infinite aggregation the material existence
of the universe is constituted. The attempt of the individual, the living
atom, to maintain and aggrandise itself is the whole sense of Desire; a
physical, vital, moral, mental increase by a more and more all-embracing
experience, a more and more all-embracing possession, absorption, assim-
ilation, enjoyment is the inevitable, fundamental, ineradicable impulse of
Existence, once divided and individualised, yet ever secretly conscious
of its all-embracing, all-possessing infinity. The impulse to realise that
secret consciousness is the spur of the cosmic Divine, the lust of the

l80 THE LIFE DIVINE

embodied Self within every individual creature; and it is inevitable, just,
salutary that it should seek to realise it first in the terms of life by an
increasing growth and expansion. In the physical world this can only be
done by feeding on the environment, by aggrandising oneself through
the absorption of others or of what is possessed by others ; and this neces-
sity is the universal justification of Hunger in all its forms. Still what
devours must also be devoured; for the law of interchange, of action and
reaction, of limited capacity and therefore of a final exhaustion and suc-
cumbing governs all life in the physical world.

In the conscious mind that which was still only a vital hunger in
subconscious life, transforms itself into higher forms ; hunger in the vital
parts becomes craving of Desire in the mentalised life, straining of Will
in the intellectual or thinking life. This movement of desire must and
ought to continue until the individual has grown sufficiently so that he
can now at last become master of himself and by increasing union with
the Infinite possessor of this universe. Desire is the lever by which the
divine Life-principle effects its end of self-affirmation in the universe and
the attempt to extinguish it in the interests of inertia is a denial of the
divine Life-principle, a Will-not-to-be which is necessarily ignorance ; for
one cannot cease to be individually except by being infinitely. Desire too
can only cease rightly by becoming the desire of the infinite and satisfy-
ing itself with a supernal fulfilment and an infinite satisfaction in the
all-possessing bliss of the Infinite. Meanwhile it has to progress from
the type of a mutually devouring hunger to the type of a mutual giving,
of an increasingly joyous sacrifice of interchange; — the individual gives
himself to other individuals and receives them back in exchange; the
lower gives itself to the higher and the higher to the lower so that they
may be fulfilled in each other ; the human gives itself to the Divine and
the Divine to the human ; the All in the individual gives itself to the All
in the universe and receives its realised universality as a divine recom-
pense. Thus the law of Hunger must give place progressively to the law
of Love, the law of Division to the law of Unity, the law of Death to the
law of Immortality. Such is the necessity, such the justification, such the
culmination and self-fulfilment of the Desire that is at work in the uni-
verse.

As this mask of Death which Life assumes results from the move-
ment of the finite seeking to affirm its immortality, so Desire is the im-
pulse of the Force of Being individualised in Life to affirm progressively
in the terms of succession in Time and of self-extension in Space, in the

DEATH, DESIRE AND INCAPACITY l8l

framework of the finite, its infinite Bliss, the Ananda of Sachchidananda.
The mask of Desire which that impulse assumes comes directly from the
third phenomenon of Life, its law of incapacity. Life is an infinite Force
working in the terms of the finite ; inevitably, throughout its overt indi-
vidualised action in the finite its omnipotence must appear and act as a
limited capacity and a partial impotence, although behind every act of
the individual, however weak, however futile, however stumbling, there
must be the whole superconscious and subconscious presence of infinite
omnipotent Force; without that presence behind it no least single move-
ment in the cosmos can happen; into its sum of universal action each
single act and movement falls by the fiat of the omnipotent omniscience
which works as the Supermind inherent in things. But the individualised
life-force is to its own consciousness limited and full of incapacity; for
it has to work not only against the mass of other environing individ-
ualised life-forces, but also subject to control and denial by the infinite
Life itself with whose total will and trend its own will and trend may not
immediately agree. Therefore limitation of force, phenomenon of in-
capacity is the third of the three characteristics of individualised and
divided Life. On the other hand, the impulse of self-enlargement and all-
possession remains and it does not and is not meant to measure or limit
itself by the limit of its present force or capacity. Hence from the gulf
between the impulse to possess and the force of possession desire arises ;
for if there were no such discrepancy, if the force could always take pos-
session of its object, always attain securely its end, desire would not come
into existence but only a calm and self-possessed Will without craving
such as is the Will of the Divine.

If the individualised force were the energy of a mind free from
ignorance, no such limitation, no such necessity of desire would inter-
vene. For a mind not separated from supermind, a mind of divine knowl-
edge would know the intention, scope and inevitable result of its every
act and would not crave or struggle but put forth an assured force self-
limited to the immediate object in view. It would, even in stretching
beyond the present, even in undertaking movements not intended to suc-
ceed immediately, yet not be subject to desire or limitation. For the
failures also of the Divine are acts of its omniscient omnipotence which
knows the right time and circumstance for the incipience, the vicissitudes,
the immediate and the final results of all its cosmic undertakings. The
mind of knowledge, being in unison with the divine Supermind, would
participate in this science and this all-determining power. But, as we

1 82 THE LIFE DIVINE

have seen, individualised life-force here is an energy of individualising
and ignorant Mind, Mind that has fallen from the knowledge of its own
Siipermind. Therefore incapacity is necessary to its relations in Life and
inevitable in the nature of things; for the practical omnipotence of an
ignorant force even in a limited sphere is unthinkable, since in that
sphere such a force would set itself against the working of the divine and
omniscient omnipotence and unfix the fixed purpose of things, — an im-
possible cosmic situation. The struggle of limited forces increasing their
capacity by that struggle under the driving impetus of instinctive or con-
scious desire is therefore the first law of Life. As with desire, so with this
strife; it must rise into a mutually helpful trial of strength, a conscious
wrestling of brother forces in which the victor and vanquished or rather
that which influences by action from above and that which influences by
retort of action from below must equally gain and increase. And this
again has eventually to become the happy shock of divine interchange,
the strenuous clasp of Love replacing the convulsive clasp of strife. Still,
strife is the necessary and salutary beginning. Death, Desire and Strife
are the trinity of divided living, the triple mask of the divine Life-
principle in its first essay of cosmic self-affirmation.

CHAPTER XXI

THE ASCENT OF LIFE

Let the path of the Word lead to the godheads, towards
the Waters by the working of the Mind. . . .^ O Flame,
thou goest to the ocean of Heaven, towards the gods; thou
makest to meet together the godheads of the planes, the
waters that are in the realm of light above the sun and the
waters that abide below."

The Lord of Delight conquers the third status ; he main-
tains and governs according to the Soul of universality ; like
a hawk, a kite he settles on the vessel and uplifts it, a finder
of the Light he manifests the fourth status and cleaves to
the ocean that is the billowing of those waters.^

Thrice Vishnu paced and set his step uplifted out of the
primal dust; three steps he has paced, the Guardian, the In-
vincible, and from beyond he upholds their laws. Scan the
workings of Vishnu and see from whence he has manifested
their laws. That is his highest pace which is seen ever by
the seers like an eye extended in heaven; that the illumined,
the awakened kindle into a blaze, even Vishnu's step su-
preme. . . /

Rig Veda.

WE HAVE seen that as the divided mortal Mind, parent of limita-
tion and ignorance and the dualities, is only a dark figure of the
supermind, of the self-luminous divine Consciousness in its first deal-
ings with the apparent negation of itself from which our cosmos com-
mences, so also Life as it emerges in our material universe, an energy
of thp dividing Mind subconscious, submerged, imprisoned in Matter,
Life as the parent of death, hunger and incapacity, is only a dark figure
of the divine superconscient Force whose highest terms are immortality,
satisfied delight and omnipotence. This relation fixes the nature of that
great cosmic processus of which we are a part; it determines the first,
the middle and the ultimate terms of our evolution. The first terms of
Life are division, a force-driven subconscient will, apparent not as will
but as dumb urge of physical energy, and the impotence of an inert sub-
jection to the mechanical forces that govern the interchange between the

'X. 30. I. ^IIL22. 3.

"IX. 96. 18, 19. *I. 22. 17-21.

183

1 84 THE LIFE DIVINE

form and its environment. This inconscience and this blind but potent
action of Energy are the type of the material universe as the physical
scientist sees it and this his view of things extends and turns into the
whole of basic existence; it is the consciousness of Matter and the ac-
complished type of material living. But there comes a new equipoise,
there intervenes a new set of terms which increase in proportion as Life
delivers itself out of this form and begins to evolve towards conscious
Mind; for the middle terms of Life are death and mutual devouring,
hunger and conscious desire, the sense of a limited room and capacity
and the struggle to increase, to expand, to conquer and to possess. These
three terms are the basis of that status of evolution which the Darwinian
theory first made plain to human knowledge. For the phenomenon of
death involves in itself a struggle to survive, since death is only the nega-
tive term in which Life hides from itself and tempts its own positive
being to seek for immortality. The phenomenon of hunger and desire
involves a struggle towards a status of satisfaction and security, since
desire is only the stimulus by which Life tempts its own positive being to
rise out of the negation of unfulfilled hunger towards the full possession
of the delight of existence. The phenomenon of limited capacity involves
a struggle towards expansion, mastery and possession, the possession of
the self and the conquest of the environment, since limitation and defect
are only the negation by which Life tempts its own positive being to seek
for the perfection of which it is eternally capable. The struggle for life
is not only a struggle to survive, it is also a struggle for possession and
perfection, since only by taking hold of the environment whether more or
less, whether by self-adaptation to it or by adapting it to oneself either by
accepting and conciliating it or by conquering and changing it, can sur-
vival be secured, and equally is it true that only a greater and greater
perfection can assure a continuous permanence, a lasting survival. It is
this truth that Darwinism sought to express in the formula of the survival
of the fittest.

But as the scientific mind sought to extend to Life the mechanical
principle proper to the existence and concealed mechanical consciousness
in Matter, not seeing that a new principle has entered whose very reason
of being is to subject to itself the mechanical, so the Darwinian formula
was used to extend too largely the aggressive principle of Life, the vital
selfishness of the individual, the instinct and process of self-preserva-
tion, self-assertion and aggressive living. For these two first states of
Life contain in themselves the seeds of a new principle and another state

THE ASCENT OF LIFE 1 85

which must increase in proportion as Mind evolves out of matter through
the vital formula into its own law. And still more must all things change
when as Life evolves upward towards Mind, so Mind evolves upward
towards Supermind and Spirit. Precisely because the struggle for sur-
vival, the impulse towards permanence is contradicted by the law of
death, the individual life is compelled, and used, to secure permanence
rather for its species than for itself; but this it cannot do without the co-
operation of others; and the principle of co-operation and mutual help,
the desire of others, the desire of the wife, the child, the friend and
helper, the associated group, the practice of association, of conscious
joining and interchange are the seeds out of which flowers the principle
of love. Let us grant that at first love may only be an extended selfish-
ness and that this aspect of extended selfishness may persist and domi-
nate, as it does still persist and dominate, in higher stages of the evolu-
tion : still as mind evolves and more and more finds itself, it comes by the
experience of life and love and mutual help to perceive that the natural
individual is a minor term of being and exists by the universal. Once
this is discovered, as it is inevitably discovered by man the mental being,
his destiny is determined; for he has reached the point at which ]Mind
can begin to open to the truth that there is something beyond itself ; from
that moment his evolution, however obscure and slow, towards that su-
perior something, towards Spirit, towards supermind, towards superman-
hood is inevitably predetermined.

Therefore Life is predestined by its own nature to a third status, a
third set of terms of its self-expression. If we examine this ascent of Life
We shall see that the last terms of its actual evolution, the terms of that
which we have called its third status, must necessarily be in appearance
the very contradiction and opposite but in fact the very fulfilment and
transfiguration of its first conditions. Life starts with the extreme divi-
sions and rigid forms of Matter, and of this rigid division the atom,
which is the basis of all material form, is the very type. The atom stands
apart from all others even in its union with them, rejects death and dis-
solution under any ordinary force and is the physical t\^e of the sepa-
rate ego defining its existence against the principle of fusion in Nature.
But unity is as strong a principle in Nature as division; it is indeed the
master principle of which division is only a subordinate term, and to the
principle of unity every divided form must therefore subordinate itself
in one fashion or another by mechanical necessity, by compulsion, by
assent or inducement. Therefore, if Nature for her own ends, in order

1 86 THE LIFE DIVINE

principally to have a firm basis for her combinations and a fixed seed of
forms, allows the atom ordinarily to resist the process of fusion by dis-
solution, she compels it to subserve the process of fusion by aggregation ;
the atom, as it is the first aggregate, is also the first basis of aggregate
unities.

When Life reaches its second status, that which we recognise as vi-
tality, the contrary phenomenon takes the lead and the physical basis
of the vital ego is obliged to consent to dissolution. Its constituents are
broken up so that the elements of one life can be used to enter into the
elemental formation of other lives. The extent to which this law reigns
in Nature has not yet been fully recognised and indeed cannot be until we
have a science of mental life and spiritual existence as sound as our pres-
ent science of physical life and the existence of Matter. Still we can see
broadly that not only the elements of our physical body, but those of our
subtler vital being, our life-energy, our desire-energy, our powers, striv-
ings, passions enter both during our life and after our death into the
life-existence of others. An ancient occult knowledge tells us that we
have a vital frame as well as a physical and this too is after death dis-
solved and lends itself to the constitution of other vital bodies; our life
energies while we live are continually mixing with the energies of other
beings. A similar law governs the mutual relations of our mental life
with the mental life of other thinking creatures. There is a constant dis-
solution and dispersion and a reconstruction effected by the shock of
mind with a constant interchange and fusion of elements. Interchange,
intermixture and fusion of being with being, is the very process of life,
a law of its existence.

We have then two principles in Life, the necessity or the will of the
separate ego to survive in its distinctness and guard its identity and the
compulsion imposed upon it by Nature to fuse itself with others. In
the physical world she lays much stress on the former impulse; for she
needs to create stable separate forms, since it is her first and really her
most difficult problem to create and maintain any such thing as a separa-
tive survival of individuality and a stable form for it in the incessant flux
and motion of Energy and in the unity of the infinite. In the atomic life
therefore the individual form persists as the basis and secures by its ag-
gregation with others the more or less prolonged existence of aggregate
forms which shall be the basis of vital and mental individualisations. But
as soon as Nature has secured a sufficient firmness in this respect for the
safe conduct of her ulterior operations, she reverses the process; the

THE ASCENT OF LIFE 187

individual form perishes and the aggregate life profits by the elements of
the form that is thus dissolved. This, however, cannot be the last stage;
that can only be reached when the two principles are harmonised, when
the individual is able to persist in the consciousness of his individuality
and yet fuse himself with others without disturbance of preservative
equilibrium and interruption of survival.

The terms of the problem presuppose the full emergence of Mind;
for in vitality without conscious mind there can be no equation, but only
a temporary unstable equilibrium ending in the death of the body, the
dissolution of the individual and the dispersal of its elements into the
universality. The nature of physical Life forbids the idea of an individ-
ual form possessing the same inherent power of persistence and therefore
of continued individual existence as the atoms of which it is composed.
Only a mental being, supported by the psychic nodus within which ex-
presses or begins to express the secret soul, can hope to persist by his
power of linking on the past to the future in a stream of continuity which
the breaking of the form may break in the physical memory but need not
destroy in the mental being itself and which may even by an eventual
development bridge over the gap of physical memory created by death
and birth of the body. Even as it is, even in the present imperfect de-
velopment of embodied mind, the mental being is conscious in the mass
of a past and a future extending beyond the life of the body; he becomes
aware of an individual past, of individual lives that have created his and
of which he is a development and modified reproduction and of future in-
dividual lives which his is creating out of itself; he is conscious also of
an aggregate life past and future through which his own continuity runs
as one of its fibres. This which is evident to physical Science in the terms
of heredity, becomes otherwise evident to the developing soul behind the
mental being in the terms of persistent personality. The mental being
expressive of this soul-consciousness is therefore the nodus of the per-
sistent individual and the persistent aggregate life; in him their union
and harmony become possible.

Association with love as its secret principle and its emergent sum-
mit is the type, the power of this new relation and therefore the governing
principle of the development into the third status of life. The conscious
preservation of individuality along with the consciously accepted neces-
sity and desire of interchange, self-giving and fusion with other individ-
uals, is necessary for the working of the principle of love ; for if either is
abolished, the working of love ceases, whatever may take its place. Ful-

1 88 THE LIFE DIVINE

filment of love by entire self-immolation, even with an illusion of self-
annihilation, is indeed an idea and an impulse in the mental being, but
it points to a development beyond this third status of Life. This third
status is a condition in which we rise progressively beyond the struggle
for life by mutual devouring and the survival of the fittest by that strug-
gle ; for there is more and more a survival by mutual help and a self-per-
fectioning by mutual adaptation, interchange and fusion. Life is a self-
affirmation of being, even a development and survival of ego, but of a
being that has need of other beings, an ego that seeks to meet and include
other egos and to be included in their life. The individuals and the ag-
gregates who develop most the law of association and the law of love,
of common help, kindliness, affection, comradeship, unity, who harmonise
most successfully survival and mutual self-giving, the aggregate increas-
ing the individual and the individual the aggregate, as well as individual
increasing individual and aggregate aggregate by mutual interchange,
will be the fittest for survival in this tertiary status of the evolution.

This development is significant of the increasing predominance of
Mind ^ which progressively imposes its own law more and more upon
the material existence. For mind by its greater subtlety does not need to
devour in order to assimilate, possess and grow; rather the more it gives,
the more it receives and grows; and the more it fuses itself into others,
the more it fuses others into itself and increases the scope of its being.
Physical life exhausts itself by too much giving and ruins itself by too
much devouring ; but though Mind in proportion as it leans on the law of
Matter suffers the same limitation, yet, on the other hand, in proportion
as it grows into its own law it tends to overcome this limitation, and in
proportion as it overcomes the material limitation giving and receiving
become one. For in its upward ascent it grows towards the rule of con-
scious unity in differentiation which is the divine law of the manifest
Sachchidananda.

The second term of the original status of life is subconscious will

which in the secondary status becomes hunger and conscious desire, —

hunger and desire, the first seed of conscious mind. The growth into the

third status of life by the principle of association, the growth of love, does

not abolish the law of desire, but rather transforms and fulfils it. Love

^What is spoken of here is mind as it acts directly in life, in the vital being,,
through the heart. Love — the relative principle, not its absolute — is a principle of
life, not of mind, but it can possess itself and move towards permanence only when,
taken up by the mind into its own light. What is called love in the body and the
vital parts is mostly a form of hunger without permanence.

THE ASCENT OF LIFE 189

is in its nature the desire to give oneself to others and to receive others in
exchange; it is a commerce between being and being. Physical life does
not desire to give itself, it desires only to receive. It is true that it is
compelled to give itself, for the life which only receives and does not give
must become barren, wither and perish, — if indeed such life in its en-
tirety is possible at all here or in any world; but it is compelled, not will-
ing, it obeys the subconscious impulse of Nature rather than consciously
shares in it. Even when love intervenes, the self-giving at first still pre-
serves to a large extent the mechanical character of the subconscious will
in the atom. Love itself at first obeys the law of hunger and enjoys the
receiving and the exacting from others rather than the giving and sur-
rendering to others which it admits chiefly as a necessary price for the
thing that it desires. But here it has not yet attained to its true nature;
its true law is to establish an equal commerce in which the joy of giving
is equal to the joy of receiving and tends in the end to become even
greater; but that is when it is shooting beyond itself under the pressure
of the psychic flame to attain to the fulfilment of utter unity and has
therefore to realise that which seemed to it not-self as an even greater and
dearer self than its own individuality. In its life-origin, the law of love is
the impulse to realise and fulfil oneself in others and by others, to be
enriched by enriching, to possess and be possessed because without being
possessed one does not possess oneself utterly.

The inert incapacity of atomic existence to possess itself, the sub-
jection of the material individual to the not-self belongs to the first status
of life. The consciousness of limitation and the struggle to possess, to
master both self and the not-self is the type of the secondary status.
Here, too, the development to the third status brings a transformation of
the original terms into a fulfilment and a harmony which repeat the terms
while seeming to contradict them. There comes about through associa-
tion and through love a recognition of the not-self as a greater self and
therefore a consciously accepted submission to its law and need which
fulfils the increasing impulse of aggregate life to absorb the individual;
and there is a possession again by the individual of the life of others as
his own and of all that it has to give him as his own which fulfils the op-
posite impulse of individual possession. Nor can this relation of mutu-
ality between the individual and the world he lives in be expressed or com-
plete or secure unless the same relation is established between individual
and individual and between aggregate and aggregate. All the difficult
effort of man towards the harmonisation of self-affirmation and freedom,

190 THE LIFE DIVINE

by which he possesses himself, with association and love, fraternity, com-
radeship, in which he gives himself to others, his ideals of harmonious
equilibrium, justice, mutuality, equahty by which he creates a balance of
the two opposites, are really an attempt inevitably predetermined in its
lines to solve the original problem of Nature, the very problem of Life
itself, by the resolution of the conflict between the two opposites which
present themselves in the very foundations of Life in Matter. The reso-
lution is attempted by the higher principle of Mind which alone can find
the road towards the harmony intended, even though the harmony itself
can only be found in a Power still beyond us.

For, if the data with which we have started are correct, the end of
the road, the goal itself can only be reached by Mind passing beyond it-
self into that which is beyond Mind, since of That the Mind is only an
inferior term and an instrument first for descent into form and individ-
uality and secondly for reascension into that reality which the form em-
bodies and the individuality represents. Therefore the perfect solution of
the problem of Life is not likely to be realised by association, interchange
and accommodations of love alone or through the law of the mind and
the heart alone. It must come by a fourth status of life in which the eter-
nal unity of the many is realised through the spirit and the conscious
foundation of all the operations of life is laid no longer in the divisions of
body, nor in the passions and hungers of the vitality, nor in the groupings
and the imperfect harmonies of the mind, nor in a combination of all
these, but in the unity and freedom of the Spirit.

CHAPTER XXII

THE PROBLEM OF LIFE

This it is that is called the universal Life.

Taittiriya Upanishad}

The Lord is seated in the heart of all beings turning all
beings mounted upon a machine by his Maya.

Gita."

He who knows the Truth, the Knowledge, the Infinity
that is Brahman shall enjoy with the all-wise Brahman all
objects of desire.

Taittiriya Upanishad.^

IIFE is, we have seen, the putting forth, under certain cosmic cir-
-^ cumstances, of a Conscious-Force which is in its own nature infi-
nite, absolute, untrammelled, inalienably possessed of its own unity
and bliss, the Conscious-Force of Sachchidananda. The central circum-
stance of this cosmic process, in so far as it differs in its appearances
from the purity of the infinite Existence and the self-possession of the un-
divided Energy, is the dividing faculty of the Mind obscured by ignorance.
There results from this divided action of an undivided Force the appari-
tion of dualities, oppositions, seeming denials of the nature of Sachchi-
dananda which exist as an abiding reality for the mind, but only as a
phenomenon misrepresenting a manifold Reality for the divine cosmic
Consciousness concealed behind the veil of mind. Hence the world takes
on the appearance of a clash of opposing truths each seeking to fulfil it-
self, each having the right to fulfilment, and therefore of a mass of prob-
lems and mysteries which have to be solved because behind all this con-
fusion there is the hidden Truth and unity pressing for the solution and
by the solution for its own unveiled manifestation in the world.

This solution has to be sought by the mind, but not by the mind
alone; it has to be a solution in Life in act of being as well as in con-
sciousness of being. Consciousness as Force has created the world-move-
ment and its problems ; consciousness as Force has to solve the problems

'IL 3. "XVin.ei.

»IL 1.

191

192 THE LIFE DIVINE

it has created and carry the world-movement to the inevitable fulfilment
of its secret sense and evolving Truth. But this Life has taken succes-
sively three appearances. The first is material, — a submerged conscious-
ness is concealed in its own superficial expressive action and representa-
tive forms of force; for the consciousness itself disappears from view in
the act and is lost in the form. The second is vital, — an emerging con-
sciousness is half-apparent as power of life and process of the growth,
activity and decay of form, it is half-delivered out of its original impris-
onment, it has become vibrant in power, as vital craving and satisfaction
or repulsion, but at first not at all and then only imperfectly vibrant in
light as knowledge of its own self-existence and its environment. The
third is mental, — an emerged consciousness reflects fact of life as mental
sense and responsive perception and idea while as new idea it tries to be-
come fact of life, modifies the internal and attempts to modify conform-
ably the external existence of the being. Here, in mind, consciousness is
delivered out of its imprisonment in the act and form of its own force;
but it is not yet master of the act and form because it has emerged as an
individual consciousness and is aware therefore only of a fragmentary
movement of its own total activities.

The whole crux and difficulty of human life lies here. Man is this
mental being, this mental consciousness working as mental force, aware
in a way of the universal force and life of which he is part but, because
he has not knowledge of its universality or even of the totality of his own
being, unable to deal either with life in general or with his own life in a
really effective and victorious movement of mastery. He seeks to know
Matter in order to be master of the material environment, to know Life
in order to be master of the vital existence, to know Mind in order to be
master of the great obscure movement of mentality in which he is not
only a jet of light of self-consciousness like the animal, but also more
and more a flame of growing knowledge. Thus he seeks to know himself
in order to be master of himself, to know the world in order to be master
of the world. This is the urge of Existence in him, the necessity of the
Consciousness he is, the impulsion of the Force that is his life, the secret
will of Sachchidananda appearing as the individual in a world in which
He expresses and yet seems to deny Himself. To find the conditions un-
der which this inner impulsion is satisfied is the problem man must strive
always to resolve and to that he is compelled by the very nature of his
own existence and by the Deity seated within him ; and until the problem
is solved, the impulse satisfied, the human race cannot rest from its

THE PROBLEM OF LIFE 1 93

labour. Either man must fulfil himself by satisfying the Divine within
him or he must produce out of himself a new and greater being who will
be more capable of satisfying it. He must either himself become a divine
humanity or give place to Superman.

This results from the very logic of things because, the mental con-
sciousness of man not being the completely illumined consciousness en-
tirely emerged out of the obscuration of Matter but only a progressive
term in the great emergence, the line of evolutionary creation in which he
has appeared cannot stop where he now is_, but must go either beyond its
present term in him or else beyond him if he himself has not the force to
go forward. Mental idea trying to become fact of life must pass on till
it becomes the whole Truth of existence delivering itself out of its suc-
cessive wrappings, revealed and progressively fulfilled in light of con-
sciousness and joyously fulfilled in power; for in and through these two
terms of power and light Existence manifests itself, because existence is
in its nature Consciousness and Force: but the third term in which these,
its two constituents, meet, become one and are ultimately fulfilled, is
satisfied Delight of self-existence. For an evolving life like ours this in-
evitable culmination must necessarily mean the finding of the self that
was contained in the seed of its own birth and, with that self-finding, the
complete working out of the potentialities deposited in the movement of
Conscious-Force from which this life took its rise. The potentiality thus
contained in our human existence is Sachchidananda realising Himself
in a certain harmony and unification of the individual life and the uni-
versal so that mankind shall express in a common consciousness, com-
mon movement of power, common delight the transcendent Something
which has cast itself into this form of things.

All life depends for its nature on the fundamental poise of its own
constituting consciousness; for as the Consciousness is, so will the Force
be. Where the Consciousness is infinite, one, transcendent of its acts
and forms even while embracing and informing, organising and executing
them, as is the consciousness of Sachchidananda, so will be the Force,
infinite in its scope, one in its works, transcendent in its power and self-
knowledge. Where the Consciousness is like that of material Nature, sub-
merged, self-oblivious, driving along in the drift of its own Force without
seeming to know it, even though by the very nature of the eternal rela-
tion between the two terms it really determines the drift which drives it,
so will be the Force: it will be a monstrous movement of the Inert and
Inconscient, unaware of what it contains, seeming mechanically to fulfil

194 THE LIFE DIVINE

itself by a sort of inexorable accident, an inevitably happy chance, even
while all the while it really obeys faultlessly the law of the Right and
Truth fixed for it by the will of the supernal Conscious-Being concealed
within its movement. Where the Consciousness is divided in itself, as in
Mind, limiting itself in various centres, setting each to fulfil itself without
knowledge of what is in other centres and of its relation to others, aware
of things and forces in their apparent division and opposition to each
other but not in their real unity, such will be the Force: it will be a life
like that we are and see around us; it will be a clash and intertwining of
individual lives seeking each its own fulfilment without knowing its rela-
tion to others, a conflict and difficult accommodation of divided and op-
posing or differing forces and, in the mentality, a mixing, a shock and
wrestle and insecure combination of divided and opposing or divergent
ideas which cannot arrive at the knowledge of their necessity to each
other or grasp their place as elements of that Unity behind which is ex-
pressing itself through them and in which their discords must cease. But
where the Consciousness is in possession of both the diversity and the
unity and the latter contains and governs the former, where it is aware
at once of the Law, Truth and Right of the All and the Law, Truth and
Right of the individual and the two become consciously harmonised in a
mutual unity, where the whole nature of the consciousness is the One
knowing itself as the Many and the Many knowing themselves as the
One, there the Force also will be of the same nature: it will be a Life that
consciously obeys the law of Unity and yet fulfils each thing in the di-
versity according to its proper rule and function ; it will be a life in which
all the individuals live at once in themselves and in each other as one con-
scious Being in many souls, one power of Consciousness in many minds,
one joy of Force working in many lives, one reality of Dehght fulfilling
itself in many hearts and bodies.

The first of these four positions, the source of all this progressive re-
lation between Consciousness and Force, is their poise in the being of
Sachchidananda where they are one ; for there the Force is consciousness
of being working itself out without ever ceasing to be consciousness and
the Consciousness is similarly luminous Force of being eternally aware
of itself and of its own Delight and never ceasing to be this power of utter
light and self-possession. The second relation is that of material Nature;
it is the poise of being in the material universe which is the great denial
of Sachchidananda by Himself: for here there is the utter apparent sepa-

THE PROBLEM OF LIFE 1 95

ration of Force from Consciousness, the specious miracle of the all-
governing and infallible Inconscient which is only the mask but which
modern knowledge has mistaken for the real face of the cosmic Deity.
The third relation is the poise of being in Mind and in the Life which we
see emerging out of this denial, bewildered by it, struggling — without any
possibility of cessation by submission, but also without any clear knowl-
edge or instinct of a victorious solution — against the thousand and one
problems involved in this perplexing apparition of man the half -potent
conscient being out of the omnipotent Inconscience of the material uni-
verse. The fourth relation is the poise of being in Supermind: it is the
fulfilled existence which will eventually solve all this complex problem
created by the partial affirmation emerging out of the total denial ; and
it must needs solve it in the only possible way, by the complete affirma-
tion fulfilling all that was secretly there contained in potentiality and in-
tended in fact of evolution behind the mask of the great denial. That is
the real life of the real Man towards which this partial life and partial
unfulfilled manhood is striving forward with a perfect knowledge and
guidance in the so-called Inconscient within us, but in our conscient
parts with only a dim and struggling prevision, with fragments of realisa-
tion, with glimpses of the ideal, with flashes of revelation and inspiration
in the poet and the prophet, the seer and the transcendentalist, the mystic
and the thinker, the great intellects and the great souls of humanity.

From the data we have now before us we can see that the difficulties
which arise from the imperfect poise of Consciousness and Force in man
in his present status of mind and life are principally three. First, he is
aware only of a small part of his own being: his surface mentality, his
surface life, his surface physical being is all that he knows and he does
not know even all of that; below is the occult surge of his subconscious
and his subliminal mind, his subconscious and his subliminal life-im-
pulses, his subconscious corporeality, all that large part of himself which
he does not know and cannot govern, but which rather knows and
governs him. For, existence and consciousness and force being one, we
can only have some real power over so much of our existence as we are
identified with by self-awareness; the rest must be governed by its own
consciousness which is subliminal to our surface mind and life and
body. And yet, the two being one movement and not two separate
movements, the larger and more potent part of ourselves must govern
and determine in the mass the smaller and less powerful; therefore we

196 THE LIFE DIVINE

are governed by the subconscient and subliminal even in our conscious
existence and in our very self-mastery and self-direction we are only
instruments of what seems to us the Inconscient within us.

This is what the old wisdom meant when it said that man imagines
himself to be the doer of the work by his free will, but in reality Nature
determines all his works and even the wise are compelled to follow their
own Nature. But since Nature is the creative force of consciousness of
the Being within us who is masked by His own inverse movement and
apparent denial of Himself, they called that inverse creative movement
of His consciousness the Maya or Illusion-Power of the Lord and said
that all existences are turned as upon a machine through His Maya by
the Lord seated within the heart of all existences. It is evident then
that only by man so far exceeding mind as to become one in self-aware-
ness with the Lord can he become master of his own being. And since
this is not possible in the inconscience or in the subconscient itself, since
profit cannot come by plunging down into our depths back towards the
Inconscient, it can only be by going inward where the Lord is seated and
by ascending into that which is still superconscient to us, into the Super-
mind, that this unity can be wholly established. For there in the higher
and divine Maya is the conscious knowledge, in its law and truth, of
that which works in the subconscient by the lower Maya under the con-
ditions of the Denial which seeks to become the Affirmation. For this
lower Nature works out what is willed and known in that higher Nature.
The Illusion-Power of the divine knowledge in the world which creates
appearances is governed by the Truth-Power of the same knowledge
which knows the truth behind the appearances and keeps ready for us
the Affirmation towards which they are working. The partial and ap-
parent Man here will find there the perfect and real Man capable of an
entirely self-aware being by his full unity with that Self-existent who is
the omniscient lord of His own cosmic evolution and procession.

The second difficulty is that man is separated in his mind, his life,
his body from the universal and therefore, even as he does not know him-
self, is equally and even more incapable of knowing his fellow-creatures.
He forms by inferences, theories, observations and a certain imperfect
capacity of sympathy a rough mental construction about them ; but this
is not knowledge. Knowledge can only come by conscious identity, for
that is the only true knowledge, — existence aware of itself. We know
what we are so far as we are consciously aware of ourself , the rest is hid-
den ; so also we can come really to know that with which we become one

THE PROBLEM OF LIFE I97

in our consciousness, but only so far as we can become one with it. If
the means of knowledge are indirect and imperfect, the knowledge at-
tained will also be indirect and imperfect. It will enable us to work out
with a certain precarious clumsiness but still perfectly enough from our
mental standpoint certain limited practical aims, necessities, conven-
iences, a certain imperfect and insecure harmony of our relations with
that which we know; but only by a conscious unity with it can we arrive
at a perfect relation. Therefore we must arrive at a conscious unity with
our fellow-beings and not merely at the sympathy created by love or the
understanding created by mental knowledge, which will always be the
knowledge of their superficial existence and therefore imperfect in itself
and subject to denial and frustration by the uprush of the unknown and
unmastered from the subconscient or the subliminal in them and us.
But this conscious oneness can only be established by entering into that in
which we are one with them, the universal ; and the fullness of the uni-
versal exists consciently only in that which is superconscient to us, in the
Supermind: for here in our normal being the greater part of it is sub-
conscient and therefore in this normal poise of mind, life and body it
cannot be possessed. The lower conscious nature is bound down to ego
in all its activities, chained triply to the stake of differentiated indi-
viduality. The Supermind alone commands unity in diversity.

The third difficulty is the division between force and consciousness
in the evolutionary existence. There is, first, the division which has been
created by the evolution itself in its three successive formations of Mat-
ter, Life and Mind, each with its own law of working. The Life is at war
with the body; it attempts to force it to satisfy life's desires, impulses,
satisfactions and demands from its limited capacity what could only be
possible to an immortal and divine body; and the body, enslaved and
tyrannised over, suffers and is in constant dumb revolt against the de-
mands made upon it by the Life. The Mind is at war with both: some-
times it helps the Life against the Body, sometimes restrains the vital
urge and seeks to protect the corporeal frame from life's desires, pas-
sions and over-driving energies ; it also seeks to possess the Life and turn
its energy to the mind's own ends, to the utmost joys of the mind's own
activity, to the satisfaction of mental, aesthetic, emotional aims and
their fulfilment in human existence; and the Life too finds itself en-
slaved and misused and is in frequent insurrection against the ignorant
half-wise tyrant seated above it. This is the war of our members which
the mind cannot satisfactorily resolve because it has to deal with a prob-

198 THE LIFE DIVINE

lem insoluble to it, the aspiration of an immortal being in a mortal life
and body. It can only arrive at a long succession of compromises or end
in an abandonment of the problem either by submission with the ma-
terialist to the mortality of our apparent being or with the ascetic and the
religionist by the rejection and condemnation of the earthly life and
withdrawal to happier and easier fields of existence. But the true solu-
tion lies in finding the principle beyond Mind of which Immortality
is the law and in conquering by it the mortality of our existence.

But there is also that fundamental division within between force
of Nature and the conscious being which is the original cause of this in-
capacity. Not only is there a division between the mental, the vital and
the physical being, but each of them is also divided against itself. The
capacity of the body is less than the capacity of the instinctive soul
or conscious being, the physical Purusha within it, the capacity of the
vital force less than the capacity of the impulsive soul, the vital con-
scious being or Purusha within it, the capacity of the mental energy less
than the capacity of the intellectual and emotional soul, the mental
Purusha within it. For the soul is the inner consciousness which aspires
to its own complete self-realisation and therefore always exceeds the in-
dividual formation of the moment, and the Force which has taken its
poise in the formation is always pushed by its soul to that which is ab-
normal to the poise, transcendent of it; thus constantly pushed it has
much trouble in answering, more in evolving from the present to a greater
capacity. In trying to fulfil the demands of this triple soul it is distracted
and driven to set instinct against instinct, impulse against impulse, emo-
tion against emotion, idea against idea, satisfying this, denying that,
then repenting and returning on what it has done, adjusting, compensat-
ing, readjusting ad infinitum, but not arriving at any principle of unity.
And in the mind again the conscious-power that should harmonise and
unite is not only limited in its knowledge and in its will, but the knowl-
edge and the will are disparate and often at discord. The principle of
unity is above in the supermind: for there alone is the conscious unity
of all diversities; there alone will and knowledge are equal and in perfect
harmony; there alone Consciousness and Force arrive at their divine
equation.

Man, in proportion as he develops into a self-conscious and
truly thinking being, becomes acutely aware of all this discord and
disparateness in his parts and he seeks to arrive at a harmony of his
mind, life and body, a harmony of his knowledge and will and emotion.

THE PROBLEM OF LIFE 1 99

a harmony of all his members. Sometimes this desire stops short at the
attainment of a workable compromise which will bring with it a relative
peace; but compromise can only be a halt on the way, since the Deity
within will not be satisfied eventually with less than a perfect harmony
combining in itself the integral development of our many-sided poten-
tialities. Less than this would be an evasion of the problem, not its solu-
tion, or else only a temporary solution provided as a resting-place for the
soul in its continual self-enlargem.ent and ascension. Such a perfect har-
mony would demand as essential terms a perfect mentality, a perfect
play of vital force, a perfect physical existence. But where in the radi-
cally imperfect shall we find the principle and power of perfection? Mind
rooted in division and limitation cannot provide it to us nor can life and
the body which are the energy and the frame of dividing and limiting mind.
The principle and power of perfection are there in the subconscient but
wrapped up in the tegument or veil of the lower Maya, a mute premoni-
tion emerging as an unrealised ideal; in the superconscient they await,
open, eternally realised, but still separated from us by the veil of our self-
ignorance. It is above, then, and not either in our present poise nor
below it that we must seek for the reconciling power and knowledge.

Equally, man, as he develops, becomes acutely aware of the discord
and ignorance that governs his relations with the world, acutely intolerant
of it, more and more set upon finding a principle of harmony, peace, joy
and unity. This too can only come to him from above. For only by de-
veloping a mind which shall have knowledge of the mind of others as of
itself, free from our mutual ignorance and misunderstanding, a will that
feels and makes itself one with the will of others, an emotional heart that
contains the emotions of others as its own, a life-force that senses the
energies of others and accepts them for its own and seeks to fulfil them as
its own, and a body that is not a wall of imprisonment and defence
against the world, but all this under the law of a Light and Truth that
shall transcend the aberrations and errors, the much sin and falsehood
of our and others' minds, wills, emotions, life-energies, — only so can the
life of man spiritually and practically become one with that of his fellow-
beings and the individual recover his own universal self. The subcon-
scient has this life of the All and the superconscient has it, but under
conditions which necessitate our motion upwards. For not towards the
Godhead concealed in the "inconscient ocean where darkness is wrapped
within darkness," ^ but towards the Godhead seated in the sea of eternal
* Rig Veda, X. 129. 3.

200 THE LIFE DIVINE

light,^ in the highest ether of our being, is the original impetus which has
carried upward the evolving soul to the type of our humanity.

Unless therefore the race is to fall by the wayside and leave the vic-
tory to other and new creations of the eager travailing Mother, it must
aspire to this ascent, conducted indeed through love, mental illumination
and the vital urge to possession and self-giving, but leading beyond to
the supramental unity which transcends and fulfils them ; in the founding
of human life upon the supramental realisation of conscious unity with
the One and with all in our being and in all its members humanity must
seek its final good and salvation. And this is what we have described
as the fourth status of Life in its ascent towards the Godhead.

^The Waters which are in the realm of light above the Sun and those which
abide below. — Rig Veda, III. 22. 3.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE DOUBLE SOUL IN MAN

The Purusha, the inner Self, no larger than the size of
a man's thumb.

Katha Upanishad}
Swetaswatara Upanishad!^

He who knows this Self who is the eater of the honey
of existence and the lord of what is and shall be, has thence-
forward no shrinking.

Katha Upanishad?

Whence shall he have grief, how shall he be deluded who
sees everywhere the Oneness?

Isha Upanishad.*

He who has found the bliss of the Eternal has no fear
from any quarter.

Taittiriya Upanishad.^

THE first status of Life we found to be characterised by a dumb
inconscient drive or urge, a force of some involved will in the ma-
terial or atomic existence, not free and possessor of itself or its works or
their results, but entirely possessed by the universal movement in which
it arises as the obscure unformed seed of individuaHty. The root of
the second status is desire, eager to possess but limited in capacity;
the bud of the third is Love which seeks both to possess and be possessed,
to receive and to give itself; the fine flower of the fourth, its sign of per-
fection, we conceive as the pure and full emergence of the original will,
the illumined fulfilment of the intermediate desire, the high and deep
satisfaction of the conscious interchange of Love by the unification
of the state of the possessor and possessed in the divine unity of souls
which is the foundation of the supramental existence. If we scrutinise
these terms carefully we shall see that they are shapes and stages of the
soul's seeking for the individual and universal delight of things; the as-

^IV. 12. "VL 17.

MV. s. * Verse 7.

202 THE LIFE DIVINE

cent of Life is in its nature the ascent of the divine Delight in things
from its dumb conception in Matter through vicissitudes and opposites
to its luminous consummation in Spirit.

The world being what it is, it could not be otherwise. For the
world is a masked form of Sachchidananda, and the nature of the con-
sciousness of Sachchidananda and therefore the thing in which His force
must always find and achieve itself is divine Bliss, an omnipresent self-
delight. Since Life is an energy of His conscious-force, the secret of all
its movements must be a hidden delight inherent in all things which is at
once cause, motive and object of its activities; and if by reason of egoistic
division that delight is missed, if it is held back behind a veil, if it is
represented as its own opposite, even as being is masked in death, con-
sciousness figures as the inconscient and force mocks itself with the guise
of incapacity, then that which lives cannot be satisfied, cannot either
rest from the movement or fulfil the movement except by laying hold on
this universal delight which is at once the secret total delight of its own
being and the original, all-encompassing, all-informing, all-upholding de-
light of the transcendent and immanent Sachchidananda. To seek for
delight is therefore the fundamental impulse and sense of Life; to find
and possess and fulfil it is its whole motive.

But where in us is this principle of Delight? through what term of
our being does it manifest and fulfil itself in the action of the cosmos
as the principle of Conscious-Force manifests and uses Life for its cosmic
term and the principle of Supermind manifests and uses Mind? We have
distinguished a fourfold principle of divine Being creative of the universe,
— Existence, Conscious-Force, Bliss and Supermind. Supermind, we
have seen, is omnipresent in the material cosmos, but veiled ; it is behind
the actual phenomenon of things and occultly expresses itself there, but
uses for effectuation its own subordinate term. Mind. The divine Con-
scious-Force is omnipresent in the material cosmos, but veiled, operative
secretly behind the actual phenomenon of things, and it expresses itself
there characteristically through its own subordinate term, Life. And,
though we have not yet examined separately the principle of Matter, yet
we can already see that the divine All-existence also is omnipresent in the
material cosmos, but veiled, hidden behind the actual phenomenon of
things, and manifests itself there initially through its own subordinate
term, Substance, Form of being or Matter. Then, equally, the principle of
divine Bliss must be omnipresent in the cosmos, veiled indeed and possess-
ing itself behind the actual phenomenon of things, but still manifested in

THE DOUBLE SOUL IN MAN 203

US through some subordinate principle of its own in which it is hidden
and by which it must be found and achieved in the action of the universe.

That term is something in us which we sometimes call in a special
sense the soul, — that is to say, the psychic principle which is not the
life or the mind, much less the body, but which holds in itself the open-
ing and flowering of the essence of all these to their own peculiar delight
of self, to light, to love, to joy and beauty and to a refined purity of be-
ing. In fact, however, there is a double soul or psychic term in us, as
every other cosmic principle in us is also double. For we have two minds,
one the surface mind of our expressed evolutionary ego, the superficial
mentality created by us in our emergence out of Matter, another is sub-
liminal mind which is not hampered by our actual mental life and its
strict limitations, something large, powerful and luminous, the true men-
tal being behind that superficial form of mental personality which we
mistake for ourselves. So also we have two lives, one outer, involved
in the physical body, bound by its past evolution in Matter, which lives
and was born and will die, the other a subliminal force of life which is not
cabined between the narrow boundaries of our physical birth and death,
but is our true vital being behind the form of living which we ignorantly
take for our real existence. Even in the matter of our being there is this
duality; for behind our body we have a subtler material existence which
provides the substance not only of our physical but of our vital and
mental sheaths and is therefore our real substance supporting this physi-
cal form which we erroneously imagine to be the whole body of our
spirit. So too we have a double psychic entity in us, the surface desire-
soul which works in our vital cravings, our emotions, aesthetic faculty
and mental seeking for power, knowledge and happiness, and a subliminal
psychic entity, a pure power of light, love, joy and refined essence of
being which is our true soul behind the outer form of psychic existence
we so often dignify by the name. It is when some reflection of this larger
and purer psychic entity comes to the surface that we say of a man, he
has a soul, and when it is absent in his outward psychic life that we say
of him, he has no soul.

The external forms of our being are those of our small egoistic exist-
ence; the subliminal are the formations of our larger true individuality.
Therefore are these that concealed part of our being in which our indi-
viduality is close to our universality, touches it, is in constant relation and
commerce with it. The subliminal mind in us is open to the universal
knowledge of the cosmic Mind, the subliminal life in us to the universal

204 THE LIFE DIVINE

force of the cosmic Life, the subliminal physicality in us to the univer-
sal force- formation of cosmic Matter ; the thick walls which divide from
these things our surface mind, life, body and which Nature has to pierce
with so much trouble, so imperfectly and by so many skilful-clumsy phys-
ical devices, are there, in the subliminal, only a rarefied medium at once
of separation and communication. So too is the subliminal soul in us
open to the universal delight which the cosmic soul takes in its own exist-
ence and in the existence of the myriad souls that represent it and in the
operations of mind, life and matter by which Nature lends herself to
their play and development; but from this cosmic delight the surface
soul is shut off by egoistic walls of great thickness which have indeed
gates of penetration, but in their entry through them the touches of the
divine cosmic Delight become dwarfed, distorted or have to come in
masked as their own opposites.

It follows that in this surface or desire-soul there is no true soul-
life, but a psychic deformation and wrong reception of the touch of
things. The malady of the world is that the individual cannot find his
real soul, and the root-cause of this malady is again that he cannot
meet in his embrace of things outward the real soul of the world in which
he lives. He seeks to find there the essence of being, the essence of power,
the essence of conscious-existence, the essence of delight, but receives in-
stead a crowd of contradictory touches and impressions. If he could
find that essence, he would find also the one universal being, power, con-
scious existence and delight even in this throng of touches and impres-
sions ; the contradictions of what seems would be reconciled in the unity
and harmony of the Truth that reaches out to us in these contacts. At
the same time he would find his own true soul and through it his self,
because the true soul is his self's delegate and his self and the self of the
world are one. But this he cannot do because of the egoistic ignorance
in the mind of thought, the heart of emotion, the sense which responds to
the touch of things not by a courageous and whole-hearted embrace of
the world, but by a flux of reachings and shrinkings, cautious approaches
or eager rushes and sullen or discontented or panic or angry recoils ac-
cording as the touch pleases or displeases, comforts or alarms, satisfies
or dissatisfies. It is the desire-soul that by its wrong reception of life be-
comes the cause of a triple misinterpretation of the rasa, the delight in
things, so that, instead of figuring the pure essential joy of being, it
comes rendered unequally into the three terms of pleasure, pain and in-
difference.

THE DOUBLE SOUL IN MAN 2 OS

We have seen, when we considered the Delight of Existence in its
relations to the world, that there is no absoluteness or essential validity
in our standards of pleasure and pain and indifference, that they are en-
tirely determined by the subjectivity of the receiving consciousness and
that the degree of either pleasure and pain can be heightened to a maxi-
mum or depressed to a minimum or even effaced entirely in its apparent
nature. Pleasure can become pain or pain pleasure because in their
secret reality they are the same thing differently reproduced in the sen-
sations and emotions. Indifference is either the inattention of the sur-
face desire-soul in its mind, sensations, emotions and cravings to the
rasa of things, or its incapacity to receive and respond to it, or its refusal
to give any surface response or, again, its driving and crushing down of
the pleasure or the pain by the will into the neutral tint of unacceptance.
In all these cases what happens is that either there is a positive refusal
or a negative unreadiness or incapacity to render or in any way represent
positively on the surface something that is yet subliminally active.

For, as we now know by psychological observation and experiment
that the subliminal mind receives and remembers all those touches of
things which the surface mind ignores, so also we shall find that the sub-
liminal soul responds to the rasa, or essence in experience, of these things
which the surface desire-soul rejects by distaste and refusal or ignores by
neutral unacceptance. Self-knowledge is impossible unless we go behind
our surface existence, which is a mere result of selective outer experi-
ences, an imperfect sounding-board or a hasty, incompetent and fragmen-
tary translation of a little out of the much that we are, — unless we go
behind this and send down our plummet into the subconscient and open
ourself to the superconscient so as to know their relation to our surface
being. For between these three things our existence moves and finds in
them its totality. The superconscient in us is one with the self and soul
of the world and is not governed by any phenomenal diversity; it pos-
sesses therefore the truth of things and the delight of things in their
plenitude. The subconscient, so called,^ in that luminous head of itself
which we call the subliminal, is, on the contrary, not a true possessor but
an instrument of experience; it is not practically one with the soul and
self of the world, but it is open to it through its world-experience. The

®The real subconscious is a nether diminished consciousness close to the Incon-
scient; the subliminal is a consciousness larger than our surface existence. But both
belong to the inner realm of our being of which our surface is unaware, so both
are jumbled together in our common conception and parlance.

206 THE LIFE DIVINE

subliminal soul is conscious inwardly of the rasa of things and has an
equal delight in all contacts; it is conscious also of the values and stand-
ards of the surface desire-soul and receives on its own surface corre-
sponding touches of pleasure, pain and indifference, but takes an equal
delight in all. In other words, our real soul within takes joy of all its ex-
periences, gathers from them strength, pleasure and knowledge, grows by
them in its store and its plenty. It is this real soul in us which compels
the shrinking desire-mind to bear and even to seek and find a pleasure
in what is painful to it, to reject what is pleasant to it, to modify or even
reverse its values, to equalise things in indifference or to equalise them in
joy, the joy of the variety of existence. And this it does because it is
impelled by the universal to develop itself by all kinds of experience so
as to grow in Nature. Otherwise, if we lived only by the surface desire-
soul, we could no more change or advance than the plant or stone in
whose immobility or in whose routine of existence, because life is not
superficially conscious, the secret soul of things has as yet no instru-
ment by which it can rescue the life out of the fixed and narrow gamut
into which it is born. The desire-soul left to itself would circle in the
same grooves for ever.

In the view of old philosophies pleasure and pain are inseparable
like intellectual truth and falsehood and power and incapacity and birth
and death; therefore the only possible escape from them would be a
total indifference, a blank response to the excitations of the world-self.
But a subtler psychological knowledge shows us that this view which
is based on the surface facts of existence only, does not really exhaust
the possibilities of the problem. It is possible by bringing the real soul
to the surface to replace the egoistic standards of pleasure and pain by
an equal, an all-embracing personal-impersonal delight.. The lover of
Nature does this when he takes joy in all the things of Nature universally
without admitting repulsion or fear or mere liking and disliking, per-
ceiving beauty in that which seems to others mean and insignificant,
bare and savage, terrible and repellent. The artist and the poet do it
when they seek the rasa of the universal from the aesthetic emotion or
from the physical line or from the mental form of beauty or from the in-
ner sense and power alike of that from which the ordinary man turns
away and of that to which he is attached by a sense of pleasure. The
seeker of knowledge, the God-lover who finds the object of his love every-
where, the spiritual man, the intellectual, the sensuous, the aesthetic all
do this in their own fashion and must do it if they would find embracingly

THE DOUBLE SOUL IN MAN 207

the Knowledge, the Beauty, the Joy or the Divinity which they seek.
It is only in the parts where the little ego is usually too strong for us,
it is only in our emotional or physical joy and suffering, our pleasure and
pain of life, before which the desire-soul in us is utterly weak and cow-
ardly, that the application of the divine principle becomes supremely
difficult and seems to many impossible or even monstrous and repellent.
Here the ignorance of the ego shrinks from the principle of impersonality
which it yet applies without too much difficulty in Science, in Art and
even in a certain kind of imperfect spiritual living because there the
rule of impersonality does not attack those desires cherished by the sur-
face soul and those values of desire fixed by the surface mind in which
our outward life is most vitally interested. In the freer and higher move-
ments there is demanded of us only a limited and specialised equality
and impersonality proper to a particular field of consciousness and ac-
tivity while the egoistic basis of our practical life remains to us; in the
lower movements the whole foundation of our life has to be changed in
order to make room for impersonality, and this the desire-soul finds im-
possible.

The true soul secret in us — subliminal, we have said, but the word
is misleading, for this presence is not situated below the threshold of
waking mind, but rather burns in the temple of the inmost heart behind
the thick screen of an ignorant mind, life and body, not subliminal but
behind the veil, — this veiled psychic entity is the flame of the Godhead
always alight within us, inextinguishable even by that dense unconscious-
ness of any spiritual self within which obscures our outward nature. It is
a flame born out of the Divine and, luminous inhabitant of the Igno-
rance, grows in it till it is able to turn it towards the Knowledge. It is
the concealed Witness and Control, the hidden Guide, the Daemon of
Socrates, the inner light or inner voice of the mystic. It is that which
endures and is imperishable in us from birth to birth, untouched by
death, decay or corruption, an indestructible spark of the Divine. Not
the unborn Self or Atman, for the Self even in presiding over the exist-
ence of the individual is aware always of its universality and transcend-
ence, it is yet its deputy in the forms of Nature, the individual soul,
caitya purusa, supporting mind, life and body, standing behind the men-
tal, the vital, the subtle-physical being in us and watching and profiting
by their development and experience. These other person-powers in
man, these beings of his being, are also veiled in their true entity, but they
put forward temporary personalities which compose our outer individ-

208 THE LIFE DIVINE

uality and whose combined superficial action and appearance of status
we call ourselves: this inmost entity also, taking form in us as the psychic
Person, puts forward a psychic personality which changes, grows, de-
velops from life to life; for this is the traveller between birth and death
and between death and birth, our nature parts are only its manifold
and changing vesture. The psychic being can at first exercise only a con-
cealed and partial and indirect action through the mind, the life and the
body, since it is these parts of Nature that have to be developed as its in-
struments of self-expression, and it is long confined by their evolution.
Missioned to lead man in the Ignorance towards the light of the Divine
Consciousness, it takes the essence of all experience in the Ignorance to
form a nucleus of soul-growth in the nature; the rest it turns into ma-
terial for the future growth of the instruments which it has to use until
they are ready to be a luminous instrumentation of the Divine. It is this
secret psychic entity which is the true original Conscience in us deeper
than the constructed and conventional conscience of the moralist, for it
is this which points always towards Truth and Right and Beauty, towards
Love and Harmony and all that is a divine possibility in us, and persists
till these things become the major need of our nature. It is the psychic
personality in us that flowers as the saint, the sage, the seer; when it
reaches its full strength, it turns the being towards the Knowledge of
Self and the Divine, towards the supreme Truth, the supreme Good, the
supreme Beauty, Love and Bliss, the divine heights and largenesses, and
opens us to the touch of spiritual sympathy, universality, oneness. On
the contrary, where the psychic personality is weak, crude or ill-de-
veloped, the finer parts and movements in us are lacking or poor in char-
acter and power, even though the mind may be forceful and brilliant, the
heart of vital emotions hard and strong and masterful, the life-force
dominant and successful, the bodily existence rich and fortunate and an
apparent lord and victor. It is then the outer desire-soul, the pseudo-
psychic entity, that reigns and we mistake its misinterpretations of
psychic suggestion and aspiration, its ideas and ideals, its desires and
yearnings for true soul-stuff and wealth of spiritual experience.''' If the

''The word "psychic" in our ordinary parlance is more often used in reference
to this desire-soul than to the true psychic. It is used still more loosely of psycho-
logical and other phenomena of an abnormal or supernormal character which are
really connected with the inner mind, inner vital, subtle physical being subliminal
in us and are not at all direct operations of the psyche. Even such phenomena as
materialisation and dematerialisation are included, though, if established, they evi-
dently are not soul-action and would not shed any light upon the nature or exist-

THE DOUBLE SOUL IN MAN 209

secret psychic Person can come forward into the front and, replacing
the desire-soul, govern overtly and entirely and not only partially and
from behind the veil this outer nature of mind, life and body, then these
can be cast into soul images of what is true, right and beautiful and in
the end the whole nature can be turned towards the real aim of life, the
supreme victory, the ascent into spiritual existence.

But it might seem then that by bringing this psychic entity, this
true soul in us, into the front and giving it there the lead and rule we
shall gain all the fulfilment of our natural being that we can seek for
and open also the gates of the kingdom of the Spirit. And it might well
be reasoned that there is no need for any intervention of a superior
Truth-Consciousness or principle of Supermind to help us to attain to the
divine status or the divine perfection. Yet, although the psychic trans-
formation is one necessary condition of the total transformation of our
existence, it is not all that is needed for the largest spiritual change. In
the first place, since this is the individual soul in Nature, it can open to
the hidden diviner ranges of our being and receive and reflect their light
and power and experience, but another, a spiritual transformation from
above is needed for us to possess our self in its universality and tran-
scendence. By itself the psychic being at a certain stage might be content
to create a formation of truth, good and beauty and make that its sta-
tion; at a farther stage it might become passively subject to the world-
self, a mirror of the universal existence, consciousness, power, delight, but
not their full participant or possessor. Although more nearly and thrill-
ingly united to the cosmic consciousness in knowledge, emotion and even
appreciation through the senses, it might become purely recipient and pas-
sive, remote from mastery and action in the world; or, one with the static
self behind the cosmos, but separate inwardly from the world-movement,
losing its individuality in its Source, it might return to that Source and
have neither the will nor the power any further for that which was its ul-
timate mission here, to lead the nature also towards its divine realisation.
For the psychic being came into Nature from the Self, the Divine, and
it can turn back from Nature to the silent Divine through the silence of
the Self and a supreme spiritual immobility. Again, an eternal portion
of the Divine,^ this part is by the law of the Infinite inseparable from its

ence of the psychic entity, but would rather be an abnormal action of an occult
subtle physical energy intervening in the ordinary status of the gross body of things,
reducing it to its own subtle condition and again reconstituting it in the terms of
gross matter.

' Gita, XV. 7.

2IO THE LIFE DIVINE

Divine Whole, this part is indeed itself that Whole, except in its frontal
appearance, its frontal separative self-experience ; it may awaken to that
reality and plunge into it to the apparent extinction or at least the merg-
ing of the individual existence. A small nucleus here in the mass of our
ignorant Nature, so that it is described in the Upanishad as no bigger
than a man's thumb, it can by the spiritual influx enlarge itself and em-
brace the whole world with the heart and mind in an intimate communion
or oneness. Or it may become aware of its eternal Companion and elect
to live for ever in His presence, in an imperishable union and oneness as
the eternal lover with the eternal Beloved, which of all spiritual experi-
ences is the most intense in beauty and rapture. All these are great
and splendid achievements of our spiritual self-finding, but they are not
necessarily the last end and entire consummation; more is possible.

For these are achievements of the spiritual mind in man; they are
movements of that mind passing beyond itself, but on its own plane, into
the splendours of the Spirit. Mind, even at its highest stages far beyond
our present mentality, acts yet in its nature by division; it takes the
aspects of the Eternal and treats each aspect as if it were the whole truth
of the Eternal Being and can find in each its own perfect fulfilment.
Even it erects them into opposites and creates a whole range of these
opposites, the Silence of the Divine and the divine Dynamis, the immo-
bile Brahman aloof from existence, without qualities, and the active
Brahman with qualities, Lord of existence. Being and Becoming, the
Divine Person and an impersonal pure Existence; it can then cut itself
away from the one and plunge itself into the other as the sole abiding
Truth of existence. It can regard the Person as the sole Reality or the
Impersonal as alone true ; it can regard the Lover as only a means of ex-
pression of eternal Love or love as only the self-expression of the Lover;
it can see beings as only personal powers of an impersonal Existence or
impersonal existence as only a state of the one Being, the Infinite Person.
Its spiritual achievement, its road of passage towards the supreme aim
will follow these dividing lines. But beyond this movement of spiritual
Mind is the higher experience of the supermind Truth-Consciousness;
there these opposites disappear and these partialities are relinquished
in the rich totality of a supreme and integral realisation of eternal Being.
It is this that is the aim we have conceived, the consummation of our
existence here by an ascent to the supramental Truth-Consciousness and
its descent into our nature. The psychic transformation after rising into
the spiritual change has then to be completed, integralised, exceeded and

THE DOUBLE SOUL IN MAN 211

uplifted by a supramental transformation which lifts it to the sunninit
of the ascending endeavour.

Even as between the other divided and opposed terms of manifested
Being, so also a supramental consciousness-energy could alone establish a
perfect harmony between these two terms — apparently opposite only be-
cause of the Ignorance — of spirit status and world dynamism in our
embodied existence. In the Ignorance Nature centres the order of her
psychological movements, not around the secret spiritual self, but around
its substitute, the ego-principle: a certain ego-centrism is the basis on
which we bind together our experiences and relations in the midst of the
complex contacts, contradictions, dualities, incoherences of the world
in which we live; this ego-centrism is our rock of safety against the cos-
mic and the infinite, our defence. But in our spiritual change we have
to forego this defence; ego has to vanish, the person finds itself dissolved
into a vast impersonality, and in this impersonality there is at first no
key to an ordered dynamism of action. A very usual result is that one
is divided into two parts of being, the spiritual within, the natural with-
out; in one there is the divine realisation seated in a perfect inner free-
dom, but the natural part goes on with the old action of Nature, continues
by a mechanical movement of past energies her already transmitted im-
pulse. Even, if there is an entire dissolution of the hmited person and the
old ego-centric order, the outer nature may become the field of an ap-
parent incoherence, although all within is luminous with the Self. Thus
we become outwardly inert and inactive, moved by circumstance or forces
but not self-mobile,^ even though the consciousness is enlightened within,
or as a child though within is a plenary self-knowledge,^^ or as one incon-
sequent in thought and impulse though within is an utter calm and se-
renity,^^ or as the wild and disordered soul though inwardly there is the
purity and poise of the Spirit.^^ Or if there is an ordered dynamism in the
outward nature, it may be a continuation of superficial ego-action wit-
nessed but not accepted by the inner being, or a mental dynamism that
cannot be perfectly expressive of the inner spiritual realisation; for there
is no equipollence between action of mind and status of spirit. Even at
the best where there is an intuitive guidance of Light from within, the
nature of its expression in dynamism of action must be marked with the
imperfections of mind, life and body, a King with incapable ministers,
a Knowledge expressed in the values of the Ignorance. Only the descent

^ jadavat. ^^ bdlavat.

" unmattavat. ^^ pisdcavat.

212 THE LIFE DIVINE

of the Supermind with its perfect unity of Truth-Knowledge and Truth-
Will can establish in the outer as in the inner existence the harmony
of the Spirit; for it alone can turn the values of the Ignorance entirely
into the values of the Knowledge.

In the fulfilment of our psychic being as in the consummation of
our parts of mind and life, it is the relating of it to its divine source, to
its correspondent truth in the Supreme Reality, that is the indispensable
movement; and, here too as there, it is by the power of the Supermind
that it can be done with an integral completeness, an intimacy that be-
comes an authentic identity; for it is the Supermind which links the
higher and the lower hemispheres of the One Existence. In Supermind is
the integrating Light, the consummating Force, the wide entry into the
supreme Ananda: the psychic being uplifted by that Light and Force
can unite itself with the original Delight of existence from which it came:
overcoming the dualities of pain and pleasure, delivering from all fear
and shrinking the mind, life and body, it can recast the contacts of exist-
ence in the world into terms of the Divine Ananda.

CHAPTER XXIV

MATTER

He arrived at the knowledge that Matter is Brahman.

Taittiriya Upanishad}

WE HAVE now the rational assurance that Life is neither an inex-
plicable dream nor an impossible evil that has yet become a dolor-
ous fact, but a mighty pulsation of the divine All-Existence. We see
something of its foundation and its principle, we look upward to its
high potentiaHty and ultimate divine out-flowering. But there is one
principle below all the others which we have not yet sufficiently con-
sidered, the principle of Matter upon which Life stands as upon a
pedestal or out of which it evolves like the form of a many-branching tree
out of its encasing seed. The mind, life and body of man depend upon
this physical principle, and if the out-flowering of Life is the result of
Consciousness emerging into Mind, expanding, elevating itself in search
of its own truth in the largeness of the supramental existence, yet it
seems also to be conditioned by this case of body and by this foundation
of Matter. The importance of the body is obvious; it is because he has
developed or been given a body and brain capable of receiving and serv-
ing a progressive mental illumination that man has risen above the ani-
mal. Equally, it can only be by developing a body or at least a function-
ing of the physical instrument capable of receiving and serving a still
higher illumination that he will rise above himself and realise, not merely
in thought and in his internal being but in life, a perfectly divine man-
hood. Otherwise either the promise of Life is cancelled, its meaning an-
nulled and earthly being can only realise Sachchidananda by abolishing
itself, by shedding from it mind, life and body and returning to the pure
Infinite, or else man is not the divine instrument, there is a destined limit
to the consciously progressive power which distinguishes him from all
other terrestrial existences and as he has replaced them in the front of
things, so another must eventually replace him and assume his heritage.
It seems indeed that the body is from the beginning the soul's great

^III. 2.

213

214 THE LIFE DIVINE

difficulty, its continual stumbling-block and rock of offence. Therefore
the eager seeker of spiritual fulfilment has hurled his ban against the
body and his world-disgust selects this world-principle above all other
things as an especial object of loathing. The body is the obscure burden
that he cannot bear; its obstinate material grossness is the obsession
that drives him for deliverance to the life of the ascetic. To get rid
of it he has even gone so far as to deny its existence and the reality of
the material universe. Most of the religions have put their curse upon
Matter and have made the refusal or the resigned temporary endurance
of the physical life the test of religious truth and of spirituality. The
older creeds, more patient, more broodingly profound, not touched with
the torture and the feverish impatience of the soul under the burden of
the Iron Age, did not make this formidable division; they acknowledged
Earth the Mother and Heaven the Father and accorded to them an equal
love and reverence; but their ancient mysteries are obscure and un-
fathomable to our gaze who, whether our view of things be materialistic
or spiritual, are alike content to cut the Gordian knot of the problem of
existence with one decisive blow and to accept an escape into an eternal
bliss or an end in an eternal annihilation or an eternal quietude.

The quarrel does not really commence with our awakening to our
spiritual possibilities ; it begins from the appearance of life itself and its
struggle to establish its activities and its permanent aggregations of liv-
ing form against the force of inertia, against the force of inconscience,
against the force of atomic disaggregation which are in the material prin-
ciple the knot of the great Denial. Life is at constant war with Matter
and the battle seems always to end in the apparent defeat of Life and in
that collapse downward to the material principle which we call death.
The discord deepens with the appearance of Mind; for Mind has its
own quarrel with both Life and Matter: it is at constant war with their
limitations, in constant subjection to and revolt against the grossness and
inertia of the one and the passions and sufferings of the other ; and the
battle seems to turn eventually, though not very surely, towards a partial
and costly victory for the Mind in which it conquers, represses or even
slays the vital cravings, impairs the physical force and disturbs the bal-
ance of the body in the interests of a greater mental activity and a higher
moral being. It is in this struggle that the impatience of Life, the dis-
gust of the body and the recoil from both towards a pure mental and
moral existence take their rise. When man awakens to an existence be-
yond Mind, he carries yet farther this principle of discord. Mind. Body

MATTER 215

and Life are condemned as the trinity of the world, the flesh and the
devil. Mind too is banned as the source of all our malady; war is de-
clared between the spirit and its instruments and the victory of the spir-
itual Inhabitant is sought for in an evasion from its narrow residence, a
rejection of mind, life and body and a withdrawal into its own infini-
tudes. The world is a discord and we shall best solve its perplexities by
carrying the principle of discord itself to its extreme possibility, a cutting
away and a final severance.

But these defeats and victories are only apparent, this solution is not
a solution but an escape from the problem. Life is not really defeated by
Matter; it makes a compromise by using death for the continuance of
life. Mind is not really victorious over Life and Matter, but has only
achieved an imperfect development of some of its potentialities at the
cost of others which are bound up with the unrealised or rejected possi-
bilities of its better use of life and body. The individual soul has not
conquered the lower triplicity, but only rejected their claim upon it and
fled from the work which spirit had undertaken when it first cast itself
into form of universe. The problem continues because the labour of the
Divine in the universe continues, but without any satisfying solution
of the problem or any victorious accomplishment of the labour. There-
fore, since our own standpoint is that Sachchidananda is the beginning
and the middle and the end and that struggle and discord cannot be
eternal and fundamental principles in His being but by their very exist-
ence imply labour towards a perfect solution and a complete victory, we
must seek that solution in a real victory of Life over Matter through the
free and perfect use of body by Life, in a real victory of Mind over Life
and Matter through a free and perfect use of life-force and form by ^^lind
and in a real victory of Spirit over the triplicity through a free and per-
fect occupation of mind, life and body by conscious spirit; in the view
we have worked out this last conquest can alone make the others really
possible. To the end, then, that we may see how these conquests can be
at all or wholly possible, we must find out the reality of Matter just as,
seeking the fundamental knowledge, we have found out the reality of
Mind and Soul and Life.

In a certain sense Matter is unreal and non-existent ; that is to say,
our present knowledge, idea and experience of Matter is not its truth,
but merely a phenomenon of particular relation between our senses and
the all-existence in which we move. When Science discovers that ^Matter
resolves itself into forms of Energy, it has hold of a universal and funda-

2l6 THE LIFE DIVINE

mental truth; and when philosophy discovers that Matter only exists
as substantial appearance to the consciousness and that the one reality is
Spirit or pure conscious Being, it has hold of a greater and completer,
a still more fundamental truth. But s.till the question remains why
Energy should take the form of Matter and not of mere force-currents
or why that which is really Spirit should admit the phenomenon of Mat-
ter and not rest in states, velleities and joys of the spirit. This, it is said,
is the work of Mind or else, since evidently Thought does not directly
create or even perceive the material form of things, it is the work of
Sense; the sense-mind creates the forms which it seems to perceive and
the thought-mind works upon the forms which the sense-mind presents to
it. But, evidently, the individual embodied mind is not the creator of the
phenomenon of Matter ; earth-existence cannot be the result of the human
mind which is itself the result of earth-existence. If we say that the world
exists only in our own minds, we express a non-fact and a confusion ; for
the material world existed before man was upon the earth and it will go
on existing if man disappears from the earth or even if our individual
mind abolishes itself in the Infinite. We must conclude then that there is
a universal Mind,^ subconscious to us in the form of the universe or
superconscious in its spirit, which has created that form for its habita-
tion. And since the creator must have preceded and must exceed its crea-
tion, this really implies a superconscient Mind which by the instrumen-
tality of a universal sense creates in itself the relation of form with form
and constitutes the rhythm of the material universe. But this also is no
complete solution; it tells us that Matter is a creation of Consciousness,
but it does not explain how Consciousness came to create Matter as the
basis of its cosmic workings.

We shall understand better if we go back at once to the original
principle of things. Existence is in its activity a Conscious-Force which
presents the workings of its force to its consciousness as forms of its own
being. Since Force is only the action of one sole-existing Conscious-Be-
ing, its results can be nothing else but forms of that Conscious-Being;
Substance or Matter, then, is only a form of Spirit. The appearance

" Mind, as we know it, creates only in a relative and instrumental sense ; it has
an unlimited power of combination, but its creative motives and forms come to it
from above: all created forms have their base in the Infinite above Mind, Life and
Matter and are here represented, reconstructed — very usually misconstructed — from
the infinitesimal. Their foundation is above, their branchings downward, says the
Rig Veda. The superconscient Mind of which we speak might rather be called an
Overmind and inhabits in the hierachical order of the powers of the Spirit, a zone
directly dependent on the supramental consciousness.

MATTER 2 I 7

which this form of Spirit assumes to our senses is due to that dividing
action of Mind from which we have been able to deduce consistently the
whole phenomenon of the universe. We know now that Life is an action
of Conscious-Force of which material forms are the result; Life involved
in those forms, appearing in them first, as inconscient force, evolves and
brings back into manifestation as Mind the consciousness which is the
real self of the force and which never ceased to exist in it even when un-
manifest. We know also that Mind is an inferior power of the original
conscious Knowledge or Supermind, a power to which Life acts as an
instrumental energy; for, descending through Supermind, Consciousness
or Chit represents itself as Mind, Force of consciousness or Tapas repre-
sents itself as Life. Mind, by its separation from its own higher reality
in Supermind, gives Life the appearance of division and, by its farther
involution in its own Life-Force, becomes subconscious in Life and thus
gives the outward appearance of an inconscient force to its material
workings. Therefore, the inconscience, the inertia, the atomic disag-
gregation of Matter must have their source in this all-dividing and self-
involving action of Mind by which our universe came into being. As
Mind is only a final action of Supermind in the descent towards creation
and Life an action of Conscious- Force working in the conditions of the
Ignorance created by this descent of Mind, so Matter, as we know it, is
only the final form taken by conscious-being as the result of that work-
ing. Matter is substance of the one conscious-being phenomenally di-
vided within itself by the action of a universal jNIind,^ — a division
which the individual mind repeats and dwells in, but w^hich does not
abrogate or at all diminish the unity of Spirit or the unity of Energy
or the real unity of Matter.

But why this phenomenal and pragmatic division of an indivisible
Existence? It is because Mind has to carry the principle of multiplicity
to its extreme potential which can only be done by separativeness and di-
vision. To do that it must, precipitating itself into Life to create forms
for the Multiple, give to the universal principle of Being the appearance
of a gross and material substance instead of a pure or subtle substance.
It must, that is to say, give it the appearance of substance which offers
itself to the contact of Mind as stable thing or object in an abiding mul-
tiplicity of objects and not of substance which offers itself to the contact

^Mind is here used in its widest sense including the operation of Overmind
power which is nearest to the supramental Truth-Consciousness and which is the
first fountain of the creation of the Ignorance.

2l8 THE LIFE DIVINE

of pure consciousness as something of its own eternal pure existence and
reality or to subtle sense as a principle of plastic form freely expressive of
the conscious being. The contact of mind with its objects creates what
we call sense, but here it has to be an obscure externalised sense which
must be assured of the reality of what it contacts. The descent of pure
substance into material substance follows, then, inevitably on the descent
of Sachchidananda through supermind into mind and life. It is a neces-
sary result of the will to make multiplicity of being and an awareness
of things from separate centres of consciousness the first method of this
lower experience of existence. If we go back to the spiritual basis of
things, substance in its utter purity resolves itself into pure conscious
being, self-existent, inherently self-aware by identity, but not yet turn-
ing its consciousness upon itself as object. Supermind preserves this self-
awareness by identity as its substance of self-knowledge and its light of
self -creation, but for that creation presents Being to itself as the subject-
object one and multiple of its own active consciousness. Being as object
is held there in a supreme knowledge which can, by comprehension, see
it both as an object of cognition within itself and subjectively as itself,
but can also and simultaneously, by apprehension, project it as an object
(or objects) of cognition within the circumference of its consciousness,
not other than itself, part of its being, but a part (or parts) put away
from itself, — that is to say, from the centre of vision in which Being
concentrates itself as the Knower, Witness or Purusha. We have seen
that from this apprehending consciousness arises the movement of Mind,
the movement by which the individual knower regards a form of his own
universal being as if other than he; but in the divine Mind there is im-
mediately or rather simultaneously another movement or reverse side of
the same movement, an act of union in being which heals this phe-
nomenal division and prevents it from becoming even for a moment solely
real to the knower. This act of conscious union is that which is repre-
sented otherwise in dividing Mind obtusely, ignorantly, quite externally
as contact in consciousness between divided beings and separate objects,
and with us this contact in divided consciousness is primarily represented
by the principle of sense. On this basis of sense, on this contact of union
subject to division, the action of the thought-mind founds itself and pre-
pares for the return to a higher principle of union in which division is
made subject to unity and subordinate. Substance, then, as we know
it, material substance, is the form in which Mind acting through sense

MATTER 219

contacts the conscious Being of which it is itself a movement of knowl-
edge.

But Mind by its very nature tends to know and sense substance of
conscious-being, not in its unity or totality but by the principle of divi-
sion. It sees it, as it were, in infinitesimal points which it associates
together in order to arrive at a totality, and into these view-points and
associations cosmic Mind throws itself and dwells in them. So dwelling,
creative by its inherent force as the agent of Real-Idea, bound by its
own nature to convert all its perceptions into energy of life, as the All-
Existent converts all His self-aspectings into various energy of His
creative Force of consciousness, cosmic Mind turns these, its multiple
view-points of universal existence, into standpoints of universal Life;
it turns them in Matter into forms of atomic being instinct with the life
that forms them and governed by the mind and will that actuate the
formation. At the same time, the atomic existences which it thus forms
must by the very law of their being tend to associate themselves, to
aggregate; and each of these aggregates also, instinct with the hidden
life that forms and the hidden mind and will that actuate them, bears
with it a fiction of a separated individual existence. Each such indi-
vidual object or existence is supported, according as the mind in it is
implicit or explicit, unmanifest or manifest, by its mechanical ego of
force, in which the will-to-be is dumb and imprisoned but none the less
powerful, or by its self-aware mental ego in which the will-to-be is liber-
ated, conscious, separately active.

Thus not any eternal and original law of eternal and original Mat-
ter, but the nature of the action of cosmic Mind is the cause of atomic
existence. Matter is a creation, and for its creation the infinitesimal, an
extreme fragmentation of the Infinite, was needed as the starting-point
or basis. Ether may and does exist as an intangible, almost spiritual
support of Matter, but as a phenomenon it does not seem, to our pres-
ent knowledge at least, to be materially detectable. Subdivide the visible
aggregate or the formal atom into essential atoms, break it up into the
most infinitesimal dust of being, we shall still, because of the nature of
the Mind and Life that formed them, arrive at some utmost atomic
existence, unstable perhaps but always reconstituting itself in the eternal
flux of force, phenomenally, and not at a mere unatomic extension in-
capable of contents. Unatomic extension of substance, extension which
is not an aggregation, coexistence otherwise than by distribution in space

220 THE LIFE DIVINE

are realities of pure existence, pure substance; they are a knowledge of
supermind and a principle of its dynamism, not a creative concept of the
dividing Mind, though Mind can become aware of them behind its
workings. They are the reality underlying Matter, but not the phe-
nomenon which we call Matter. Mind, Life, Matter itself can be one
with that pure existence and conscious extension in their static reality,
but not operate by that oneness in their dynamic action, self-perception
and self-formation.

Therefore we arrive at this truth of Matter that there is a concep-
tive self-extension of being which works itself out in the universe as
substance or object of consciousness and which cosmic Mind and Life
in their creative action represent through atomic division and aggrega-
tion as the thing we call Matter. But this Matter, like Mind and Life,
is still Being or Brahman in its self-creative action. It is a form of the
force of conscious Being, a form given by Mind and realised by Life. It
holds within it as its own reality consciousness concealed from itself,
involved and absorbed in the result of its own self-formation and there-
fore self-oblivious. And, however brute and void of sense it seems to
us, it is yet, to the secret experience of the consciousness hidden within
it, delight of being offering itself to this secret consciousness as object
of sensation in order to tempt that hidden godhead out of its secrecy.
Being manifest as substance, force of Being cast into form, into a fig-
ured self-representation of the secret self-consciousness, delight offering
itself to its own consciousness as an object, — what is this but Sachchi-
dananda? Matter is Sachchidananda represented to His own mental
experience as a formal basis of objective knowledge, action and delight
of existence.

CHAPTER XXV

THE KNOT OF MATTER

I cannot travel to the Truth of the lummous Lord by
force or by the duaUty. . . . Who are they that protect the
foundation of the falsehood? Who are the guardians of the
unreal word?

Then existence was not nor non-existence, the mid-world
was not nor the Ether nor what is beyond. What covered
all? where was it? in whose refuge? what was that ocean
dense and deep? Death was not nor immortality nor the
knowledge of day and night. That One lived without breath
by his self-law, there was nothing else nor aught beyond it.
In the beginning Darkness was hidden by darkness, all this
was an ocean of inconscience. When universal being was con-
cealed by fragmentation, then by the greatness of its energy
That One was born. That moved at first as desire within,
which was the primal seed of mind. The seers of Truth dis-
covered the building of being in non-being by will in the
heart and by the thought; their ray was extended horizon-
tally; but what was there below, what was there above?
There were Casters of the seed, there were Greatnesses ; there
was self-law below, there was Will above.

Rig Veda?-

IF THEN the conclusion at which we have arrived is correct, — and
there is no other possible on the data upon which we are working, —
the sharp division which practical experience and long habit of mind
have created between Spirit and Matter has no longer any fundamen-
tal reality. The world is a differentiated unity, a manifold oneness,
not a constant attempt at compromise between eternal dissonances, not
an everlasting struggle between irreconcilable opposites. An inalienable
oneness generating infinite variety is its foundation and beginning; a
constant reconciliation behind apparent division and struggle combin-
ing all possible disparates for vast ends in a secret Consciousness and
Will which is ever one and master of all its own complex action, appears
to be its real character in the middle; we must assume therefore that a
fulfilment of the emerging Will and Consciousness and a triumphant
harmony must be its conclusion. Substance is the form of itself on

^V. 12. 2, 4; X. 129. I-S.

222 THE LIFE DIVINE

which it works, and of that substance if Matter is one end, Spirit is the
other. The two are one: Spirit is the soul and reality of that which we
sense as Matter; Matter is a form and body of that which we realise
as Spirit.

Certainly, there is a vast practical difference and on that difference
the whole indivisible series and ever-ascending degrees of the world-
existence are founded. Substance, we have said, is conscious existence
presenting itself to the sense as object so that, on the basis of whatever
sense-relation is established, the work of world- formation and cosmic
progression may proceed. But there need not be only one basis, only
one fundamental principle of relation immutably created between sense
and substance; on the contrary, there is an ascending and developing
series. We are aware of another substance in which pure mind v^^orks
as its natural medium and which is far subtler, more flexible, more
plastic than anything that our physical sense can conceive of as Matter.
We can speak of a substance of mind because we become aware of a
subtler medium in which forms arise and action takes place; we can
speak also of a substance of pure dynamic life-energy other than the
subtlest forms of material substance and its physically sensible force-
currents. Spirit itself is pure substance of being presenting itself as an
object no longer to physical, vital or mental sense, but to a light of a
pure spiritual perceptive knowledge in which the subject becomes its
own object, that is to say, in which the Timeless and Spaceless is aware
of itself in a pure spiritually self-conceptive self-extension as the basis
and primal material of all existence. Beyond this foundation is the
disappearance of all conscious differentiation between subject and object
in an absolute identity, and there we can no longer speak of Substance.

Therefore it is a purely conceptive — a spiritually, not a mentally
conceptive difference ending in a practical distinction, which creates the
series descending from Spirit through Mind to Matter and ascending
again from Matter through Mind to Spirit. But the real oneness is
never abrogated, and, when we get back to the original and integral
view of things, we see that it is never even truly diminished or impaired,
not even in the grossest densities of Matter. Brahman is not only the
cause and supporting power and indwelling principle of the universe, he
is also its material and its sole material. Matter also is Brahman and
it is nothing other than or different from Brahman. If indeed Matter
were cut off from Spirit, this would not be so; but it is, as we have seen,
only a final form and objective aspect of the divine Existence with all

THE KNOT OF MATTER 22$

of God ever present in it and behind it. As this apparently brute and
inert Matter is everywhere and always instinct with a mighty dynamic
force of Life, as this dynamic but apparently unconscious Life secretes
within it an ever-working unapparent Mind of whose secret dealings it
is the overt energy, as this ignorant, unillumined and groping Mind in
the living body is supported and sovereiignly guided by its own real
self, the Supermind, which is there equally in unmentalised Matter, so
all Matter as well as all Life, Mind and Supermind are only modes of
the Brahman, the Eternal, the Spirit, Sachchidananda, who not only
dwells in them all, but is all these things though no one of them is His
absolute being.

But still there is this conceptive difference and practical distinction,
and in that, even if Matter is not really cut off from Spirit, yet it seems
with such a practical definiteness to be so cut off, it is so different, even
so contrary in its law, the material life seems so much to be the negation
of all spiritual existence that its rejection might well appear to be the
one short cut out of the difficulty, — as undoubtedly it is; but a short
cut or any cut is no solution. Still, there, in Matter undoubtedly lies
the crux; that raises the obstacle: for because of Matter Life is gross
and limited and stricken with death and pain, because of Matter ^Nlind
is more than half blind, its wings clipped, its feet tied to a narrow perch
and held back from the vastness and freedom above of which it is con-
scious. Therefore the exclusive spiritual seeker is justified from his
view-point if, disgusted with the mud of Matter, revolted by the animal
grossness of Life or impatient of the self-imprisoned narrowness and
downward vision of Mind, he determines to break from it all and return
by inaction and silence to the Spirit's immobile liberty. But that is not
the sole view-point, nor, because it has been sublimely held or glorified
by shining and golden examples, need we consider it the integral and
ultimate wisdom. Rather, liberating ourselves from all passion and
revolt, let us see what this divine order of the universe means, and, as
for this great knot and tangle of Matter denying the Spirit, let us seek
to find out and separate its strands so as to loosen it by a solution and
not cut through it by a violence. We must state the difficulty, the oppo-
sition first, entirely, trenchantly, with exaggeration, if need be, rather
than with diminution, and then look for the issue.

First, then, the fundamental opposition Matter presents to Spirit
is this that it is the culmination of the principle of Ignorance. Here
Consciousness has lost and forgotten itself in a form of its works, as a

2 24 THE LIFE DIVINE

man might forget in extreme absorption not only who he is but that he is
at all and become momentarily only the work that is being done and the
force that is doing it. The Spirit self-luminous, infinitely aware of itself
behind all workings of force and their master, seems here to have dis-
appeared and not to be at all; somewhere He is perhaps, but here He
seems to have left only a brute and inconscient material Force which
creates and destroys eternally without knowing itself or what it creates
or why it creates at all or why it destroys what once it has created: it
does not know, for it has no mind; it does not care, for it has no heart.
And if that is not the real truth even of the material universe, if behind
all this false phenomenon there is a Mind, a Will and something greater
than Mind or mental Will, yet it is this dark semblance that the mate-
rial universe itself presents as a truth to the consciousness which emerges
in it out of its night; and if it be no truth but a lie, yet is it a most effec-
tive lie, for it determines the conditions of our phenomenal existence
and besieges all our aspiration and effort.

For this is the monstrous thing, the terrible and pitiless miracle of
the material universe that out of this no-Mind a mind or, at least, minds
emerge and find themselves struggling feebly for light, helpless individu-
ally, only less helpless when in self-defence they associate their individual
feeblenesses in the midst of the giant Ignorance which is the law of the
universe. Out of this heartless Inconscience and within its rigorous juris-
diction hearts have been born and aspire and are tortured and bleed
under the weight of the blind and insentient cruelty of this iron exist-
ence, a cruelty which lays its law upon them and becomes sentient in
their sentience, brutal, ferocious, horrible. But what after all, behind
appearances, is this seeming mystery? We can see that it is the Con-
sciousness which had lost itself returning again to itself, emerging out
of its giant self-forgetfulness, slowly, painfully, as a Life that is would-be
sentient, half-sentient, dimly sentient, wholly sentient and finally strug-
gles to be more than sentient, to be again divinely self-conscious, free,
infinite, immortal. But it works towards this under a law that is the
opposite of all these things, under the conditions of Matter, that is to
say, against the grasp of the Ignorance. The movements it has to follow,
the instruments it has to use are set and made for it by this brute and
divided Matter and impose on it at every step ignorance and limitation.

For the second fundamental opposition that Matter offers to Spirit,
is this that it is the culmination of bondage to mechanic Law and opposes
to all that seeks to liberate itself a colossal Inertia. Not that Matter

THE KNOT OF MATTER 225

itself is inert; it is rather an infinite motion, an inconceivable force, a
limitless action, whose grandiose movements are a subject for our con-
stant admiration. But while Spirit is free, master of itself and its works,
not bound by them, creator of law and not its subject, this giant Matter
is rigidly chained by a fixed and mechanical Law which is imposed on
it, which it does not understand nor has ever conceived but works out
inconsciently as a machine works and knows not who created it, by
what process or to what end. And when Life awakes and seeks to impose
itself on physical form and material force and to use all things at its
own will and for its own need, when Mind awakes and seeks to know the
who, the why, the how of itself and all things and above all to use its
knowledge for the imposition of its own freer law and self-guiding action
upon things, material Nature seems to yield, even to approve and aid,
though after a struggle, reluctantly and only up to a certain point. But
beyond that point it presents an obstinate inertia, obstruction, negation
and even persuades Life and Mind that they cannot go farther, cannot
pursue to the end their partial victory. Life strives to enlarge and pro-
long itself and succeeds; but when it seeks utter wideness and immor-
tality, it meets the iron obstruction of Matter and finds itself bound to
narrowness and death. Mind seeks to aid life and to fulfil its own im-
pulse to embrace all knowledge, to become all light, to possess truth
and be truth, to enforce love and joy and be love and joy; but alwaj-s
there is the deviation and error and grossness of the material life-instincts
and the denial and obstruction of the material sense and the physical
instruments. Error ever pursues its knowledge, darkness is inseparably
the companion and background of its light; truth is successfully sought
and yet, when grasped, it ceases to be truth and the quest has to con-
tinue; love is there but it cannot satisfy itself, joy is there but it cannot
justify itself, and each of them drags as if its chain or casts as if its
shadow its own opposites, anger and hatred and indifference, satiety
and grief and pain. The inertia with which Matter responds to the
demands of the Mind and Life, prevents the conquest of the Ignorance
and of the brute Force that is the power of the Ignorance.

And when we seek to know why this is so, we see that the success
of this inertia and obstruction is due to a third power of Matter; for
the third fundamental opposition which Matter offers to Spirit is this
that it is the culmination of the principle of division and struggle. In-
divisible indeed in reality, divisibility is its whole basis of action from
which it seems forbidden ever to depart; for its only two methods of

226 THE LIFE DIVINE

union are either the aggregation of units or an assimilation which in-
volves the destruction of one unit by another ; and both of these methods
of union are a confession of eternal division, since even the first asso-
ciates rather than unifies and by its very principle admits the constant
possibility and therefore the ultimate necessity of dissociation, of disso-
lution. Both methods repose on death, one as a means, the other as
a condition of life. And both presuppose as the condition of world-
existence a constant struggle of the divided units with each other, each
striving to maintain itself, to maintain its associations, to compel or
destroy what resists it, to gather in and devour others as its food, but
itself moved to revolt against and flee from compulsion, destruction and
assimilation by devouring. When the vital principle manifests its activi-
ties in Matter, it finds there this basis only for all its activities and is
compelled to bow itself to the yoke; it has to accept the law of death,
desire and limitation and that constant struggle to devour, possess, domi-
nate which we have seen to be the first aspect of Life. And when the
mental principle manifests in Matter, it has to accept from the mould
and material in which it works the same principle of limitation, of seek-
ing without secure finding, the same constant association and dissocia-
tion of its gains and of the constituents of its works, so that the knowl-
edge gained by man, the mental being, seems never to be final or free
from doubt and denial and all his labour seems condemned to move in
a rhythm of action and reaction and of making and unmaking, in cycles
of creation and brief preservation and long destruction with no certain
and assured progress.

Especially and most fatally, the ignorance, inertia and division of
Matter impose on the vital and mental existence emerging in it the law
of pain and suffering and the unrest of dissatisfaction with its status of
division, inertia and ignorance. Ignorance would indeed bring no pain
of dissatisfaction if the mental consciousness were entirely ignorant, if
it could halt satisfied in some shell of custom, unaware of its own igno-
rance or of the infinite ocean of consciousness and knowledge by which
it lives surrounded; but precisely it is to this that the emerging con-
sciousness in Matter awakes, first, to its ignorance of the world in which
it lives and which it has to know and master in order to be happy, sec-
ondly, to the ultimate barrenness and limitation of this knowledge, to
the meagreness and insecurity of the power and happiness it brings and
to the awareness of an infinite consciousness, knowledge, true being in
which alone is to be found a victorious and infinite happiness. Nor

THE KNOT OF MATTER 227

would the obstruction of inertia bring with it unrest and dissatisfaction
if the vital sentience emerging in Matter were entirely inert, if it were
kept satisfied with its own half-conscient limited existence, unaware of
the infinite power and immortal existence in which it lives as part of
and yet separated from it, or if it had nothing within driving it towards
the effort really to participate in that infinity and immortality. But this
is precisely what all life is driven to feel and seek from the first, its
insecurity and the need and struggle for persistence, for self-preserva-
tion; it awakes in the end to the limitation of its existence and begins
to feel the impulsion towards largeness and persistence, towards the
infinite and the eternal.

And when in man life becomes wholly self-conscious, this unavoid-
able struggle and effort and aspiration reach their acme and the pain
and discord of the world become finally too keenly sensible to be borne
with contentment. Man may for a long time quiet himself by seeking
to be satisfied with his limitations or by confining his struggle to such
mastery as he can gain over this material world he inhabits, some mental
and physical triumph of his progressive knowledge over its inconscient
fixities, of his small, concentrated conscious will and power over its
inertly-driven monstrous forces. But here, too, he finds the limitation,
the poor inconclusiveness of the greatest results he can achieve and is
obliged to look beyond. The finite cannot remain permanently satisfied
so long as it is conscious either of a finite greater than itself or of an
infinite beyond itself to which it can yet aspire. And if the finite could
be so satisfied, yet the apparently finite being who feels himself to be
really an infinite or feels merely the presence or the impulse and stir-
ring of an infinite within, can never be satisfied till these two are recon-
ciled, till that is possessed by him and he is possessed by it in whatever
degree or manner. Man is such a finite-seeming infinity and cannot fail
to arrive at a seeking after the Infinite. He is the first son of earth who
becomes vaguely aware of God within him, of his immortality or of his
need of immortality, and the knowledge is a whip that drives and a
cross of crucifixion until he is able to turn it into a source of infinite light
and joy and power.

This progressive development, this growing manifestation of the
divine Consciousness and Force, Knowledge and Will that had lost
itself in the ignorance and inertia of Matter, might well be a happy
efflorescence proceeding from joy to greater and at last to infinite joy
if it were not for the principle of rigid division from which !Matter has

228 THE LIFE DIVINE

Started. The shutting up of the individual in his own personal conscious-
ness of separate and limited mind, life and body prevents what would
otherwise be the natural law of our development. It brings into the
body the law of attraction and repulsion, of defence and attack, of dis-
cord and pain. For each body being a limited conscious-force feels
itself exposed to the attack, impact, forceful contact of other such lim-
ited conscious-force or of universal forces and, where it feels itself broken
in upon or unable to harmonise the contacting and the recipient con-
sciousness, it suffers discomfort and pain, is attracted or repelled, has
to defend itself or to assail ; it is constantly called upon to undergo what
it is unwilling or unable to suffer. Into the emotional and the sense-mind
the law of division brings the same reactions with the higher values of
grief and joy, love and hatred, oppression and depression, all cast into
terms of desire, and by desire into straining and effort, and by the
straining into excess and defect of force, incapacity, the rhythm of
attainment and disappointment, possession and recoil, a constant strife
and trouble and unease. Into the mind as a whole, instead of a divine
law of narrower truth flowing into greater truth, lesser light taken up
into wider light, lower will surrendered to higher transforming will,
pettier satisfaction progressing towards nobler and more complete satis-
faction, it brings similar dualities of truth pursued by error, light by
darkness, power by incapacity, pleasure of pursuit and attainment by
pain of repulse and of dissatisfaction with what is attained; mind takes
up its own affliction along with the affliction of life and body and be-
comes aware of the triple defect and insufficiency of our natural being.
All this means the denial of Ananda, the negation of the trinity of Sach-
chidananda and therefore, if the negation be insuperable, the futility of
existence; for existence in throwing itself out in the play of conscious-
ness and force must seek that movement not merely for itself, but for
satisfaction in the play, and if in the play no real satisfaction can be
found, it must obviously be abandoned in the end as a vain attempt, a
colossal mistake, a delirium of th^ self-embodying spirit.

This is the whole basis of the pessimist theory of the world, —
optimist, it may be, as to worlds and states beyond, but pessimist as to
the earthly life and the destiny of the mental being in his dealings with
the material universe. For it affirms that since the very nature of mate-
rial existence is division and the very seed of embodied mind is self-
limitation, ignorance and egoism, to seek satisfaction of the spirit upon

THE KNOT OF MATTER 229

earth or to seek an issue and divine purpose and culmination for the
world-play is a vanity and delusion ; only in a heaven of the Spirit and
not in the world, or only in the Spirit's true quietude and not in its
phenomenal activities can we reunite existence and consciousness with
the divine self-delight. The Infinite can only recover itself by rejecting
as an error and a false step its attempt to find itself in the finite. Nor
can the emergence of mental consciousness in the material universe bring
with it any promise of a divine fulfilment. For the principle of division
is not proper to Matter, but to Mind; Matter is only an illusion of
Mind into which Mind brings its own rule of division and ignorance.
Therefore within this illusion Mind can only find itself; it can only
travel between the three terms of the divided existence it has created:
it cannot find there the unity of the Spirit or the truth of the spiritual
existence.

Now it is true that the principle of division in Matter can be only
a creation of the divided Mind which has precipitated itself into material
existence ; for that material existence has no self-being, is not the original
phenomenon but only a form created by an all-dividing Life-force which
works out the conceptions of an all-dividing Mind. By working out
being into these appearances of the ignorance, inertia and division of
Matter the dividing Mind has lost and imprisoned itself in a dungeon of
its own building, is bound with chains which it has itself forged. And
if it be true that the dividing Mind is the first principle of creation, then
it must be also the ultimate attainment possible in the creation, and the
mental being struggling vainly with Life and Matter, overpowering them
only to be overpowered by them, repeating eternally a fruitless cycle
must be the last and highest word of cosmic existence. But no such
consequence ensues if, on the contrary, it is the immortal and infinite
Spirit that has veiled itself in the dense robe of material substance and
works there by the supreme creative power of Supermind, permitting
the divisions of Mind and the reign of the lowest or material principle
only as initial conditions for a certain evolutionary play of the One in
the Many. If, in other words, it is not merely a mental being who is
hidden in the forms of the universe, but the infinite Being, Knowledge,
Will which emerges out of Matter first as Life, then as ^lind, with the
rest of it still unrevealed, then the emergence of consciousness out of
the apparently Inconscient must have another and completer term; the
appearance of a supramental spiritual being who shall impose on his

230 THE LIFE DIVINE

mental, vital, bodily workings a higher law than that of the dividing
Mind is no longer impossible. On the contrary, it is the natural and
inevitable conclusion of the nature of cosmic existence.

Such a supramental being would, as we have seen, liberate the mind
from the knot of its divided existence and use the individualisation of
mind as merely a useful subordinate action of the all-embracing Super-
mind; and he would liberate the life also from the knot of its divided
existence and use the individualisation of life as merely a useful sub-
ordinate action of the one Conscious-Force fulfilling its being and joy
in a diversified unity. Is there any reason why he should not also liber-
ate the bodily existence from the present law of death, division and
mutual devouring and use individualisation of body as merely a useful
subordinate term of the one divine Conscious-Existence made service-
able for the joy of the Infinite in the finite? or why this spirit should not
be free in a sovereign occupation of form, consciously immortal even in
the changing of his robe .of Matter, possessed of his self-delight in a
world subjected to the law of unity and love and beauty? And if man
be the inhabitant of terrestrial existence through whom that transforma-
tion of the mental into the supramental can at last be operated, is it
not possible that he may develop, as well as a divine mind and a divine
life, also a divine body? or, if the phrase seem to be too startling to
our present limited conceptions of human potentiality, may he not in his
development of his true being and its light and joy and power arrive at
a divine use of mind and life and body by which the descent of Spirit
into form shall be at once humanly and divinely justified?

The one thing that can stand in the way of that ultimate terrestrial
possibility is if our present view of Matter and its laws represent the
only possible relation between sense and substance, between the Divine
as knower and the Divine as object, or if, other relations being possible,
they are yet not in any way possible here, but must be sought on higher
planes of existence. In that case, it is in heavens beyond that we must
seek our entire divine fulfilment, as the religions assert, and their other
assertion of the kingdom of God or the kingdom of the perfect upon
earth must be put aside as a delusion. Here we can only pursue or attain
an internal preparation or victory and, having liberated the mind and
life and soul within, must turn from the unconquered and unconquerable
material principle, from an unregenerated and intractable earth to find
elsewhere our divine substance. There is, however, no reason why we
should accept this limiting conclusion. There are, quite certainly, other

THE KNOT OF MATTER 23 1

states even of Matter itself; there is undoubtedly an ascending series of
the divine gradations of substance; there is the possibility of the mate-
rial being transfiguring itself through the acceptation of a higher law
than its own which is yet its own because it is always there latent and
potential in its own secrecies.

CHAPTER XXVI

THE ASCENDING SERIES OF SUBSTANCE

There is a self that is of the essence of Matter — there is
another inner self of Life that fills the other — there is an-
other inner self of Mind — there is another inner self of Truth-
Knowledge — there is another inner self of Bliss.

Taittiriya U panishad}

They climb Indra like a ladder. As one mounts peak
after peak, there becomes clear the much that has still to be
done. Indra brings consciousness of That as the goal.

Like a hawk, a kite He settles on the Vessel and upbears
it; in His stream of movement He discovers the Rays, for He
goes bearing his weapons: He cleaves to the ocean surge of
the waters ; a great King, He declares the fourth status. Like
a mortal purifying his body, like a war-horse galloping to the
conquest of riches He pours calling through all the sheath
and enters these vessels.

Rig Veda.''

IF WE consider what it is that most represents to us the materiality
of Matter, we shall see that it is its aspects of solidity, tangibiUty,
increasing resistance, firm response to the touch of Sense. Substance
seems more truly material and real in proportion as it presents to us
a solid resistance and by virtue of that resistance a durability of sensi-
ble form on which our consciousness can dwell; in proportion as it is
more subtle, less densely resistant and enduringly seizable by the sense,
it appears to us less material. This attitude of our ordinary conscious-
ness towards Matter is a symbol of the essential object for which
Matter has been created. Substance passes into the material status in
order that it may present to the consciousness which has to deal with
it durable, firmly seizable images on which the mind can rest and base
its operations and which the Life can handle with at least a relative
surety of permanence in the form upon which it works. Therefore in
the ancient Vedic formula Earth, type of the more solid states of sub-
stance, was accepted as the symbolic name of the material principle.
Therefore, too, touch or contact is for us the essential basis of Sense;

^11. 1-5. ^I. 10. I, 2; IX. 96. 19, 20.

232

THE ASCENDING SERIES OF SUBSTANCE 233

all other physical senses, taste, smell, hearing, sight are based upon a
series of more and more subtle and indirect contacts between the per-
cipient and the perceived. Equally, in the Sankhya classification of the
five elemental states of Substance from ether to earth, we see that their
characteristic is a constant progression from the more subtle to the less
subtle so that at the summit we have the subtle vibrations of the ethereal
and at the base the grosser density of the earthly or solid elemental
condition. Matter therefore is the last stage known to us in the progress
of pure substance towards a basis of cosmic relation in which the first
word shall be not spirit but form, and form in its utmost possible devel-
opment of concentration, resistance, durably gross image, mutual im-
penetrability,— the culminating point of distinction, separation and
division. This is the intention and character of the material universe;
it is the formula of accomplished divisibility.

And if there is, as there must be in the nature of things, an ascend-
ing series in the scale of substance from Matter to Spirit, it must be
marked by a progressive diminution of these capacities most character-
istic of the physical principle and a progressive increase of the opposite
characteristics which will lead us to the formula of pure spiritual self-
extension. This is to say that they must be marked by less and less
bondage to the form, more and more subtlety and flexibility of substance
and force, more and more interfusion, interpenetration, power of assimi-
lation, power of interchange, power of variation, transmutation, unifica-
tion. Drawing away from durability of form, we draw towards eternity
of essence; drawing away from our poise in the persistent separation
and resistance of physical Matter, we draw near to the highest divine
poise in the infinity, unity and indivisibility of Spirit. Between gross
substance and pure spirit substance this must be the fundamental an-
tinomy. In Matter Chit or Conscious-Force masses itself more and
more to resist and stand out against other masses of the same Conscious-
Force; in substance of Spirit pure consciousness images itself freely in
its sense of itself with an essential indivisibility and a constant unifying
interchange as the basic formula even of the most diversifying play of
its own Force. Between these two poles there is the possibilit}^ of an
infinite gradation.

These considerations become of great importance when we con-
sider the possible relation between the divine life and the di\dne mind
of the perfected human soul and the very gross and seemingly undi\'ine
body or formula of physical being in which we actually dwell. That

234 THE LIFE DIVINE

formula is the result of a certain fixed relation between sense and sub-
stance from which the material universe has started. But as this rela-
tion is not the only possible relation, so that formula is not the only-
possible formula. Life and mind may manifest themselves in another
relation to substance and work out different physical laws, other and
larger habits, even a different substance of body with a freer action of
the sense, a freer action of the life, a freer action of the mind. Death,
division, mutual resistance and exclusion between embodied masses of
the same conscious life-force are the formula of our physical existence;
the narrow limitation of the play of the senses, the determination within
a small circle of the field, duration and power of the life-workings, the
obscuration, lame movement, broken and bounded functioning of the
mind are the yoke which that formula expressed in the animal body has
imposed upon the higher principles. But these things are not the sole
possible rhythm of cosmic Nature. There are superior states, there are
higher worlds, and if the law of these can by any progress of man and
by any liberation of our substance from its present imperfections be
imposed on this sensible form and instrument of our being, then there
may be even here a physical working of divine mind and sense, a physi-
cal working of divine life in the human frame and even the evolution
upon earth of something that we may call a divinely human body. The
body of man also may some day come by its transfiguration; the Earth-
Mother too may reveal in us her godhead.

Even within the formula of the physical cosmos there is an ascend-
ing series in the scale of Matter which leads us from the more to the less
dense, from the less to the more subtle. Where we reach the highest
term of that series, the most supra-ethereal subtlety of material sub-
stance or formulation of Force, what Hes beyond? Not a Nihil, not a
void; for there is no such thing as absolute void or real nullity and what
we call by that name is simply something beyond the grasp of our sense,
our mind or our most subtle consciousness. Nor is it true that there is
nothing beyond, or that some ethereal substance of Matter is the eternal
beginning ; for we know that Matter and material Force are only a last
result of a pure Substance and pure Force in which consciousness is
luminously self-aware and self-possessing and not as in Matter lost to
itself in an inconscient sleep and an inert motion. What then is there
between this material substance and that pure substance? For we do
not leap from the one to the other, we do not pass at once from the
inconscient to absolute consciousness. There must be and there are

THE ASCENDING SERIES OF SUBSTANCE 235

grades between inconscient substance and utterly self-conscious self-
extension, as between the principle of Matter and the principle of Spirit.

All who have at all sounded those abysses are agreed and bear
witness to this fact that there are a series of subtler and subtler formu-
lations of substance which escape from and go beyond the formula of
the material universe. Without going deeply into matters which are too
occult and difficult for our present inquiry, we may say, adhering to
the system on which we have based- ourselves, that these gradations of
substance, in one important aspect of their formulation in series, can
be seen to correspond to the ascending series of Matter, Life, Mind,
Supermind and that other higher divine triplicity of Sachchidananda.
In other words, we find that substance in its ascension bases itself upon
each of these principles and makes itself successively a characteristic
vehicle for the dominating cosmic self-expression of each in their ascend-
ing series.

Here in the material world everything is founded upon the formula
of material substance. Sense, Life, Thought found themselves upon
what the ancients called the Earth-Power, start from it, obey its laws,
accommodate their workings to this fundamental principle, limit them-
selves by its possibilities and, if they would develop others, have even
in that development to take account of the original formula, its purpose
and its demand upon the divine evolution. The sense w^orks through
physical instruments, the life through a physical nerve-system and vital
organs, the mind has to build its operations upon a corporeal basis and
use a material instrumentation, even its pure mental workings have to
take the data so derived as a field and as the stuff upon which it works.
There is no necessity in the essential nature of mind, sense, life that they
should be so limited: for the physical sense-organs are not the creators
of sense-perceptions, but themselves the creation, the instruments and
here a necessary convenience of the cosmic sense; the nervous system
and vital organs are not the creators of life's action and reaction, but
themselves the creation, the instruments and here a necessary conven-
ience of the cosmic Life-force; the brain is not the creator of thought,
but itself the creation, the instrument and here a necessary convenience
of the cosmic Mind. The necessity then is not absolute, but teleologi-
cal ; it is the result of a divine cosmic Will in the material univ^erse which
intends to posit here a physical relation between sense and its object,
establishes here a material formula and law of Conscious- Force and
creates by it physical images of Conscious-Being to serve as the initial.

236 THE LIFE DIVINE

dominating and determining fact of the world in which we live. It is
not a fundamental law of being, but a constructive principle necessitated
by the intention of the Spirit to evolve in a world of Matter.

In the next grade of substance the initial, dominating, determining
fact is no longer substantial form and force, but life and conscious
desire. Therefore the world beyond this material plane must be a world
based upon a conscious cosmic vital Energy, a force of vital seeking and
a force of Desire and their self-expression and not upon an inconscient
or subconscient will taking the form of a material force and energy. All
the forms, bodies, forces, life-movements, sense-movements, thought-
movements, developments, culminations, self-fulfilments of that world
must be dominated and determined by this initial fact of Conscious-Life
to v/hich Matter and Mind must subject themselves, must start from
that, base themselves upon that, be limited or enlarged by its laws,
powers, capacities, limitations; and if Mind there seeks to develop yet
higher possibilities, still it must then too take account of the original
vital formula of desire-force, its purpose and its demand upon the divine
manifestation.

So too with the higher gradations. The next in the series must be
governed by the dominating and determining factor of Mind. Substance
there must be subtle and flexible enough to assume the shapes directly
imposed upon it by Mind, to obey its operations, to subordinate itself
to its demand for self-expression and self-fulfilment. The relations of
sense and substance too must have a corresponding subtlety and flexibil-
ity and must be determined, not by the relations of physical organ with
physical object, but of Mind with the subtler substance upon which it
works. The life of such a world would be the servant of Mind in a sense
of which our weak mental operations and our limited, coarse and re-
bellious vital faculties can have no adequate conception. There Mind
dominates as the original formula, its purpose prevails, its demand over-
rides all others in the law of the divine manifestation. At a yet higher
reach Supermind — or, intermediately, principles touched by it — or, still
higher, a pure Bliss, a pure Conscious Power or pure Being replace Mind
as the dominant principle, and we enter into those ranges of cosmic
existence which to the old Vedic seers were the worlds of illuminated
divine existence and the foundation of what they termed Immortality
and which later Indian religions imaged in figures like the Brahmaloka
or Goloka, some supreme self-expression of the Being as Spirit in which

THE ASCENDING SERIES OF SUBSTANCE 237

the soul liberated into its highest perfection possesses the infinity and
beatitude of the eternal Godhead.

The principle which underlies this continually ascending experience
and vision uplifted beyond the material formulation of things is that all
cosmic existence is a complex harmony and does not finish with the
limited range of consciousness in which the ordinary human mind and
life is content to be imprisoned. Being, consciousness, force, substance
descend and ascend a many-runged ladder on each step of which being
has a vaster self-extension, consciousness a wider sense of its own range
and largeness and joy, force a greater intensity and a more rapid and
blissful capacity, substance gives a more subtle, plastic, buoyant and
flexible rendering of its primal reality. For the more subtle is also the
more powerful, — one might say, the more truly concrete ; it is less bound
than the gross, it has a greater permanence in its being along with a
greater potentiality, plasticity and range in its becoming. Each plateau
of the hill of being gives to our widening experience a higher plane of our
consciousness and a richer world for our existence.

But how does this ascending series affect the possibilities of our
material existence? It would not affect them at all if each plane of con-
sciousness, each world of existence, each grade of substance, each degree
of cosmic force were cut off entirely from that which precedes and that
which follows it. But the opposite is the truth ; the manifestation of the
Spirit is a complex weft and in the design and pattern of one principle all
the others enter as elements of the spiritual whole. Our material world
is the result of all the others, for the other principles have all descended
into Matter to create the physical universe, and every particle of what
we call Matter contains all of them implicit in itself ; their secret action,
as we have seen, is involved in every moment of its existence and every
movement of its activity. And as Matter is the last word of the descent,
so it is also the first word of the ascent ; as the powers of all these planes,
worlds, grades, degrees are involved in the material existence, so are
they all capable of evolution out of it. It is for this reason that material
being does not begin and end with gases and chemical compounds and
physical forces and movements, with nebulae and suns and earths, but
evolves life, evolves mind, must evolve eventually supermind and the
higher degrees of the spiritual existence. Evolution comes by the un-
ceasing pressure of the supra-material planes on the material compelling
it to deliver out of itself their principles and powers which might con-

238 THE LIFE DIVINE

ceivably otherwise have slept imprisoned in the rigidity of the material
formula. This would even so have been improbable, since their presence
there implies a purpose of deliverance; but still this necessity from
below is actually very much aided by a kindred superior pressure.

Nor can this evolution end with the first meagre formulation of life,
mind, supermind, spirit conceded to these higher powers by the reluctant
power of Matter. For as they evolve, as they awake, as they become
more active and avid of their own potentialities, the pressure on them
of the superior planes, a pressure involved in the existence and close
connection and interdependence of the worlds, must also increase in
insistence, power and effectiveness. Not only must these principles mani-
fest from below in a qualified and restricted emergence, but also from
above they must descend in their characteristic power and full possible
efflorescence into the material being; the material creature must open
to a wider and wider play of their activities in Matter, and all that is
needed is a fit receptacle, medium, instrument. That is provided for in
the body, life and consciousness of man.

Certainly, if that body, life and consciousness were limited to the
possibilities of the gross body which are all that our physical senses and
physical mentality accept, there would be a very narrow term for this
evolution, and the human being could not hope to accomplish anything
essentially greater than his present achievement. But this body, as
ancient occult science discovered, is not the whole even of our physical
being ; this gross density is not all of our substance. The oldest Vedantic
knowledge tells us of five degrees of our being, the material, the vital,
the mental, the ideal, the spiritual or beatific and to each of these grades
of our soul there corresponds a grade of our substance, a sheath as it
was called in the ancient figurative language. A later psychology found
that these five sheaths of our substance were the material of three bodies,
gross physical, subtle and causal, in all of which the soul actually and
simultaneously dwells, although here and now we are superficially con-
scious only of the material vehicle. But it is possible to become conscious
in our other bodies as well and it is in fact the opening up of the veil
between them and consequently between our physical, psychical and
ideal personalities which is the cause of those "psychic" and "occult"
phenomena that are now beginning to be increasingly though yet too
little and too clumsily examined, even while they are far too much
exploited. The old Hathayogins and Tantriks of India had long ago
reduced this matter of the higher human life and body to a science.

THE ASCENDING SERIES OF SUBSTANCE 239

They had discovered six nervous centres of life in the dense body cor-
responding to six centres of life and mind faculty in the subtle, and they
had found out subtle physical exercises by which these centres, now
closed, could be opened up, the higher psychical life proper to our subtle
existence entered into by man, and even the physical and vital obstruc-
tions to the experience of the ideal and spiritual being could be destroyed.
It is significant that one prominent result claimed by the Hathayogins
for their practices and verified in many respects was a control of the
physical life-force which liberated them from some of the ordinary habits
or so-called laws thought by physical science to be inseparable from life
in the body.

Behind all these terms of ancient psycho-physical science lies the
one great fact and law of our being that whatever be its temporary poise
of form, consciousness, power in this material evolution, there must be
behind it and there is a greater, a truer existence of which this is only
the external result and physically sensible aspect. Our substance does
not end with the physical body; that is only the earthly pedestal, the
terrestrial base, the material starting-point. As there are behind our
waking mentality vaster ranges of consciousness subconscient and super-
conscient to it of which we become sometimes abnormally aware, so there
are behind our gross physical being other and subtler grades of substance
with a finer law and a greater power which support the denser body and
which can by our entering into the ranges of consciousness belonging to
them be made to impose that law and power on our dense matter and
substitute their purer, higher, intenser conditions of being for the gross-
ness and limitation of our present physical life and impulses and habits.
If that be so, then the evolution of a nobler physical existence not lim-
ited by the ordinary conditions of animal birth and life and death, of
difficult alimentation and facility of disorder and disease and subjection
to poor and unsatisfied vital cravings ceases to have the appearance of a
dream and chimera and becomes a possibility founded upon a rational
and philosophic truth which is in accordance with all the rest that we
have hitherto known, experienced or been able to think out about the
overt and secret truth of our existence.

So it should rationally be ; for the unmterrupted series of the prin-
ciples of our being and their close mutual connection is too e\ddent for
it to be possible that one of them should be condemned and cut oft" while
the others are capable of a divine liberation. The ascent of man from
the physical to the supramental must open out the possibility of a cor-

240 THE LIFE DIVINE

responding ascent in the grades of substance to that ideal or causal body
which is proper to our supramental being, and the conquest of the lower
principles by supermind and its liberation of them into a divine life and
a divine mentality must also render possible a conquest of our physical
limitations by the power and principle of supramental substance. And
this means the evolution not only of an untrammelled consciousness, a
mind and sense not shut up in the walls of the physical ego or limited
to the poor basis of knowledge given by the physical organs of sense,
but a life-power liberated more and more from its mortal limitations, a
physical life fit for a divine inhabitant and, — in the sense not of attach-
ment or of restriction to our present corporeal frame but an exceeding
of the law of the physical body, — the conquest of death, an earthly im-
mortality. For from the divine Bliss, the original Delight of existence,
the Lord of Immortality comes pouring the wine of that Bliss, the mystic
Soma, into these jars of mentalised living matter; eternal and beautiful,
he enters into these sheaths of substance for the integral transformation
of the being and nature.

CHAPTER XXVII

THE SEVENFOLD CHORD OF BEING

In the ignorance of my mind, I ask of these steps of the
Gods that are set within. The all-knowing Gods have taken
the Infant of a year and they have woven about him seven
threads to make this weft.

Rig Veda}

WE HAVE now, by our scrutiny of the seven great terms of existence
which the ancient seers fixed on as the foundation and sevenfold
mode of all cosmic existence, discerned the gradations of evolution and
involution and arrived at the basis of knowledge towards which we were
striving. We have laid down that the origin, the continent, the initial
and the ultimate reality of all that is in the cosmos is the triune
principle of transcendent and infinite Existence, Consciousness and
Bliss which is the nature of divine being. Consciousness has two as-
pects, illuminating and effective, state and power of self-awareness and
state and power of self-force, by which Being possesses itself whether
in its static condition or in its dynamic movement; for in its creative
action it knows by omnipotent self-consciousness all that is latent within
it and produces and governs the universe of its potentialities by an
omniscient self-energy. This creative action of the All-existent has its
nodus in the fourth, the intermediate principle of Supermind or Real-
Idea, in which a divine Knowledge one with self-existence and self-
awareness and a substantial Will which is in perfect unison with that
knowledge, because it is itself in its substance and nature that self-
conscious self-existence dynamic in illumined action, develop infallibly
the movement and form and law of things in right accordance with their
self-existent Truth and in harmony with the significances of its manifes-
tation.

The creation depends on and moves between the biune principle
of unity and multiplicity; it is a manifoldness of idea and force and
form which is the expression of an original unity, and it is an eternal
oneness which is the foundation and reality of the multiple worlds and

'I. 164. s.

241

242 THE LIFE DIVINE

makes their play possible. Supermind therefore proceeds by a double
faculty of comprehensive and apprehensive knowledge ; proceeding from
the essential oneness to the resultant multiplicity, it comprehends all
things in itself as itself the One in its manifold aspects and it apprehends
separately all things in itself as objects of its will and knowledge. While
to its original self-awareness all things are one being, one consciousness,
one will, one self-delight and the whole movement of things a movement
one and indivisible, it proceeds in its action from the unity to the mul-
tiplicity and from multiplicity to unity, creating an ordered relation
between them and an appearance but not a binding reality of division,
a subtle unseparating division, or rather a demarcation and determina-
tion within the indivisible. The Supermind is the divine Gnosis which
creates, governs and upholds the worlds: it is the secret Wisdom which
upholds both our Knowledge and our Ignorance.

We have discovered also that Mind, Life and Matter are a triple
aspect of these higher principles working, so far as our universe is con-
cerned, in subjection to the principle of Ignorance, to the superficial
and apparent self-forgetfulness of the One in its play of division and
multiplicity. Really, these three are only subordinate powers of the
divine quaternary: Mind is a subordinate power of Supermind which
takes its stand in the standpoint of division, actually forgetful here of
the oneness behind though able to return to it by reillumination from
the supramental; Life is similarly a subordinate power of the energy
aspect of Sachchidananda, it is Force working out form and the play of
conscious energy from the standpoint of division created by Mind;
Matter is the form of substance of being which the existence of Sach-
chidananda assumes when it subjects itself to this phenomenal action of
its own consciousness and force.

In addition, there is a fourth principle which comes into manifesta-
tion at the nodus of mind, life and body, that which we call the soul;
but this has a double appearance, in front the desire-soul which strives
for the possession and delight of things, and, behind and either largely
or entirely concealed by the desire-soul, the true psychic entity which
is the real repository of the experiences of the spirit. And we have con-
cluded that this fourth human principle is a projection and an action of
the third divine principle of infinite Bliss, but an action in the terms of
our consciousness and under the conditions of soul-evolution in this
world. As the existence of the Divine is in its nature an infinite con-
sciousness and the self-power of that consciousness, so the nature of its

THE SEVENFOLD CHORD OF BEING 243

infinite consciousness is pure and infinite Bliss; self-possession and self-
awareness are the essence of its self-delight. The cosmos also is a play
of this divine self-delight and the delight of that play is entirely pos-
sessed by the Universal; but in the individual owing to the action of
ignorance and division it is held back in the subliminal and the super-
conscient being; on our surface it lacks and has to be sought for, found
and possessed by the development of the individual consciousness to-
wards universality and transcendence.

We may, therefore, if we will, pose eight^ principles instead of
seven, and then we perceive that our existence is a sort of refraction
of the divine existence, in inverted order of ascent and descent, thus
ranged, —

Existence Matter

Consciousness-Force Life

Bliss Psyche

Supermind Mind.

The Divine descends from pure existence through the play of
Consciousness-Force and Bliss and the creative medium of Supermind
into cosmic being; we ascend from Matter through a developing life,
soul and mind and the illuminating medium of supermind towards the
divine being. The knot of the two, the higher and the lower hemisphere,^
is where mind and supermind meet with a veil between them. The
rending of the veil is the condition of the divine life in humanity; for
by that rending, by the illumining descent of the higher into the nature
of the lower being and the forceful ascent of the lower being into the
nature of the higher, mind can recover its divine light in the all-compre-
hending supermind, the soul realise its divine self in the all-possessing
all-blissful Ananda, life repossess its divine power in the play of omnip-
otent Conscious- Force and Matter open to its divine liberty as a form
of the divine Existence. And if there be any goal to the evolution which
finds here its present crown and head in the human being, other than
an aimless circling and an individual escape from the circling, if the
infinite potentiality of this creature, who alone here stands between
Spirit and Matter with the power to mediate between them, has any
meaning other than an ultimate awakening from the delusion of life by

^ The Vedic seers speak of the seven Rays, but also of eight, nine, ten or twelve.
^ Pardrdha and Apardrdha.

244 THE LIFE DIVINE

despair and disgust of the cosmic effort and its complete rejection, then
even such "a luminous and puissant transfiguration and emergence of the
Divine in the creature must be that high-uplifted goal and that supreme
significance.

But before we can turn to the psychological and practical condi-
tions under which such a transfiguration may be changed from an essen-
tial possibility into a dynamic potentiality, we have much to consider;
for we must discern not only the essential principles of the descent of
Sachchidananda into cosmic existence, which we have already done, but
the large plan of its order here and the nature and action of the mani-
fested power of Conscious-Force which reigns over the conditions under
which we now exist. At present, what we have first to see is that the
seven or the eight principles we have examined are essential to all cosmic
creation and are there, manifested or as yet unmanifested, in ourselves,
in tliis "Infant of a year" which we still are, — for we are far yet from
being the adults of evolutionary Nature. The higher Trinity is the
source and basis of all existence and play of existence, and all cosmos
must be an expression and action of its essential reality. No universe
can be merely a form of being which has sprung up and outlined itself
in an absolute nullity and void and remains standing out against a non-
existent emptiness. It must be either a figure of existence within the
infinite Existence who is beyond all 'figure or it must be itself the All-
Existence. In fact, when we unify our self with cosmic being, we see that
it is really both of these things at once; that is to say, it is the All-
Existent figuring Himself out in an infinite series of rhythms in His own
conceptive extension of Himself as Time and Space. Moreover we see
that this cosmic action or any cosmic action is impossible without the
play of an infinite Force of Existence which produces and regulates all
these forms and movements; and that Force equally presupposes or is
the action of an infinite Consciousness, because it is in its nature a
cosmic Will determining all relations and apprehending them by its own
mode of awareness, and it could not so determine and apprehend them
if there were no comprehensive Consciousness behind that mode of cos-
mic awareness to originate as well as to hold, fix and reflect through it
the relations of Being in the developing formation or becoming of itself
v/hich we call a universe.

Finally, Consciousness being thus omniscient and omnipotent, in
entire luminous possession of itself, and such entire luminous possession
being necessarily and in its very nature Bliss, for it cannot be anything

THE SEVENFOLD CHORD OF BEING 245

else, a vast universal self-delight must be the cause, essence and object
of cosmic existence. "If there were not" says the ancient seer ''this
all-encompassing ether of Delight of existence in which we dwell, if that
delight were not our ether, then none could breathe, none could live."
This self-bliss may become subconscient, seemingly lost on the surface,
but not only must it be there at our roots, all existence must be essen-
tially a seeking and reaching out to discover and possess it, and in pro-
portion as the creature in the cosmos finds himself, whether in will and
power or in light and knowledge or in being and wideness or in love and
joy itself, he must awaken to something of the secret ecstasy. Joy of
being, delight of realisation by knowledge, rapture of possession by w^ill
and power or creative force, ecstasy of union in love and joy are the
highest terms of expanding life because they are the essence of existence
itself in its hidden roots as on its yet unseen heights. Wherever, then,
cosmic existence manifests itself, these three must be behind and
within it.

But infinite Existence, Consciousness and Bliss need not throw
themselves out into apparent being at all or, doing so, it would not be
cosmic being, but simply an infinity of figures without fixed order or
relation, if they did not hold or develop and bring out from themselves
this fourth term of Supermind, of the divine Gnosis. There must be in
every cosmos a power of Knowledge and Will which out of infinite
potentiality fixes determined relations, develops the result out of the
seed, rolls out the mighty rhythms of cosmic Law and views and governs
the worlds as their immortal and infinite Seer and Ruler.-* This power
indeed is nothing else than Sachchidananda Himself; it creates nothing
which is not in its own self-existence, and for that reason all cosmic and
real Law is a thing not imposed from outside, but from within, all
development is self-development, all seed and result are seed of a Truth
of things and result of that seed determined out of its potentialities.
For the same reason no Law is absolute, because only the infinite is
absolute, and everything contains within itself endless potentialities
quite beyond its determined form and course, which are only deter-
mined through a self-limitation by Idea proceeding from an infinite
liberty within. This power of self-limitation is necessarily inherent in
the boundless All-Existent. The Infinite would not be the Infinite if it
could not assume a manifold finiteness; the Absolute would not be the

*The Seer, the Thinker, He who becomes everywhere, the Self-existent. — Isha
Upanishad. 8.

246 THE LIFE DIVINE

Absolute if it were denied in knowledge and power and will and manifes-
tation of being a boundless capacity of self-determination. This Super-
mind then is the Truth or Real-Idea, inherent in all cosmic force and
existence, which is necessary, itself remaining infinite, to determine and
combine and uphold relation and order and the great lines of the mani-
festation. In the language of the Vedic Rishis, as infinite Existence,
Consciousness and Bliss are the three highest and hidden Names of the
Nameless, so this Supermind is the fourth Name^ — fourth to That in
its descent, fourth to us in our ascension.

But Mind, Life and Matter, the lower trilogy, are also indispensa-
ble to all cosmic being, not necessarily in the form or with the action and
conditions which we know upon earth or in this material universe, but
in some kind of action, however luminous, however puissant, however
subtle. For Mind is essentially that faculty of Supermind which meas-
ures and limits, which fixes a particular centre and views from that the
cosmic movement and its interactions. Granted that in a particular
world, plane or cosmic arrangement, mind need not be limited, or rather
that the being who uses mind as a subordinate faculty need not be
incapable of seeing things from other centres or standpoints or even
from the real Centre of all or in the vastness of a universal self-diffusion,
still if he is not capable of fixing himself normally in his own firm stand-
point for certain purposes of the divine activity, if there is only the
universal self-diffusion or only infinite centres without some determin-
ing or freely limiting action for each, then there is no cosmos but only
a Being musing within Himself infinitely as a creator or poet may muse
freely, not plastically, before he proceeds to the determining work of
creation. Such a state must exist somewhere in the infinite scale of
existence, but it is not what we understand by a cosmos. Whatever
order there may be in it, must be a sort of unfixed, unbinding order such
as Supermind might evolve before it had proceeded to the work of fixed
development, measurement and interaction of relations. For that meas-
urement and interaction Mind is necessary, though it need not be aware
of itself as anything but a subordinate action of Supermind nor develop
the interaction of relations on the basis of a self-imprisoned egoism such
as we see active in terrestrial Nature.

Mind once existent, Life and Form of substance follow; for life is
simply the determination of force and action, of relation and interaction

^ Turlyam svid, "a certain Fourth," ako called turiyam dhdma, the fourth plac-
ing or poise of existence.

THE SEVENFOLD CHORD OF BEING 247

of energy from many fixed centres of consciousness, — fixed, not neces-
sarily in place or time, but in a persistent coexistence of beings or soul-
forms of the Eternal supporting a cosmic harmony. That life may be
very different from life as we know or conceive it, but essentially it
would be the same principle at work which we see here figured as vitality,
— the principle to which the ancient Indian thinkers gave the name of
Vayu or Prana, the life-stuff, the substantial will and energy in the
cosmos working out into determined form and action and conscious
dynamis of being. Substance too might be very different from our view
and sense of material body, much more subtle, much less rigidly binding
in its law of self-division and mutual resistance, and body or form might
be an instrument and not a prison, yet for the cosmic interaction some
determination of form and substance would always be necessary, even
if it be only a mental body or something yet more luminous, subtle and
puissantly and freely responsive than the freest mental body.

It follows that wherever Cosmos is, there, even if only one principle
be initially apparent, even if at first that seem to be the sole principle of
things and everything else that may appear afterwards in the world seem
to be no more than its forms and results and not in themselves indis-
pensable to cosmic existence, such a front presented by being can only
be an illusory mask or appearance of its real truth. Where one principle
is manifest in Cosmos, there all the rest must be not merely present and
passively latent, but secretly at work. In any given world its scale and
harmony of being may be openly in possession of all seven at a higher
or lower degree of activity; in another they may be all involved in one
which becomes the initial or fundamental principle of evolution in that
world, but evolution of the involved there must be. The evolution of
the sevenfold power of being, the realisation of its septuple Name, must
be the destiny of any world which starts apparently from the involution
of all in one power.^ Therefore the material universe was bound in the
nature of things to evolve from its hidden life apparent life, from its
hidden mind apparent mind, and it must in the same nature of things
evolve from its hidden Supermind apparent Supermind and from the
concealed Spirit within it the triune glory of Sachchidananda. The only
question is whether the earth is to be a scene of that emergence or the
human creation on this or any other material scene, in this or any other

" In any given world there need not be an involution but only a subordination
of the other principles to one or their inclusion in one ; then evolution is not a ne-
cessity of that world-order.

248 THE LIFE DIVINE

cycle of the large wheelings of Time, its instrument and vehicle. The
ancient seers believed in this possibility for man and held it to be his
divine destiny; the modern thinker does not even conceive of it or, if he
conceived, would deny or doubt. If he sees a vision of the Superman,
it is in the figure of increased degrees of mentality or vitality; he admits
no other emergency, sees nothing beyond these principles, for these have
traced for us up till now our limit and circle. In this progressive world,
with this human creature in whom the divine spark has been kindled,
real wisdom is likely to dwell with the higher aspiration rather than
with the denial of aspiration or with the hope that limits and circum-
scribes itself within those narrow walls of apparent possibility which are
only our intermediate house of training. In the spiritual order of things,
the higher we project our view and our aspiration, the greater the Truth
that seeks to descend upon us, because it is already there within us and
calls for its release from the covering that conceals it in manifested
Nature.

CHAPTER XXVIII

SUPERMIND, MIND AND THE OVERMIND MAYA

There is a Permanent, a Truth hidden by a Truth where
the Sun unyokes his horses. The ten hundreds (of his rays)
came together — That One. I saw the most glorious of the
Forms of the Gods.

Rig Veda}
The face of Truth is hidden by a golden lid; that re-
move, O Fostering Sun, for the Law of the Truth, for sight.
O Sun, 0 sole Seer, marshal thy rays, gather them together,
— let me see of thee thy happiest form of all ; that Conscious
Being everywhere. He am I.

Isha Upanishad.'
The Truth, the Right, the Vast.

Atharva Veda.'
It became both truth and falsehood. It became the
Truth, even all this that is.

Taittiriya Upanishad.*'

ONE point remains to be cleared which we have till now left in ob-
scurity, the process of the lapse into the Ignorance; for we have
seen that nothing in the original nature of Mind, Life or Matter neces-
sitates a fall from Knowledge. It has been shown indeed that division
of consciousness is the basis of the Ignorance, a division of individual
consciousness from the cosmic and the transcendent of which yet it is
an intimate part, in essence inseparable, a division of Mind from the
supramental Truth of which it should be a subordinate action, of Life
from the original Force of which it is one energism, of Matter from the
original Existence of which it is one form of substance. But it has still
to be made clear how this division came about in the Indivisible, by what
peculiar self-diminishing or self-effacing action of Consciousness-Force in
the Being: for since all is a movement of that Force, only by some such
action obscuring its own plenary light and power can there have arisen
the dynamic and effective phenomenon of the Ignorance. But this prob-
lem can be left over to be treated in a more close examination of the dual
phenomenon of Knowledge-Ignorance which makes our consciousness

^V. 62. I. 'Verses 15, 16. «XIL i. i. m. 6.

249

250 THE LIFE DIVINE

a blend of light and darkness, a half-light between the full day of the
supramental Truth and the night of the material Inconscience. All that
is necessary to note at present is that it must be in its essential character
an exclusive concentration on one movement and status of Conscious
Being, which puts all the rest of consciousness and being behind and veils
it from that one movement's now partial knowledge.

Still there is one aspect of this problem which must be immediately
considered; it is the gulf created between Mind as we know it and the
supramental Truth-Consciousness of which we have found Mind in its
origin to be a subordinate process. For this gulf is considerable and, if
there are no gradations between the two levels of consciousness, a tran-
sition from one to the other, either in the descending involution of Spirit
into Matter or the corresponding evolution in Matter of the concealed
grades leading back to the Spirit, seems in the highest degree improbable,
if not impossible. For Mind as we know it is a power of the Ignorance
seeking for Truth, groping with difficulty to find it, reaching only mental
constructions and representations of it in word and idea, in mind forma-
tions, sense formations, — as if bright or shadowy photographs or films of
a distant Reality were all that it could achieve. Supermind, on the con-
trary, is in actual and natural possession of the Truth and its formations
are forms of the Reality, not constructions, representations or indicative
figures. No doubt, the evolving Mind in us is hampered by its encase-
ment in the obscurity of this life and body, and the original Mind princi-
ple in the involutionary descent is a thing of greater power to which we
have not fully reached, able to act with freedom in its own sphere or
province, to build more revelatory constructions, more minutely inspired
formations, more subtle and significant embodiments in which the light
of Truth is present and palpable. But still that too is not likely to be
essentially different in its characteristic action, for it too is a movement
into the Ignorance, not a still unseparated portion of the Truth-Con-
sciousness. There must be somewhere in the descending and ascending
scale of Being an intermediate power and plane of consciousness, per-
haps something more than that, something with an original creative force,
through which the involutionary transition from Mind in the Knowledge
to Mind in the Ignorance was effected and through which again the evo-
lutionary reverse transition becomes intelligible and possible. For the in-
volutionary transition this intervention is a logical imperative, for the
evolutionary it is a practical necessity. For in the evolution there are in-
deed radical transitions, from indeterminate Energy to organised Matter,

SUPERMIND, MIND AND THE OVERMIND MAYA 251

from inanimate Matter to Life, from a subconscious or submental to a
perceptive and feeling and acting Life, from primitive animal mentality
to conceptive reasoning Mind observing and governing Life and observ-
ing itself also, able to act as an independent entity and even to seek con-
sciously for self-transcendence; but these leaps, even when considerable,
are to some extent prepared by slow gradations which make them con-
ceivable and feasible. There can be no such immense hiatus as seems to
exist between supramental Truth-Consciousness and the Mind in the
Ignorance.

But if such intervening gradations exist, it is clear that they must
be superconscient to human mind which does not seem to have in its
normal state any entry into these higher grades of being. Man is limited
in his consciousness by mind and even by a given range or scale of mind:
what is below his mind, submental or mental but nether to his scale,
readily seems to him subconscious or not distinguishable from complete
inconscience; what is above it is to him superconscious and he is al-
most inclined to regard it as void of awareness, a sort of luminous Incon-
science. Just as he is limited to a certain scale of sounds or of colours
and what is above or below that scale is to him inaudible and invisible
or at least indistinguishable, so is it with his scale of mental conscious-
ness, confined at either extremity by an incapacity which marks his
upper and his nether limit. He has no sufficient means of communica-
tion even with the animal who is his mental congener, though not his
equal, and he is even capable of denying mind or real consciousness
to it because its modes are other and narrower than those with which
in himself and his kind he is familiar; he can observe submental being
from outside but cannot at all communicate with it or enter intimately
into its nature. Equally the superconscious is to him a closed book which
may well be filled only with empty pages. At first sight, then, it would
appear as if he had no means of contact with these higher gradations
of consciousness: if so, they cannot act as links or bridges and his evo-
lution must cease with his accomplished mental range and cannot ex-
ceed it; Nature in drawing these limits has written finis to his upward
endeavour.

But when we look more closely, we perceive that this normality is
deceptive and that in fact there are several directions in which human
mind reaches beyond itself, tends towards self-exceeding; these are pre-
cisely the necessary lines of contact or veiled or half-veiled passages
which connect it with higher grades of consciousness of the self-mani-

252 THE LIFE DIVINE

festing Spirit. First, we have noted the place Intuition occupies in the
human means of knowledge, and Intuition is in its very nature a pro-
jection of the characteristic action of these higher grades into the mind
of Ignorance. It is true that in human mind its action is largely hidden
by the interventions of our normal intelligence; a pure intuition is a rare
occurrence in our mental activity: for what we call by the name is usually
a point of direct knowledge which is immediately caught and coated over
with mental stuff, so that it serves only as an invisible or a very tiny
nucleus of a crystallisation which is in its mass intellectual or otherwise
mental in character; or else the flash of intuition is quickly replaced or
intercepted, before it has a chance of manifesting itself, by a rapid imita-
tive mental movement, insight or quick perception or some swift-leaping
process of thought which owes its appearance to the stimulus of the com-
ing intuition but obstructs its entry or covers it with a substituted mental
suggestion true or erroneous but in either case not the authentic intuitive
movement. Nevertheless, the fact of this intervention from above, the
fact that behind all our original thinking or authentic perception of
things there is a veiled, a half-veiled or a swift unveiled intuitive element
is enough to establish a connection between mind and what is above it;
it opens a passage of communication and of entry into the superior spirit-
ranges. There is also the reaching out of mind to exceed the personal ego
limitation, to see things in a certain impersonality and universality. Im-
personality is the first character of cosmic self; universality, non-limita-
tion by the single or limiting point of view, is the character of cosmic
perception and knowledge: this tendency is therefore a widening, how-
ever rudimentary, of these restricted mind areas towards cosmicity, to-
wards a quality which is the very character of the higher mental planes,
— towards that superconscient cosmic Mind which, we have suggested,
must in the nature of things be the original mind-action of which ours is
only a derivative and inferior process. Again, there is not an entire ab-
sence of penetration from above into our mental limits. The phenomena
of genius are really the result of such a penetration, — veiled no doubt,
because the light of the superior consciousness not only acts within nar-
• row limits, usually in a special field, without any regulated separate or-
ganization of its characteristic energies, often indeed quite fitfully, er-
ratically and with a supernormal or abnormal irresponsible governance,
but also in entering the mind it subdues and adapts itself to mind sub-
stance so that it is only a modified or diminished dynamis that reaches
us, not all the original divine luminosity of what might be called the over-

SUPERMIND, MIND AND THE OVERMIND MAYA 253

head consciousness beyond us. Still the phenomena of inspiration, of
revelatory vision or of intuitive perception and intuitive discernment,
surpassing our less illumined or less powerful normal mind-action, are
there and their origin is unmistakable. Finally, there is the vast and mul-
titudinous field of mystic and spiritual experience, and here the gates
already lie wide open to the possibility of extending our consciousness
beyond its present limits, — unless, indeed, by an obscurantism that re-
fuses to inquire or an attachment to our boundaries of mental normality
we shut them or turn away from the vistas they open before us. But
in our present investigation we cannot afford to neglect the possibilities
which these domains of mankind's endeavour bring near to us, or the
added knowledge of oneself and of the veiled Reality which is their gift
to human mind, the greater light which arms them with the right to act
upon us and is the innate power of their existence.

There are two successive movements of consciousness, difficult but
well within our capacity, by which we can have access to the superior
gradations of our conscious existence. There is first a movement inward
by which, instead of living in our surface mind, we break the wall be-
tween our external and our now subliminal self; this can be brought
about by a gradual effort and discipline or by a vehement transition,
sometimes a forceful involuntary rupture, — the latter by no means safe
for the limited human mind accustomed to live securely only within its
normal limits, — but in either way, safe or unsafe, the thing can be done.
What we discover within this secret part of ourselves is an inner being,
a soul, an inner mind, an inner life, an inner subtle-physical entity which
is much larger in its potentialities, more plastic, more powerful, more
capable of a manifold knowledge and dynamism than our surface mind,
life or body; especially, it is capable of a direct communication with the
universal forces, movements, objects of the cosmos, a direct feeling and
opening to them, a direct action on them and even a widening of itself
beyond the limits of the personal mind, the personal life, the body, so
that it feels itself more and more a universal being no longer limited by
the existing walls of our too narrow mental, vital, physical existence.
This widening can extend itself to a complete entry into the conscious-
ness of cosmic Mind, into unity with the universal Life, even into a one-
ness with universal Matter. That, however, is still an identification either
with a diminished cosmic truth or with the cosmic Ignorance.

But once this entry into the inner being is accomplished, the irmer
Self is found to be capable of an opening, an ascent upwards into things

254 THE LIFE DIVINE

beyond our present mental level ; that is the second spiritual possibility
in us. The first most ordinary result is a discovery of a vast static and
silent Self which we feel to be our real or our basic existence, the founda-
tion of all else that we are. There may be even an extinction, a Nirvana
both of our active being and of the sense of self into a Reality that is in-
definable and inexpressible. But also we can realise that this self is not
only our own spiritual being but the true self of all others; it presents
itself then as the underlying truth of cosmic existence. It is possible to
remain in a Nirvana of all individuality, to stop at a static realisation or,
regarding the cosmic movement as a superficial play or illusion imposed
on the silent Self, to pass into some supreme immobile and immutable
status beyond the universe. But another less negative line of supernor-
mal experience also offers itself; for there takes place a large dynamic
descent of light, knowledge, power, bliss or other supernormal energies
into our self of silence, and we can ascend too into higher regions of the
Spirit where its immobile status is the foundation of those great and
luminous energies. It is evident in either case that we have risen beyond
the mind of Ignorance into a spiritual state; but, in the dynamic move-
ment, the resultant greater action of Consciousness-Force may present
itself either simply as a pure spiritual dynamis not otherwise determinate
in its character or it may reveal a spiritual mind-range where mind is no
longer ignorant of the Reality, — not yet a supermind level, but deriving
from the supramental Truth-Consciousness and still luminous with some-
thing of its knowledge.

It is in the latter alternative that we find the secret we are seeking,
the means of the transition, the needed step towards a supramental trans-
formation ; for we perceive a graduality of ascent, a communication with
a more and more deep and immense light and power from above, a scale
of intensities which can be regarded as so many stairs in the ascension
of Mind or in a descent into Mind from That which is beyond it. We are
aware of a sealike downpour of masses of a spontaneous knowledge which
assumes the nature of Thought but has a different character from the
process of thought to which we are accustomed; for there is nothing here
of seeking, no trace of mental construction, no labour of speculation or
difficult discovery; it is an automatic and spontaneous knowledge from a
Higher Mind that seems to be in possession of Truth and not in search
of hidden and withheld realities. One observes that this Thought is much
more capable than the mind of including at once a mass of knowledge in
a single view; it has a cosmic character, not the stamp of an individual

SUPERMIND, MIND AND THE OVERMIND MAYA 255

thinking. Beyond this Truth-Thought we can distinguish a greater il-
lumination instinct with an increased power and intensity and driving
force, a luminosity of the nature of Truth-Sight with thought formula-
tion as a minor and dependent activity. If we accept the Vedic image of
the Sun of Truth, — an image which in this experience becomes a reality,
— we may compare the action of the Higher Mind to a composed and
steady sunshine, the energy of the Illumined Mind beyond it to an out-
pouring of massive lightnings of flaming sun-stuff. Still beyond can be
met a yet greater power of the Truth- Force, an intimate and exact
Truth-vision, Truth-thought, Truth-sense, Truth-feeling, Truth-action,
to which we can give in a special sense the name of Intuition ; for though
we have applied that word for want of a better to any supra-intellectual
direct way of knowing, yet what we actually know as intuition is only
one special movement of self-existent knowledge. This new range is its
origin ; it imparts to our intuitions something of its own distinct character
and is very clearly an intermediary of a greater Truth-Light with which
our mind cannot directly communicate. At the source of this Intuition
we discover a superconscient cosmic Mind in direct contact with the
Supramental Truth-Consciousness, an original intensity determinant of
all movements below it and all mental energies, — not Mind as we know
it, but an Overmind that covers as with the wide wings of some creative
Oversoul this whole lower hemisphere of Knowledge-Ignorance, links it
with that greater Truth-Consciousness while yet at the same time with
its brilliant golden Lid it veils the face of the greater Truth from our
sight, intervening with its flood of infinite possibilities as at once an ob-
stacle and a passage in our seeking of the spiritual law of our existence,
its highest aim, its secret Reahty. This then is the occult link we were
looking for ; this is the Power that at once connects and divides the su-
preme Knowledge and the cosmic Ignorance.

In its nature and law the Overmind is a delegate of the Supermind
Consciousness, its delegate to the Ignorance. Or we might speak of it as
a protective double, a screen of dissimilar similarity through which Super-
mind can act indirectly on an Ignorance whose darkness could not bear
or receive the direct impact of a supreme Light. Even, it is by the pro-
jection of this luminous Overmind corona that the diffusion of a dimin-
ished light in the Ignorance and the throwing of that contrary shadow
which swallows up in itself all light, the Inconscience, became at all poss
sible. For Supermind transmits to Overmind all its realities, but leaves
it to formulate them in a movement and according to an awareness of

256 THE LIFE DIVINE

things which is still a vision of Truth and yet at the same time a first
parent of the Ignorance. A line divides Supermind and Overmind which
permits a free transmission, allows the lower Power to derive from the
higher Power all it holds or sees, but automatically compels a transitional
change in the passage. The integrality of the Supermind keeps always
the essential truth of things, the total truth and the truth of its individ-
ual self-determinations clearly knit together ; it maintains in them an in-
separable unity and between them a close interpenetration and a free and
full consciousness of each other: but in Overmind this integrality is no
longer there. And yet the Overmind is well aware of the essential Truth
of things; it embraces the totality; it uses the individual self-determina-
tions without being limited by them: but although it knows their one-
ness, can realise it in a spiritual cognition, yet its dynamic movement,
even while relying on that for its security, is not directly determined by
it. Overmind Energy proceeds through an illimitable capacity of separa-
tion and combination of the powers and aspects of the integral and
indivisible all-comprehending Unity. It takes each Aspect or Power and
gives to it an independent action in which it acquires a full separate im-
portance and is able to work out, we might say, its own world of creation.
Purusha and Prakriti, Conscious Soul and executive Force of Nature, are
in the supramental harmony a two-aspected single truth, being and dy-
namis of the Reality; there can be no disequilibrium or predominance of
one over the other. In Overmind we have the origin of the cleavage, the
trenchant distinction made by the philosophy of the Sankhyas in which
they appear as two independent entities, Prakriti able to dominate Puru-
sha and cloud its freedom and power, reducing it to a witness and re-
cipient of her forms and actions, Purusha able to return to its separate
existence and abide in a free self-sovereignty by rejection of her original
overclouding material principle. So with the other aspects or powers of
the Divine Reality, One and Many, Divine Personality and Divine Im-
personality, and the rest; each is still an aspect and power of the one Re-
ality, but each is empowered to act as an independent entity in the whole,
arrive at the fullness of the possibilities of its separate expression and de-
velop the dynamic consequences of that separateness. At the same time
in Overmind this separateness is still founded on the basis of an implicit
underlying unity; all possibilities of combination and relation between
the separated Powers and Aspects, all interchanges and mutualities of
their energies are freely organised and their actuality always possible.
If we regard the Powers of the Reality as so many Godheads, we

SUPERMIND, MIND AND THE OVERMIND MAYA 257

can say that the Overmind releases a million Godheads into action, each
empowered to create its own world, each world capable of relation, com-
munication and interplay with the others. There are in the Veda different
formulations of the nature of the Gods: it is said they are all one Exist-
ence to which the sages give different names; yet each God is worshipped
as if he by himself is that Existence, one who is all the other Gods to-
gether or contains them in his being; and yet again each is a separate
Deity acting sometimes in unison with companion deities, sometimes
separately, sometimes even in apparent opposition to other Godheads of
the same Existence. In the Supermind all this would be held together
as a harmonised play of the one Existence; in the Overmind each of
these three conditions could be a separate action or basis of action and
have its own principle of development and consequences and yet each
keep the power to combine with the others in a more composite harmony.
As with the One Existence, so with its Consciousness and Force. The One
Consciousness is separated into many independent forms of consciousness
and knowledge; each follows out its own line of truth which it has to
realize. The one total and many-sided Real-Idea is split up into its
many sides; each becomes an independent Idea-Force with the power to
realise itself. The one Consciousness- Force is liberated into its million
forces, and each of these forces has the right to fulfil itself or to assume,
if needed, a hegemony and take up for its own utility the other forces.
So too the Delight of Existence is loosed out into all manner of delights
and each can carry in itself its independent fullness or sovereign extreme.
Overmind thus gives to the One Existence-Consciousness-Bliss the char-
acter of a teeming of infinite possibilities which can be developed into a
multitude of worlds or thrown together into one world in which the end-
lessly variable outcome of their play is the determinant of the creation, of
its process, its course and its consequence.

Since the Consciousness- Force of the eternal Existence is the univer-
sal creatrix, the nature of a given world will depend on whatever self-
formulation of that Consciousness expresses itself in that world. Equally,
for each individual being, his seeing or representation to himself of the
world he lives in will depend on the poise or make which that Conscious-
ness has assumed in him. Our human mental consciousness sees the
world in sections cut by the reason and sense and put together in a forma-
tion which is also sectional ; the house it builds is planned to accommo-
date one or another generalised formulation of Truth, but excludes the
rest or admits some only as guests or dependents in the house. Over-

258 THE LIFE DIVINE

mind Consciousness is global in its cognition and can hold any number
of seemingly fundamental differences together in a reconciling vision.
Thus the mental reason sees Person and the Impersonal as opposites:
it conceives an impersonal Existence in which person and personality are
fictions of the Ignorance or temporary constructions; or, on the contrary,
it can see Person as the primary reality and the impersonal as a mental
abstraction or only stuff or means of manifestation. To the Overmind
intelligence these are separable Powers of the one Existence which can
pursue their independent self-affirmation and can also unite together their
different modes of action, creating both in their independence and in their
union different states of consciousness and being which can be all of them
valid and all capable of coexistence. A purely impersonal existence and
consciousness is true and possible, but also an entirely personal con-
sciousness and existence; the Impersonal Divine, Nirguna Brahman, and
the Personal Divine, Saguna Brahman, are here equal and coexistent
aspects of the Eternal. Impersonality can manifest with person subordi-
nated to it as a mode of expression ; but, equally. Person can be the re-
ality with impersonality as a mode of its nature: both aspects of mani- j
festation face each other in the infinite variety of conscious Existence. '
What to the mental reason are irreconcilable differences present them-
selves to the Overmind intelligence as coexistent correlatives; what to
the mental reason are contraries are to the Overmind intelligence com-
plementaries. Our mind sees that all things are born from Matter or ma-
terial Energy, exist by it, go back into it ; it concludes that Matter is the
eternal factor, the primary and ultimate reality. Brahman. Or it sees all
as born of Life-Force or Mind, existing by Life or by Mind, going back
into the universal Life or Mind, and it concludes that this world is a
creation of the cosmic Life-Force or of a cosmic Mind or Logos. Or
again it sees the world and all things as born of, existing by and going
back to the Real-Idea or Knowledge-Will of the Spirit or to the Spirit
itself and it concludes on an idealistic or spiritual view of the universe. It
can fix on any of these ways of seeing, but to its normal separative vision
each way excludes the others. Overmind consciousness perceives that
each view is true of the action of the principle it erects; it can see that
there is a material world-formula, a vital world-formula, a mental world-
formula, a spiritual world-formula, and each can predominate in a world
of its own and at the same time all can combine in one world as its con-
stituent powers. The self-formulation of Conscious Force on which our
world is based as an apparent Inconscience that conceals in itself a su-

SUPERMIND, MIND AND THE OVERMIND MAYA 259

preme Conscious-Existence and holds all the powers of Being together in
its inconscient secrecy, a world of universal Matter realising in itself Life,
Mind, Overmind, Supermind, Spirit, each of them in its turn taking up
the others as means of its self-expression. Matter proving in the spiritual
vision to have been always itself a manifestation of the Spirit, is to the
Overmind view a normal and easily realisable creation. In its power
of origination and in the process of its executive dynamis Overmind is an
organiser of many potentialities of Existence, each affirming its separate
reality but all capable of linking themselves together in many different
but simultaneous ways, a magician craftsman empowered to weave the
multicoloured wrap and woof of manifestation of a single entity in a
complex universe.

In this simultaneous development of multitudinous independent or
combined Powers or Potentials there is yet — or there is as yet — no chaos,
no conflict, no fall from Truth or Knowledge. The Overmind is a creator
of truths, not of illusions or falsehoods: what is worked out in any given
overmental energism or movement is the truth of the Aspect, Power,
Idea, Force, Delight which is liberated into independent action, the truth
of the consequences of its reality in that independence. There is no exclu-
siveness asserting each as the sole truth of being or the others as inferior
truths: each God knows all the Gods and their place in existence; each
Idea admits all other ideas and their right to be ; each Force concedes a
place to all other forces and their truth and consequences; no delight of
separate fulfilled existence or separate experience denies or condemns the
delight of other existence or other experience. The Overmind is a prin-
ciple of cosmic Truth and a vast and endless catholicity is its very
spirit; its energy is an all-dynamism as well as a principle of separate
dynamisms: it is a sort of inferior Supermind, — although it is concerned
predominantly not with absolutes, but with what might be called the
dynamic potentials or pragmatic truths of Reality, or with absolutes
mainly for their power of generating pragmatic or creative values, al-
though, too, its comprehension of things is more global than integral,
since its totality is built up of global wholes or constituted by separate
independent realities uniting or coalescing together, and although the
essential unity is grasped by it and felt to be basic of things and per-
vasive in their manifestation, but no longer as in the Supermind their
intimate and ever-present secret, their dominating continent, the over
constant builder of the harmonic whole of their activity and nature.

If we would understand the difference of this global Overmind Con-

2 60 THE LIFE DIVINE

sciousness from our separative and only imperfectly synthetic mental
consciousness, we may come near to it if we compare the strictly mental
with what would be an overmental view of activities in our material uni-
verse. To the Overmind, for example, all religions would be true as de-
velopments of the one eternal religion, all philosophies would be valid
each in its own field as a statement of its own universe-view from its own
angle, all political theories with their practice would be the legitimate
working out of an Idea Force with its right to application and practical
development in the play of the energies of Nature. In our separative
consciousness, imperfectly visited by glimpses of catholicity and univer-
sality, these things exist as opposites; each claims to be the truth and
taxes the others with error and falsehood, each feels impelled to refute or
destroy the others in order that itself alone may be the Truth and live: at
best, each must claim to be superior, admit all others only as inferior
truth-expressions. An overmental Intelligence would refuse to entertain
this conception or this drift to exclusiveness for a moment; it would allow
all to Hve as necessary to the whole or put each in its place in the whole or
assign to each its field of realisation or of endeavour. This is because in
us consciousness has come down completely into the divisions of the Ig-
norance; Truth is no longer either an Infinite or a cosmic whole with
many possible formulations, but a rigid affirmation holding any other
affirmation to be false because different from itself and entrenched in
other limits. Our mental consciousness can indeed arrive in its cognition
at a considerable approach towards a total comprehensiveness and
catholicity, but to organise that in action and life seems to be beyond
its power. Evolutionary Mind, manifest in individuals or collectivities,
throws up a multiplicity of divergent view-points, divergent lines of ac-
tion and lets them work themselves out side by side or iti collision or in
a certain intermixture; it can make selective harmonies, but it cannot
arrive at the harmonic control of a true totality. Cosmic Mind must have
even in the evolutionary Ignorance, like all totalities, such a harmony, if
only of arranged accords and discords; there is too in it an underlying
dynamism of oneness: but it carries the completeness of these things in
its depths, perhaps in a supermind-overmind substratum, but does not
impart it to individual Mind in the evolution, does not bring it or has not
yet brought it from the depths to the surface. An Overmind world would
be a world of harmony; the world of Ignorance in which we live is a
world of disharmony and struggle.

And still we can recognise at once in the Overmind the original cos-

SUPERMIND, MIND AND THE OVERMIND MAYA 2 6l

mic Maya, not a Maya of Ignorance but a Maya of Knowledge, yet a
Power which has made the Ignorance possible, even inevitable. For if
each principle loosed into action must follow its independent line and
carry out its complete consequences, the principle of separation must
also be allowed its complete course and arrive at its absolute conse-
quence ; this is the inevitable descent, jacilis descensus, which Conscious-
ness, once it admits the separative principle, follows till it enters by
obscuring infinitesimal fragmentation, tucchyena^ into the material In-
conscience, — the Inconscient Ocean of the Rig Veda, — and if the One is
born from that by its own greatness, it is still at first concealed by a
fragmentary separative existence and consciousness which is ours and in
which we have to piece things together to arrive at a whole. In that slow
and difficult emergence a certain semblance of truth is given to the dic-
tum of Heraclitus that War is the father of all things; for each idea, force,
separate consciousness, living being by the very necessity of its ignorance
enters into collision with others and tries to live and grow and fulfil itself
by independent self-assertion, not by harmony with the rest of existence.
Yet there is still the unknown underlying Oneness which compels us to
strive slowly towards some form of harmony, of interdependence, of con-
cording of discords, of a difficult unity. But it is only by the evolution in
us of the concealed superconscient powers of cosmic Truth and of the
Reality in which they are one that the harmony and unity we strive for
can be dynamically realised in the very fibre of our being and all its
self-expression and not merely in imperfect attempts, incomplete con-
structions, ever-changing approximations. The higher ranges of spiritual
Mind have to open upon our being and consciousness and also that which
is beyond even spiritual Mind must appear in us if we are to fulfil the
divine possibility of our birth into cosmic existence.

Overmind in its descent reaches a line which divides the cosmic
Truth from the cosmic Ignorance; it is the line at which it becomes
possible for Consciousness-Force, emphasising the separateness of each
independent movement created by Overmind and hiding or darkening
their unity, to divide Mind by an exclusive concentration from the over-
mental source. There has already been a similar separation of Overmind
from its supramental source, but with a transparency in the veil which
allows a conscious transmission and maintains a certain luminous kin-
ship; but here the veil is opaque and the transmission of the Overmind
motives to the Mind is occult and obscure. Mind separated acts as if it
^Rig Veda. X. 129. 3.

2 62 THE LIFE DIVINE

were an independent principle, and each mental being, each basic mental
idea, power, force stands similarly on its separate self; if it communicates
with or combines or contacts others, it is not with the catholic universality
of the Overmind movement, on a basis of underljring oneness, but as inde-
pendent units joining to form a separate constructed whole. It is by this
movement that we pass from the cosmic Truth into the cosmic Ignorance.
The cosmic Mind on this level, no doubt, comprehends its own unity, but
it is not aware of its own source and foundation in the Spirit or can only
comprehend it by the intelligence, not in any enduring experience; it acts
in itself as if by its own right and works out what it receives as material
without direct communication with the source from which it receives it.
Its units also act in ignorance of each other and of the cosmic whole ex-
cept for the knowledge that they can get by contact and communication,
— the basic sense of identity and the mutual penetration and understand-
ing that comes from it are no longer there. All the actions of this Mind
Energy proceed on the opposite basis of the Ignorance and its divisions
and, although they are the results of a certain conscious knowledge, it is
a partial knowledge, not a true and integral self-knowledge, nor a true
and integral world-knowledge. This character persists in Life and in sub-
tle Matter and reappears in the gross material universe which arises from
the final lapse into the Inconscience.

Yet, as in our subliminal or inner Mind, so in this Mind also a larger
power of communication and mutuality still remains, a freer play of men-
tality and sense than human mind possesses, and the Ignorance is not
complete ; a conscious harmony, an interdependent organisation of right
relations is more possible: mind is not yet perturbed by blind Life forces
or obscured by irresponsive Matter. It is a plane of Ignorance, but not
yet of falsehood or error, — or at least the lapse into falsehood and error is
not yet inevitable ; this Ignorance is limitative, but not necessarily f alsifi-
cative. There is limitation of knowledge, an organisation of partial truths,
but not a denial or opposite of truth or knowledge. This character of an
organisation of partial truths on a basis of separative knowledge persists
in Life and subtle Matter, for the exclusive concentration of Conscious-
ness-Force which puts them into separative action does not entirely
sever or veil Mind from Life or Mind and Life from Matter. The com-
plete separation can take place only when the stage of Inconscience has
been reached and our world of manifold Ignorance arises out of that tene-
brous matrix. These other still conscient stages of the involution are in-
deed organisations of Conscious Force in which each lives from his own

SUPERMIND, MESTD AND THE OVERMIND MAYA 263

centre, follows out his own possibilities, and the predominant principle
itself, whether Mind, Life or Matter, works out things on its own inde-
pendent basis; but what is worked out are truths of itself, not illusions
or a tangle of truth and falsehood, knowledge and ignorance. But when
by an exclusive concentration on Force and Form Consciousness-Force
seems phenomenally to separate Consciousness from Force, or when it
absorbs Consciousness in a blind sleep lost in Form and Force, then Con-
sciousness has to struggle back to itself by a fragmentary evolution
which necessitates error and makes falsehood inevitable. Nevertheless,
these things too are not illusions that have sprung out of an original
Non-Existence ; they are, we might say, the unavoidable truths of a world
born out of Inconscience. For the Ignorance is still in reality a knowl-
edge seeking for itself behind the original mask of Inconscience; it misses
and finds; its results, natural and even inevitable on their own line, are
the true consequence of the lapse, — in a way, even, the right working of
the recovery from the lapse. Existence plunging into an apparent Non-
Existence, Consciousness into an apparent Inconscience, Delight of ex-
istence into a vast cosmic insensibility are the first result of the fall and,
in the return from it by a struggling fragmentary experience, the render-
ing of Consciousness into the dual terms of truth and falsehood, knowl-
edge and error, of Existence into the dual terms of life and death, of
Delight of existence into the dual terms of pain and pleaseure are the
necessary process of the labour of self-discovery. A pure experience of
Truth, Knowledge, Delight, imperishable existence would here be itself a
contradiction of the truth of things. It could only be otherwise if all be-
ings in the evolution were quiescently responsive to the psychic elements
within them and to the Supermind underlying Nature's operations; but
here there comes in the Overmind law of each Force working out its own
possibilities. The natural possibilities of a world in which an original
Inconscience and a division of consciousness are the main principles,
would be the emergence of Forces of Darkness impelled to maintain the
Ignorance by which they live, an ignorant struggle to know originative of
falsehood and error, an ignorant struggle to live engendering wrong and
evil, an egoistic struggle to enjoy, parent of fragmentary joys and pains
and sufferings; these are therefore the inevitable first-imprinted char-
acters, though not the sole possibilities of our evolutionary existence.
Still, because the Non-Existence is a concealed Existence, the Incon-
science a concealed Consciousness, the insensibility a masked and dor-
mant Ananda, these secret realities must emerge; the hidden Overmind

264 THE LIFE DIVINE

and Supermind too must in the end fulfil themselves in this apparently-
opposite organisation from a dark Infinite.

Two things render that culmination more facile than it would
otherwise be. Overmind in the descent towards material creation has
originated modifications of itself, — Intuition especially with its penetra-
tive lightning flashes of truth lighting up local points and stretches of
country in our consciousness, — which can bring the concealed truth of
things nearer to our comprehension, and, by opening ourselves more
widely first in the inner being and then as a result in the outer surface self
also to the messages of these higher ranges of consciousness, by growing
into them, we can become ourselves also intuitive and overmental beings,
not limited by the intellect and sense, but capable of a more universal
comprehension and a direct touch of truth in its very self and body. In
fact flashes of enlightenment from these higher ranges already come to
us, but this intervention is mostly fragmentary, casual or partial; we
have still to begin to enlarge ourselves into their likeness and organise
in us the greater Truth activities of which we are potentially capable.
But, secondly, Overmind, Intuition, even Supermind not only must be, as
we have seen, principles inherent and involved in the Inconscience from
which we arise in the evolution and inevitably destined to evolve, but
are secretly present, occult actively with flashes of intuitive emergence
in the cosmic activity of Mind, Life and Matter. It is true that their ac-
tion is concealed and, even when they emerge, it is modified by the me-
dium, material, vital, mental in which they work and not easily recogni-
sable. Supermind cannot manifest itself as the Creator Power in the
universe from the beginning, for if it did, the Ignorance and Inconscience
would be impossible or else the slow evolution necessary would change
into a rapid transformation scene. Yet at every step of the material
energy we can see the stamp of inevitability given by a supramental
creator, in all the development of life and mind the play of the lines of
possibility and their combination which is the stamp of Overmind inter-
vention. As Life and Mind have been released in Matter, so too must in
their time these greater powers of the concealed Godhead emerge from the
involution and their supreme Light descend into us from above.

A divine Life in the manifestation is then not only possible as the
high result and ransom of our present life in the Ignorance but, if these
things are as we have seen them, it is the inevitable outcome and consum-
mation of Nature's evolutionary endeavour.
End of Book One

Book Two

THE KNOWLEDGE AND THE IGNORANCE
—THE SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION

PART I

THE INFINITE CONSCIOUSNESS

AND

THE IGNORANCE

CHAPTER I

INDETERMINATES, COSMIC DETERMINATIONS
AND THE INDETERMINABLE

The Unseen with whom there can be no pragmatic rela-
tions, unseizable, featureless, unthinkable, undesignable by-
name, whose subtance is the certitude of One Self, in whom
world-existence is stilled, who is all peace and bliss — that is
the Self, that is what must be known.

Mandukya Upanishad}

One sees it as a mystery or one speaks of it or hears of
it as a mystery, but none knows it.

Gita.''

When men seek after the Immutable, the Indetermi-
nable, the Unmanifest, the All Pervading, the Unthinkable,
the Summit Self, the Immobile, the Permanent, — equal in
mind to all, intent on the good of all beings, it is to Me that
they come.

High beyond the Intelligence is the Great Self, beyond
the Great Self is the Unmanifest, beyond the Unmanifest is
the Conscious Being. There is nothing beyond the Being, —
that is the extreme ultimate, that the supreme goal.

Katha Upanishad.*
Rare is the great of soul to whom all is the Divine
Being.

Gita.^

A CONSCIOUSNESS-FORCE, everywhere inherent in Existence,
acting even when concealed, is the creator of the worlds, the oc-
cult secret of Nature. But in our material world and in our own be-
ing consciousness has a double aspect; there is a force of Knowledge,
there is a force of Ignorance. In the infinite consciousness of a self-
aware infinite Existence knowledge must be everywhere implicit or opera-
tive in the very grain of its action ; but we see here at the beginning of
things, apparent as the base or the nature of the creative world-energy,
an Inconscience, a total Nescience. This is the stock with which the
material universe commences: consciousness and knowledge emerge at

'Verse 7. ^11. 29. =XII. 3, 4. *III. 10, 11.

^ vdsudevah sarvamiti, VII. 19.

269

2 70 THE LIFE DIVINE

first in obscure infinitesimal movements, at points, in little quanta which
associate themselves together; there is a tardy and difficult evolution, a
slowly increasing organisation and ameliorated mechanism of the work-
ings of consciousness, more and more gains are written on the blank slate
of the Nescience. But still these have the appearance of gathered acqui-
sitions and constructions of a seeking Ignorance which tries to know, to
understand, to discover, to change slowly and strugglingly into knowl-
edge. As Life here establishes and maintains its operations with diffi-
culty on a foundation and in an environment of general Death, first in
infinitesimal points of life, in quanta of life-form and life-energy, in in-
creasing aggregates that create more and more complex organisms, an
intricate life-machinery, Consciousness also establishes and maintains a
growing but precarious light in the darkness of an original Nescience and
a universal Ignorance.

Moreover the knowledge gained is of phenomena, not of the reality
of things or of the foundations of existence. Wherever our consciousness
meets what seems to be a foundation, that foundation wears the appear-
ance of a blank, — ^when it is not a void, — ^an original state which is
featureless and a multitude of consequences which are not inherent in the
origin and which nothing in it seems to justify or visibly to necessitate ;
there is a mass of superstructure which has no clear native relation to the
fundamental existence. The first aspect of cosmic existence is an Infinite
which is to our perception an indeterminate, if not indeterminable. In
this Infinite the universe itself, whether in its aspect of Energy or its as-
pect of structure, appears as an indeterminate determination, a "bound-
less finite," — paradoxical but necessary expressions which would seem to
indicate that we are face to face with a suprarational mystery as the base
of things; in that universe arise — from where? — a vast number and
variety of general and particular determinates which do not appear to
be warranted by anything perceptible in the nature of the Infinite, but
seem to be imposed — or, it may be, self-imposed — upon it. We give to
the Energy which produces them the name of Nature, but the word con-
veys no meaning unless it is that the nature of things is what it is by vir-
tue of a Force which arranges them according to an inherent Truth in
them; but the nature of that Truth itself, the reason why these determi-
nates are what they are is nowhere visible. It has been possible indeed
for human Science to detect the process or many processes of material
things, but this knowledge does not throw any light on the major ques-
tion ; we do not know even the rationale of the original cosmic processes,

INDETERMINATES AND COSMIC DETERMINATIONS 271

for the results do not present themselves as their necessary but only their
pragmatic and actual consequence. In the end we do not know how these
determinates came into or out of the original Indeterminate or Inde-
terminable on which they stand forth as on a blank and flat background
in the riddle of their ordered occurrence. At the origin of things we are
faced with an Infinite containing a mass of unexplained finites, an Indi-
visible full of endless divisions, an Immutable teeming with mutations
and differentiae. A cosmic paradox is the beginning of all things, a para-
'dox without any key to its significance.

It is possible indeed to question the need of positing an Infinite
which contains our formed universe, although this conception is impera-
tively demanded by our mind as a necessary basis to its conceptions, — for
it is unable to fix or assign a limit whether in Space or Time or essential
existence beyond which there is nothing or before or after which there
is nothing, — although too the alternative is a Void or Nihil which can
be only an abyss of the Infinite into which we refuse to look ; an infinite
mystic zero of Non-Existence would replace an infinite :« as a necessary
postulate, a basis for our seeing of all that is to us existence. But even
if we refuse to recognise anything as real except the limitless expanding
finite of the material universe and its teeming determinations, the enigma
remains the same. Infinite existence, infinite non-being or boundless
finite, all are to us original indeterminates or indeterminables; we can
assign to them no distinct characters or features, nothing which would
predetermine their determinations. To describe the fundamental char-
acter of the universe as Space or Time or Space-Time does not help us ;
for even if these are not abstractions of our inteUigence which we impose
by our mental view on the cosmos, the mind's necessary perspective of
its picture, these too are indeterminates and carry in themselves no clue
to the origin of the determinations that take place in them ; there is still
no explanation of the strange process by which things are determined or
of their powers, qualities and properties, no revelation of their true na-
ture, origin and significance.

Actually to our Science this infinite or indeterminate Existence re-
veals itself as an Energy, known not by itself but by its works, which
throws up in its motion waves of energism and in them a multitude of
infinitesimals; these, grouping themselves to form larger infinitesimals,
become a basis for all the creations of the Energy, even those farthest
away from the material basis, for the emergence of a world of organised
Matter, for the emergence of Life, for the emergence of Consciousness,

272 THE LIFE DIVINE

for all the still unexplained activities of evolutionary Nature. On the
original process are erected a multitude of processes which we can
observe, follow, can take advantage of many of them, utilise; but they
are none of them, fundamentally, explicable. We know now that different
groupings and a varying number of electric infinitesimals can produce or
serve as the constituent occasion — miscalled the cause, for here there
seems to be only a necessary antecedent condition — for the appearance
of larger atomic infinitesimals of different natures, qualities, powers ; but
we fail to discover how these different dispositions can come to consti-
tute these different atoms, — how the differentiae in the constituent oc-
casion or cause necessitate the differentiae in the constituted outcome or
result. We know also that certain combinations of certain invisible
atomic infinitesimals produce or occasion new and visible determinations
quite different in nature, quality and power from the constituent infini-
tesimals; but we fail to discover, for instance, how a fixed formula for
the combination of oxygen and hydrogen comes to determine the appear-
ance of water which is evidently something more than a combination of
gases, a new creation, a new form of substance, a material manifestation
of a quite new character. We see that a seed develops into a tree, we fol-
low the line of the process of production and we utilise it; but we do not
discover how a tree can grow out of a seed, how the life and form of the
tree come to be implied in the substance or energy of the seed or, if that
be rather the fact, how the seed can develop into a tree. We know that
genes and chromosomes are the cause of hereditary transmissions, not
only of physical but of psychological variations ; but we do not discover
how psychological characteristics can be contained and transmitted in
this inconscient material vehicle. We do not see or know, but it is ex-
pounded to us as a cogent account of Nature-process, that a play of
electrons, of atoms and their resultant molecules, of cells, glands, chemi-
cal secretions and physiological processes manages by their activity on
the nerves and brain of a Shakespeare or a Plato to produce or could be
perhaps the dynamic occasion for the production of a Hamlet or a Sym-
posium or a Republic; but we fail to discover or appreciate how such
material movements could have composed or necessitated the composi-
tion of these highest points of thought and literature: the divergence
here of the determinants and the determination becomes so wide that we
are no longer able to follow the process, much less understand or utilise.
These formulae of Science may be pragmatically correct and infallible,
they may govern the practical how of Nature's processes, but they do not

INDETERMINATES AND COSMIC DETERMINATIONS 273

disclose the intrinsic how or why; rather they have the air of the for-
mulae of a cosmic Magician, precise, irresistible, automatically successful
each in its field, but their rationale is fundamentally unintelligible.

There is more to perplex us; for we see the original indeterminate
Energy throwing out general determinates of itself, — we might equally
in their relation to the variety of their products call them generic in-
determinates, — with their appropriate states of substance and determined
forms of that substance: the latter are numerous, sometimes innumerable
variations on the substance-energy which is their base : but none of these
variations seems to be predetermined by anything in the nature of the
general indeterminate. An electric Energy produces positive, negative,
neutral forms of itself, forms that are at once waves and particles; a
gaseous state of energy-substance produces a considerable number of
different gases; a solid state of energy-substance from which results the
earth principle develops into different forms of earth and rock of many
kinds and numerous minerals and metals; a life principle produces its
vegetable kingdom teeming with a countless foison of quite different
plants, trees, flowers ; . a principle of animal life produces an enormous
variety of genus, species, individual variations: so it proceeds into human
life and mind and its mind-types towards the still unwritten end or per-
haps the yet occult sequel of that unfinished evolutionary chapter.
Throughout there is the constant rule of a general sameness in the orig-
inal determinate and, subject to this substantial sameness of basic sub-
stance and nature, a profuse variation in the generic and individual de-
terminates; an identical law obtains of sameness or similarity in the
genus or species with numerous variations often meticulously minute in
the individual. But we do not find anything in any general or generic
determinate necessitating the variant determinations that result from it.
A necessity of immutable sameness at the base, of free and unaccountable
variations on the surface seems to be the law; but who or what necessi-
tates or determines? What is the rationale of the determination, what is
its original truth or its significance? What compels or impels this ex-
uberant play of varying possibilities which seem to have no aim or mean-
ing unless it be the beauty or delight of creation? A Mind, a seeking
and curious inventive Thought, a hidden determining Will might be
there, but there is no trace of it in the first and fundamental appearance
of material Nature.

A first possible explanation points to a self-organising dynamic
Chance that is at work, — a. paradox necessitated by the appearance of

2 74 THE LIFE DIVINE

inevitable order on one side, of unaccountable freak and fantasy on the
other side of the cosmic phenomenon we call Nature. An inconscient
and inconsequent Force, we may say, that acts at random and creates this
or that by a general chance without any determining principle, — deter-
minations coming in only as the result of a persistent repetition of the
same rhythm of action and succeeding because only this repetitive
rhythm could succeed in keeping things in being, — this is the energy of
Nature. But this implies that somewhere in the origin of things there is
a boundless Possibility or a womb of innumerable possibilities that are
manifested out of it by the original Energy, — an incalculable Incon-
scient which we find some embarrassment in calling either an Existence
or a Non-Existence ; for without some such origin and basis the appear-
ance and the action of the Energy is unintelligible. Yet an opposite as-
pect of the nature of the cosmic phenomenon as we see it appears to for-
bid the theory of a random action generating a persistent order. There
is too much of an iron insistence on order, on a law basing the possi-
bilities. One would be justified rather in supposing that there is an in-
herent imperative Truth of things unseen by us, but a Truth capable of
manifold manifestation, throwing out a multitude of possibilities and
variants of itself which the creative Energy by its action turns into so
many realised actualities. This brings us to a second explanation — a,
mechanical necessity in things, its workings recognisable by us as so many
mechanical laws of Nature; — the necessity, we might say, of some such
secret inherent Truth of things as we have supposed, governing auto-
matically the processes we observe in action in the universe. But a
theory of mechanical Necessity by itself does not elucidate the free
play of the endless unaccountable variations which are visible in the evo-
lution: there must be behind the Necessity or in it a law of unity asso-
ciated with a co-existent but dependent law of multiplicity, both insist-
ing on manifestation; but the unity of what, the multiplicity of what?
Mechanical Necessity can give no answer. Again the emergence of con-
sciousness out of the Inconscient is a stumbling-block in the way of this
theory; for it is a phenomenon which can have no place in an all-per-
vading truth of inconscient mechanical Necessity. If there is a necessity
which compels the emergence, it can be only this, that there is already a
consciousness concealed in the Inconscient, waiting for evolution and
when all is ready breaking out from its prison of apparent Nescience.
We may indeed get rid of the difficulty of the imperative order of things
by supposing that it does not exist, that determinism in Nature is im-

INDETERMINATES AND COSMIC DETERMINATIONS 275

posed on it by our thought which needs such an imperative order to en-
able it to deal with its surroundings, but in reality there is no such thing;
there is only a Force experimenting in a random action of infinitesimals
which build up in their general results different determinations by a repet-
itive persistence operative in the sum of their action; thus we go back
from Necessity to Chance as the basis of our existence. But what then
is this Mind, this Consciousness which differs so radically from the
Energy that produced it that for its action it has to impose its idea and
need of order on the world she has made and in which it is obliged to
live? There would then be the double contradiction of consciousness
emerging from a fundamental Inconscience and of a Mind of order and
reason manifesting as the brilliant final consequence of a world created
by inconscient Chance. These things may be possible, but they need a
better explanation than any yet given before we can accord to them our
acceptance.

This opens the way for other explanations which make Conscious-
ness the creator of this world out of an apparent original Inconscience.
A Mind, a Will seems to have imagined and organised the universe, but it
has veiled itself behind its creation ; its first erection has been this screen
of an inconscient Energy and a material form of substance, at once a dis-
guise of its presence and a plastic creative basis on which it could work
as an artisan uses for his production of forms and patterns a dumb and
obedient material. All these things we see around us are then the
thoughts of an extra-cosmic Divinity, a Being with an omnipotent and
omniscient Mind and Will, who is responsible for the mathematical law
of the physical universe, for its artistry of beauty, for its strange play
of sameness and variations, of concordances and discords, of combining
and intermingling opposites, for the drama of consciousness struggling
to exist and seeking to affirm itself in an inconscient universal order. The
fact that this Divinity is invisible to us, undiscoverable by our mind and
senses, offers no difficulty, since self-evidence or direct sign of an extra-
cosmic Creator could not be expected in a cosmos which is void of his
presence: the patent signals everywhere of the works of an Intelligence,
of law, design, formula, adaptation of means to end, constant and in-
exhaustible invention, fantasy even but restrained by an ordering Reason
might be considered sufficient proof of this origin of things. Or if this
Creator is not entirely supracosmic, but is also immanent in his works,
even then there need be no other sign of him, — except indeed to some
consciousness evolving in this inconscient world, but only when its evo-

276 THE LIFE DIVINE

lution reached a point at which it could become aware of the indwelling
Presence. The intervention of this evolving consciousness would not be
a difficulty, since there would be no contradiction of the basic nature of
things in its appearance ; an omnipotent Mind could easily infuse some-
thing of itself into its creatures. One difficulty remains; it is the arbitrary
nature of the creation, the incomprehensibility of its purpose, the crude
meaninglessness of its law of unnecessary ignorance, strife and suffering,
its ending without a denouement or issue. A play? But why this stamp
of so many undivine elements and characters in the play of One whose
nature must be supposed to be divine? To the suggestion that what we
see worked out in the world is the thoughts of God, the retort can be
made that God could well have had better thoughts and the best thought
of all would have been to refrain from the creation of an unhappy and
unintelligible universe. All theistic explanations of existence starting
from an extra-cosmic Deity stumble over this difficulty and can only
evade it; it would disappear only if the creator were, even though ex-
ceeding the creation, yet immanent in it, himself in some sort both the
player and the play, an Infinite casting infinite possibilities into the set
form of an evolutionary cosmic order.

On that hypothesis, there must be behind the action of the material
Energy a secret involved Consciousness, cosmic, infinite, building up
through the action of that frontal Energy its means of an evolutionary
manifestation, a creation out of itself in the boundless finite of the ma-
terial universe. The apparent inconscience of the material Energy would
be an indispensable condition for the structure of the material world-
substance in which this Consciousness intends to involve itself so that it
may grow by evolution out of its apparent opposite; for without some
such device a complete involution would be impossible. If there is such
a creation by the Infinite out of itself, it must be the manifestation, in a
material disguise, of truths or powers of its own being: the forms or
vehicles of these truths or powers would be the basic general or funda-
mental determinates we see in Nature; the particular determinates, which
otherwise are unaccountable variations that have emerged from the vague
general stuff in which they originate, would be the appropriate forms or
vehicles of the possibilities that the truths or powers residing in these
fundamentals bore within them. The principle of free variation of possi-
bilities natural to an infinite Consciousness would be the explanation of
the aspect of inconscient Chance of which we are aware in the workings
of Nature, — inconscient only in appearance and so appearing because

INDETERMINATES AND COSMIC DETERMINATIONS 277

of the complete involution in Matter, because of the veil with which the
secret Consciousness has disguised its presence. The principle of truths,
real powers of the Infinite imperatively fulfilling themselves would be
the explanation of the opposite aspect of a mechanical Necessity which
we see in Nature, — mechanical in appearance only and so appearing be-
cause of the same veil of Inconscience. It would then be perfectly intel-
ligible why the Inconscient does its works with a constant principle of
mathematical architecture, of design, of effective arrangement of num-
bers, of adaptation of means to ends, of inexhaustible device and inven-
tion, one might almost say, a constant experimental skill and an autom-
atism of purpose. The appearance of consciousness out of an apparent
Inconscience would also be no longer inexplicable.

All the unexplained processes of Nature would find their meaning
and their place if this hypothesis proved to be tenable. Energy seems to
create substance, but, in reality, as existence is inherent in Consciousness-
Force, so also substance would be inherent in Energy, — the Energy a
manifestation of the Force, substance a manifestation of the secret
Existence. But as it is a spiritual substance, it would not be appre-
hended by the material sense until it is given by Energy the forms of
Matter seizable by that sense. One begins to understand also how ar-
rangement of design, quantity and number can be a base for the manifes-
tation of quality and property; for design, quantity and number are
powers of existence-substance, quality and property are powers of the
consciousness and its force that reside in the existence ; they can then be
made manifest and operative by a rhythm and process of substance. The
growth of the tree out of the seed would be accounted for, like all other
similar phenomena, by the indwelling presence of what we have called
the Real-Idea; the Infinite's self-perception of the significant form, the
living body of its power of existence that has to emerge from its own
self-compression in energy-substance, would be carried internally in the
form of the seed, carried in the occult consciousness involved in that form,
and would naturally evolve out of it. There would be no difficulty either
in understanding on this principle how infinitesimals of a material char-
acter like the gene and the chromosome can carry in them psychological
elements to be transmitted to the physical form that has to emerge
from the human seed; it would be at bottom on the same principle in the
objectivity of Matter as that which we find in our subjective experience,
— for we see that the subconscient physical carries in it a mental psy-
chological content, impressions of past events, habits, fixed mental and

278 THE LIFE DIVINE

vital formations, fixed forms of character, and sends them up by an occult
process to the waking consciousness, thus originating or influencing many
activities of our nature.

On the same basis there would be no difficulty in understanding
why the physiological functionings of the body help to determine the
mind's psychological actions: for the body is not mere unconscious Mat-
ter: it is a structure of a secretly conscious Energy that has taken form
in it. Itself occultly conscious, it is, at the same time, the vehicle of ex-
pression of an overt Consciousness that has emerged and is self-aware in
our physical energy-substance. The body's functionings are a necessary
machinery or instrumentation for the movements of this mental Inhab-
itant; it is only by setting the corporeal instrument in motion that the
Conscious Being emerging, evolving in it can transmit its mind forma-
tions, will formations and turn them into a physical manifestation of it-
self in Matter. The capacity, the processes of the instrument must to
a certain extent reshape the mind formations in their transition from
mental shape into physical expression; its workings are necessary and
must exercise their influence before that expression can become actual.
The bodily instrument may even in some directions dominate its user;
it may too by a force of habit suggest or create involuntary reactions of
the consciousness inhabiting it before the working Mind and Will can
control or interfere. All this is possible because the body has a "sub-
conscient" consciousness of its own which counts in our total self-expres-
sion; even, if we look at this outer instrumentation only, we can con-
clude that body determines mind, but this is only a minor truth and
the major Truth is that mind determines body. In this view a still deeper
Truth becomes conceivable; a spiritual entity ensouling the substance
that veils it is the original determinant of both mind and body. On the
other side, in the opposite order of process, — that by which the mind
can transmit its ideas and commands to the body, can train it to be an
instrument for new action, can even so impress it with its habitual de-
mands or orders that the physical instinct carries them out automatically
even when the mind is no longer consciously willing them, those also
more unusual but well attested by which to an extraordinary and hardly
limitable extent the mind can learn to determine the reactions of the
body even to the overriding of its normal law or conditions of action, —
these and other otherwise unacountable aspects of the relation between
these two elements of our being become easily understandable: for it
is the secret consciousness in the living matter that receives from its

INDETERMINATES AND COSMIC DETERMINATIONS 279

greater companion; it is this in the body that in its own involved and
occult fashion perceives or feels the demand on it and obeys the
emerged or evolved consciousness which presides over the body. Finally,
the conception of a divine Mind and Will creating the cosmos becomes
justifiable, while at the same time the perplexing elements in it which our
reasoning mentality refuses to ascribe to an arbitrary fiat of the Creator,
find their explanation as inevitable phenomena of a Consciousness emerg-
ing with difficulty out of its opposite — but with the mission to override
these contrary phenomena and manifest by a slow and difficult evolution
its greater reality and true nature.

But an approach from the material end of Existence cannot give
us any certitude of validity for this hypothesis or for that matter for any
other explanation of Nature and her procedure: the veil cast by the orig-
inal Inconscience is too thick for the Mind to pierce and it is behind
this veil that is hidden the secret origination of what is manifested;
there are seated the truths and powers underlying the phenomena and
processes that appear to us in the material front of Nature. To know
with greater certitude we must follow the curve of evolving conscious-
ness until it arrives at a height and largeness of self-enlightenment in
which the primal secret is self -discovered ; for presumably it must evolve,
must eventually bring out what was held from the beginning by the oc-
cult original Consciousness in things of which it is a gradual manifesta-
tion. In Life it would be clearly hopeless to seek for the truth ; for Life
begins with a formulation in which consciousness is still submental and
therefore to us as mental beings appears as inconscient or at most sub-
conscious, and our own investigation into this stage of life studying it
from outside cannot be more fruitful of the secret truth than our exami-
nation of Matter. Even when mind develops in life, its first functional
aspect is a mentality involved in action, in vital and physical needs and
preoccupations, in impulses, desires, sensations, emotions, unable to
stand back from these things and observe and know them. In the human
mind there is the first hope of understanding, discovery, a free compre-
hension; here we might seem to be coming to the possibility of self-
knowledge and world-knowledge. But in fact our mind can at first only
observe facts and processes and for the rest it has to make deductions
and inferences, to construct hypotheses, to reason, to speculate. In order
to discover the secret of Consciousness it would have to know itself and
determine the reality of its own being and process; but as in animal
life the emerging Consciousness is involved in vital action and movement.

28o THE LIFE DIVINE

SO in the human being mind-consciousness is involved in its own whirl
of thoughts, an activity in which it is carried on without rest and in which
its very reasonings and speculations are determined in their tendency,
trend, conditions by its own temperament, mental turn, past formation
and line of energy, inclination, preference, an inborn natural selection, —
we do not freely determine our thinking according to the truth of things,
it is determined for us by our nature. We can indeed stand back with a
certain detachment and observe the workings of the mental Energy in us;
but it is still only its process that we see and not any original source of
our mental determinations: we can build theories and hypotheses of the
process of Mind, but a veil is still there over the inner secret of ourselves,
our consciousness, our total nature.

It is only when we follow the yogic process of quieting the mind it-
self that a profounder result of our self-observation becomes possible.
For first we discover that mind is a subtle substance, a general deter-
minate— or generic indeterminate — ^which mental energy when it operates
throws into forms or particular determinations of itself, thoughts, con-
cepts, percepts, mental sentiments, activities of will and reactions of
feeling, but which, when the energy is quiescent, can live either in an
inert torpor or in an immobile silence and peace of self-existence. Next
we see that the determinations of our mind do not all proceed from it-
self; for waves and currents of mental energy enter into it from outside:
these take form in it or appear already formed from some universal Mind
or from other minds and are accepted by us as our own thinking. We
can perceive also an occult or subliminal mind in ourselves from which
thoughts and perceptions and will-impulses and mental feelings arise ; we
can perceive too higher planes of consciousness from which a superior
mind energy works through us or upon us. Finally we discover that that
which observes all this is a mental being supporting the mind substance
and mind energy; without this presence, their upholder and source of
sanctions, they could not exist or operate. This mental being or Purusha
first appears as a silent witness and, if that were all, we would have to
accept the determinations of mind as a phenomenal activity imposed
upon the being by Nature, by Prakriti, or else as a creation presented to
it by Prakriti, a world of thought which Nature constructs and offers to
the observing Purusha. But afterwards we find that the Purusha, the
mental being, can depart from its posture of a silent or accepting Wit-
ness ; it can become the source of reactions, accept, reject, even rule and
regulate, become the giver of the command, the knower. A knowledge

INDETERMINATES AND COSMIC DETERMINATIONS 281

also arises that this mind-substance manifests the mental being, is its
own expressive substance and the mental energy is its own consciousness-
force, so that it is reasonable to conclude that all mind determinations
arise from the being of the Purusha. But this conclusion is complicated
by the fact that from another view-point our personal mind seems to be
little more than a formation of universal Mind, an engine for the re-
ception, modification, propagation of cosmic thought-waves, idea-cur-
rents, will-suggestions, waves of feeling, sense-suggestions, form-sugges-
tions. It has no doubt its own already realised expression, predispositions,
propensities, personal temperament and nature; what comes from the
universal can only find a place there if it is accepted and assimilated into
the self-expression of the individual mental being, the personal Prakriti
of the Purusha. But still, in view of these complexities, the question
remains entire whether all this evolution and action is a phenomenal
creation by some universal Energy presented to the mental being or
an activity imposed by Mind-Energy on the Purusha's indeterminate,
perhaps indeterminable existence, or whether the whole is something pre-
determined by some dynamic truth of Self within and only manifested
on the mind surface. To know that we would have to touch or to enter
into a cosmic state of being and consciousness to which the totality of
things and their integral principle would be better manifest than to our
limited mind experience.

Overmind consciousness is such a state or principle beyond indi-
vidual mind, beyond even universal mind in the Ignorance; it carries in
itself a first direct and masterful cognition of cosmic truth: here then we
might hope to understand something of the original working of things,
get some insight into the fundamental movements of cosmic Nature. One
thing indeed becomes clear ; it is self-evident here that both the individual
and the cosmos come from a transcendent Reality which takes form in
them: the mind and life of the individual being, its self in nature must
therefore be a partial self-expression of the cosmic Being and, both
through that and directly, a self-expression of the transcendent Reality,
— a conditional and half-veiled expression it may be, but still that is its
significance. But also we see that what the expression shall be is also
determined by the individual himself: only what he can in his nature
receive, assimilate, formulate, his portion of the cosmic being or of the
Reality, can find shape in his mind and life and physical parts; some-
thing that derives from Reality, something that is in the cosmos he
expresses, but in the terms of his own self-expression, in the terms of his

282 THE LIFE DIVINE

own nature. But the original question set out for us by the phenomenon
of the universe is not solved by the Overmind knowledge, — the question,
in this case, whether the building of thought, experience, world of percep-
tions of the mental Person, the mind Purusha, is truly a self-expression,
a self-determination proceeding from some truth of his own spiritual
being, a manifestation of that truth's dynamic possibilities, or whether
it is not rather a creation or construction presented to him by Nature,
by Prakriti, and only in the sense of being individualised in his personal
formation of that Nature can it be said to be his own or dependent on
him; or, again, it might be a play of a cosmic Imagination, a fantasia
of the Infinite imposed on the blank indeterminable of his own eternal
pure existence. These are the three views of creation that seem to have
an equal chance of being right, and mind is incapable of definitely de-
ciding between them; for each view is armed with its own mental logic
and its appeal to intuition and experience. Overmind seems to add to
the perplexity, for the overmental view of things allows each possibility
to formulate itself in its own independent right and realise its own exist-
ence in cognition, in dynamic self-presentation, in substantiating experi-
ence.

In Overmind, in all the higher ranges of the mind, we find recurring
the dichotomy of a pure silent self without feature or qualities or rela-
tions, self-existent, self-poised, self-sufficient, and the mighty dynamis
of a determinative knowledge-power, of a creative consciousness and
force which precipitates itself into the forms of the universe. This opposi-
tion which is yet a collocation, as if these two were correlatives or comple-
mentaries, although apparent contradictions of each other, sublimates it-
self into the co-existence of an impersonal Brahman without qualities,
a fundamental divine Reality free from all relations or determinates, and
a Brahman with infinite qualities, a fundamental divine Reality who is
the source and container and master of all relations and determinations —
Nirguna, Saguna. If we pursue the Nirguna into a farthest possible self-
experience, we arrive at a supreme Absolute void of all relations and de-
terminations, the ineffable first and last word of existence. If we enter
through the Saguna into some ultimate possible of experience, we arrive
at a divine Absolute, a personal supreme and omnipresent Godhead,
transcendent as well as universal, an infinite Master of all relations and
determinations who can uphold in his being a million universes and
pervade each with a single ray of his self-light and a single degree of his
ineffable existence. The Overmind consciousness maintains equally

INDETERMINATES AND COSMIC DETERMINATIONS 283

these two truths of the Eternal which face the mind as mutually exclu-
sive alternatives; it admits both as supreme aspects of one Reality: some-
where, then, behind them there must be a still greater Transcendence
which originates them or upholds them both in its supreme Eternity.
But what can that be of which such opposites are equal truths, unless it
be an original indeterminable Mystery of which any knowledge, any
understanding by the mind is impossible? We can know it indeed to
some degree, in some kind of experience or realisation, by its aspects,
powers, constant series of fundamental negatives and positives through
which we have to pursue it, independently in either or integrally in both
together; but in the last resort it seems to escape even from the highest
mentality and remain unknowable.

But if the supreme Absolute is indeed a pure Indeterminable, then
no creation, no manifestation, no universe is possible. And yet the uni-
verse exists. What then is it that creates this contradiction, is able to ef-
fect the impossible, bring this insoluble riddle of self-division into exist-
ence? A Power of some kind it must be, and since the Absolute is the
sole reality, the one origin of all things, this Power must proceed from it,
must have some relation with it, a connection, a dependence. For if it
is quite other than the supreme Reality, a cosmic Imagination imposing
its determinations on the eternal blank of the Indeterminable, then the
sole existence of an absolute Parabrahman is no longer admissible ; there
is then a dualism at the source of things — not substantially different from
the Sankhya dualism of Soul and Nature. If it is a Power, the sole Power
indeed, of the Absolute, we have this logical impossibility that the exist-
ence of the Supfcreme Being and the Power of his existence are entirely
opposite to each other, two supreme contradictories; for Brahman is free
from all possibility of relations and determinations, but Maya is a crea-
tive Imagination imposing these very things upon It, an originator of re-
lations and determinations of which Brahman must necessarily be the
supporter and witness, — to the logical reason an inadmissible formula.
If it is accepted, it can only be as a suprarational mystery, something
neither real nor unreal, inexplicable in its nature, anirvacanlya. But
the difficulties are so great that it can be accepted only if it imposes itself
irresistibly as the inevitable ultimate, the end and summit of metaphysi-
cal inquiry and spiritual experience. For even if all things are illusory
creations, they must have at least a subjective existence and they can
exist nowhere except in the consciousness of the Sole Existence; they
are then subjective determinations of the Indeterminable. If, on the

284 THE LIFE DIVINE

contrary, the determinations of this Power are real creations, out of what
are they determined, what is their substance? It is not possible that
they are made out of a Nothing, a Non-Existence other than the Ab-
solute; for that will erect a new dualism, a great positive Zero over
against the greater indeterminable x we have supposed to be the one
Reality. It is evident therefore that the Reality cannot be a rigid In-
determinable. Whatever is created must be of it and in it, and what is
of the substance of the utterly Real must itself be real: a vast baseless
negation of reality purporting to be real cannot be the sole outcome of
the eternal Truth, the Infinite Existence. It is perfectly understandable
that the Absolute is and must be indeterminable in the sense that it can-
not be limited by any determination or any sum of possible determina-
tions, but not in the sense that it is incapable of self-determination. The
Supreme Existence cannot be incapable of creating true self-determina-
tions of its being, incapable of upholding a real self-creation or manifesta-
tion in its self-existent infinite.

Overmind, then, gives us no final and positive solution; it is in a
supramental cognition beyond it that we are left to seek for an answer.
A Supramental Truth-consciousness is at once the self-awareness of the
Infinite and Eternal and a power of self-determination inherent in that
self-awareness; the first is its foundation and status, the second is its
power of being, the dynamis of its self-existence. All that a timeless
eternity of self-awareness sees in itself as truth of being, the conscious
power of its being manifests in Time-eternity. To Supermind therefore
the Supreme is not a rigid Indeterminable, an all-negating Absolute; an
infinite of being complete to itself in its own immutable purity of exist-
ence, its sole power a pure consciousness able only to dwell on the
being's changeless eternity, on the immobile delight of its sheer self-
existence, is not the whole Reality. The Infinite of Being must also be
an Infinite of Power; containing in itself an eternal repose and quies-
cence, it must also be capable of an eternal action and creation: but this
too must be an action in itself, a creation out of its own self eternal and
infinite, since there could be nothing else out of which it could create;
any basis of creation seeming to be other than itself must be still really
in itself and of itself and could not be something foreign to its existence.
An infinite Power cannot be solely a Force resting in a pure inactive
sameness, an immutable quiescence; it must have in it endless powers
of its being and energy: an infinite Consciousness must hold within it
endless truths of its own self-awareness. These in action would appear

INDETERMINATES AND COSMIC DETERMINATIONS 285

to our cognition as aspects of its being, to our spiritual sense as powers
and movements of its dynamis, to our aesthesis as instruments and for-
mulations of its delight of existence. Creation would then be a self-
manifestation: it would be an ordered deploying of the infinite possibili-
ties of the Infinite. But every possibility implies a truth of being behind
it, a reality in the Existent; for without that supporting truth there
could not be any possibles. In manifestation a fundamental reality of
the Existent would appear to our cognition as a fundamental spiritual as-
pect of the Divine Absolute; out of it would emerge all its possible
manifestations, its innate dynamisms: these again must create or rather
bring out of a non-manifest latency their own significant forms, expres-
sive powers, native processes; their own being would develop their own
becoming, svarilpa, svabhdva. This then would be the complete process
of creation: but in our mind we do not see the complete process, we see
only possibilities that determine themselves into actualities and, though
we infer or conjecture, we are not sure of a necessity, a predetermining
truth, an imperative behind them which capacitates the possibilities, de-
cides the actualities. Our mind is an observer of actuals, an inventor or
discoverer of possibilities, but not a seer of the occult imperatives that
necessitate the movements and forms of a creation: for in the front of
universal existence there are only forces determining results by some
balance of the meeting of their powers ; the original Determinant or de-
terminants, if it or they exist, are veiled from us by our ignorance. But
to the supramental Truth-Consciousness these imperatives would be ap-
parent, would be the very stuff of its seeing and experience: in the supra-
mental creative process the imperatives, the nexus of possibilities, the
resultant actualities would be a single whole, an indivisible movement;
the possibilities and actualities would carry in themselves the inevita-
bility of their originating imperative, — all their results, all their creation
would be the body of the Truth which they manifest in predetermined
significant forms and powers of the All-Existence.

Our fundamental cognition of the Absolute, our substantial spirit-
ual experience of it is the intuition or the direct experience of an in-
finite and eternal Existence, an infinite and eternal Consciousness, an
infinite and eternal Delight of Existence. In overmental and mental cog-
nition it is possible to make discrete and even to separate this original
unity into three self-existent aspects: for we can experience a pure cause-
less eternal Bliss so intense that we are that alone ; existence, conscious-
ness seem to be swallowed up in it, no longer ostensibly in presence; a

286 THE LIFE DIVINE

similar experience of pure and absolute consciousness and a similar
exclusive identity with it is possible, and there can be too a like identify-
ing experience of pure and absolute existence. But to a supermind cog-
nition these three are always an inseparable Trinity, even though one
can stand in front of the others and manifest its own spiritual deter-
minates; for each has its primal aspects or its inherent self-formations,
but all of these together are original to the triune Absolute. Love, Joy
and Beauty are the fundamental determinates of the Divine Delight of
Existence, and we can see at once that these are of the very stuff and
nature of that Delight: they are not alien impositions on the being of the
Absolute or creations supported by it but outside it ; they are truths of
its being, native to its consciousness, powers of its force of existence.
So too is it with the fundamental determinates of the absolute conscious-
ness,— ^knowledge and will; they are truths and powers of the original
Consciousness-Force and are inherent in its very nature. This authentic-
ity becomes still more evident when we regard the fundamental spiritual
determinates of the absolute Existence; they are its triune powers, neces-
sary first postulates for all its self-creation or manifestation, — Self, the
Divine, the Conscious Being; Atman, Ishwara, Purusha.

If we pursue the process of self-manifestation farther, we shall see
that each of these aspects or powers reposes in its first action on a triad
or trinity; for Knowledge inevitably takes its stand in a trinity of the
Knower, the Known and Knowledge; Love finds itself in a trinity of
the Lover, the Beloved and Love; Will is self- fulfilled in a trinity of the
Lord of the Will, the object of the Will and the executive Force; Joy has
its original and utter gladness in a trinity of the Enjoyer, the Enjoyed
and the Delight that unites them; Self as inevitably appears and founds
its manifestation in a trinity of Self as subject. Self as object and self-
awareness holding together Self as subject-object. These and other
primal powers and aspects assume their status among the fundamental
spiritual self-determinations of the Infinite; all others are determinates
of the fundamental spiritual determinates, significant relations, signifi-
cant powers, significant forms of being, consciousness, force, delight, —
energies, conditions, ways, lines of the truth-process of the Consciousness-
Force of the Eternal, imperatives, possibilities, actualities of its manifes-
tation. All this deploying of powers and possibilities and their inherent
consequences is held together by supermind cognition in an intimate
oneness; it keeps them founded consciously on the original Truth and
maintained in the harmony of the truths they manifest and are in their

INDETERMINATES AND COSMIC DETERMINATIONS 287

nature. There is here no imposition of imaginations, no arbitrary crea-
tion, neither is there any division, fragmentation, irreconcilable con-
trariety or disparateness. But in Mind of Ignorance these phenomena
appear; for there a limited consciousness sees and deals with every-
thing as if all were separate objects of cognition or separate existences
and it seeks so to know, possess and enjoy them and gets mastery over
them or suffers their mastery: but, behind its ignorance, what the soul
in it is seeking for is the Reality, the Truth, the Consciousness, the
Power, the Delight by which they exist; the mind has to learn to awaken
to this true seeking and true knowledge veiled within itself, to the Reality
from which all things hold their truth, to the Consciousness of which all
consciousnesses are entities, to the Power from which all get what force
of being they have within them, to the Delight of which all delights are
partial figures. This limitation of consciousness and this awakening to
the integrality of consciousness are also a process of self-manifestation,
are a self-determination of the Spirit; even when contrary to the Truth in
their appearances, the things of the limited consciousness have in their
deeper sense and reality a divine significance ; they too bring out a truth
or a possibility of the Infinite. Of some such nature, as far as it can be
expressed in mental formulas, would be the supramental cognition of
things which sees the one Truth everywhere and would so arrange its ac-
count to us of our existence, its report of the secret of creation and the
significance of the universe.

At the same time indeterminability is also a necessary element in
our conception of the Absolute and in our spiritual experience: this is
the other side of the supramental regard on being and on things. The
Absolute is not limitable or definable by any one determination or by
any sum of determinations; on the other side, it is not bound down to
an indeterminable vacancy of pure existence. On the contrary, it is
the source of all determinations: its indeterminability is the natural, the
necessary condition both of its infinity of being and its infinity of power
of being ; it can be infinitely all things because it is no thing in particular
and exceeds any definable totality. It is this essential indeterminability
of the Absolute that translates itself into our consciousness through the
fundamental negating positives of our spiritual experience, the immobile
immutable Self, the Nirguna Brahman, the Eternal without qualities,
the pure featureless One Existence, the Impersonal, the Silence void of
activities, the Non-being, the Ineffable and the Unknowable. On the
other side it is the essence and source of all determinations, and this

288 THE LIFE DIVINE

dynamic essentiality manifests to us through the fundamental affirming
positives in which the Absolute equally meets us; for it is the Self that
becomes all things, the Saguna Brahman, the Eternal with infinite quali-
ties, the One who is the Many, the infinite Person who is the source and
foundation of all persons and personalities, the Lord of creation, the
Word, the Master of all works and action; it is that which being known
all is known: these affirmatives correspond to those negatives. For it is
not possible in a supramental cognition to split asunder the two sides of
the One Existence, — even to speak of them as sides is excessive, for they
are in each other, their co-existence or one-existence is eternal and their
powers sustaining each other found the self-manifestation of the Infinite.
But neither is the separate cognition of them entirely an illusion or
a complete error of the Ignorance ; this too has its validity for spiritual
experience. For these primary aspects of the Absolute are fundamental
spiritual determinates or indeterminates answering at this spiritual end
or beginning to the general determinates or generic indeterminates of the
material end or inconscient beginning of the descending and ascending
Manifestation. Those that seem to us negative carry in them the free-
dom of the Infinite from limitation by its own determinations; their
realisation disengages the spirit within, liberates us and enables us to
participate in this supremacy: thus, when once we pass into or through
the experience of immutable self, we are no longer bound and limited in
the inner status of our being by the determinations and creations of Na-
ture. On the other, the dynamic side, this original freedom enables the
Consciousness to create a world of determinations without being bound
by it: it enables it also to withdraw from what it has created and re-
create in a higher truth-formula. It is on this freedom that is based the
spirit's power of infinite variation of the truth-possibilities of existence
and also its capacity to create, without trying itself to its workings, any
and every form of Necessity or system of order: the individual being too
by experience of these negating absolutes can participate in that dy-
namic liberty, can pass from one order of self -formulation to a higher
order. At the stage when from the mental it has to move towards its
supramental status, one most liberatingly helpful, if not indispensable
experience that may intervene is the entry into a total Nirvana of
mentality and mental ego, a passage into the silence of the Spirit. In
any case, a realisation of the pure Self must always precede the transi-
tion to that mediating eminence of the consciousness from which a clear
vision of the ascending and descending stairs of manifested existence is

INDETERMINATES AND COSMIC DETERMINATIONS 289

commanded and the possession of the free power of ascent and descent
becomes a spiritual prerogative. An independent completeness of iden-
tity with each of the primal aspects and powers — not narrowing as in
the mind into a sole engrossing experience seeming to be final and inte-
gral, for that would be incompatible with the realisation of the unity of
all aspects and powers of existence — is a capacity inherent in conscious-
ness in the Infinite ; that indeed is the base and justification of the over-
mind cognition and its will to carry each aspect, each power, each
possibility to its independent fullness. But the Supermind keeps always
and in every status or condition the spiritual realisation of the Unity of
all; the intimate presence of that unity is there even within the com-
pletest grasp of each thing, each state given its whole delight of itself,
power and value: there is thus no losing sight of the affirmative aspects
even when there is the full acceptance of the truth of the negative. The
Overmind keeps still the sense of this underlying Unity; that is for it
the secure base of the independent experience. In Mind the knowledge
of the unity of all aspects is lost on the surface, the consciousness is
plunged into engrossing, exclusive separate affirmations; but there too,
even in the Mind's ignorance, the total reality still remains behind the
exclusive absorption and can be recovered in the form of a profound
mental intuition or else in the idea or sentiment of an underlying truth
of integral oneness; in the spiritual mind this can develop into an ever-
present experience.

All aspects of the omnipresent Reality have their fundamental truth
in the Supreme Existence. Thus even the aspect or power of Incon-
science, which seems to be an opposite, a negation of the eternal Reality,
yet corresponds to a Truth held in itself by the self-aware and all-
conscious Infinite. It is, when we look closely at it, the Infinite's power
of plunging the consciousness into a trance of self-involution, a self-
oblivion of the Spirit veiled in its own abysses where nothing is mani-
fest but all inconceivably is and can emerge from that ineffable latency.
In the heights of Spirit this state of cosmic or infinite trance-sleep ap-
pears to our cognition as a luminous uttermost Superconscience : at the
other end of being it offers itself to cognition as the Spirit's potency of
presenting to itself the opposites of its own truths of being — an abyss
of non-existence, a profound Night of inconscience, a fathomless swoon
of insensibility from which yet all forms of being, consciousness and
delight of existence can manifest themselves, — but they appear in lim-
ited terms, in slowly emerging and increasing self-formulations, even in

290 THE LIFE DIVINE

contrary terms of themselves; it is the play of a secret all-being, all-
delight, all-knowledge, but it observes the rules of its own self-oblivion,
self-opposition, self -limitation until it is ready to surpass it. This is
the Inconscience and Ignorance that we see at work in the material
universe. It is not a denial, it is one term, one formula of the infinite
and eternal Existence.

It is important to observe here the sense that is acquired in such
a total cognition of cosmic being by the phenomenon of the Ignorance,
its assigned place in the spiritual economy of the universe. If all that
we experience were an imposition, an unreal creation in the Absolute,
both cosmic and individual existence would be in their very nature an
Ignorance; the sole real knowledge would be the indeterminable self-
awareness of the Absolute. If all were the erection of a temporal and
phenomenal creation over against the reality of the witnessing timeless
Eternal and if the creation were not a manifestation of the Reality but
an arbitrary self-effective cosmic construction, that too would be a sort
of imposition. Our knowledge of the creation would be the knowledge
of a temporary structure of evanescent consciousness and being, a
dubious Becoming that passes across the vision of the Eternal, not
a knowledge of Reality; that too would be an Ignorance. But if all
is a manifestation of the Reality and itself real by the constituting
immanence, the substantiating essence and presence of the Reality, then
the awareness of individual being and world-being would be in its
spiritual origin and nature a play of the infinite self-knowledge and
all-knowledge: ignorance could be only a subordinate movement, a
suppressed or restricted cognition or a partial and imperfect evolving
knowledge with the true and total self-awareness and all-awareness
concealed both in it and behind it. It would be a temporary phenome-
non, not the cause and essence of cosmic existence; its inevitable con-
summation would be a return of the spirit, not out of the cosmos to a
sole supracosmic self-awareness, but even in the cosmos itself to an
integral self-knowledge and all-knowledge.

It might be objected that the supramental cognition is, after all,
not the final truth of things. Beyond the supramental plane of conscious-
ness which is an intermediate step from overmind and mind to the com-
plete experience of Sachchidananda, are the greatest heights of the
manifested Spirit: here surely existence would not at all be based on
the determination of the One in multiplicity, it would manifest solely
and simply a pure identity in oneness. But the supramental truth-

INDETERMINATES AND COSMIC DETERMINATIONS 29 1

consciousness would not be absent from these planes, for it is an inher-
ent power of Sachchidananda: the difference would be that the deter-
minations would not be demarcations, they would be plastic, interfused,
each a boundless finite. For there all is in each and each is in all radically
and integrally, — there would be to the utmost a fundamental awareness
of identity, a mutual inclusion and interpenetration of consciousness:
knowledge as we envisage it would not exist, because it would not be
needed, since all would be direct action of consciousness in being itself,
identical, intimate, intrinsically self-aware and all-aware. But still
relations of consciousness, relations of mutual delight of existence, rela-
tions of self-power of being with self-power of being would not be ex-
cluded; these highest spiritual planes would not be a field of blank
indeterminability, a vacancy of pure existence.

It might be said again that, even so, in Sachchidananda itself at
least, above all worlds of manifestation, there could be nothing but the
self-awareness of pure existence and consciousness and a pure delight
of existence. Or, indeed, this triune being itself might well be only a
trinity of original spiritual self-determinations of the Infinite; these
too, like all determinations, would cease to exist in the ineffable Abso-
lute. But our position is that these must be inherent truths of the su-
preme being; their utmost reality must be pre-existent in the Absolute
even if they are ineffably other there than what they are in the spiritual
mind's highest possible experience. The Absolute is not a mystery of
infinite blankness nor a supreme sum of negations; nothing can manifest
that is not justified by some self-power of the original and omnipresent
Reality.

CHAPTER II

BRAHMAN, PURUSHA, ISHWARA—
MAYA, PRAKRITI, SHAKTI

It is there in beings indivisible and as if divided,

Gita}

Brahman, the Truth, the Knowledge, the Infinite.

Taittiriya Upanishad?

Know Purusha and Prakriti to be both eternal without
beginning.

Gita.^

One must know Maya as Prakriti and the Master of
Maya as the great Lord of all.

Swetaswatara Upanishad.*

It is the might of the Godhead in the world that turns
the wheel of Brahman. Him one must know, the supreme
Lord of all lords, the supreme Godhead above all godheads.
Supreme too is his Shakti and manifold the natural working
of her knowledge and her force. One Godhead, occult in all
beings, the inner Self of all beings, the all-pervading, ab-
solute without qualities, the overseer of all actions, the wit-
ness, the knower.

Swetaswatara Upanishad.^

THERE is then a supreme Reality eternal, absolute and infinite.
Because it is absolute and infinite, it is in its essence indetermi-
nable. It is indefinable and inconceivable by finite and defining Mind;
it is ineffable by a mind-created speech; it is describable neither by our
negations, neti neti, — for we cannot limit it by saying it is not this,
it is not that, — nor by our affirmations, for we cannot fix it by say-
ing it is this, it is that, iti iti. And yet, though in this way unknowable
to us, it is not altogether and in every way unknowable; it is self-evident
to itself and, although inexpressible, yet self-evident to a knowledge by
identity of which the spiritual being in us must be capable; for that
spiritual being is in its essence and its original and intimate reality not
other than this Supreme Existence.

^Xm. i6, "IL I. «Xin. 19. *IV. 10. ^VI. i, 7, 8, n.

292

BRAHMAN, PURUSHA, ISHWARA 293

But although thus indeterminable to Mind, because of its absolute-
ness and infinity, we discover that this Supreme and Eternal Infinite
determines itself to our consciousness in the universe by real and funda-
mental truths of its being which are beyond the universe and in it and
are the very foundation of its existence. These truths present them-
selves to our conceptual cognition as the fundamental aspects in which
we see and experience the omnipresent Reality. In themselves they
are seized directly, not by intellectual understanding but by a spiritual
intuition, a spiritual experience in the very substance of our conscious-
ness ; but they can also be caught at in conception by a large and plastic
idea and can be expressed in some sort by a plastic speech which does
not insist too much on rigid definition or limit the wideness and subtlety
of the idea. In order to express this experience or this idea with any
nearness a language has to be created which is at once intuitively meta-
physical and revealingly poetic, admitting significant and living images
as the vehicle of a close, suggestive and vivid indication, — a language
such as we find hammered out into a subtle and pregnant massiveness
in the Veda and the Upanishads. In the ordinary tongue of metaphysical
thought we have to be content with a distant indication, an approxima-
tion by abstractions, which may still be of some service to our intellect,
for it is this kind of speech which suits our method of logical and ra-
tional understanding; but if it is to be of real service, the intellect must
consent to pass out of the bounds of a finite logic and accustom itself
to the logic of the Infinite. On this condition alone, by this way of
seeing and thinking, it ceases to be paradoxical or futile to speak of the
ineffable: but if we insist on applying a finite logic to the Infinite, the
omnipresent Reality will escape us and we shall grasp instead an abstract
shadow, a dead form petrified into speech or a hard incisive graph which
speaks of the Reality but does not express it. Our way of knowing must
be appropriate to that which is to be known ; otherwise we achieve only
a distant speculation, a figure of knowledge and not veritable knowledge.

The supreme Truth-aspect which thus manifests itself to us is an
eternal and infinite and absolute self-existence, self-awareness, self-
delight of being; this founds all things and secretly supports and per-
vades all things. This Self-existence reveals itself again in three terms
of its essential nature, — self, conscious being or spirit, and God or the
Divine Being. The Indian terms are more satisfactory, — Brahman the
Reality is Atman, Purusha, Ishwara; for these terms grew from a root
of Intuition and, while they have a comprehensive preciseness, are

294 THE LIFE DIVINE

capable of a plastic application which avoids both vagueness in the use
and the rigid snare of a too limiting intellectual concept. The Supreme
Brahman is that which in Western metaphysics is called the Absolute:
but Brahman is at the same time the omnipresent Reality in which all
that is relative exists as its forms or its movements; this is an Absolute
which takes all relativities in its embrace. The Upanishads affirm that
all this is the Brahman; Mind is Brahman, Life is Brahman, Matter
is Brahman; addressing Vayu, the Lord of Air, of Life, it is said "O
Vayu, thou art manifest Brahman"; and, pointing to man and beast and
bird and insect, each separately is identified with the One, — ^''O Brah-
man, thou art this old man and boy and girl, this bird, this insect."
Brahman is the Consciousness that knows itself in all that exists; Brah-
man is the Force that sustains the power of God and Titan and Demon,
the Force that acts in man and animal and the forms and energies of
Nature; Brahman is the Ananda, the secret Bliss of existence which is
the ether of our being and without which none could breathe or live.
Brahman is the inner Soul in all ; it has taken a form in correspondence
with each created form which it inhabits. The Lord of Beings is that
which is conscious in the conscious being, but he is also the Conscious
in inconscient things, the One who is master and in control of the many
that are passive in the hands of Force-Nature. He is the Timeless and
Time; He is Space and all that is in Space; He is Causality and the cause
and the effect: He is the thinker and his thought, the warrior and his
courage, the gambler and his dice-throw. All realities and all aspects
and all semblances are the Brahman; Brahman is the Absolute, the
Transcendent and incommunicable, the Supracosmic Existence that
sustains the cosmos, the Cosmic Self that upholds all beings, but It is
too the self of each individual: the soul or psychic entity is an eternal
portion of the Ishwara; it is his supreme Nature or Consciousness- Force
that has become the living being in a world of living beings. The Brah-
man alone is, and because of It all are, for all are the Brahman; this
Reality is the reality of everything that we see in Self and Nature.
Brahman, the Ishwara, is all this by his Yoga-Maya, by the power of
his Consciousness-Force put out in self-manifestation: he is the Con-
scious Being, Soul, Spirit, Purusha, and it is by his Nature, the force
of his conscious self-existence that he is all things; he is the Ishwara,
the omniscient and omnipotent All-ruler, and it is by his Shakti, his
conscious Power, that he manifests himself in Time and governs the
universe. These and similar statements taken together are all-compre-

BRAHMAN, PURUSHA, ISHWARA 295

hensive: it is possible for the mind to cut and select, to build a closed
system and explain away all that does not fit within it ; but it is on the
complete and many-sided statement that we must take our stand if we
have to acquire an integral knowledge.

An absolute, eternal and infinite Self-existence, Self-awareness,
Self-delight of being that secretly supports and pervades the universe
even while it is also beyond it, is, then, the first truth of spiritual
experience. But this truth of being has at once an impersonal and a
personal aspect; it is not only Existence, it is the one Being absolute,
eternal and infinite. As there are three fundamental aspects in which
we meet this Reality, — Self, Conscious Being or Spirit and God, the
Divine Being, or to use the Indian terms, the absolute and omnipresent
Reality, Brahman, manifest to us as Atman, Purusha, Ishwara, — so too
its power of Consciousness appears to us in three aspects: it is the self-
force of that consciousness conceptively creative of all things, Maya;
it is Prakriti, Nature or Force made dynamically executive, working out
all things under the witnessing eye of the Conscious Being, the Self or
Spirit; it is the conscious Power of the Divine Being, Shakti, which is
both conceptively creative and dynamically executive of all the divine
workings. These three aspects and their powers base and comprise the
whole of existence and all Nature and, taken together as a single whole,
they reconcile the apparent disparateness and incompatibility of the
supracosmic Transcendence, the cosmic universality and the separative-
ness of our individual existence; the Absolute^ cosmic Nature and our-
selves are linked in oneness by this triune aspect of the one Reality.
For taken by itself the existence of the Absolute, the Supreme Brahman,
would be a contradiction of the relative universe and our owti real
existence would be incompatible with its sole incommunicable Reality.
But the Brahman is at the same time omnipresent in all relativities;
it is the Absolute independent of all relatives, the Absolute basing all
relatives, the Absolute governing, pervading, constituting all relatives;
there is nothing that is not the omnipresent Reality. In observing the
triple aspect and the triple power we come to see how this is possible.

If we look at this picture of the Self-Existence and its works as a
unitary unlimited whole of vision, it stands together and imposes itself
by its convincing totality: but to the analysis of the logical intellect it
offers an abundance of difficulties, such as all attempts to erect a logical
system out of a perception of an illimitable Existence must necessarily
create; for any such endeavour must either effect consistency by an

296 THE LIFE DIVINE

arbitrary sectioning of the complex truth of things or else by its com-
prehensiveness become logically untenable. For we see that the Indeter-
minable determines itself as infinite and finite, the Immutable admits
a constant mutability and endless differences, the One becomes an in-
numerable multitude, the Impersonal creates or supports personality, is
itself a Person; the Self has a nature and is yet other than its nature;
Being turns into becoming and yet it is always itself and other than its
becomings; the Universal individualises itself and the Individual uni-
versalises himself; Brahman is at once void of qualities and capable of
infinite qualities, the Lord and Doer of works, yet a non-doer and a
silent witness of the workings of Nature. If we look carefully at these
workings of Nature, once we put aside the veil of familiarity and our
unthinking acquiescence in the process of things as natural because so
they always happen, we discover that all she does in whole or in parts
is a miracle, an act of some incomprehensible magic. The being of the
Self-existence and the world that has appeared in it are, each of them
and both together, a suprarational mystery. There seems to us to be a
reason in things because the processes of the physical finite are con-
sistent to our view and their law determinable, but this reason in things,
when closely examined, seems to stumble at every moment against the
irrational or infrarational and the suprarational: the consistency, the
determinability of process seems to lessen rather than increase as we
pass from matter to life and from life to mentality; if the finite consents
to some extent to look as if it were rational, the infinitesimal refuses to
be bound by the same laws and the infinite is unseizable. As for the
action of the universe and its significance, it escapes us altogether; if
Self, God or Spirit there be, his dealings with the world and us are
incomprehensible, offer no clue that we can follow. God and Nature
and even ourselves move in a mysterious way which is only partially and
at points intelligible, but as a whole escapes our comprehension. All
the works of Maya look like the production of a suprarational magical
Power which arranges things according to its wisdom or its phantasy,
but a wisdom which is not ours and a phantasy which baffles our imagi-
nation. The Spirit that manifests things or manifests itself in them so
obscurely, looks to our reason like a Magician and his power or Maya a
creative magic: but magic can create illusions or it can create astound-
ing realities, and we find it difficult to decide which of these supra-
rational processes faces us in this universe.

But, in fact, the cause of this impression must necessarily be sought

BRAHMAN, PURUSHA, ISHWARA 297

not in anything illusory or fantastic in the Supreme or the universal
Self-existence, but in our own inability to seize the supreme clue to its
manifold existence or discover the secret plan and pattern of its action.
The Self-existent is the Infinite and its way of being and of action must
be the way of the Infinite, but our consciousness is limited, our reason
built upon things finite: it is irrational to suppose that a finite conscious-
ness and reason can be a measure of the Infinite; this smallness cannot
judge that Immensity; this poverty bound to a limited use of its scanty
means cannot conceive the opulent management of those riches; an
ignorant half-knowledge cannot follow the motions of an All-Knowledge.
Our reasoning is based upon our experience of the finite operations of
physical Nature, on an incomplete observation and uncertain under-
standing of something that acts within limits; it has organised on that
basis certain conceptions which it seeks to make general and universal,
and whatever contradicts or departs from these conceptions it regards
as irrational, false or inexplicable. But there are different orders of the
reality and the conceptions, measures, standards suitable to one need
not be applicable to another order. Our physical being is built first upon
an aggregate of infinitesimals, electrons, atoms, molecules, cells; but
the law of action of these infinitesimals does not explain all the physical
workings even of the human body, much less can they cover all the law
and process of action of man's supraphysical parts, his life movements
and mind movements and soul movements. In the body finites have been
formed with their own habits, properties, characteristic ways of action;
the body itself is a finite which is not a mere aggregate of these smaller
finites which it uses as parts, organs, constituent instruments of its
operations; it has developed a being and has a general law which sur-
passes its dependence upon these elements or constituents. The life and
mind again are supraphysical finites with a different and more subtle
mode of operation of their own, and no dependence on the physical parts
for instrumentation can annul their intrinsic character; there is some-
thing more and other in our vital and mental being and vital and mental
forces than the functioning of a physical body. But, again, each finite is
in its reality or has behind it an Infinite which has built and supports
and directs the finite it has made as its self-figure; so that even the being
and law and process of the finite cannot be totally understood without a
knowledge of that which is occult within or behind it: our finite knowl-
edge, conceptions, standards may be valid within their limits, but they
are incomplete and relative. A law founded upon an observation of what

298 THE LIFE DIVINE

is divided in Space and Time cannot be confidently applied to the being
and action of the Indivisible ; not only it cannot be applied to the space-
less and timeless Infinite, but it cannot be applied even to a Time In-
finite or a Space Infinite. A law and process binding for our superficial
being need not be binding on what is occult within us. Again our intel-
lect, founding itself on reason, finds it difficult to deal with what is
inf rarational ; life is inf rarational and we find that our intellectual reason
applying itself to life is constantly forcing upon it a control, a measure,
an artificial procrustean rule that either succeeds in killing or petrifying
life or constrains it into rigid forms and conventions that lame and im-
prison its capacity or ends by a bungle, a revolt of life, a decay or dis-
ruption of the systems and superstructures built upon it by our intelli-
gence. An instinct, an intuition is needed which the intellect has not at
its command and does not always listen to when it comes in of itself to
help the mental working. But still more difficult must it be for our
reason to understand and deal with the suprarational ; the suprarational
is the realm of the spirit, and in the largeness, subtlety, profundity, com-
plexity of its movement the reason is lost; here intuition and inner
experience alone are the guide, or, if there is any other, it is that of which
intuition is only a sharp edge, an intense projected ray, — the final
enlightenment must come from the suprarational Truth-consciousness,
from a supramental vision and knowledge.

But the being and action of the Infinite must not be therefore
regarded as if it were a magic void of all reason; there is, on the con-
trary, a greater reason in all the operations of the Infinite, but it is not
a mental or intellectual, it is a spiritual and supramental reason: there
is a logic in it, because there are relations and connections infallibly
seen and executed; what is magic to our finite reason is the logic of the
Infinite. It is a greater reason, a greater logic because it is more vast,
subtle, complex in its operations: it comprehends all the data which
our observation fails to seize, it deduces from them results which neither
our deduction nor induction can anticipate, because our conclusions and
inferences have a meagre foundation and are fallible and brittle. If
we observe a happening, we judge and explain it from the result and
from a glimpse of its most external constituents, circumstances or causes;
but each happening is the outcome of a complex nexus of forces which
we do not and cannot observe, because all forces are to us invisible, —
but they are not invisible to the spiritual vision of the Infinite: some of
them are actualities working to produce or occasion a new actuality,

BRAHMAN, PURUSHA, ISHWARA 299

some are possibles that are near to the pre-existent actuals and in a way
included in their aggregate; but there can intervene always new possi-
bilities that suddenly become dynamic potentials and add themselves to
the nexus, and behind all are imperatives or an imperative which these
possibilities are labouring to actualise. Moreover, out of the same nexus
of forces different results are possible; what will come out of them is
determined by a sanction which was no doubt waiting and ready all the
time but seems to come in rapidly to intervene and alter everything, a
decisive divine imperative. All this our reason cannot grasp because
it is the instrument of an ignorance with a very limited vision and a
small stock of accumulated and not always very certain or reliable
knowledge and because too it has no means of direct awareness ; for this
is the difference between intuition and intellect, that intuition is born
of a direct awareness while intellect is an indirect action of a knowledge
which constructs itself with difficulty out of the unknown from signs and
indications and gathered data. But what is not evident to our reason
and senses, is self-evident to the Infinite Consciousness, and, if there
is a Will of the Infinite, it must be a Will that acts in this full knowledge
and is the perfect spontaneous result of a total self-evidence. It is
neither a hampered evolutionary Force bound by what it has evolved
nor an imaginative Will acting in the void upon a free caprice ; it is the
truth of the Infinite affirming itself in the determinations of the finite.
It is evident that such a Consciousness and Will need not act in
harmony with the conclusions of our limited reason or according to a
procedure familiar to it and approved of by our constructed notions or
in subjection to an ethical reason working for a limited and fragmentary
good; it might and does admit things deemed by our reason irrational
and unethical because that was necessary for the final and total Good
and for the working out of a cosmic purpose. What seems to us irrational
or reprehensible in relation to a partial set of facts, motives, desiderata
might be perfectly rational and approvable in relation to a much vaster
motive and totality of data and desiderata. Reason with its partial
vision sets up constructed conclusions which it strives to turn into gen-
eral rules of knowledge and action and it compels into its rule by some
mental device or gets rid of what does not suit with it: an infinite Con-
sciousness would have no such rules, it would have instead large intrinsic
truths governing automatically conclusion and result, but adapting them
differently and spontaneously to a different total of circumstances, so
that by this pliability and free adaptation it might seem to the narrower

300 THE LIFE DIVINE

faculty to have no standards whatever. In the same way, we cannot
judge of the principle and dynamic operation of infinite being by the
standards of finite existence, — ^what might be impossible for the one
would be normal and self-evidently natural states and motives for the
greater freer Reality. It is this that makes the difference between our
fragmentary mind consciousness constructing integers out of its frac-
tions and an essential and total consciousness, vision and knowledge.
It is not indeed possible, so long as we are compelled to use reason as
our main support, for it to abdicate altogether in favour of an undevel-
oped or half-organised intuition; but it is imperative on us in a con-
sideration of the Infinite and its being and action to enforce on our
reason an utmost plasticity and open it to an awareness of the larger
states and possibilities of that which we are striving to consider. It will
not do to apply our limited and limiting conclusions to That which is
illimitable. If we concentrate only on one aspect and treat it as the
whole, we illustrate the story of the blind men and the elephant; each
of the blind inquirers touched a different part and concluded that the
whole animal was some object resembling the part of which he had had
the touch. An experience of some one aspect of the Infinite is valid in
itself; but we cannot generalise from it that the Infinite is that alone,
nor would it be safe to view the rest of the Infinite in the terms of that
aspect and exclude all other view-points of spiritual experience. The
Infinite is at once an essentiality, a boundless totality and a multitude;
all these have to be known in order to know truly the Infinite. To see
the parts alone and the totality not at all or only as a sum of the parts
is a knowledge, but also at the same time an ignorance; to see the totality
alone and ignore the parts is also a knowledge and at the same time an
ignorance, for a part may be greater than the whele because it belongs
to the transcendence; to see the essence alone because it takes us back
straight towards the transcendence and negate the totality and the parts
is a penultimate knowledge, but here too there is a capital ignorance.
A whole knowledge must be there and the reason must become plastic
enough to look at all sides, all aspects and seek through them for that
in which they are one.

Thus too, if we see only the aspect of self, we may concentrate on
its static silence and miss the dynamic truth of the Infinite; if we see
only the Ishwara, we may seize the dynamic truth but miss the eternal
status and the infinite silence, become aware of only dynamic being,
dynamic consciousness, dynamic delight of being, but miss the pure

BRAHMAN, PURUSHA, ISHWARA 3OI

existence, pure consciousness, pure bliss of being. If we concentrate on
Purusha-Prakriti alone, we may see only the dichotomy of Soul and
Nature, Spirit and Matter, and miss their unity. In considering the
action of the Infinite we have to avoid the error of the disciple who
thought of himself as the Brahman, refused to obey the warning of the
elephant-driver to budge from the narrow path and was taken up by
the elephant's trunk and removed out of the way; ''You are no doubt
the Brahman," said the master to his bewildered disciple, "but why did
you not obey the driver Brahman and get out of the path of the elephant
Brahman?" We must not commit the mistake of emphasising one side
of the Truth and concluding from it or acting upon it to the exclusion
of all other sides and aspects of the Infinite. The realisation "I am
That" is true, but we cannot safely proceed on it unless we realise also
that all is That; our self-existence is a fact, but we must also be aware
of other selves, of the same Self in other beings and of That which
exceeds both own-self and other-self. The Infinite is one in a multi-
plicity and its action is only seizable by a supreme Reason which regards
all and acts as a one-awareness that observes itself in difference and
respects its own differences, so that each thing and each being has its
form of essential being and its form of dynamic nature, svarupa, svad-
harma, and all are respected in the total working. The knowledge and
action of the Infinite is one in an unbound variability: it would be from
the point of view of the infinite Truth equally an error to insist either
on a sameness of action in all circumstances or on a diversity of action
without any unifying truth and harmony behind the diversity. In our
own principle of conduct, if we sought to act in this greater Truth, it
would be equally an error to insist on our self alone or to insist on other
selves alone; it is the Self of all on which we have to found a unity of
action and a total, infinitely plastic yet harmonious diversity of action;
for that is the nature of the working of the Infinite.

If we look from this view-point of a larger more plastic reason,
taking account of the logic of the Infinite, at the difficulties which meet
our intelligence when it tries to conceive the absolute and omnipresent
Reality, we shall see that the whole difficulty is verbal and conceptual
and not real. Our intelligence looks at its concept of the Absolute and
sees that it must be indeterminable and at the same time it sees a world
of determinations which emanates from the Absolute and exists in it, —
for it can emanate from nowhere else and can exist nowhere else;
it is further baffled by the affirmation, also hardly disputable on the

302 THE LIFE DIVINE

premisses, that all these determinates are nothing else than this very-
indeterminable Absolute. But the contradiction disappears when we
understand that the indeterminability is not in its true sense negative,
not an imposition of incapacity on the Infinite, but positive, a freedom
within itself from limitation by its own determinations and necessarily
a freedom from all external determination by anything not itself, since
there is no real possibility of such a not-self coming into existence. The
Infinite is inimitably free, free to determine itself infinitely, free from
all restraining effect of its own creations. In fact the Infinite does not
create, it manifests what is in itself, in its own essence of reality; it is
itself that essence of all reality and all realities are powers of that one
Reality. The Absolute neither creates nor is created, — in the current
sense of making or being made; we can speak of creation only in the
sense of the Being becoming in form and movement what it already is in
substance and status. Yet we have to emphasise its indeterminability in
that special and positive sense, not as a negation but as an indispensable
condition of its free infinite self-determination, because without that
the Reality would be a fixed eternal determinate or else an indeterminate
fixed and bound to a sum of possibilities of determination inherent within
it. Its freedom from all limitation, from any binding by its own creation
cannot be itself turned into a limitation, an absolute incapacity, a denial
of all freedom of self-determination; it is this that would be a contradic-
tion, it would be an attempt to define and limit by negation the infinite
and illimitable. Into the central fact of the two sides of the nature of
the Absolute, the essential and the self-creative or dynamic, no real
contradiction enters; it is only a pure infinite essence that can formulate
itself in infinite ways. One statement is complementary to the other,
there is no mutual cancellation, no incompatibility; it is only the dual
statement of a single inescapable fact by human reason in human
language.

The same conciliation occurs everywhere, when we look with a
straight and accurate look on the truth of the Reality. In our experience
of it we become aware of an Infinite essentially free from all limitation
by qualities, properties, features; on the other hand, we are aware of an
Infinite teeming with innumerable qualities, properties, features. Here
again the statement of illimitable freedom is positive, not negative; it
does not negate what we see, but on the contrary provides the indis-
pensable condition for it, it makes possible a free and infinite self-
expression in quality and feature. A quality is the character of a power

BRAHMAN, PUEUSHA, ISHWARA 3O3

of conscious being; or we may say that the consciousness of being
expressing what is in it makes the power it brings out recognisable by
a native stamp on it which we call quality or character. Courage as a
quality is such a power of being, it is a certain character of my con-
sciousness expressing a formulated force of my being, bringing out or
creating a definite kind of force of my nature in action. So too the
power of a drug to cure is its property, a special force of being native
to the herb or mineral from which it is produced, and this speciality is
determined by the Real-Idea concealed in the involved consciousness
which dwells in the plant or mineral ; the idea brings out in it what was
there at the root of its manifestation and has now come out thus empow-
ered as the force of its being. All qualities, properties, features are such
powers of conscious being thus put forth from itself by the Absolute;
It has everything within It, It has the free power to put all forth ; ^ yet
we cannot define the Absolute as a quality of courage or a power of
healing, we cannot even say that these are a characteristic feature of
the Absolute, nor can we make up a sum of qualities and say "that is
the Absolute." But neither can we speak of the Absolute as a pure blank
incapable of manifesting these things; on the contrary, all capacity is
there, the powers of all qualities and characters are there inherent
within it. The mind is in a difficulty because it has to say, "The Abso-
lute or Infinite is none of these things, these things are not the Absolute
or Infinite" and at the same time it has to say, "The Absolute is all these
things, they are not something else than That, for That is the sole
existence and the all-existence." Here it is evident that it is an undue
finiteness of thought conception and verbal expression which creates
the difficulty, but there is in reality none; for it would be evidently
absurd to say that the Absolute is courage or curing-power, or to say
that courage and curing-power are the Absolute, but it would be equally
absurd to deny the capacity of the Absolute to put forth courage or
curing-power as self-expressions in its manifestation. When the logic
of the finite fails us, we have to see with a direct and unbound vision
what is behind in the logic of the Infinite. We can then realise that the
Infinite is infinite in quality, feature, power, but that no sum of quali-
ties, features, powers can describe the Infinite.

We see that the Absolute, the Self, the Divine, the Spirit, the Being
is One; the Transcendental is one, the Cosmic is one: but we see also

° The word for creation in Sanskrit means a loosing or putting forth of what is
in the being.

304 THE LIFE DIVINE

that beings are many and each has a self, a spirit, a like yet different
nature. And since the spirit and essence of things is one, we are obliged
to admit that all these many must be that One, and it follows that the
One is or has become many; but how can the limited or relative be the
Absolute and how can man or beast or bird be the Divine Being? But
in erecting this apparent contradiction the mind makes a double error.
It is thinking in the terms of the mathematical finite unit which is sole
in limitation, the one which is less than two and can become two only
by division and fragmentation or by addition and multiplication; but
this is an infinite Oneness, it is the essential and infinite Oneness which
can contain the hundred and the thousand and the million and billion
and trillion. Whatever astronomic or more than astronomic figures you
heap and multiply, they cannot overpass or exceed that Oneness; for,
in the language of the Upanishad, it moves not, yet is always far in
front when you would pursue and seize it. It can be said of it that it
would not be the infinite Oneness if it were not capable of an infinite
multiplicity; but that does not mean that the One is plural or can be
limited or described as the sum of the Many: on the contrary, it can be
the infinite Many because it exceeds all limitation or description by
multiplicity and exceeds at the same time all limitation by finite con-
ceptual oneness. Pluralism is an error because, though there is the
spiritual plurality, the many souls are dependent and interdependent
existences; their sum also is not the One nor is it the cosmic totality;
they depend on the One and exist by its Oneness: yet the plurality is
not unreal, it is the One Soul that dwells as the individual in these many
souls and they are eternal in the One and by the one Eternal. This is
difficult for the mental reason which makes an opposition between the
Infinite and the finite and associates finiteness with plurality and infinity
with oneness; but in the logic of the Infinite there is no such opposition
and the eternity of the Many in the One is a thing that is perfectly
natural and possible.

Again, we see that there is an infinite pure status and immobile
silence of the Spirit; we see too that there is a boundless movement of
the Spirit, a power, a dynamic spiritual all-containing self-extension
of the Infinite. Our conceptions foist upon this perception, in itself valid
and accurate, an opposition between the silence and status and the
dynamis and movement, but to the reason and the logic of the Infinite
there can be no such opposition. A solely silent and static Infinite, an
Infinite without an infinite power and dynamis and energy is inadmis-

BRAHMAN, PURUSHA, ISHWARA 3O5

sible except as the perception of an aspect; a powerless Absolute, an
impotent Spirit is unthinkable: an infinite energy must be the dynamis
of the Infinite, an all-power must be the potency of the Absolute, an
illimitable force must be the force of the Spirit. But the silence, the
status are the basis of the movement, an eternal immobility is the nec-
essary condition, field, essence even, of the infinite mobility, a stable
being is the condition and foundation of the vast action of the Force
of being. It is when we arrive at something of this silence, stability,
immobility that we can base on it a force and energy which in our
superficial restless state would be inconceivable. The opposition we
make is mental and conceptual; in reality, the silence of the Spirit and
the dynamis of the Spirit are complementary truths and inseparable.
The immutable silent Spirit may hold its infinite energy silent and
immobile within it, for it is not bound by its own forces, is not their
subject or instrument, but it does possess them, does release them, is
capable of an eternal and infinite action, does not weary or need to stop,
and yet all the time its silent immobility inherent in its action and move-
ment is not for a moment shaken or disturbed or altered by its action
and movement; the witness silence of the Spirit is there in the very
grain of all the voices and workings of Nature. These things may be
difficult for us to understand because our own surface finite capacity in
either direction is limited and our conceptions are based on our limita-
tions ; but it should be easy to see that these relative and finite concep-
tions do not apply to the Absolute and Infinite.

Our conception of the Infinite is formlessness, but everywhere we
see form and forms surrounding us and it can be and is affirmed of the
Divine Being that he is at once Form and the Formless. For here too
the apparent contradiction does not correspond to a real opposition ; the
Formless is not a negation of the power of formation, but the condition
for the Infinite's free formation: for otherwise there would be a single
Form or only a fixity or sum of possible forms in a finite universe. The
formlessness is the character of the spiritual essence, the spirit-substance
of the Reality; all finite realities are powers, forms, self-shapings of that
substance: the Divine is formless and nameless, but by that very reason
capable of manifesting all possible names and shapes of being. Forms
are manifestations, not arbitrary inventions out of nothing ; for line and
colour, mass and design which are the essentials of form carry always
in them a significance, are, it might be said, secret values and signifi-
cances of an unseen reality made visible; it is for that reason that

306 THE LIFE DIVINE

figure, line, hue, mass, composition can embody what would be other-
wise unseen, can convey what would be otherwise occult to the sense.
Form may be said to be the innate body, the inevitable self-revelation
of the formless, and this is true not only of external shapes, but of the
unseen formations of mind and life which we seize only by our thought
and those sensible forms of which only the subtle grasp of the inner
consciousness can become aware. Name in its deeper sense is not the
word by which we describe the object, but the total of power, quality,
character of the reality which a form of things embodies and which we
try to sum up by a designating sound, a knowable name, Nomen. No-
men in this sense, we might say, is Numen; the secret Names of the
Gods are their power, quality, character of being caught up by the con-
sciousness and made conceivable. The Infinite is nameless, but in that
namelessness all possible names, Numens of the gods, the names and
forms of all realities, are already envisaged and prefigured, because they
are there latent and inherent in the All-Existence.

It becomes clear from these considerations that the co-existence of
the Infinite and the finite, which is the very nature of universal being,
is not a juxtaposition or mutual inclusion of two opposites, but as natural
and inevitable as the relation of the principle of Light and Fire with
the suns. The finite is a frontal aspect and a self-determination of the
Infinite ; no finite can exist in itself and by itself, it exists by the Infinite
and because it is of one essence with the Infinite. For by the Infinite
we do not mean solely an illimitable self-extension in Space and Time,
but something that is also spaceless and timeless, a self-existent Inde-
finable and Illimitable which can express itself in the infinitesimal as
well as in the vast, in a second of time, in a point of space, in a passing
circumstance. The finite is looked upon as a division of the Indivisible,
but there is no such thing: for this division is only apparent; there is
a demarcation, but no real separation is possible. When we see with
the inner vision and sense and not with the physical eye a tree or other
object, what we become aware of is an infinite one Reality constituting
the tree or object, pervading its every atom and molecule, forming them
out of itself, building the whole nature, process of becoming, operation
of indwelling energy; all of these are itself, are this infinite, this Reality:
we see it extending indivisibly and uniting all objects so that none is
really separate from it or quite separate from other objects. "It stands"
says the Gita ^'undivided in beings and yet as if divided." Thus each

BRAHMAN, PURUSHA, ISHWARA 307

object is that Infinite and one in essential being with all other objects
that are also forms and names — powers, numens — of the Infinite.

This incoercible unity in all divisions and diversities is the mathe-
matics of the Infinite, indicated in a verse of the Upanishads — "This is
the complete and That is the complete; subtract the complete from the
complete, the complete is the remainder." For so too it may be said of
the infinite self-multiplication of the Reality that all things are that
self-multiplication; the One becomes Many, but all these Many are
That which was already and is always itself and in becoming the Many
remains the One. There is no division of the One by the appearance of
the finite, for it is the one Infinite that appears to us as the many finite:
the creation adds nothing to the Infinite; it remains after creation what
it was before. The Infinite is not a sum of things, it is That which is
all things and more. If this logic of the Infinite contradicts the concep-
tions of our finite reason, it is because it exceeds it and does not base
itself on the data of the limited phenomenon, but embraces the Reality
and sees the truth of all phenomena in the truth of the Reality; it does
not see them as separate beings, movements, names, forms, things; for
that they cannot be, since they could be that only if they were phe-
nomena in the Void, things without a common basis or essence, funda-
mentally unconnected, connected only by coexistence and pragmatic
relation, not realities which exist by their root of unity and, so far as
they can be considered independent, are secured in their independence
of outer or inner figure and movement only by their perpetual depend-
ence on their parent Infinite, their secret identity with the one Identical.
The Identical is their root, their cause of form, the one power of their
varying powers, their constituting substance.

The Identical to our notions is the Immutable; it is ever the same
through eternity, for if it is or becomes subject to mutation or if it
admits of differences, it ceases to be identical; but what we see every-
where is an infinitely variable fundamental oneness which seems the
very principle of Nature. The basic Force is one, but it manifests from
itself innumerable forces; the basic substance is one, but it develops
many different substances and millions of unlike objects; mind is one
but differentiates itself into many mental states, mind-formations,
thoughts, perceptions differing from each other and entering into har-
mony or into conflict; life is one, but the forms of life are unlike and
innumerable; humanity is one in nature, but there are different race

308 THE LIFE DIVINE

types and every individual man is himself and in some way unlike
others; Nature insists on tracing lines of difference on the leaves of one
tree; she drives differentiation so far that it has been found that the
lines on one man's thumb are different from the lines of every other
man's thumb so that he can be identified by that differentiation alone, —
yet fundamentally all men are alike and there is no essential difference.
Oneness or sameness is everywhere, differentiation is everywhere; the
indwelling Reality has built the universe on the principle of the develop-
ment of one seed into a million different fashions. But this again is the
logic of the Infinite; because the essence of the Reality is immutably
the same, it can assume securely these innumerable differences of form
and character and movement, for even if they were multiplied a trillion-
fold, that would not affect the underlying immutability of the eternal
Identical. Because the Self and Spirit in things and beings is one
everywhere, therefore Nature can afford this luxury of infinite differen-
tiation: if there were not this secure basis which brings it about that
nothing changes yet all changes, all her workings and creations would
in this play collapse into disintegration and chaos; there would be
nothing to hold her disparate movements and creations together. The
immutability of the Identical does not consist in a monotone of change-
less sameness incapable of variation; it consists in an unchangeableness
of being which is capable of endless formation of being, but which no
differentiation can destroy or impair or minimise. The Self becomes
insect and bird and beast and man, but it is always the same Self through
these mutations because it is the One who manifests himself infinitely
in endless diversity. Our surface reason is prone to conclude that the
diversity may be unreal, an appearance only, but if we look a little
deeper we shall see that a real diversity brings out the real Unity, shows
it as it were in its utmost capacity, reveals all that it can be and is in
itself, delivers from its whiteness of hue the many tones of colour that
are fused together there ; Oneness finds itself infinitely in what seems to
us to be a falling away from its oneness, but is really an inexhaustible
diverse display of unity. This is the miracle, the Maya of the universe,
yet perfectly logical, natural and a matter of course to the self-vision
and self-experience of the Infinite.

For the Maya of Brahman is at once the magic and the logic of an
infinitely variable Oneness ; if, indeed, there were only a rigid monotone
of limited oneness and sameness, there would be no place for reason
and logic, for logic consists in the right perceptions of relations: the

309

highest work of reason is to find the one substance, the one law, the
cementing latent reality connecting and unifying the many, the different,
the discordant and disparate. All universal existence moves between
these two terms, a diversification of the One, a unification of the many
and diverse, and that must be because the One and the Many are funda-
mental aspects of the Infinite. For what the divine Self-knowledge and
All-knowledge brings out in its manifestation must be a truth of its
being and the play of that truth is its Lila.

This, then, is the logic of the way of universal being of Brahman
and the basic working of the reason, the infinite intelligence of ^laya.
As with the being of Brahman, so with its consciousness, Maya: it is
not bound to a finite restriction of itself or to one state or law of its
action; it can be many things simultaneously, have many co-ordinated
movements which to the finite reason may seem contradictory; it is one
but innumerably manifold, infinitely plastic, inexhaustibly adaptable.
Maya is the supreme and universal consciousness and force of the
Eternal and Infinite and, being by its very nature unbound and illimit-
able, it can put forth many states of consciousness at a time, many
dispositions of its Force, without ceasing to be the same consciousness-
force for ever. It is at once transcendental, universal and individual;
it is the supreme supracosmic Being that is aware of itself as All-Being,
as the Cosmic Self, as the Consciousness-force of cosmic Nature, and
at the same time experiences itself as the individual being and conscious-
ness in all existences. The individual consciousness can see itself as
limited and separate, but can also put off its limitations and know itself
as universal and again as transcendent of the universe; this is because
there is in all these states or positions or underlying them the same
triune consciousness in a triple status. There is then no difficulty in
the One thus seeing or experiencing itself triply, whether from above
in the Transcendent Existence or from between in the Cosmic Self or
from below in the individual conscious being. All that is necessary for
this to be accepted as natural and logical is to admit that there can be
different real statuses of consciousness of the One Being, and that can-
not be impossible for an Existence which is free and infinite and cannot
be tied to a single condition; a free power of self- variation must be
natural to a consciousness that is infinite. If the possibility of a mani-
fold status of consciousness is admitted, no limit can be put to the ways
of its variation of status, provided the One is aware of itself simultane-
ously in all of them; for the One and Infinite must be thus universally

310 THE LIFE DIVINE

conscious. The only difficulty, which a further consideration may solve,
is to understand the connections between a status of limited or con-
structed consciousness like ours, a status of ignorance, with the infinite
self-knowledge and all-knowledge.

A second possibility of the Infinite Consciousness that must be
admitted is its power of self-limitation or secondary self- formation into
a subordinate movement within the integral illimitable consciousness and
knowledge; for that is a necessary consequence of the power of self-
determination of the Infinite. Each self-determination of the self-being
must have its own awareness of its self-truth and its self-nature; or, if
we prefer so to put it, the Being in that determination must be so self-
aware. Spiritual individuality means that each individual self or spirit
is a centre of self- vision and aU-vision ; the circumstance — the boundless
circumference, as we may say, — of this vision may be the same for all,
but the centre may be different, — not located as in a spatial point in a
spatial circle, but a psychological centre related with others through a
co-existence of the diversely conscious Many in the universal being.
Each being in a world will see the same world, but see it from its own
self-being according to its own way of self-nature: for each will manifest
its own truth of the Infinite, its own way of self-determination and of
meeting the cosmic determinations; its vision by the law of unity in
variety will no doubt be fundamentally the same as that of others, but
it will still develop its own differentiation, — as we see all human beings
conscious in the one human way of the same cosmic things, yet always
with an individual difference. This self-limitation would be, not funda-
mental, but an individual specialisation of a common universality or
totality; the spiritual individual would act from his own centre of the
one Truth and according to his self-nature, but on a common basis and
not with any blindness to other-self and other-nature. It would be con-
sciousness limiting its action with full knowledge, not a movement of
ignorance. But apart from this individualising self-limitation, there must
also be in the consciousness of the Infinite a power of cosmic limitation ;
it must be able to limit its action so as to base a given world or universe
and to keep it in its own order, harmony, self-building: for the creation
of a universe necessitates a special determination of the Infinite Con-
sciousness to preside over that world and a holding back of all that is
not needed for that movement. In the same way the putting forth of an
independent action of some power like Mind, Life or Matter must have
as its support a similar principle of self-limitation. It cannot be said

BRAHMAN, PURUSHA, ISHWARA 3II

that such a movement must be impossible for the Infinite, because it is
illimitable; on the contrary, this must be one of its many powers; for its
powers too are illimitable: but this also, like other self-determinations,
other finite buildings, would not be a separation or a real division, for
all the Infinite Consciousness would be around and behind it and
supporting it and the special movement itself would be intrinsically
aware not only of itself, but, in essence, of all that was behind it. This
would be so, inevitably, in the integral consciousness of the Infinite: but
we can suppose also that an intrinsic though not an active awareness
of this kind, demarcating itself, yet indivisible, might be there too in
the total self-consciousness of the movement of the Finite. This much
cosmic or individual conscious self-limitation would evidently be pos-
sible to the Infinite and can be accepted by a larger reason as one of its
spiritual possibilities; but so far, on this basis, any division or ignorant
separation or binding and blinding limitation such as is apparent in our
own consciousness would be unaccountable.

But a third power or possibility of the Infinite Consciousness can
be admitted, its power of self-absorption, of plunging into itself, into
a state in which self-awareness exists but not as knowledge and not as
all-knowledge; the all would then be involved in pure self -awareness, and
knowledge and the inner consciousness itself would be lost in pure being.
This is, luminously, the state which we call the Superconscience in an
absolute sense, — although most of what we call superconscient is in
reality not that but only a higher conscient, something that is conscious
to itself and only superconscious to our own limited level of awareness.
This self-absorption, this trance of infinity is again, no longer luminously
but darkly, the state which we call the Inconscient ; for the being of the
Infinite is there though by its appearance of inconscience it seems to us
rather to be an infinite non-being: a self -oblivious intrinsic conscious-
ness and force are there in that apparent non-being, for by the energy
of the Inconscient an ordered world is created; it is created in a trance
of self-absorption, the force acting automatically and with an apparent
blindness as in a trance, but still with the inevitability and power of truth
of the Infinite. If we take a step further and admit that a special
or a restricted and partial action of self-absorption is possible to the In-
finite, an action not always of its infinity concentrated limitlessly in itself,
but confined to a special status or to an individual or cosmic self-deter-
mination, we have then the explanation of the concentrated condition or
status by which it becomes aware separately of one aspect of its being.

312 THE LIFE DIVINE

There can then be a fundamental double status such as that of the Nirguna
standing back from the Saguna and absorbed in its own purity and im-
mobility, while the rest is held back behind a veil and not admitted
within that special status. In the same way we could account for the
status of consciousness aware of one field of being or one movement of
it, while the awareness of all the rest would be held behind and veiled or,
as it were, cut off by a waking trance of dynamic concentration from
the specialised or limited awareness occupied only with its own field or
movement. The totality of the infinite consciousness would be there, not
abolished, recoverable, but not evidently active, active only by implica-
tion, by inherence or by the instrumentality of the limited awareness,
not in its own manifest power and presence. It will be evident that all
these three powers can be accepted as possible to the dynamics of the
Infinite Consciousness, and it is by considering the many ways in which
they can work that we may get a clue to the operations of Maya.

This throws light incidentally on the opposition made by our minds
between pure consciousness, pure existence, pure bliss and the abundant
activity, the manifold application, the endless vicissitudes of being, con-
sciousness and delight of being that take place in the universe. In the
state of pure consciousness and pure being we are aware of that only,
simple, immutable, self-existent, without form or object, and we feel
that to be alone true and real. In the other or dynamic state we feel its
dynamism to be perfectly true and natural and are even capable of
thinking that no such experience as that of pure consciousness is possi-
ble. Yet it is now evident that to the Infinite Consciousness both the
static and the dynamic are possible; these are two of its statuses and
both can be present simultaneously in the universal awareness, the one
witnessing the other and supporting it or not looking at it and yet auto-
matically supporting it; or the silence and status may be there penetrat-
ing the activity or throwing it up like an ocean immobile below throw-
ing up a mobility of waves on its surface. This is also the reason why it
is possible for us in certain conditions of our being to be aware of several
different states of consciousness at the same time. There is a state of
being experienced in Yoga in which we become a double consciousness,
one on the surface, small, active, ignorant, swayed by thoughts and feel-
ings, grief and joy and all kinds of reactions, the other within calm, vast,
equal, observing the surface being with an immovable detachment or
indulgence or, it may be, acting upon its agitation to quiet, enlarge,
transform it. So too we can rise to a consciousness above and observe

BRAHMAN, PURUSHA, ISHWARA 313

the various parts of our being, inner and outer, mental, vital and physi-
cal and the subconscient below all, and act upon one or other or the
whole from that higher status. It is possible also to go down from that
height or from any height into any of these lower states and take its
limited light or its obscurity as our place of working while the rest that
we are is either temporarily put away or put behind or else kept as a
field of reference from which we can get support, sanction or light and
influence or as a status into which we can ascend or recede and from it
observe the inferior movements. Or we can plunge into trance, get within
ourselves and be conscious there while all outward things are excluded;
or we can go beyond even this inner awareness and lose ourselves in some
deeper other consciousness or some high superconscience. There is also
a pervading equal consciousness into which we can enter and see all
ourselves with one enveloping glance or omnipresent awareness one and
indivisible. All this which looks strange and abnormal or may seem fan-
tastic to the surface reason acquainted only with our normal status of
limited ignorance and its movements divided from our inner higher and
total reality, becomes easily intelligible and admissible in the light of
the larger reason and logic of the Infinite or by the admission of the
greater illimitable powers of the Self, the Spirit in us which is of one
essence with the Infinite.

Brahman the Reality is the self -existent Absolute and Maya is the
Consciousness and Force of this self-existence; but with regard to the
universe Brahman appears as the Self of all existence, Atman, the cos-
mic Self, but also as the Supreme Self transcendent of its own cosmicity
and at the same time individual-universal in each being ; Maya can then
be seen as the self-power, Atma-Shakti, of the Atman. It is true that
when we first become aware of this Aspect, it is usually in a silence of the
whole being or at the least in a silence within which draws back or stands
away from the surface action ; this Self is then felt as a status in silence,
an immobile immutable being, self -existent, pervading the whole uni-
verse, omnipresent in all, but not dynamic or active, aloof from the ever
mobile energy of Maya. In the same way we can become aware of it as
the Purusha, separate from Prakriti, the Conscious Being standing back
from the activities of Nature. But this is an exclusive concentration
which limits itself to a spiritual status and puts away from it all activity
in order to realise the freedom of Brahman the self-existent Reality from
all limitation by its own action and manifestation: it is an essential
realisation, but not the total realisation. For we can see that the Con-

314 THE LIFE DIVrNE

scious-Power, the Shakti that acts and creates, is not other than the Maya
or all-knowledge of Brahman; it is the Power of the Self; Prakriti is the
working of the Purusha, Conscious Being active by its own Nature: the
duality then of Soul and World-Energy, silent Self and the creative
Power of the Spirit, is not really something dual and separate, it is biune.
As we cannot separate Fire and the power of Fire, it has been said, so
we cannot separate the Divine Reality and its Consciousness-Force,
Chit-Shakti. This first realisation of Self as something intensely silent
and purely static is not the whole truth of it, there can also be a realisa-
tion of Self in its power. Self as the condition of world-activity and
world-existence. However, the Self is a fundamental aspect of Brahman,
but with a certain stress on its impersonality; therefore the Power of the
Self has the appearance of a Force that acts automatically with the Self
sustaining it, witness and support and originator and enjoyer of its ac-
tivities but not involved in them for a moment. As soon as we become
aware of the Self, we are conscious of it as eternal, unborn, unembodied,
uninvolved in its workings: it can be felt within the form of being, but
also as enveloping it, as above it, surveying its embodiment from above,
adhyaksa; it is omnipresent, the same in everything, infinite and pure
and intangible for ever. This Self can be experienced as the Self of the
individual, the Self of the thinker, doer, enjoyer, but even so it always
has this greater character; its individuality is at the same time a vast
universality or very readily passes into that, and the next step to that
is a sheer transcendence or a complete and ineffable passing into the
Absolute. The Self is that aspect of the Brahman in which it is intimately
felt as at once individual, cosmic, transcendent of the universe. The reali-
sation of the Self is the straight and swift way towards individual libera-
tion, a static universality, a Nature-transcendence. At the same time
there is a realisation of Self in which it is felt not only sustaining and
pervading and enveloping all things, but constituting everything and
identified in a free identity with all its becomings in Nature. Even so,
freedom and impersonality are always the character of the Self. There
is no appearance of subjection to the workings of its own Power in the
universe, such as the apparent subjection of the Purusha to Prakriti. To
realise the Self is to realise the eternal freedom of the Spirit.

The Conscious Being, Purusha, is the Self as originator, witness, sup-
port and lord and enjoyer of the forms and works of Nature. As the
aspect of Self is in its essential character transcendental even when
involved and identified with its universal and individual becomings, so

BRAHMAN, PURUSHA, ISHWARA 315

the Purusha aspect is characteristically universal-individual and inti-
mately connected with Nature even when separated from her. For this
conscious Spirit while retaining its impersonality and eternity, its uni-
versality, puts on at the same time a more personal aspect ;''^ it is the
impersonal-personal being in Nature from whom it is not altogether
detached, for it is always coupled with her: Nature acts for the Purusha
and by its sanction, for its will and pleasure; the Conscious Being im-
parts its consciousness to the Energy we call Nature, receives in that
consciousness her workings as in a mirror, accepts the forms which she,
the executive cosmic Force, creates and imposes on it, gives or with-
draws its sanction from her movements. The experience of Purusha-
Prakriti, the Spirit or Conscious Being in its relations to Nature, is of
immense pragmatic importance ; for on these relations the whole play of
the consciousness depends in the embodied being. If the Purusha in us
is passive and allows Nature to act, accepting all she imposes on him,
giving a constant automatic sanction, then the soul in mind, life, body,
the mental, vital, physical being in us, becomes subject to our nature,
ruled by its formation, driven by its activities; that is the normal state
of our ignorance. If the Purusha in us becomes aware of itself as the Wit-
ness and stands back from Nature, that is the first step to the soul's
freedom; for it becomes detached, and it is possible then to know Nature
and her processes and in all independence, since we are no longer in-
volved in her works, to accept or not to accept, to make the sanction no
longer automatic but free and effective; we can choose what she shall
do or not do in us, or we can stand back altogether from her works and
withdraw easily into the Self's spiritual silence, or we can reject her
present formations and rise to a spiritual level of existence and from
there re-create our existence. The Purusha can cease to be subject, amsa,
and become lord of its nature, Isvara.

In the philosophy of the Sankhyas we find developed most thor-
oughly the metaphysical idea of Purusha-Prakriti. These two are eter-
nally separate entities, but in relation to each other. Prakriti is Nature-
power, an executive Power, it is Energy apart from Consciousness; for
Consciousness belongs to the Purusha, Prakriti without Purusha is inert,
mechanical, inconscient. Prakriti develops as its formal self and basis of
action primal Matter and in it manifests life and sense and mind and

'The Sankhya philosophy stresses this personal aspect, makes the Purusha
many, plural, and assigns universality to Nature ; in this view each soul is an inde-
pendent existence although all souls experience a common universal Nature.

3l6 THE LIFE DIVINE

intelligence ; but intelligence too, since it is part of Nature and its prod-
uct in primal Matter, is also inert, mechanical, inconscient, — a concep-
tion which sheds a certain light on the order and perfectly related work-
ings of the Inconscient in the material universe: it is the light of the
soul, the Spirit, that is imparted to the mechanical workings of sense-
mind and intelligence, they become conscious by its consciousness, even
as they become active only by the assent of the spirit. The Purusha be-
comes free by drawing back from Prakriti ; it becomes master of her by
refusing to be involved in Matter. Nature acts by three principles, modes
or qualities of its stuff and its action, which in us become the fundamental
modes of our psychological and physical substance and its workings,
the principle of inertia, the principle of kinesis and the principle of bal-
ance, light and harmony: when these are in unequal motion, her action
takes place; when they fall into equilibrium she passes into quiescence.
Purusha, conscious being, is plural, not one and single, while Nature is
one: it would seem to follow that whatever principle of oneness we find
in existence belongs to Nature, but each soul is independent and unique,
sole to itself and separate whether in its enjoyment of Nature or its
liberation from Nature. All these positions of the Sankhya we find to
be perfectly valid in experience when we come into direct inner contact
with the realities of individual soul and universal Nature; but they are
pragmatic truths and we are not bound to accept them as the whole or the
fundamental truth either of self or of Nature. Prakriti presents itself
as an inconscient Energy in the material world, but, as the scale of
consciousness rises, she reveals herself more and more as a conscious
force and we perceive that even her inconscience concealed a secret con-
sciousness ; so too conscious being is many in its individual souls, but in
its self we can experience it as one in all and one in its own essential
existence. Moreover, the experience of soul and Nature as dual is true,
but the experience of their unity has also its validity. If nature or Energy
is able to impose its forms and workings on Being, it can only be because
it is Nature or Energy of Being and so the Being can accept them as its
own; if the Being can become lord of Nature, it must be because it is
its own Nature which it had passively watched doing its work, but can
control and master; even in its passivity its consent is necessary to the
action of Prakriti and this relation shows sufficiently that the two are not
alien to each other. The duality is a position taken up, a double status
accepted for the operations of the self-manifestation of the being; but

BRAHMAN, PURUSHA, ISHWAEA 317

there is no eternal and fundamental separateness and dualism of Being
and its Consciousness-Force, of the Soul and Nature.

It is the Reality, the Self, that takes the position of the Conscious
Being regarding and accepting or ruling the works of its own Nature.
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. This duality is also necessary that the Spirit may be at any time
at liberty to draw back from any formation of its Nature and dissolve all
formation or accept or enforce a new or a higher formation. These are
very evident possibilities of the Spirit in its dealings with its own Force
and they can be observed and verified in our own experience; they are
logical results of the powers of the Infinite Consciousness, powers which
we have seen to be native to its infinity. The Purusha aspect and the
Prakriti aspect go always together and whatever status Nature or Con-
sciousness-force in action assumes, manifests or develops, there is a cor-
responding status of the Spirit. In its supreme status the Spirit is the
supreme Conscious Being, Purushottama, and the Consciousness-Force
is his supreme Nature, Para-Prakriti. In each status of the gradations of
Nature, the Spirit takes a poise of its being proper to that gradation ; in
Mind-Nature it becomes the mental being, in Life-Nature it becomes the
vital being, in nature of Matter it becomes the physical being, in super-
mind it becomes the Being of Knowledge; in the supreme spiritual status
it becomes the Being of Bliss and pure Existence. In us, in the embodied
individual, it stands behind all as the psychic Entity, the inner Self sup-
porting the other formulations of our consciousness and spiritual exist-
ence. The Purusha, individual in us, is cosmic in the cosmos, tran-
scendent in the transcendence: the identity with the Self is apparent,
but it is the Self in its pure impersonal-personal status of a Spirit in
things and beings — impersonal because undifferentiated by personal
quality, personal because it presides over the individualisations of self
in each individual — which deals with the works of its Consciousness-
force, its executive force of self-nature, in whatever poise is necessary for
that purpose.

But it is evident that whatever the posture taken or relation formed
in any individual nodus of Purusha-Prakriti, the Being is in a funda-
mental cosmic relation lord or ruler of its nature: for even when it allows
Nature to have its own way with it, its consent is necessary to support

3l8 THE LIFE DIVINE

her workings. This comes out in its fullest revelation in the third aspect
of the Reality, the Divine Being who is the master and creator of the
universe. Here the supreme Person, the Being in its transcendental and
cosmic consciousness and force, comes to the front, omnipotent, omni-
scient, the controller of all energies, the Conscious in all that is conscient
or inconscient, the Inhabitant of all souls and minds and hearts and
bodies, the Ruler or Overruler of all works, the Enjoyer of all delight,
the Creator who has built all things in his own being, the All-Person of
whom all beings are personalities, the Power from whom are all powers,
the Self, the Spirit in all, by his being the Father of all that is, in his
Consciousness-Force the Divine Mother, the Friend of all creatures, the
All-blissful and All-beautiful of whom beauty and joy are the revelation,
the All-Beloved and All-Lover. In a certain sense, so seen and under-
stood, this becomes the most comprehensive of the aspects of the Reality,
since here all are united in a single formulation; for the Ishwara is
supracosmic as well as intracosmic; He is that which exceeds and in-
habits and supports all individuality; He is the supreme and universal
Brahman, the Absolute, the supreme Self, the supreme Purusha.^ But,
very clearly, this is not the personal God of popular religions, a being
limited by his qualities, individual and separate from all others; for all
such personal gods are only limited representations or names and divine
personalities of the one Ishwara. Neither is this the Saguna Brahman
active and possessed of qualities, for that is only one side of the being of
the Ishwara ; the Nirguna immobile and without qualities is another as-
pect of His existence. Ishwara is Brahman the Reality, Self, Spirit, re-
vealed as possessor, enjoyer of his own self-existence, creator of the uni-
verse and one with it, Pantheos, and yet superior to it, the Eternal, the
Infinite, the Ineffable, the Divine Transcendence.

The sharp opposition made between personality and impersonality
by our mental way of thinking is a creation of the mind based on the
appearances of the material world; for here in terrestrial existence the
Inconscient from which everything takes its origin appears as something
entirely impersonal; Nature, the inconscient Energy, is entirely imper-
sonal in her manifest essence and dealings; all Forces wear this mask of
impersonality, all qualities and powers, Love and Delight and Conscious-
ness itself, have this aspect. Personality makes its apparition as a crea-
tion of consciousness in an impersonal world; it is a limitation by a
restricted formation of powers, qualities, habitual forces of the nature-
' Gita.

BRAHMAN, PURUSHA, ISHWARA 319

action, an imprisonment in a limited circle of self-experience which we
have to transcend, — to lose personality is necessary if we are to gain
universality, still more necessary if we are to rise into the Transcendence.
But what we thus call personality is only a formation of superficial con-
sciousness; behind it is the Person who takes on various personalities,
who can have at the same time many personalities but is himself one, real,
eternal. If we look at things from a larger point of view, we might say
that what is impersonal is qnly a power of the Person: existence itself has
no meaning without an Existent, consciousness has no standing-place
if there is none who is conscious, delight is useless and invalid without an
enjoyer, love can have no foundation- or fulfilment if there is no lover, all-
power must be otiose if there is not an Almighty. For what we mean by
Person is conscious being; even if this emerges here as a term or product
of the Inconscient, it is not that in reality: for it is the Inconscient itself
that is a term of the secret Consciousness ; what emerges is greater than
that in which it emerges, as Mind is greater than Matter, Soul than
Mind ; Spirit, most secret of all, the supreme emergence, the last revela-
tion, is the greatest of all, and Spirit is the Purusha, the All-Person, the
omnipresent Conscious Being. It is the mind's ignorance of this true
Person in us, its confusion of person with our experience of ego and
limited personality, the misleading phenomenon of the emergence of
limited consciousness and personality in an inconscient existence that
have made us create an opposition between these two aspects of the
Reality, but in truth there is no opposition. An eternal infinite self-exist-
ence is the supreme reality, but the supreme transcendent eternal Being,
Self and Spirit, — an infinite Person, we may say, because his being is
the essence and source of all personality, — is the reality and meaning of
self-existence: so too the cosmic Self, Spirit, Being, Person is the reality
and meaning of cosmic existence; the same Self, Spirit, Being or Person
manifesting its multiplicity is the reality and meaning of individual
existence.

If we admit the Divine Being, the supreme Person and All-Person
as the Ishwara, a difficulty arises in understanding his rule or govern-
ment of world-existence, because we immediately transfer to him our
mental conception of a human ruler; we picture him as acting by the
mind and mental will in an omnipotent arbitrary fashion upon a world
on which he imposes his mental conceptions as laws, and we conceive of
his will as a free caprice of his personality. But there is no need for the
Divine Being to act by an arbitrary will or idea as an omnipotent yet

320 THE LIFE DIVINE

ignorant human being — if such an omnipotence were possible — ^might
do: for he is not Hmited by mind; he has an all-consciousness in which he
is aware of the truth of all things and aware of his own all-wisdom
working them out according to the truth that is in them, their signifi-
cance, their possibility or necessity, the imperative selfness of their
nature. The Divine is free and not bound by laws of any making, but
still he acts by laws and processes because they are the expression of the
truth o.f things, — not their mechanical, mathematical or other outward
truth alone, but the spiritual reality of what they are, what they have
become and have yet to become, what they have it within themselves to
realise. He is himself present in the working, but he also exceeds and
can overrule it; for on one side Nature works according to her limited
complex of formulas and is informed and supported in their execution by
the Divine Presence, but on the other side there is an overseeing, a
higher working and determination, even an intervention, free but not
arbitrary, often appearing to us magical and miraculous because it pro-
ceeds and acts upon Nature from a divine Supernature: Nature here
is a limited expression of that Supernature and open to intervention or
mutation by its light, its force, its influence. The mechanical, mathemati-
cal, automatic law of things is a fact, but within it there is a spiritual
law of consciousness at work which gives to the mechanical steps of
Nature's forces an inner turn and value, a significant rightness and a
secretely conscious necessity, and above it there is a spiritual freedom
that knows and acts in the supreme and universal truth of the Spirit. Our
view of the divine government of the world or of the secret of its action
is either incurably anthropomorphic or else incurably mechanical; both
the anthropomorphism and mechanism have their elements of truth, but
they are only a side, an aspect, and the real truth is that the world is
governed by the One in all and over all who is infinite in his conscious-
ness and it is according to the law and logic of an infinite consciousness
that we ought to understand the significance and building and movement
of the universe.

If we regard this aspect of the one Reality and put it in close
connection with the other aspects, we can get a complete view of the
relation between the eternal Self-Existence and the dynamics of the
Consciousness-Force by which it manifests the universe. If we place
ourselves in a silent Self-existence immobile, static, inactive, it will
appear that a conceptive Consciousness-Force, Maya, able to effectuate
all its conceptions, a dynamic consort of the Self of silence, is doing

BRAHMAN, PURUSHA, ISHWARA 32 I

everything; it takes its stand on the fixed unmoving eternal status and
casts the spiritual substance of being into all manner of forms and move-
ments to which its passivity consents or in which it takes its impartial
pleasure, its immobile delight of creative and mobile existence. Whether
this be a real or an illusory existence, that must be its substance and sig-
nificance. Consciousness is at play with Being, Force of Nature does
what it wills with Existence and makes it the stuff of her creations, but
secretly the consent of the Being must be there at every step to make this
possible. There is an evident truth in this perception of things; it is
what we see happening everywhere in us and around us ; it is a truth of
the universe and must answer to a fundamental truth-aspect of the
Absolute. But when we step back from the outer dynamic appearances
of things, not into a witness Silence, but into an inner dynamic partici-
pating experience of the Spirit, we find that this Consciousness-Force,
Maya, Shakti, is itself the power of the Being, the Self-Existent, the
Ishwara. The Being is lord of her and of all things, we see him doing
everything in his own sovereignty as the creator and ruler of his own
manifestation; or, if he stands back and allows freedom of action to the
forces of Nature and her creatures, his sovereignty is still innate in the
permission, at every step his tacit sanction. "Let it be so," tathdstu, is
there implicit; for otherwise nothing could be done or happen. Being and
its Consciousness-Force, Spirit and Nature cannot be fundamentally
dual: what Nature does, is really done by the Spirit. This too is a truth
that becomes evident when we go behind the veil and feel the presence
of a living Reality which is everything and determines everything, is the
All-powerful and the All-ruler; this too is a fundamental truth-aspect
of the Absolute.

Again, if we remain absorbed in the Silence, the creative Conscious-
ness and her works disappear into the Silence; Nature and the creation
for us cease to exist or be real. On the other hand, if we look exclusively
at the Being in its aspect of the sole-existent Person and Ruler, the Power
or Shakti by which he does all things disappears into his uniqueness or
becomes an attribute of His cosmic personality; the absolute monarchy
of the one Being becomes our perception of the universe. Both these
experiences create many difficulties for the mind due to its non-percep-
tion of the reality of the Self-Power whether in quiescence or in action,
or to a too exclusively negative experience of the Self, or to the too an-
thropomorphic character our conceptions attach to the Supreme Being as
Ruler. It is evident that we are looking at an Infinite of which the Self-

322 THE LIFE DIVINE

Power is capable of many movements, all of them valid. If we look
again more largely and take account of both the impersonal and the
personal truth of things as one truth, if in that light, the light of per-
sonality in impersonality, we see the biune aspect of Self and Self -Power,
then in the Person Aspect a dual Person emerges, Ishwara-Shakti, the
Divine Self and Creator and the Divine Mother and Creatrix of the
universe; there becomes apparent to us the mystery of the masculine and
feminine cosmic Principles whose play and interaction are necessary for
all creation. In the superconscient truth of the Self-Existence these two
are fused and implied in each other, one and indistinguishable, but in the
spiritual-pragmatic truth of the dynamism of the universe, they emerge
and become active; the Divine Mother-Energy as the universal creatrix,
Maya, Para-Prakriti, Chit-Shakti, manifests the cosmic Self and Ishwara
and her own self-power as a dual principle; it is through her that the Be-
ing, the Self, the Ishwara, acts and he does nothing except by her; though
his Will is implicit in her, it is she who works out all as the supreme
Consciousness-Force who holds all souls and beings within her and as
executive Nature; all exists and acts according to Nature, all is the
Consciousness-Force manifesting and playing with the Being in millions
of forms and movements into which she casts his existence. If we draw
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 affirm our independence of Nature, she reveals
to us the supreme and omnipresent power of the Ishwara and ourselves
as beings of his being, but that power is herself and we are that in her
supernature. If we would realise a higher formation or status of being,
then it is still through her, through the Divine Shakti, the Conscious-
ness-Force of the Spirit that it has to be done; our surrender must be
to the Divine Being through the Divine Mother: for it is towards or
into the supreme Nature that our ascension has to take place and it
can only be done by the supramental Shakti taking up our mentality
and transforming it into her supramentality. Thus we see that there
is no contradiction or incompatibility between these three aspects of
Existence, or between them in their eternal status and the three modes
of its Dynamis working in the universe. One Being, one Reality as
Self bases, supports, informs, as Purusha or Conscious Being experiences,
as Ishwara wills, governs and possesses its world of manifestation created

BRAHMAN, PURUSHA, ISHWARA 323

and kept in motion and action by its own Consciousness- Force or Self-
Power, — Maya, Prakriti, Shakti.

A certain difficulty arises for our mind in reconciling these different
faces or fronts of the One Self and Spirit, because we are obliged to use
abstract conceptions and defining words and ideas for something that
is not abstract, something that is spiritually living and intensely real.
Our abstractions get fixed into differentiating concepts with sharp lines
between them: but the Reality is not of that nature; its aspects are
many but shade off into each other. Its truth could only be rendered
by ideas and images metaphysical and yet living and concrete, — images
which might be taken by the pure Reason as figures and symbols but are
more than that and mean more to the intuitive vision and feeling, for
they are realities of a dynamic spiritual experience. The impersonal
truth of things can be rendered into the abstract formulas of the pure
reason, but there is another side of truth which belongs to the spiritual
or mystic vision and without that inner vision of realities the abstract
formulation of them is insufficiently alive, incomplete. The mystery of
things is the true truth of things; the intellectual presentation is only
truth in representation, in abstract symbols, as if in a cubist art of
thought-speech, in geometric figure. It is necessary in a philosophic in-
quiry to confine oneself mostly to this intellectual presentation, but it
is as well to remember that this is only the abstraction of the Truth
and to seize it completely or express it completely there is needed a
concrete experience and a more living and full-bodied language.

Here it becomes opportune to see how in this aspect of the Reality
we must regard the relation we have discovered between the One and
the Many; this amounts to a determination of the true connection be-
tween the individual and the Divine Being, between the Soul and the
Ishwara. In the normal theistic conception the Many are created by
God; made by him as a potter might make a vessel, they are dependent
on him as are creatures on their creator. But in this larger view of the
Ishwara the many are themselves the Divine One in their inmost reality,
individual selves of the supreme and universal Self-Existence, eternal as
he is eternal but eternal in his being: our material existence is indeed
a creation of Nature, but the soul is an immortal portion of the Divinity
and behind it is the Divine Self in the natural creature. Still the One
is the fundamental Truth of existence, the many exist by the One and
there is therefore an entire dependence of the manifested being on the

324 THE LIFE DIVINE

Ishwara. This dependence is concealed by the separative ignorance of
the ego which strives to exist in its own right, although at every step
it is evidently dependent on the cosmic Power that created it, moved
by it, a part of its cosmic being and action; this effort of the ego is
clearly a misprision, an erroneous reflection of the truth of the self-
existence that is within us. It is true that there is something in us, not
in the ego but in the self and inmost being, that surpasses cosmic Na-
ture and belongs to the Transcendence. But this too finds itself inde-
pendent of Nature only by dependence on a higher Reality; it is through
self-giving or surrender of soul and nature to the Divine Being that we
can attain to our highest self and supreme Reality, for it is the Divine
Being who is that highest self and that supreme Reality, and we are
self-existence and eternal only in his eternity and by his self -existence.
This dependence is not contradictory of the Identity, but is itself the
door to the realisation of the Identity, — so that here again we meet that
phenomenon of duality expressing unity, proceeding from unity and
opening back into unity, which is the constant secret and fundamental
operation of the universe. It is this truth of the consciousness of the
Infinite that creates the possibility of all relations between the many
and the One, among which the realisation of oneness by the mind, the
presence of oneness in the heart, the existence of oneness in all the
members is a highest peak, and yet it does not annul but confirms all
the other personal relations and gives them their fullness, the complete
delight, their entire significance. This too is the magic, but also the
logic of the Infinite.

One problem still remains to be solved, and it can be solved on the
same basis; it is the problem of the opposition between the Non-Mani-
fest and the manifestation. For it might be said that all that has been
advanced hitherto may be true of the manifestation, but the manifesta-
tion is a reality of an inferior order, a partial movement derived from the
Non-Manifest Reality and, when we enter into that which is supremely
Real, these truths of the universe cease to have any validity. The Non-
Manifest is the timeless, the utterly eternal, an irreducible absolute
self-existence to which the manifestation and its limitations can give
no clue or only a clue that by its insufficiency is illusory and deceptive.
This raises the problem of the relation of Time to the timeless Spirit;
for we have supposed on the contrary that what is in unmanifestation in
the Timeless Eternal is manifested in Time-Eternity. If that is so, if
the temporal is an expression of the Eternal, then however different the

BRAHMAN, PURUSHA, ISHWARA 325

conditions, however partial the expression, yet what is fundamental in
the Time-expression must be in some way pre-existent in the Tran-
scendence and drawn from the timeless Reality. For if not, these funda-
mentals must come into it direct from an Absolute which is other than
Time or Timelessness, and the Timeless Spirit must be a supreme spirit-
ual negation, an indeterminable basing the Absolute's freedom from
limitation by what is formulated in Time, — it must be the negative to
the Time positive, in the same relation to it as the Nirguna to the Saguna.
But, in fact, what we mean by the Timeless is a spiritual status of
existence not subject to the time movement or to the successive or the
relative time-experience of a past, present and future. The timeless Spirit
is not necessarily a blank; it may hold all in itself, but in essence, with-
out reference to time or form or relation or circumstance, perhaps in an
eternal unity. Eternity is the common term between Time and the Time-
less Spirit. What is in the Timeless unmanifested, implied, essential,
appears in Time in movement, or at least in design and relation, in
result and circumstance. These two then are the same Eternity or the
same Eternal in a double status; they are a twofold status of being and
consciousness, one an eternity of immobile status, the other an eternity
of motion in status.

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. The difference would be, as in all
the other oppositions, the Spirit looking at itself in essence and princi-
ple of being and the same Spirit looking at itself in the dynamism of its
essence and principle. Space and Time are our names for this self-exten-
sion of the one Reality. We are apt to see Space as a static extension
in which all things stand or move together in a fixed order ; we see Time
as a mobile extension which is measured by movement and event: Space
then would be Brahman in self-extended status; Time would be Brah-
man in self-extended movement. But this may be only a first view and
inaccurate: Space may be really a constant mobile, the constancy and
the persistent time-relation of things in it creating the sense' of stability
of Space, the mobility creating the sense of time-movement in stable
Space. Or, again. Space would be Brahman extended for the hold-
ing together of forms and objects; Time would be Brahman self-extended
for the deployment of the movement of self-power carrying forms and
objects ; the two would then be a dual aspect of one and the same self-
extension of the cosmic Eternal.

326 THE LIFE DIVINE

A purely physical Space might be regarded as in itself a property
of Matter ; but Matter is a creation of Energy in movement. Space there-
fore in the material world could be either a fundamental self-extension of
material Energy or its self-formed existence-field, its representation of
the Inconscient Infinity in which it is acting, a figure in which it accom-
modates the formulas and movements of its own action and self-creation.
Time would be itself the course of that movement or else an impression
created by it, an impression of something that presents itself to us as
regularly successive in its appearance, — a division or a continuum up-
holding the continuity of movement and yet marking off its successions,
— because the movement itself is regularly successive. Or else Time
could be a dimension of Space necessary for the complete action of the
Energy, but not understood by us as such because it is seen by our
conscious subjectivity as something itself subjective, felt by our mind,
not perceived by our senses, and therefore not recognised as a dimen-
sion of space which has to us the appearance of a sense-created or sense-
perceived objective extension.

In any case, if Spirit is the fundamental reality, Time and Space
must either be conceptive conditions under which the Spirit sees its
own movement of energy or else they must be fundamental conditions of
the Spirit itself which assume a different appearance or status according
to the status of consciousness in which they manifest. In other words
there is a different Time and Space for each status of our consciousness
and even different movements of Time and Space within each status ; but
all would be renderings of a fundamental spiritual reality of Time-Space.
In fact, when we go behind physical space, we become aware of an ex-
tension on which all this movement is based and this extension is spiritual
and not material; it is Self or Spirit containing all action of its own
Energy. This origin or basic reality of Space begins to become apparent
when we draw back from the physical: for then we become aware of
a subjective Space-extension in which mind itself lives and moves and
which is other than physical Space-Time, and yet there is an interpene-
tration; for our mind can move in its own space in such a way as to
effectuate a movement also in space of Matter or act upon something
distant in space of Matter. In a still deeper condition of consciousness
we are aware of a pure spiritual Space; in this awareness Time may
no longer seem to exist, because all movement ceases, or, if there is a
movement or happening, it can take place independent of any observ-
able Time sequence.

BRAHMAN, PURUSHA, ISHWARA 327

If we go behind Time by a similar inward motion, drawing back
from the physical and seeing it without being involved in it, we discover
that Time observation and Time movement are relative, but Time itself
is real and eternal. Time observation depends not only on the measures
used, but on the consciousness and the position of the observer: more-
over, each state of consciousness has a different Time relation; Time
in Mind consciousness and Mind Space has not the same sense and
measure of its movements as in physical Space; it moves there quickly
or slowly according to the state of the consciousness. Each state of
consciousness has its own Time and yet there can be relations of Time
between them; and when we go behind the physical surface, we find
several different Time statuses and Time movements co-existent in the
same consciousness. This is evident in dream Time where a long se-
quence of happenings can occur in a period which corresponds to a second
or a few seconds of physical Time. There is then a certain relation be-
tween different Time statuses but no ascertainable correspondence of
measure. It would seem as if Time had no objective reality, but de-
pends on whatever conditions may be established by action of conscious-
ness in its relation to status and motion of being: Time would seem to
be purely subjective. But, in fact. Space also would appear by the mu-
tual relation of Mind-Space and Matter-Space to be subjective; in other
words, both are the original spiritual extension, but it is rendered by
mind in its purity into a subjective mind-field and by sense-mind into
an objective field of sense-perception. Subjectivity and objectivity are
only two sides of one consciousness, and the cardinal fact is that any
given Time or Space or any given Time-Space as a whole is a status of
being in which there is a movement of the consciousness and force of the
being, a movement that creates or manifests events and happenings; it
is the relation of the consciousness that sees and the force that formulates
the happenings, a relation inherent in the status, which determines the
sense of Time and creates our awareness of Time-movement, Time-
relation, Time-measure. In its fundamental truth the original status of
Time behind all its variations is nothing else than the eternity of the
Eternal, just as the fundamental truth of Space, the original sense of its
reality, is the infinity of the Infinite.

The Being can have three different states of its consciousness with
regard to its own eternity. The first is that in which there is the immobile
status of the Self in its essential existence, self-absorber or self-conscious,
but in either case without development of consciousness in movement

328 THE LIFE DIVINE

or happening; this is what we distinguish as its timeless eternity. The
second is its whole-consciousness of the successive relations of all things
belonging to a destined or an actually proceeding manifestation, in which
what we call past, present and future stand together as if in a map or
settled design or very much as an artist or painter or architect might
hold all the detail of his work viewed as a whole, intended or reviewed
in his mind or arranged in a plan for execution; this is the stable status
or simultaneous integrality of Time. This seeing of Time is not at
all part of our normal awareness of events as they happen, though our
view of the past, because it is already known and can be regarded in
the whole, may put on something of this character; but we know that
this consciousness exists because it is possible in an exceptional state
to enter into it and see things from the view-point of this simultaneity
of Time- vision. The third status is that of a progressive movement of
Consciousness-Force and its successive working out of what has been
seen by it in the static vision of the Eternal ; this is the Time movement.
But it is in one and the same Eternity that this triple status exists and
the movement takes place; there are not really two eternities, one an
eternity of status, another an eternity of movement, but there are different
statuses or positions taken by Consciousness with regard to the one
Eternity. For it can see the whole Time development from outside or
from above the movement ; it can take a stable position within the move-
ment and see the before and the after in a fixed, determined or destined
succession; or it can take instead a mobile position in the movement,
itself move with it from moment to moment and see all that has hap-
pened receding back into the past and all that has to happen coming
towards it from the future; or else it may concentrate on the moment
it occupies and see nothing but what is in that moment and immediately
around or behind it. All these positions can be taken by the being of the
Infinite in a simultaneous vision or experience. It can see Time from
above and inside Time, exceeding it and not within it; it can see the
Timeless develop the Time-movement without ceasing to be timeless, it
can embrace the whole movement in a static and a dynamic vision and
put out at the same time something of itself into the moment-vision.
This simultaneity may seem to the finite consciousness tied to the mo-
ment vision a magic of the Infinite, a magic of Maya ; to its own way of
perception which needs to limit, to envisage one status only at a time in
order to harmonise, it would give a sense of confused and inconsistent
unreality. But to an infinite consciousness such an integral simultaneity

329

of vision and experience would be perfectly logical and consistent; all
could be elements of a whole-vision capable of being closely related to-
gether in a harmonious arrangement, a multiplicity of view bringing out
the unity of the thing seen, a diverse presentation of concomitant aspects
of the One Reality.

If there can be this simultaneous multiplicity of self-presentation of
one Reality, we see that there is no impossibility in the co-existence of
a Timeless Eternal and a Time Eternity. It would be the same Eternity
viewed by a dual self-awareness and there could be no opposition be-
tween them; it would be a correlation of two powers of the self-awareness
of the infinite and eternal Reality, — a power of status and non-manifesta-
tion, a power of self-effecting action and movement and manifestation.
Their simultaneity, however contradictory and difficult to reconcile it
might seem to our finite surface seeing, would be intrinsic and normal
to the INIaya or eternal self-knowledge and all-knowledge of Brahman,
the eternal and infinite knowledge and wisdom-power of the Ishwara, the
consciousness-force of the self-existent Sachchidananda.

CHAPTER III

THE ETERNAL AND THE INDIVIDUAL

He am I.

Isha U panishad?-

It is an eternal portion of Me that has become the liv-
ing being in a world of living beings. . . . The eye of knowl-
edge sees the Lord abiding in the body and enjoying and
going forth from it.

Gita?

Two birds beautiful of wing, friends and comrades, cling
to a common tree, and one eats the sweet fruit, the other
regards him and eats not. . . . Where winged souls cry the
discoveries of knowledge over their portion of immortality,
there the Lord of all, the Guardian of the World took pos-
session of me, he the Wise, me the ignorant.

Rig VedaJ"

THERE is then a fundamental truth of existence, an Omnipresent
Reality, omnipresent above the cosmic manifestation and in it
and immanent in each individual. There is also a dynamic power of
this Omnipresence, a creative or self-manifesting action of its infinite
Consciousness-Force. There is as a phase or movement of the self-mani-
festation a descent into an apparent material inconscience, an awakening
of the individual out of the Inconscience and an evolution of his being
into the spiritual and supramental consciousness and power of the
Reality, into his own universal and transcendent Self and source of ex-
istence. It is on this foundation that we have to base our conception
of a truth in our terrestrial being and the possibility of a divine Life in
material Nature. There our chief need is to discover the origin and nature
of the Ignorance which we see emerging out of the inconscience of matter
or disclosing itself within a body of matter and the nature of the Knowl-
edge that has to replace it, to understand too the process of Nature's
self-unfolding and the soul's recovery. For in fact the Knowledge is there
concealed in the Ignorance itself; it has rather to be unveiled than ac-
quired: it reveals itself rather than is learned, by an inward and upward

^ Verse i6. ^XV. 7, 10. ''L 164. 20, 21.

330

THE ETERNAL AND THE INDIVIDUAL 33 1

self-unfolding. But first it will be convenient to meet and get out of the
way one difficulty that inevitably arises, the difficulty of admitting that,
even given the immanence of the Divine in us, even given our individual
consciousness as a vehicle of progressive evolutionary manifestation, the
individual is in any sense eternal or that there can be any persistence of
individuality after liberation has been attained by unity and self-knowl-
edge.

This is a difficulty of the logical reason and must be met by a larger
and more catholic enlightening reason. Or if it is a difficulty of spiritual
experience, it can only be met by a wider resolving experience. It can
indeed be met also by a dialectical battle, a logomachy of the logical
mind; but that by itself is an artificial method, often a futile combat in
the clouds and always inconclusive. Logical reasoning is useful and in-
dispensable in its own field in order to give the mind a certain clearness,
precision and subtlety in dealing with its own ideas and word-symbols,
so that our perception of the truths which we arrive at by observation
and experience or which physically, psychologically or spiritually we have
seen, may be as little as possible obscured by the confusions of our
average human intelligence, its proneness to take appearance for fact, its
haste to be misled by partial truth, its exaggerated conclusions, its in-
tellectual and emotional partialities, its incompetent bunglings in that
linking of truth to truth by which alone we can arrive at a complete
knowledge. We must have a clear, pure, subtle and flexible mind in order
that we may fall as little as possible into that ordinary mental habit of
our kind which turns truth itself into a purveyor of errors. That clarifi-
cation, the habit of clear logical reasoning culminating in the method
of metaphysical dialectics, does help to accomplish and its part in the
preparation of knowledge is therefore very great. But by itself it cannot
arrive either at the knowledge of the world or the knowledge of God,
much less reconcile the lower and the higher realisation. It is much more
efficiently a guardian against error than a discoverer of truth, — although
by deduction from knowledge already acquired it may happen upon new
truths and indicate them for experience or for the higher and larger truth-
seeing faculties to confirm. In the more subtle field of synthetical or
unifying knowledge the logical habit of mind may even become a stum-
bling-block by the very faculty which gives it its peculiar use ; for it is so
accustomed to making distinctions and dwelling upon distinctions and
working by distinctions that it is always a little at sea when distinctions
have to be overriden and overpassed. Our object, then, in considering the

332 THE LIFE DIVINE

difficulties of the normal mind when face to face with the experience
of cosmic and transcendental unity by the individual, must be solely
to make more clear to ourselves, first, the origin of the difficulties and
the escape from them and by that, what is more important, the real
nature of the unity at which we arrive and of the culmination of the
individual when he becomes one with all creatures and dwells in the
oneness of the Eternal.

The first difficulty for the reason is that it has always been accus-
tomed to identify the individual self with the ego and to think of it as
existing only by the limitations and exclusions of the ego. If that were so,
then by the transcendence of the ego the individual would abolish his
own existence; our end would be to disappear and dissolve into some
universality of matter, life, mind or spirit or else some indeterminate
from which our egoistic determinations of individuality have started.
But what is this strongly separative self -experience that we call ego?
It is nothing fundamentally real in itself but only a practical constitution
of our consciousness devised to centralise the activities of Nature in us.
We perceive a formation of mental, physical, vital experience which
distinguishes itself from the rest of being, and that is what we think
of as ourselves in nature — this individualisation of being in becoming.
We then proceed to conceive of ourselves as something which has thus
individualised itself and only exists so long as it is individualised, — a,
temporary or at least a temporal becoming; or else we conceive of our-
selves as someone who supports or causes the individualisation, an im-
mortal being perhaps but limited by its individuality. This perception
and this conception constitute our ego-sense. Normally, we go no farther
in our knowledge of our individual existence.

But in the end we have to see that our individualisation is only
a superficial formation, a practical selection and limited conscious syn-
thesis for the temporary utility of life in a particular body, or else it is
a constantly changing and developing synthesis pursued through suc-
cessive lives in successive bodies. Behind it there is a consciousness, a
Purusha, who is not determined or limited by his individualisation or by
this synthesis but on the contrary determines, supports and yet exceeds
it. That which he selects from in order to construct this synthesis, is
his total experience of the world-being. Therefore our individualisation
exists by virtue of the world-being, but also by virtue of a consciousness
which uses the world-being for experience of its possibilities of individu-

THE ETERNAL AND THE INDIVIDUAL 333

ality. These two powers, Person and his world-material, are both nec-
essary for our present experience of individuality. If the Purusha with
his individualising syntheses of consciousness were to disappear, to merge,
to annul himself in any way, our constructed individuality would cease
because the Reality that supported it would no longer be in presence;
if, on the other hand, the world-being were to dissolve, merge, disappear,
then also our individualisation would cease, for the material of experi-
ence by which it effectuates itself would be wanting. We have then to
recognise these two terms of our existence, a world-being and an individu-
alising consciousness which is the cause of all our self -experience and
world-experience.

But we see farther that in the end this Purusha, this cause and self
of our individuality, comes to embrace the whole world and all other
beings in a sort of conscious extension of itself and to perceive itself
as one with the world-being. In its conscious extension of itself it ex-
ceeds the primary experience and abolishes the barriers of its active self-
limitation and individualisation; by its perception of its own infinite
universality it goes beyond all consciousness of separative individuality or
limited soul-being. By that very fact the individual ceases to be the self-
limiting ego ; in other words, our false consciousness of existing only by
self-limitation, by rigid distinction of ourselves from the rest of being
and becoming is transcended; our identification of ourselves with our
personal and temporal individualisation in a particular mind and body
is abolished. But is all truth of individuality and individualisation
abolished? does the Purusha cease to exist or does he become the world-
Purusha and live intimately in innumerable minds and bodies? We do
not find it to be so. He still individualises and it is still he who exists
and embraces this wider consciousness while he individualises: but the
mind no longer thinks of a limited temporary individualisation as all our-
selves but only as a wave of becoming thrown up from the sea of its
being or else as a form or centre of universality. The soul still makes the
world-becoming the material for individual experience, but instead of
regarding it as something outside and larger than itself on which it has
to draw, by which it is affected, with which it has to make accommoda-
tions, it is aware of it subjectively as within itself ; it embraces both its
world-material and its individualised experience of spatial and temporal
activities in a free and enlarged consciousness. In this new consciousness
the spiritual individual perceives its true self to be one in being with the

334 THE LIFE DIVINE

Transcendence and seated and dwelling within it, and no longer takes its
constructed individuality as anything more than a formation for world-
experience.

Our unity with the world-being is the consciousness of a Self which
at one and the same time cosmicises in the world and individualises
through the individual Purusha, and both in that world-being and in this
individual being and in all individual beings it is aware of the same Self
manifesting and experiencing its various manifestations. That then is a
Self which must be one in its being, — otherwise we could not have this
experience of unity, — and yet must be capable in its very unity of cosmic
differentiation and multiple individuality. The unity is its being, — 3^es,
but the cosmic differentiation and the multiple individuality are the
power of its being which it is constantly displaying and which it is its
delight and the nature of its consciousness to display. If then we arrive
at unity with that, if we even become entirely and in every way that be-
ing, why should the power of its being be excised and why at all should we
desire or labour to excise it? We should then only diminish the scope of
our unity with it by an exclusive concentration accepting the divine being
but not accepting our part in the power and consciousness and infinite
delight of the Divine. It would in fact be the individual seeking peace
and rest of union in a motionless identity, but rejecting delight and
various joy of union in the nature and act and power of the divine
Existence. That is possible, but there is no necessity to uphold it as the
ultimate aim of our being or as our ultimate perfection.

Or the one possible reason would be that in the power, the act of
consciousness there is not real union and that only in the status of con-
sciousness is there perfect undifferentiated unity. Now in what we may
call the waking union of the individual with the Divine, as opposed to a
falling asleep or a concentration of the individual consciousness in an
absorbed identity, there is certainly and must be a differentiation of
experience. For in this active unity the individual Purusha enlarges its
active experience also as well as its static consciousness into a way of
union with this Self of his being and of the world-being, and yet individu-
alisation remains and therefore differentiation. The Purusha is aware
of all other individuals as selves of himself ; he may be a dynamic union
become aware of their mental and practical action as occurring in his
universal consciousness, just as he is aware of his own mental and practi-
cal action; he may help to determine their action by subjective union
with them: but still there is a practical difference. The action of the

THE ETERNAL AND THE INDIVIDUAL 335

Divine in himself is that with which he is particularly and directly con-
cerned; the action of the Divine in his other selves is that with which
he is universally concerned, not directly, but through and by his union
with them and with the Divine. The individual therefore exists though
he exceeds the little separative ego; the universal exists and is embraced
by him but it does not absorb and abolish all individual differentiation,
even though by his universalising himself the limitation which we call
the ego is overcome.

Now we may get rid of this differentiation by plunging into the
absorption of an exclusive unity, but to what end? For perfect union?
But we do not forfeit that by accepting the differentiation any more than
the Divine forfeits His oneness by accepting it. We have the perfect
union in His being and can absorb ourselves in it at any time, but we
have also this other differentiated unity and can emerge into it and act
freely in it at any time without losing oneness: for we have merged the
ego and are absolved from the exclusive stresses of our mentality. Then
for peace and rest? But we have the peace and rest by virtue of our unity
with Him, even as the Divine possesses for ever His eternal calm in the
midst of His eternal action. Then for the mere joy of getting rid of all
differentiation? But that differentiation has its divine purpose: it is a
means of greater unity, not as in the egoistic life a means of divisions;
for we enjoy by it our unity with our other selves and with God in all,
which we exclude by our rejection of his multiple being. In either experi-
ence it is the Divine in the individual possessing and enjoying in one
case the Divine in His pure unity or in the other the Divine in that and
in the unity of the cosmos; it is not the absolute Divine recovering after
having lost His unity. Certainly, we may prefer the absorption in a pure
exclusive unity or a departure into a supracosmic transcendence, but
there is in the spiritual truth of the Divine Existence no compelling
reason why we should not participate in this large possession and bliss
of His universal being which is the fulfilment of our individuality.

But we see farther that it is not solely and ultimately the cosmic
being into which our individual being enters but something in which
both are unified. As our individualisation in the world is a becoming of
that Self, so is the world too a becoming of that Self. The world-being
includes always the individual being; therefore these two becomings, the
cosmic and the individual, are always related to each other and in their
practical relation mutually dependent. But we find that the individual
being also comes in the end to include the world in its consciousness, and

336 THE LIFE DIVINE

since this is not by an abolition of the spiritual individual, but by his
coming to his full, large and perfect self-consciousness, we must suppose
that the individual always included the cosmos, and it is only the surface
consciousness which by ignorance failed to possess that inclusion because
of its self-limitation in ego. But when we speak of the mutual inclusion
of the cosmic and the individual, the world in me, I in the world, all in
me, I in all, — for that is the liberated self-experience, — ^we are evidently
travelling beyond the language of the normal reason. That is because
the words we have to use were minted by mind and given their values
by an intellect bound to the conceptions of physical Space and circum-
stance and using for the language of a higher psychological experience
figures drawn from the physical life and the experience of the senses.
But the plane of consciousness to which the liberated human being arises
is not dependent upon the physical world, and the cosmos which we thus
include and are included in is not the physical cosmos, but the harmon-
ically manifest being of God in certain great rhythms of His conscious-
force and self-delight. Therefore this mutual inclusion is spiritual and
psychological; it is a translation of the two forms of the Many, all and
individual, into a unifying spiritual experience, — a translation of the
eternal unity of the One and the Many; for the One is the eternal unity
of the Many differentiating and undifferentiating itself in the cosmos.
This means that cosmos and individual are manifestations of a tran-
scendent Self who is indivisible being although he seems to be divided
or distributed ; but he is not really divided or distributed but indivisibly
present everywhere. Therefore all is in each and each is in all and all is
in God and God in all; and when the liberated soul comes into union
with this Transcendent, it has this self-experience of itself and cosmos
which is translated psychologically into a mutual inclusion and a per-
sistent existence of both in a divine union which is at once a oneness and
a fusion and an embrace.

The normal experience of the reason therefore is not applicable to
these higher truths. In the first place the ego is the individual only in
the ignorance ; there is a true individual who is not the ego and still has
an eternal relation with all other individuals which is not egoistic or
self-separative, but of which the essential character is practical mutual-
ity founded in essential unity. This mutuality founded in unity is the
whole secret of the divine existence in its perfect manifestation; it must
be the basis of anything to which we can give the name of a divine life.
But, secondly, we see that the whole difficulty and confusion into which

THE ETERNAL AND THE INDIVIDUAL 337

the normal reason falls is that we are speaking of a higher and illimitable
self-experience founded on divine infinites and yet are applying to it a
language formed by this lower and limited experience which founds
itself on finite appearances and the separative definitions by which we
try to distinguish and classify the phenomena of the material universe.
Thus we have to use the word individual and speak of the ego and the
true individual, just as we speak sometimes of the apparent and the real
Man. Evidently, all these words, man, apparent, real, individual, true,
have to be taken in a very relative sense and with a full awareness of
their imperfection and inability to express the things that we mean. By
individual we mean normally something that separates itself from every-
thing else and stands apart, though in reality there is no such thing
anywhere in existence; it is a figment of our mental conceptions useful
and necessary to express a partial and practical truth. But the difficulty
is that the mind gets dominated by its words and forgets that the partial
and practical truth becomes true truth only by its relation to others
which seem to the reason to contradict it, and that taken by itself it
contains a constant element of falsity. Thus when we speak of an indi-
vidual we mean ordinarily an individualisation of mental, vital, physical
being separate from all other beings, incapable of unity with them by its
very individuality. If we go beyond these three terms of mind, life and
body, and speak of the soul or individual self, we still think of an in-
dividualised being separate from all others, incapable of unity and in-
clusive mutuality, capable at most of a spiritual contact and soul-sym-
pathy. It is therefore necessary to insist that by the true individual
we mean nothing of the kind, but a conscious power of being of the
Eternal, always existing by unity, always capable of mutuality. It is
that being which by self-knowledge enjoys liberation and immortality.

But we have to carry still farther the conflict between the normal
and the higher reason. When we speak of the true individual as a con-
scious power of being of the Eternal, we are still using intellectual terms,
— we cannot help it, unless we plunge into a language of pure symbols
and mystic values of speech, — but, what is worse, we are, in the attempt
to get away from the idea of the ego, using a too abstract language. Let
us say, then, a conscious being who is for our valuations of existence a
being of the Eternal in his power of individualising self-experience; for
it must be a concrete being — and not an abstract power — ^who enjoys
immortality. And then we get to this that not only am I in the world
and the world in me, but God is in me and I am in God; by which yet

338 THE LIFE DIVINE

it is not meant that God depends for His existence on man, but that He
manifests Himself in that which He manifests within Himself; the indi-
vidual exists in the Transcendent, but all the Transcendent is there
concealed in the individual. Further I am one with God in my being
and yet I can have relations with Him in my experience. I, the liberated
individual, can enjoy the Divine in His transcendence, unified with Him,
and enjoy at the same time the Divine in other individuals and in His
cosmic being. Evidently we have arrived at certain primary relations
of the Absolute and they can only be intelligible to the mind if we see
that the Transcendent, the individual, the cosmic being are the eternal
powers of consciousness — ^we fall again, this time without remedy, into
a wholly abstract language, — of an absolute existence, a unity yet more
than a unity, which so expresses itself to its own consciousness in us,
but which we cannot adequately speak of in human language and must
not hope to describe either by negative or positive terms to our reason,
but can only hope to indicate it to the utmost power of our language.
But the normal mind, which has no experience of these things that
are so powerfully real to the liberated consciousness, may well revolt
against what may seem to it nothing more than a mass of intellectual
contradictions. It may say, "I know very well what the Absolute is; it
is that in which there are no relations. The Absolute and the relative are
irreconcilable opposites ; in the relative there is nowhere anything abso-
lute, in the Absolute there can be nothing relative. Anything which con-
tradicts these first data of my thought, is intellectually false and prac-
tically impossible. These other statements also contradict my law of
contradictions which is that two opposing and conflicting affirmations
cannot both be true. It is impossible that there should be oneness with
God and yet a relation with Him such as this of the enjoyment of the
Divine. In oneness there is no one to enjoy except the One and nothing
to be enjoyed except the One. God, the individual and the cosmos must
be three different actualities, otherwise there could be no relations be-
tween them. Either they are eternally different or they are different in
present time, although they may have originally been one undifferen-
tiated existence and may eventually re-become one undifferentiated
existence. Unity was perhaps and will be perhaps, but it is not now and
cannot be so long as cosmos and the individual endure. The cosmic
being can only know and possess the transcendent unity by ceasing to
be cosmic; the individual can only know and possess the cosmic or the
transcendental unity by ceasing from all individuality and individualisa-

THE ETERNAL AND THE INDIVIDUAL 339

tion. Or if unity is the one eternal fact, then cosmos and individual are
non-existent; they are illusions imposed on itself by the Eternal. That
may well involve a contradiction or an unreconciled paradox; but I am
willing to admit a contradiction in the Eternal which I am not compelled
to think out, rather than a contradiction here of my primary conceptions
which I am compelled to think out logically and to practical ends. I am
on this supposition able either to take the world as practically real and
think and act in it or to reject it as an unreality and cease to think and
act; I am not compelled to reconcile contradictions, not called on to be
conscious of and conscious in something beyond myself and world and
yet deal from that basis, as God does, with a world of contradictions.
The attempt to be as God while I am still an individual or to be three
things at a time seems to me to involve a logical confusion and a practi-
cal impossibility." Such might well be the attitude of the normal reason,
and it is clear, lucid, positive in its distinctions; it involves no extraor-
dinary gymnastics of the reason trying to exceed itself and losing itself
in shadows and half-lights or any kind of mysticism, or at least there is
only one original and comparatively simple mysticism free from all other
difficult complexities. Therefore it is the reasoning which is the most
satisfactory to the simply rational mind. Yet is there here a triple error,
the error of making an unbridgeable gulf between the Absolute and the
relative, the error of making too simple and rigid and extending too far
the law of contradictions and the error of conceiving in terms of Time
the genesis of things which have their origin and first habitat in the
Eternal.

We mean by the Absolute something greater than ourselves, greater
than the cosmos which we live in, the supreme reality of that tran-
scendent Being which we call God, something without which all that
we see or are conscious of as existing, could not have been, could not
for a moment remain in existence. Indian thought calls it Brahman,
European thought the Absolute because it is a self-existent which is ab-
solved of all bondage to relativities. For all relatives can only exist by
something which is the truth of them all and the source and continent of
their powers and properties and yet exceeds them all; it is something
of which not only each relativity itself, but also any sum we can make
of all relatives that we know, can only be — in all that we know of them —
a partial, inferior or practical expression. We see by reason that such an
Absolute must exist; we become by spiritual experience aware of its
existence: but even when we are most aware of it, we cannot describe it

340 ' THE LIFE DIVINE

because our language and thought can deal only with the relative. The
Absolute is for us the Ineffable.

So far there need be no real difficulty nor confusion. But we readily
go on, led by the mind's habit of oppositions, of thinking by distinctions
and pairs of contraries, to speak of it as not only not bound by the limi-
tations of the relative, but as if it were bound by its freedom from limita-
tions, inexorably empty of all power for relations and in its nature in-
capable of them, something hostile in its whole being to relativity and
its eternal contrary. By this false step of our logic we get into an impasse.
Our own existence and the existence of the universe become not only a
mystery, but logically inconceivable. For we get by that to an Absolute
which is incapable of relativity and exclusive of all relatives and yet the
cause or at least the support of relativity and the container, truth and
substance of all relatives. We have then only one logical-illogical way of
escape out of the impasse; we have to suppose the imposition of the
world as a self-effective illusion or an unreal temporal reality, on the
eternity of the formless relationless Absolute. This imposition is made by
our misleading individual consciousness which falsely sees Brahman in
the figure of the cosmos — as a man mistakes a rope for a serpent; but
since either our individual consciousness is itself a relative supported by
the Brahman and only existent by it, not a real reality, or since in its
reality it is itself the Brahman, it is the Brahman after all which imposes
on itself in us this delusion and mistakes in some figure of its own con-
sciousness an existent rope for a non-existent snake, imposes on its own
indeterminable pure Reality the semblance of a universe, or if it does
not impose it on its own consciousness, it is on a consciousness derived
from it and dependent on it, a projection of itself into Maya. By this
explanation nothing is explained ; the original contradiction stands where
it was, unreconciled, and we have only stated it over again in other
terms. It looks as if, by attempting to arrive at an explanation by means
of intellectual reasoning, we have only befogged ourselves by the delu-
sion of our own uncompromising logic: we have imposed on the Absolute
the imposition which our too presumptuous reasoning has practised on
our own intelligence ; we have transformed our mental difficulty in under-
standing the world-manifestation into an original impossibility for the
Absolute to manifest itself in world at all. But the Absolute, obviously,
finds no difficulty in world-manifestation and no difficulty either in a
simultaneous transcendence of world-manifestation; the difficulty exists
only for our mental limitations which prevent us from grasping the

THE ETERNAL AND THE INDIVIDUAL 34 1

supramental rationality of the co-existence of the infinite and the finite
or seizing the nodus of the unconditioned with the conditioned. For our
intellectual rationality these are opposites; for the absolute reason they
are inter-related and not essentially conflicting expressions of one and
the same reality. The consciousness of infinite Existence is other than our
mind-consciousness and sense-consciousness, greater and more capacious,
for it includes them as minor terms of its workings, and the logic of
infinite Existence is other than our intellectual logic. It reconciles in its
great primal facts of being what to our mental view, concerned as it is
with words and ideas derived from secondary facts, are irreconcilable
contraries.

Our mistake is that in trying to define the indefinable we think we
have succeeded when we have described by an all-exclusive negation this
Absolute which we are yet compelled to conceive of as a supreme posi-
tive and the cause of all positives. It is not surprising that so many
acute thinkers, with their eye on the facts of being and not on verbal
distinctions, should be driven to infer that the Absolute is a fiction of
the intelligence, an idea born of words and verbal dialectics, a zero, non-
existent, and to conclude that an eternal Becoming is the only truth of
our existence. The ancient sages spoke indeed of Brahman negatively, —
they said of it, neti, neti, it is not this, it is not that,^ — but ihey took care
also to speak of it positively; they said of it too, it is this, it is that, it
is all: for they saw that to limit it either by positive or negative defini-
tions was to fall away from its truth. Brahman, they said, is Matter, is
Life, is Mind, is Supermind, is cosmic Delight, is Sachchidananda ; yet
it cannot really be defined by any of these things, not even by our larg-
est conception of Sachchidananda. In the world as we see it, for our
mental consciousness however high we carry it, we find that to every
positive there is a negative. But the negative is not a zero, — indeed what-
ever appears to us a zero is packed with force, teeming with power of
existence, full of actual or potential contents. Neither does the existence
of the negative make its corresponding positive non-existent or an un-
reality; it only makes the positive an incomplete statement of the truth
of things and even, we may say, of the positive's own truth. For the
positive and the negative exist not only side by side, but in relation to
each other and by each other ; they complete and would to the all-view,
which a limited mind cannot reach, explain one another. Each by itself
is not really known; we only begin to know it in its deeper truth when
we can read into it the suggestions of its apparent opposite. It is through

342 THE LIFE DIVINE

such a profounder catholic intuition and not by exclusive logical opposi-
tions that our intelligence ought to approach the Absolute.

The positives of the Absolute are its various statements of itself to
our consciousness; its negatives bring in the rest of its absolute posi-
tivity by which its limitation to these first statements is denied. We
have, to begin with, its large primary relations such as the infinite and
the finite, the conditioned and unconditioned, the qualitied and unquali-
tied; in each pair the negative conceals the whole power of the corre-
sponding positive which is contained in it and emerges from it: there is
no real opposition. We have, in a less subtle order of truths, the tran-
scendent and the cosmic, the universal and the individual; here we have
seen that each member of these pairs is contained in its apparent oppo-
site. The universal particularises itself in the individual; the individual
contains in himself all the generalities of the universal. The universal
consciousness finds all itself by the variations of numberless individuals,
not by suppressing variations; the individual consciousness fulfils all
itself when it is universalised into sympathy and identity with the cosmic,
not by limiting itself in the ego. So too the cosmic contains in all itself
and in each thing in it the complete immanence of the transcendent; it
maintains itself as the world-being by the consciousness of its own tran-
scendent reality, it finds itself in each individual being by the realisation
of the divine and transcendent in that being and in all existences. The
transcendent contains, manifests, constitutes the cosmos and by mani-
festing it manifests or discovers, as we may say in the old poetic sense
of that word, its own infinite harmonic varieties. But even in the lower
orders of the relative we find this play of negative and positive, and
through the divine reconciliation of its terms, not by excising them or
carrying their opposition to the bitter end, we have to arrive at the Abso-
lute. For there in the Absolute all this relativity, all this varying rhyth-
mic self-statement of the Absolute, finds, not its complete denial, but its
reason for existence and its justification, not its conviction as a lie, but
the source and principle of its truth. Cosmos and individual go back to
something in the Absolute which is the true truth of individuality, the
true truth of cosmic being and not their denial and conviction of their
falsity. The Absolute is not a sceptical logician denying the truth of all
his own statements and self-expressions, but an existence so utterly and
so infinitely positive that no finite positive can be formulated which can
exhaust it or bind it down to its definitions.

It is evident that if such is the truth of the Absolute, we cannot

THE ETERNAL AND THE INDIVIDUAL 343

bind it either by our law of contradictions. That law is necessary to us
in order that we may posit partial and practical truths, think out things
clearly, decisively and usefully, classify, act, deal with them effectively
for particular purposes in our divisions of Space, distinctions of form and
property, moments of Time. It represents a formal and strongly dynamic
truth of existence in its practical workings which is strongest in the most
outward term of things, the material, but becomes less and less rigidly
binding as we go upward in the scale, mount on the more subtle rungs
of the ladder of being.- It is especially necessary for us in dealing with
material phenomena and forces; we have to suppose them to be one
thing at a time, to have one power at a time and to be limited by their
ostensible and practically effective capacities and properties; otherwise
we cannot deal with them. But even there, as human thought is begin-
ning to realise, the distinctions made by the intellect and the classifica-
tions and practical experiments of Science, while perfectly valid in their
own field and for their own purpose, do not represent the whole or the
real truth of things, whether of things in the whole or of the thing by
itself which we have classified and set artificially apart, isolated for
separate analysis. By that isolation we are indeed able to deal with it
very practically, very effectively, and we think at first that the effective-
ness of our action proves the entire and sufficient truth of our isolating
and analysing knowledge. Afterwards we find that by getting beyond it
we can arrive at a greater truth and a greater effectivity.

The isolation is certainly necessary for first knowledge. A diamond
is a diamond and a pearl a pearl, each thing of its own class, existing by
its distinction from all others, each distinguished by its own form and
properties. But each has also properties and elements which are common
to both and others which are common to material things in general. And
in reality each does not exist only by its distinctions, but much more
essentially by that which is common to both; and we get back to the
very basis and enduring truth of all material things only when we find
that all are the same thing, one energy, one substance or, if you like,
one universal motion which throws up, brings out, combines, realises
these different forms, these various properties, these fixed and harmo-
nised potentialities of its own being. If we stop short at the knowledge
of distinctions, we can deal only with diamond and pearl as they are,
fix their values, uses, varieties, make the best ordinary use and profit
of them; but if we can get to the knowledge and control of their elements
and the common properties of the class to which they belong, we may

344 THE LIFE DIVINE

arrive at the power of making either a diamond or pearl at our pleasure:
go farther still and master that which all material things are in their
essence and we may arrive even at the power of transmutation which
would give the greatest possible control of material Nature. Thus the
knowledge of distinctions arrives at its greatest truth and effective use
when we arrive at the deeper knowledge of that which reconciles dis-
tinctions in the unity behind all variations. That deeper knowledge does
not deprive the other and more superficial of effectivity nor convict it of
vanity. We cannot conclude from our ultimate material discovery that
there is no original substance or Matter, only energy manifesting sub-
stance or manifesting as substance, — that diamond and pearl are non-
existent, unreal, only true to the illusion of our senses of perception and
action, that the one substance, energy or motion is the sole eternal truth
and that therefore the best or only rational use of our science would be
to dissolve diamond and pearl and everything else that we can dissolve
into this one eternal and original reality and get done with their forms
and properties for ever. There is an essentiality of things, a commonalty
of things, an individuality of things; the commonalty and individuality
are true and eternal powers of the essentiality: that transcends them
both, but the three together and not one by itself are the eternal terms
of existence.

This truth which we can see, though with difficulty and under con-
siderable restrictions, even in the material world where the subtler and
higher powers of being have to be excluded from our intellectual opera-
tions, becomes clearer and more powerful when we ascend in the scale.
We see the truth of our classifications and distinctions, but also their
limits. All things, even while different, are yet one. For practical pur-
poses plant, animal, man are different existences; yet when we look
deeper we see that the plant is only an animal with an insufficient evolu-
tion of self-consciousness and dynamic force; the animal is man in the
making ; man himself is that animal and yet the something more of self-
consciousness and dynamic power of consciousness that make him man ;
and yet again he is the something more which is contained and repressed
in his being as the potentiality of the divine, — he is a god in the making.
In each of these, plant, animal, man, god, the Eternal is there contain-
ing and repressing himself as it were in order to make a certain state-
ment of his being. Each is the whole Eternal concealed. Man himself,
who takes up all that went before him and transmutes it into the term
of manhood, is the individual human being and yet he is all mankind,

THE ETERNAL AND THE INDIVIDUAL 345

the universal man acting in the individual as a human personality. He
is all and yet he is himself and unique. He is what he is, but he is also
the past of all that he was and the potentiality of all that he is not. We
cannot understand him if we look only at his present individuality, but
we cannot understand him either if we look only at his commonalty, his
general term of manhood, or go back by exclusion from both to an
essentiality of his being in which his distinguishing manhood and his
particularising individuality seem to disappear. Each thing is the Abso-
lute, all are that One, but in these three terms always the Absolute makes
its statement of its developed self-existence. We are not, because of the
essential unity, compelled to say that all God's various action and work-
ings are vain, worthless, unreal, phenomenal, illusory, and that the best
and only rational or super-rational use we can make of our knowledge
is to get away from them, dissolve our cosmic and individual existence
into the essential being and get rid of all becoming as a futility for ever.
In our practical dealings with life we have to arrive at the same
truth. For certain practical ends we have to say that a thing is good or
bad, beautiful or ugly, just or unjust and act upon that statement; but
if we limit ourselves by it, we do not get at real knowledge. The law
of contradictions here is only valid in so far as two different and opposite
statements cannot be true of the same thing at the same time, in the same
field, in the same respect, from the same point of view and for the same
practical purpose. A great war, destruction or violent all-upheaving
revolution, for example, may present itself to us as an evil, a virulent
and catastrophic disorder, and it is so in certain respects, results, ways of
looking at it; but from others, it may be a great good, since it rapidly
clears the field for a new good or a more satisfying order. No man is
simply good or simply bad; every man is a mixture of contraries: even
we find these contraries often inextricably mixed up in a single feeling,
a single action. All kinds of conflicting qualities, powers, values meet
together and run into each other to make up our action, life, nature. We
can only understand entirely if we get to some sense of the Absolute
and yet look at its workings in all the relativities which are being mani-
fested,— look not only at each by itself, but each in relation to all and
to that which exceeds and reconciles them all. In fact we can only know
by getting to the divine view and purpose in things and not merely
looking at our own, though our own limited human view and momentary
purpose have their validity in the cadre of the All. For behind all rela-
tivities there is this Absolute which gives them their being and their

346 THE LIFE DIVINE

justification. No particular act or arrangement in the world is by itself
absolute justice; but there is behind all acts and arrangements some-
thing absolute which we call justice, which expresses itself through their
relativities and which we would realise if our view and knowledge were
comprehensive instead of being as they are partial, superficial, limited
to a few ostensible facts and appearances. So too there is an absolute
good and an absolute beauty: but we can only get a glimpse of it if we
embrace all things impartially and get beyond their appearances to some
sense of that which, between them, all and each are by their complex
terms trying to state and work out; not an indeterminate, — for the in-
determinate, being only the original stuff or perhaps the packed condi-
tion of determinations, would explain by itself nothing at all, — but the
Absolute. We can indeed follow the opposite method of breaking up all
things and refusing to look at them as a whole and in relation to that
which justifies them and so create an intellectual conception of absolute
evil, absolute injustice, the absolute hideousness, painfulness, triviality,
vulgarity or vanity of all things ; but that is to pursue to its extreme the
method of the Ignorance whose view is based upon division. We cannot
rightly so deal with the divine workings. Because the Absolute expresses
itself through relativities the secret of which we find it difficult to fathom,
because to our limited view everything appears to be a purposeless play
of oppositions and negatives or a mass of contradictions, we cannot con-
clude that our first limited view is right or that all is a vain delusion of
the mind and has no reality. Nor can we solve all by an original un-
reconciled contradiction which is to explain all the rest. The human
reason is wrong in attaching a separate and definitive value to each
contradiction by itself or getting rid of one by altogether denying the
other ; but it is right in refusing to accept as final and as the last word
the coupling of contradictions which have in no way been reconciled
together or else found their source and significance in something beyond
their opposition.

We cannot, either, effect a reconciliation or explanation of the origi-
nal contradictions of existence by taking refuge in our concept of Time.
Time, as we know or conceive it, is only our means of realising things
in succession, it is a condition and cause of conditions, varies on differ-
ent planes of existence, varies even for beings on one and the same plane:
that is to say, it is not an Absolute and cannot explain the primary rela-
tions of the Absolute. They work themselves out in detail by Time and
seem to our mental and vital being to be determined by it; but that

THE ETERNAL AND THE INDIVIDUAL 347

seeming does not carry us back to their sources and principles. We make
the distinction of conditioned and unconditioned and we imagine that
the unconditioned became conditioned, the Infinite became finite at some
date in Time, and may cease to be finite at some other date in Time,
because it so appears to us in details, particulars or with regard to this
or that system of things. But if we look at existence as a whole, we see
that infinite and finite co-exist and exist in and by each other. Even if
our universe were to disappear and reappear rhythmically in Time, as
was the old belief, that too would be only a large detail and would not
show that at a particular time all condition ceases in the whole range of
infinite existence and all Being becomes the unconditioned, at another
it again takes on the reality or the appearance of conditions. The first
source and the primary relations lie beyond our mental divisions of Time,
in the divine timelessness or else in the indivisible or eternal Time of
which our divisions and successions are only figures in a mental experi-
ence.

There we see that all meets and all principles, all persistent realities
of existence, — for the finite as a principle of being is as persistent as the
infinite, — stand in a primary relation to each other in a free, not an
exclusive unity of the Absolute, and that the way they present them-
selves to us in a material or a mental world is only a working out of
them in secondary, tertiary or yet lower relativities. The Absolute has
not become the contrary of itself and assumed at a certain date real or
unreal relativities of which it was originally incapable, nor has the One
become by a miracle the Many, nor the unconditioned deviated into the
conditioned, nor the unqualitied sprouted out into qualitied. These op-
positions are only the conveniences of our mental consciousness, our
divisions of the indivisible. The things they represent are not fictions,
they are realities, but they are not rightly known if they are set in
irreconcilable opposition to or separation from each other; for there is
no such irreconcilable opposition or separation of them in the all-view
of the Absolute. This is the weakness not only of our scientific divisions
and metaphysical distinctions, but of our exclusive spiritual realisations
which are only exclusive because to arrive at them we have to start from
our limiting and dividing mental consciousness. We have to make the
metaphysical distinctions in order to help our intelligence towards a
truth which exceeds it, because it is only so that it can escape from the
confusions of our first undistinguishing mental view of things ; but if we
bind ourselves by them to the end, we make chains of what should only

348 THE LIFE DIVINE

have been first helps. We have to make use too of distinct spiritual
realisations which may at first seem contrary to each other, because as
mental beings it is difficult or impossible for us to seize at once largely
and completely what is beyond our mentality ; but we err if we intellec-
tualise them into sole truths, — as when we assert that the Impersonal
must be the one ultimate realisation and the rest creation of Maya or
declare the Saguna, the Divine in its qualities, to be that and thrust
away the impersonality from our spiritual experience. We have to see
that both these realisations of the great spiritual seekers are equally
valid in themselves, equally invalid against each other; they are one
and the same Reality experienced on two sides which are both necessary
for the full knowledge and experience of each other and of that which
they both are. So is it with the One and the Many, the finite and the
infinite, the transcendent and the cosmic, the individual and the uni-
versal; each is the other as well as itself and neither can be entirely
known without the other and without exceeding their appearance of
contrary oppositions.

We see then that there are three terms of the one existence, tran-
scendent, universal and individual, and that each of these always con-
tains secretly or overtly the two others. The Transcendent possesses itself
always and controls the other two as the basis of its own temporal possi-
bilities; that is the Divine, the eternal all-possessing God-consciousness,
omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, which informs, embraces, governs
all existences. The human being is here on earth the highest power of
the third term, the individual, for he alone can work out at its critical
turning-point that movement of self-manifestation which appears to us
as the involution and evolution of the divine consciousness between the
two terms of the Ignorance and the Knowledge. The power of the indi-
vidual to possess in his consciousness by self-knowledge his unity with
the Transcendent and the universal, with the One Being and all beings
and to live in that knowledge and transform his life by it, is that which
makes the working out of the divine self-manifestation through the indi-
vidual possible ; and the arrival of the individual — not in one but in all —
at the divine life is the sole conceivable object of the movement. The
existence of the individual is not an error in some self of the Absolute
which that self afterwards discovers; for it is impossible that the abso-
lute self-awareness or anything that is one with it should be ignorant of
its own truth and its own capacities and betrayed by that ignorance
either into a false idea of itself which it has to correct or an impossible

THE ETERNAL AND THE INDIVIDUAL 349

venture which it has to renounce. Neither is the individual existence a
subordinate circumstance in a divine play or Lila, a play which consists
in a continual revolution through unending cycles of pleasure and suffer-
ing without any higher hope in the Lila itself or any issue from it except
the occasional escape of a few from time to time out of their bondage to
this ignorance. We might be compelled to hold that ruthless and disas-
trous view of God's workings if man had no power of self-transcendence
or no power of transforming by self-knowledge the conditions of the play
nearer and nearer to the truth of the divine Delight. In that power lies
the justification of individual existence; the individual and the universal
unfolding in themselves the divine light, power, joy of transcendent
Sachchidananda always manifest above them, always secret behind their
surface appearances, this is the secret intention, the ultimate significance
of the divine play, the Lila. But it is in themselves, in their transforma-
tion but also their persistence and perfect relations, not in their self-
annihilation that that must be unfolded. Otherwise there would be no
reason for their ever having existed; the possibility of the Divine's un-
folding in the individual is the secret of the enigma, his presence there
and this intention of self-unfolding the key to the world of Knowledge-
Ignorance.

CHAPTER IV

THE DIVINE AND THE UNDIVINE

The Seer, the Thinker, the Self-existent who becomes
everywhere has ordered perfectly all things from years sem-
piternal.

Isha Upanishad}

Many purified by knowledge have come to My state of
being. . . . They have reached likeness in their law of being
to Me.

Gita?

Know That for the Brahman and not this which men
cherish here.

Kena Upanishad.^

One controlling inner Self of all beings ... As the Sun,
the eye of the world, is not touched by the external faults
of vision, so this inner Self in beings is not touched by the
sorrow of the world.

Katha Upanishad.*'

The Lord abides in the heart of all beings,

Gita.^

THE universe is a manifestation of an infinite and eternal All-Exist-
ence: the Divine Being dwells in all that is; we ourselves are that
in our self, in our own deepest being; our soul, the secret indwelling
psychic entity, is a portion of the Divine Consciousness and Essence.
This is the view we have taken of our existence; but at the same time
we speak of a divine life as the culmination of the evolutionary process,
and the use of the phrase implies that our present life is undivine and
all the life too that is below us. At the first glance this looks like a
self-contradiction; instead of making a distinction between the divine
life we aspire for and a present undivine existence, it would be more
logical to speak of an ascent from level to higher level of a divine
manifestation. It may be admitted that essentially, if we look at the
inner reality alone and discount the suggestions of the outer figure, such
might be the nature of the evolution, the change we have to undergo in

^ Verse 8. "IV lo; XIV 2. «L 4. *V. 12, 11. ^ XVIII. 61.

350

THE DIVINE AND THE UNDIVINE 35 1

Nature so it would appear perhaps to the impartial eye of a universal
vision untroubled by our dualities of knowledge and ignorance, good
and evil, happiness and suffering and participating in the untrammelled
consciousness and delight of Sachchidananda. And yet, from the prac-
tical and relative point of view as distinguished from an essential vision,
the distinction between the divine and the undivine has an insistent
value, a very pressing significance. This then is an aspect of the problem
which it is necessary to bring into the light and assess its true importance.
The distinction between the divine and the undivine life is in fact
identical with the root distinction between a life of Knowledge lived in
self-awareness and in the power of the Light and a life of Ignorance, —
at any rate it so presents itself in a world that is slowly and with diffi-
culty evolving out of an original Inconscience. All life that has still this
Inconscience for its basis is stamped with the mark of a radical imper-
fection; for even if it is satisfied with its own type, it is a satisfaction
with something incomplete and inharmonious, a patch- work of discords:
on the contrary, even a purely mental or vital life might be perfect
within its limits if it were based on a restricted but harmonious self-
power and self-knowledge. It is this bondage to a perpetual stamp of
imperfection and disharmony that is the mark of the undivine ; a divine
life, on the contrary, even if progressing from the little to the more,
would be at each stage harmonious in its principle and detail: it would
be a secure ground upon which freedom and perfection could naturally
flower or grow towards their highest stature, refine and expand into
their most subtle opulence. All imperfections, all perfections have to be
taken into view in our consideration of the difference between an un-
divine and a divine existence: but ordinarily, when we make the dis-
tinction, we do it as human beings struggling under the pressure of life
and the difficulties of our conduct amidst its immediate problems and
perplexities ; most of all we are thinking of the distinction we are obliged
to make between good and evil or of that along with its kindred problem
of the duality, the blend in us of happiness and suffering. When we seek
intellectually for a divine presence in things, a divine origin of the world,
a divine government of its workings, the presence of evil, the insistence
on suffering, the large, the enormous part offered to pain, grief and
affliction in the economy of Nature are the cruel phenomena which baffle
our reason and overcome the instinctive faith of mankind in such an
origin and government or in an all-seeing, all-determining and omni-
present Divine Immanence, Other difficulties we could solve more easily

352 THE LIFE DIVINE

and happily and make some shift to be better satisfied with the ready
conclusiveness of our solutions. But this standard of judgment is not
sufficiently comprehensive and it is supported upon a too human point
of view; for to a wider outlook evil and suffering appear only as a strik-
ing aspect, they are not the whole defect, not even the root of the matter.
The sum of the world's imperfections is not made up only of these two
deficiencies; there is more than the fall, if fall there was, of our spiritual
or material being from good and from happiness or our nature's failure
to overcome evil and suffering. Besides the deficiency of the ethical and
hedonistic satisfactions demanded by our being, the paucity of Good and
Delight in our world-experience, there is also the deficiency of other
divine degrees: for Knowledge, Truth, Beauty, Power, Unity are, they
too, the stuff and elements of a divine life, and these are given to us in
a scanty and grudging measure; yet all are, in their absolute, powers of
the Divine Nature.

It is not possible then to limit the description of our and the world's
undivine imperfection solely to moral evil or sensational suffering; there
is more in the world-enigma than their double problem, — for they are
only two strong results of a common principle. It is the general principle
of imperfection that we have to admit and consider. If we look closely
at this general imperfection, we shall see that it consists first in a limi-
tation in us of the divine elements which robs them of their divinity, then
in a various many-branching distortion, a perversion, a contrary turn, a
falsifying departure from some ideal Truth of being. To our minds which
do not possess that Truth but can conceive it, this departure presents
itself either as a state from which we have lapsed spiritually or as a pos-
sibility or promise which we cannot fulfil, cannot realise because it exists
only as an ideal. There has been either a lapse of the inner spirit from
a greater consciousness and knowledge, delight, love and beauty, power
and capacity, harmony and good, or else there is a failure of our strug-
gling nature, an impotence to achieve what we instinctively see to be
divine and desirable. If we penetrate to the cause of the fall or the
failure, we shall find that all proceeds from the one primal fact that our
being, consciousness, force, experience of things represent — not in their
very self, but in their surface pragmatic nature — a principle or an eft'ec-
tive phenomenon of division or rupture in the unity of the Divine Ex-
istence. This division becomes in its inevitable practical effect a limita-
tion of the divine consciousness and knowledge, the divine delight and
beauty, the divine power and capacity, the divine harmony and good:

THE DIVINE AND THE UNDIVINE 353

there is a limitation of completeness and wholeness, a blindness in our
vision of these things, a lameness in our following of them, in our experi-
ence of them a fragmentation, a diminution of power and intensity, a
lowering of quality, — the mark of a descent from spiritual heights or
else of a consciousness emerging from the insensible neutral monotone
of the Inconscience ; the intensities which are normal and natural on
higher ranges are in us lost or toned down so as to harmonise with the
blacks and greys of our material existence. There arises too by a sec-
ondary ulterior effect a perversion of these highest things ; in our limited
mentality unconsciousness and wrong consciousness intervene, ignorance
covers our whole nature and — by the misapplication or misdirection of
an imperfect will and knowledge, by automatic reactions of our dimin-
ished consciousness-force and the inept poverty of our substance — con-
tradictions of the divine elements are formed, incapacity, inertia, false-
hood, error, pain and grief, wrong-doing, discord, evil. There is too,
always, somewhere hidden in our selves, nursed in our recesses, even
when not overtly felt in the conscious nature, even when rejected by the
parts of us which these things torture, an attachment to this experience
of division, a clinging to the divided way of being which prevents the
excision of these unhappinesses or their rejection and removal. For since
the principle of Consciousness-Force and Ananda is at the root of all
manifestation, nothing can endure if it has not a will in our nature, a
sanction of the Purusha, a sustained pleasure in some part of the being,
even though it be a secret or a perverse pleasure, to keep it in con-
tinuance.

When we say that all is a divine manifestation, even that which
we call undivine, we mean that in its essentiality all is divine even if the
form baffles or repels us. Or, to put it in a formula to which it is easier
for our psychological sense of things to give its assent, in all things there
is a presence, a primal Reality, — the Self, the Divine, Brahman, — ^which
is for ever pure, perfect, blissful, infinite: its infinity is not affected by
the limitations of relative things ; its purity is not stained by our sin and
evil; its bliss is not touched by our pain and suffering; its perfection is
not impaired by our defects of consciousness, knowledge, will, unity. In
certain images of the Upanishads the divine Purusha is described as the
one Fire which has entered into all forms and shapes itself according to
the form, as the one Sun which illumines all impartially and is not af-
fected by the faults of our seeing. But this affirmation is not enough;
it leaves the problem unsolved, why that which is in itself ever pure,

354 THE LIFE DIVINE

perfect, blissful, infinite, should not only tolerate but seem to maintain
and encourage in its manifestation imperfection and limitation, impurity
and suffering and falsehood and evil: it states the duality that consti-
tutes the problem, but does not solve it.

If we simply leave these two dissonant facts of existence standing
in each other's presence, we are driven to conclude that there is no recon-
ciliation possible; all we can do is to cling as much as we can to a deep-
ening sense of the joy of the pure and essential Presence and do the best
we may with the discordant externality, until we can impose in its place
the law of its divine contrary. Or else we have to seek for an escape
rather than a solution. For we can say that the inner Presence alone is
a Truth and the discordant externality is a falsehood or illusion created
by a mysterious principle of Ignorance; our problem is to find some way
of escape out of the falsehood of the manifested world into the truth of
the hidden Reality. Or we may hold with the Buddhist that there is no
need of explanation, since there is this one practical fact of the imper-
fection and impermanence of things and no Self, Divine or Brahman,
for that too is an illusion of our consciousness: the one thing that is
necessary for liberation is to get rid of the persistent structure of ideas
and persistent energy of action which maintain a continuity in the flux
of the impermanence. On this road of escape we achieve self-extinction
in Nirvana; the problem of things gets itself extinguished by our own
self-extinction. This is a way out, but it does not look like the true and
only way, nor are the other solutions altogether satisfactory. It is a fact
that by excluding the discordant manifestation from our inner conscious-
ness as a superficial externality, by insistinf; only on the pure and perfect
Presence, we can achieve individually a deep and blissful sense of this
silent Divinity, can enter into the sanctuary, can live in the light and
the rapture. An exclusive inner concentration on the Real, the Eternal
is possible, even a self-immersion by which we can lose or put away the
dissonances of the universe. But there is too somewhere deep down in us
the need of a total consciousness, there is in Nature a secret universal
seeking for the whole Divine, an impulsion towards some entire aware-
ness and delight and power of existence; this need of a whole being, a
total knowledge, this integral will in us is not fully satisfied by these
solutions. So long as the world is not divinely explained to us, the Divine
remains imperfectly known ; for the world too is That and, so long as it
is not present to our consciousness and possessed by our powers of con-

THE DIVINE AND THE UNDIVINE 355

sciousness in the sense of the divine being, we are not in possession of

the whole Divinity.

It is impossible to escape from the problem otherwise; for, admit-
ting always the essential Presence, we can endeavour to justify the
divinity of the manifestation by correcting the human view of perfec-
tion or putting it aside as a too limited mental standard. We may say
that not only is the Spirit in things absolutely perfect and divine, but
each thing also is relatively perfect and divine in itself, in its expression
of what it has to express of the possibilities of existence, in its assump-
tion of its proper place in the complete manifestation. Each thing is
divine in itself because each is a fact and idea of the divine being, knowl-
edge and will fulfilling itself infallibly in accordance with the law of that
particular manifestation. Each being is possessed of the knowledge, the
force, the measure and kind of delight of existence precisely proper to
its own nature ; each works in the gradations of experience decreed by a
secret inherent will, a native law, an intrinsic power of the self, an occult
significance. It is thus perfect in the relation of its phenomena to the
law of its being; for all are in harmony with that, spring out of it, adapt
themselves to its purpose according to the infallibility of the divine Will
and Knowledge at work within the creature. It is perfect and divine also
in relation to the whole, in its proper place in the whole ; to that totality
it is necessary and in it it fulfils a part by which the perfection actual
and progressive of the universal harmony, the adaptation of all in it to
its whole purpose and its whole sense is helped and completed. If to us
things appear undivine, if we hasten to condemn this or that phenomenon
as inconsistent with the nature of a divine being, it is because we are
ignorant of the sense and purpose of the Divine in the world in its en-
tirety. Because we see only parts and fragments, we judge of each by
itself as if it were the whole, judge also the external phenomena without
knowing their secret sense; but by doing so we vitiate our valuation of
things, put on it the stamp of an initial and fundamental error. Perfec-
tion cannot reside in the thing in its separateness, for that separateness
is an illusion; perfection is the perfection of the total divine harmony.

All this may be true up to a certain point and so far as it goes ; but
this also is a solution incomplete by itself and it cannot give us an entire
satisfaction. It takes insufficient account of the human consciousness
and the human view from which we have to start; it does not give us
the vision of the harmony it alleges, and so it cannot meet our demand

356 THE LIFE DIVINE

or convince, but only contradicts by a cold intellectual conception our
acute human sense of the reality of evil and imperfection; it gives too
no lead to the psychic element in our nature, the soul's aspiration to-
wards light and truth and towards a spiritual conquest, a victory over
imperfection and evil. By itself, this view of things amounts to little
more than the facile dogma which tells us that all that is is right, because
all is perfectly decreed by the divine Wisdom. It supplies us with nothing
better than a complacent intellectual and philosophic optimism: no light
is turned on the disconcerting facts of pain, suffering and discord to
which our human consciousness bears constant and troubling witness;
at most there is a suggestion that in the divine reason of things there
is a key to these things to which we have no access. This is not a sufficient
answer to our discontent and our aspiration which, however ignorant in
their reactions, however mixed their mental motives, must correspond
to a divine reality deeper down in our being. A Divine Whole that is
perfect by reason of the imperfection of its parts, runs the risk of itself
being only perfect in imperfection, because it fulfils entirely some stage
in an unaccomplished purpose; it is then a present but not an ultimate
Totality. To it we could apply the Greek saying, Theos ouk estin alia
gignetai, the Divine is not yet in being, but is becoming. The true Divine
would then be secret within us and perhaps supreme above us; to find
the Divine within us and above us would be the real solution, to become
perfect as That is perfect, to attain liberation by likeness to it or by
attaining to the law of its nature, sddrsya, sddharmya.

If the human consciousness were bound to the sense of imperfection
and the acceptance of it as the law of our life and the very character of
our existence, — a reasoned acceptance that could answer in our human
nature to the blind animal acceptance of the animal nature, — then we
might say that what we are marks the limit of the divine self-expression
in us ; we might believe too that our imperfections and sufferings worked
for the general harmony and perfection of things and console ourselves
with this philosophic balm offered for our wounds, satisfied to move
among the pitfalls of life with as much rational prudence or as much
philosophic sagacity and resignation as our incomplete mental wisdom
and our impatient vital parts permitted. Or else, taking refuge in the
more consoling fervours of religion, we might submit to all as the will
of God in the hope or the faith of recompense in a Paradise beyond
where we shall enter into a happier existence and put on a more pure
and perfect nature. But there is an essential factor in our human con-

THE DIVINE AND THE UNDIVINE 357

sciousness and its workings which, no less than the reason, distinguishes
it entirely from the animal; there is not only a mental part in us which
recognises the imperfection, there is a psychic part which rejects it.
Our soul's dissatisfaction with imperfection as a law of life upon earth,
its aspiration towards the elimination of all imperfections from our
nature, not only in a heaven beyond where it would be automatically
impossible to be imperfect, but here and now in a life where perfection
has to be conquered by evolution and struggle, are as much a law of our
being as that against which they revolt; they too are divine, — a divine
dissatisfaction, a divine aspiration. In them is the inherent light of a
power within which maintains them in us so that the Divine may not
only be there as a hidden Reality in our spiritual secrecies but unfold
itself in the evolution of Nature.

In this light we can admit that all works perfectly towards a divine
end by a divine wisdom and therefore each thing is in that sense per-
fectly fitted in its place; but we say that that is not the whole of the
divine purpose. For what is is only justifiable, finds its perfect sense and
satisfaction by what can and will be. There is, no doubt, a key in the
divine reason that would justify things as they are by revealing their
right significance and true secret as other, subtler, deeper than their
outward meaning and phenomenal appearance which is all that can
normally be caught by our present intelligence: but we cannot be con-
tent with that belief, to search for and find the spiritual key of things
is the law of our being. The sign of the finding is not a philosophic in-
tellectual recognition and a resigned or sage acceptance of things as they
are because of some divine sense and purpose in them which is beyond
us; the real sign is an elevation towards the spiritual knowledge and
power which will transform the law and phenomena and external forms
of our life nearer to a true image of that divine sense and purpose. It is
right and reasonable to endure with equanimity suffering and subjection
to defect as the immediate will of God, a present law of imperfection
laid on our members, but on condition that we recognise it also as the
will of God in us to transcend evil and suffering, to transform imperfec-
tion into perfection, to rise into a higher law of Divine Nature. In our
human consciousness there is the image of an ideal truth of being, a
divine nature, an incipient godhead: in relation to that higher truth
our present state of imperfection can be relatively described as an un-
divine life and the conditions of the world from which we start as un-
divine conditions; the imperfections are the indication given to us that

358 THE LIFE DIVINE

they are there as first disguises, not as the intended expression of the
divine being and the divine nature. It is a Power within us, the concealed
Divinity, that has Ht the flame of aspiration, pictures the image of the
ideal, keeps alive our discontent and pushes us to throw off the disguise
and to reveal or, in the Vedic phrase, to form and disclose the Godhead
in the manifest spirit, mind, life and body of this terrestrial creature.
Our present nature can only be transitional, our imperfect status a
starting-point and opportunity for the achievement of another higher,
wider and greater that shall be divine and perfect not only by the secret
spirit within it but in its manifest and most outward form of existence.
But these conclusions are only first reasonings or primary intuitions
founded on our inner self-experience and the apparent facts of universal
existence. They cannot be entirely validated unless we know the real
cause of ignorance, imperfection and suffering and their place in the
cosmic purpose or cosmic order. There are three propositions about God
and the world, — if we admit the Divine Existence, — to which the gen-
eral reason and consciousness of mankind bear witness; but, one of the
three, — ^which is yet necessitated by the character of the world we live
in, — does not harmonise with the two others, and by this disharmony
the human mind is thrown into great perplexities of contradiction and
driven to doubt and denial. For, first, we find affirmed an omnipresent
Divinity and Reality pure, perfect and blissful, without whom, apart
from whom nothing could exist, since all exists only by him and in his
being. All thinking on the subject that is not atheistic or materialistic
or else primitive and anthropomorphic, has to start from this admission
or to arrive at this fundamental concept. It is true that certain religions
seem to suppose an extracosmic Deity who has created a world outside
and apart from his own existence; but when they come to construct a
theology or spiritual philosophy, these too admit omnipresence or im-
manence,— for this omnipresence imposes itself, is a necessity of spiritual
thinking. If there is such a Divinity, Self or Reality, it must be every-
where, one and indivisible, nothing can possibly exist apart from its
existence; nothing can be born from another than That; there can be
nothing unsupported by That, independent of It, unfilled by the breath
and power of Its being. It has been held indeed that the ignorance, the
imperfection, the suffering of this world are not supported by the Divine
Existence; but we have then to suppose two Gods, an Ormuzd of the
good and an Ahriman of the evil or, perhaps, a perfect supracosmic and
immanent Being and an imperfect cosmic Demiurge or separate un-

THE DIVINE AND THE UNDIVINE 359

divine Nature. This is a possible conception but improbable to our high-
est intelligence, — it can only be at most a subordinate aspect, not the
original truth or the whole truth of things; nor can we suppose that
the one Self and Spirit in all and the one Power creator of all are differ-
ent, contrary in the character of their being, separate in their will and
purpose. Our reason tells us, our intuitive consciousness feels, and their
witness is confirmed by spiritual experience, that the one pure and abso-
lute Existence exists in all things and beings even as all things and
beings exist in It and by It, and nothing can be or happen without this
indwelling and all-supporting Presence.

A second affirmation which our mind naturally accepts as the con-
sequence of the first postulate, is that by the supreme consciousness and
the supreme power of this omnipresent Divinity in its perfect universal
knowledge and divine wisdom all things are ordered and governed in
their fundamental relations and their process. But, on the other hand,
the actual process of things, the actual relations which we see are, as
presented to our human consciousness, relations of imperfection, of limi-
tation; there appears a disharmony, even a perversion, something that
is the contrary of our conception of the Divine Existence, a very appar-
ent denial or at least a disfigurement or disguise of the Divine Presence.
There arises then a third affirmation of the Divine Reality and the
world reality as different in essence or in order, so different that we have
to draw away from one to reach the other; if we would find the Divine
Inhabitant, we must reject the world he inhabits, governs, has created
or manifested in his own existence. The first of these three propositions
is inevitable; the second also must stand if the omnipresent Divine has
anything at all to do with the world he inhabits and with its manifesta-
tion, building, maintenance and government: but the third seems also
self-evident and yet it is incompatible with its precedents, and this dis-
sonance confronts us with a problem which appears to be incapable of
satisfactory solution.

It is not difficult by some construction of the philosophic reason or
of theological reasoning to circumvent the difficulty. It is possible to
erect a faineant Deity, like the gods of Epicurus, blissful in himself,
observing but indifferent to a world conducted or misconducted by a
mechanical law of Nature. It is open to us to posit a Witness Self, a
silent Soul in things, a Purusha who allows Nature to do what she will
and is content to reflect all her order and all her disorders in his passive
and stainless consciousness, — or a supreme Self absolute, inactive, free

360 THE LIFE DIVINE

from all relations, unconcerned with the works of the cosmic Illusion or
Creation which has mysteriously or paradoxically originated from It or
over against It to tempt and afflict a world of temporal creatures. But all
these solutions do no more than reflect the apparent dissonance of our
twofold experience; they do not attempt to reconcile, neither do they
solve or explain it, but only reaffirm it by an open or covert dualism and
an essential division of the Indivisible. Practically, there is affirmed a
dual Godhead, Self or Soul and Nature: but Nature, the Power in things,
cannot be anything else than a power of the Self, the Soul, the essential
Being of things; her works cannot be altogether independent of Soul or
Self, cannot be her own contrary result and working unaffected by its
consent or refusal or a violence of mechanical Force imposed on an
inertia of mechanical Passivity. It is possible again to posit an observing
inactive Self and an active creating Godhead; but this device cannot
serve us, for in the end these two must really be one in a dual aspect, —
the Godhead the active aspect of the observing Self, the Self a witness of
its own Godhead in action. A discord, a gulf between the Self in knowl-
edge and the same Self in its works needs explanation, but it presents
itself as unexplained and inexplicable. Or, again, we can posit a double
consciousness of Brahman the Reality, one static and one dynamic, one
essential and spiritual in which it is Self perfect and absolute, another
formative, pragmatic, in which it becomes not-self and with which its
absoluteness and perfection have no concern of participation; for it is
only a temporal formation in the timeless Reality. But to us who even
if only half-existent, half-conscious, yet inhabit the Absolute's half-
dream of living and are compelled by Nature to have in it a terrible and
insistent concern and to deal with it as real, this wears the appearance of
an obvious mystification ; for this temporal consciousness and its forma-
tions are also in the end a Power of the one Self, depend upon it, can exist
only by it ; what exists by the power of the Reality cannot be unrelated
to It or That unrelated to the world of its own Power's making. If the
world exists by the supreme Spirit, so also its ordering and relations must
exist by the power of the Spirit; its law must be according to some law
of the spiritual consciousness and existence. The Self, the Reality must
be aware of and aware in the world-consciousness which exists in its be-
ing; a power of the Self, the Reality must be constantly determining or
at least sanctioning its phenomena and operations: for there can be no
independent power, no Nature not derived from the original and eternal
Self-Existence. If it does no more, it must still be originating or determin-

THE DIVINE AND THE UNDIVINE 36 1

ing the universe through the mere fact of its conscious omnipresence. It
is, no doubt, a truth of spiritual experience that there is a status of peace
and silence in the Infinite behind the cosmic activity, a Consciousness
that is the immobile Witness of the creation; but this is not the whole
of spiritual experience, and we cannot hope to find in one side only of
knowledge a fundamental and total explanation of the Universe.

Once we admit a divine government of the universe, we must con-
clude that the power to govern is complete and absolute; for otherwise
we are obliged to suppose that a being and consciousness infinite and
absolute has a knowledge and will limited in their control of things or
hampered in their power of working. It is not impossible to concede that
the supreme and immanent Divinity may leave a certain freedom of
working to something that has come into being in his perfection but is
itself imperfect and the cause of imperfection, to an ignorant or incon-
scient Nature, to the action of the human mind and will, even to a con-
scious Power or Forces of darkness and evil that take their stand upon
the reign of a basic Inconscience. But none of these things are independ-
ent of Its own existence, nature and consciousness and none of them can
act except in Its presence and by Its sanction or allowance. Man's freedom
is relative and he cannot be held solely responsible for the imperfection of
his nature. Ignorance and inconscience of Nature have arisen, not inde-
pendently, but in the one Being; the imperfection of her workings cannot
be entirely foreign to some will of the Immanence. It may be conceded
that forces set in motion are allowed to work themselves out according to
the law of their movement; but what divine Omniscience and Omnipo-
tence has allowed to arise and act in Its omnipresence. Its all-existence,
we must consider It to have originated and decreed, since without the
fiat of the Being they could not have been, could not remain in existence.
If the Divine is at all concerned with the world he has manifested, there
is no other Lord than He and from that necessity of His original and
universal being there can eventually be no escape or departure. It is on
the foundation of this self-evident consequence of our first premiss, with-
out any evasion of its implications, that we have to consider the problem
of imperfection, suffering and evil.

And first we must realise that the existence of ignorance, error, limi-
tation, suffering, division and discord in the world need not by itself, as
we too hastily imagine, be a denial or a disproof of the divine being, con-
sciousness, power, knowledge, will, delight in the universe. They can be
that if we have to take them by themselves separately, but need not be

362 THE LIFE DIVINE

SO taken if we get a clear vision of their place and significance in a com-
plete view of the universal workings. A part broken off from the whole
may be imperfect, ugly, incomprehensible; but when we see it in the
whole, it recovers its place in the harmony, it has a meaning and a use.
The Divine Reality is infinite in its being ; in this infinite being, we find
limited being everywhere, — that is the apparent fact from which our
existence here seems to start and to which our own narrow ego and its
ego-centric activities bear constant witness. But, in reality, when we
come to an integral self-knowledge, we find that we are not limited, for
we also are infinite. Our ego is only a face of the universal being and has
no separate existence; our apparent separative individuality is only a
surface movement and behind it our real individuality stretches out to
unity with all things and upward to oneness with the transcendent Divine
Infinity. Thus our ego, which seems to be a limitation of existence, is
really a power of infinity; the boundless multiplicity of beings in the
world is a result and signal evidence, not of limitation or finiteness, but
of that illimitable Infinity. Apparent division can never erect itself into a
real separateness ; there is supporting and overriding it an indivisible
unity which division itself cannot divide. This fundamental world-fact of
ego and apparent division and their separative workings in the world
existence is no denial of the Divine Nature of unity and indivisible being;
they are the surface results of an infinite multiplicity which is a power of
the infinite Oneness.

There is then no real division or limitation of being, no fundamental
contradiction of the omnipresent Reality; but there does seem to be a
real limitation of consciousness: there is an ignorance of self, a veiling
of the inner Divinity, and all imperfection is its consequence. For we
identify ourselves mentally, vitally, physically with this superficial ego-
consciousness which is our first insistent self-experience ; this does impose
on us, not a fundamentally real, but a practical division with all the un-
toward consequences of that separateness from the Reality. But here
again we have to discover that from the point of view of God's workings,
whatever be our reactions or our experience on the surface, this fact of
ignorance is itself an operation of knowledge and not a true ignorance.
Its phenomenon of ignorance is a superficial movement; for behind it is
an indivisible all-consciousness: the ignorance is a frontal power of that
all-consciousness which limits itself in a certain field, within certain
boundaries to a particular operation of knowledge, a particular mode of
conscious working, and keeps back all the rest of its knowledge in waiting

THE DIVINE AND THE UNDIVINE 363

as a force behind it. All that is thus hidden is an occult store of light and
power for the All-Consciousness to draw upon for the evolution of our
being in Nature; there is a secret working which fills up all the defi-
ciencies of the frontal Ignorance, acts through its apparent stumblings,
prevents them from leading to another final result than that which the
All-Knowledge has decreed, helps the soul in the Ignorance to draw from
its experience, even from the natural personality's sufferings and errors,
what is necessary for its evolution and to leave behind what is no longer
utilisable. This frontal power of Ignorance is a power of concentration
in a limited working, much like that power in our human mentality by
which we absorb ourselves in a particular object and in a particular work
and seem to use only so much knowledge, only such ideas as are neces-
sary for it, — the rest, which are alien to it or would interfere with it, are
put back for the moment: yet, in reality, all the time it is the indivisible
consciousness which we are that has done the work to be done, seen the
thing that has to be seen, — that and not any fragment of consciousness
or any exclusive ignorance in us is the silent knower and worker : so is it
too with this frontal power of concentration of the All-Consciousness
within us.

In our valuation of the movements of our consciousness this ability
of concentration is rightly held to be one of the greatest powers of the
human mentality. But equally the power of putting forth what seems to
be an exclusive working of limited knowledge, that which presents itself
to us as ignorance, must be considered one of the greatest powers of the
divine Consciousness. It is only a supreme self-possessing Knowledge
which can thus be powerful to limit itself in the act and yet work out per-
fectly all its intentions through that apparent ignorance. In the universe
we see this supreme self-possessing Knowledge work through a multitude
of ignorances, each striving to act according to its own blindness, yet
through them all it constructs and executes its universal harmonies.
More, the miracle of its omniscience appears most strikingly of all in
what seems to us the action of an Inconscient, when through the complete
or the partial nescience — more thick than our ignorance — of the electron,
atom, cell, plant, insect, the lowest forms of animal life, it arranges per-
fectly its order of things and guides the instinctive impulse or the in-
conscient impetus to an end possessed by the All-Knowledge but held
behind a veil, not known by the instrumental form of existence, j-et per-
fectly operative within the instinct or the impetus. We may say then
that this action of the ignorance or nescience is no real ignorance, but

364 THE LIFE DIVINE

a power, a sign, a proof of an omniscient self-knowledge and all-knowl-
edge. If we need any personal and inner witness to this indivisible all-
consciousness behind the ignorance, — all Nature is its external proof, —
we can get it with any completeness only in our deeper inner being or
larger and higher spiritual state when we draw back behind the veil of
our own surface ignorance and come into contact with the divine Idea
and Will behind it. Then we see clearly enough that what we have done
by ourselves in our ignorance was yet overseen and guided in its result
by the invisible Omniscience ; we discover a greater working behind our
ignorant working and begin to glimpse its purpose in us: then only can
we see and know what now we worship in faith, recognise wholly the pure
and universal Presence, meet the Lord of all being and all Nature.

As with the cause, — the Ignorance, — so is it with the consequences
of the Ignorance. All this that seems to us incapacity, weakness, impo-
tence, limitation of power, our will's hampered struggle and fettered
labour, takes from the point of view of the Divine in his self-workings
the aspect of a just limitation of an omniscient power by the free will
of that Power itself so that the surface energy shall be in exact corre-
spondence with the work that it has to do, with its attempt, its allotted
success or its destined because necessary failure, with the balance of the
sum of forces in which it is a part and with the larger result of which its
own results are an indivisible portion. Behind this limitation of power is
the All-Power and in the limitation that All-Power is at work; but it is
through the sum of many limited workings that the indivisible Omnipo-
tence executes infallibly and sovereignly its purposes. This power to limit
its force and to work through that self-limitation, by what we call labour,
struggle, difficulty, by what seems to us a series of failures or half-
baulked successes and through them to achieve its secret intention, is
not therefore a sign, proof or reality of weakness, but a sign, proof, real-
ity— the greatest possible — of an absolute omnipotence.

As to suffering, which is so great a stumbling-block to our under-
standing of the universe, it is evidently a consequence of the limitation
of consciousness, the restriction of force which prevents us from master-
ing or assimilating the touch of what is to us other-force: the result of
this incapacity and disharmony is that the delight of the touch cannot
be seized and it affects our sense with a reaction of discomfort or pain, a
defect or excess, a discord resultant in inner or outer injury, born of di-
vision between our power of being and the power of being that meets us.
Behind in our self and spirit is the All-Delight of the universal being

THE DIVINE AND THE UNDIVINE 365

which takes its account of the contact, a delight first in the enduring and
then in the conquest of the suffering and finally in its transmutation that
shall come hereafter; for pain and suffering are a perverse and contrary
term of the delight of existence and they can turn into their opposite,
even into the original All-Delight, Ananda. This All-Delight is not pres-
ent in the universal alone, but it is here secret in ourselves, as we dis-
cover when we go back from our outward consciousness into the Self
within us; the psychic being in us takes its account even of its most per-
verse or contrary as well as its more benign experiences and grows by the
rejection of them or acceptance; it extracts a divine meaning and use
from our most poignant sufferings, difficulties, misfortunes. Nothing but
this All-Delight could dare or bear to impose such experiences on itself
or on us; nothing else could turn them thus to its own utility and our
spiritual profit. So too nothing but an inalienable harmony of being in-
herent in an inalienable unity of being would throw out so many harshest
apparent discords and yet force them to its purpose so that in the end
they are unable to do anything else but to serve and secure, and even
themselves change into elements that constitute, a growing universal
rhythm and ultimate harmony. At every turn it is the divine Reality
which we can discover behind that which we are yet compelled by the
nature of the superficial consciousness in which we dwell to call undivine
and in a sense are right in using that appellation ; for these appearances
are a veil over the Divine Perfection, a veil necessary for the present,
but not at all the true and complete figure.

But even when we thus regard the universe, we cannot and ought
not to dismiss as entirely and radically false and unreal the values that
are given to it by our own limited human consciousness. For grief, pain,
suffering, error, falsehood, ignorance, weakness, wickedness, incapacity,
non-doing of what should be done and wrong-doing, deviation of will and
denial of will, egoism, limitation, division from other beings with whom
we should be one, all that makes up the effective figure of what we call
evil, are facts of the world-consciousness, not fictions and unrealities,
although they are facts whose complete sense or true value is not that
which we assign to them in our ignorance. Still our sense of them is part
of a true sense, our values of them are necessary to their complete values.
One side of the truth of these things we discover when we get into a
deeper and larger consciousness; for we find then that there is a cosmic
and individual utility in what presents itself to us as adverse and evil. For
without experience of pain we would not get all the infinite value of the

366 THE LIFE DIVINE

divine delight of which pain is in travail; all ignorance is a penumbra
which environs an orb of knowledge, every error is significant of the pos-
sibility and the effort of a 'discovery of truth; every weakness and failure
is a first sounding of gulfs of power and potentiality; all division is in-
tended to enrich by an experience of various sweetness of unification the
joy of realised unity. All this imperfection is to us evil, but all evil is in
travail of the eternal good; for all is an imperfection which is the first
condition — in the law of life evolving out of Inconscience — of a greater
perfection in the manifesting of the hidden divinity. But at the same time
our present feeling of this evil and imperfection, the revolt of our con-
sciousness against them is also a necessary valuation; for if we have
first to face and endure them, the ultimate command on us is to reject, to
overcome, to transform the life and the nature. It is for that end that
their insistence is not allowed to slacken ; the soul must learn the results
of the Ignorance, must begin to feel their reactions as a spur to its
endeavour of mastery and conquest and finally to a greater endeavour of
transformation and transcendence. It is possible, when we live inwardly
in the depths, to arrive at a state of vast inner equality and peace which
is untouched by the reactions of the outer nature, and that is a great
but incomplete liberation, — for the outer nature too has a right to de-
liverance. But even if our personal deliverance is complete, still there is
the suffering of others, the world travail, which the great of soul cannot
regard with indifference. There is a unity with all beings which something
within us feels and the deliverance of others must be felt as intimate to
its own deliverance.

This then is the law of the manifestation, the reason of the imper-
fection here. True, it is a law of manifestation only and, even, a law
special to this movement in which we live, and we may say that it need
not have been — if there were no movement of manifestation or not this
movement; but, the manifestation and the movement being given, the
law is necessary. It is not enough simply to say that the law and all its
circumstances are an unreality created by the mental consciousness, non-
existent in God, and to be indifferent to these dualities or to get out of the
manifestation into God's pure being is the only wisdom. It is true they
are creations of mind Consciousness, but Mind is only secondarily re-
sponsible ; in a deeper reality they are, as we have seen already, creations
of the Divine Consciousness projecting mind away from its all-knowledge
so as to realise these opposite or contrary values of its all-power, all-
knowledge, all-delight, all-being and unity. Obviously, this action and

THE DIVINE AND THE UNDIVINE 367

these fruits of the Divine Consciousness can be called by us unreal in
the sense of not being the eternal and fundamental truth of being or can
be taxed with falsehood because they contradict what is originally and
eventually the truth of being; but, all the same, they have their persistent
reality and importance in our present phase of the manifestation, nor
can they be a mere mistake of the Divine Consciousness without any
meaning in the divine wisdom, without any purpose of the divine joy,
power and knowledge to justify their existence. Justification there must
be even if it reposes for us upon a mystery which may confront us, so
long as we live in a surface experience, as an insoluble riddle.

But if, accepting this side of Nature, we say that all things are fixed
in their statutory and stationary law of being, and man too must be fixed
in his imperfections, his ignorance and sin and weakness and vileness and
suffering, our life loses its true significance. Man's perpetual attempt to
arise out of the darkness and insufficiency of his nature can then have no
issue in the world itself, in life itself ; its one issue, if there is any, must
be by an escape out of life, out of the world, out of his human existence
and therefore out of its eternally unsatisfactory law of imperfect being,
either into a heaven of the gods or of God or into the pure ineffability of
the Absolute. If so, man can never really deliver out of the ignorance
and falsehood the truth and knowledge, out of the evil and ugliness the
good and beauty, out of the weakness and vileness the power and glory,
out of the grief and suffering the joy and delight which are contained in
the Spirit behind them and of these contradictions are the first adverse
and contrary conditions of emergence. All he can do is to cut the imper-
fections away from him and overpass too their balancing opposites, im-
perfect also, — leave with the ignorance the human knowledge, with the
evil the human good, with the weakness the human strength and power,
with the strife and suffering the human love and joy ; for these are in our
present nature inseparably entwined together, look like conjoint dualities,
negative pole and positive pole of the same unreality, and since they
cannot be elevated and transformed, they must be both abandoned:
humanity cannot be fulfilled in divinity; it must cease, be left behind
and rejected. Whether the result will be an individual enjoyment of the
absolute divine nature or of the Divine Presence or a Nirvana in the
featureless Absolute, is a point on which religions and philosophies differ :
but in either case human existence on earth must be taken as condemned
to eternal imperfection by the very law of its being; it is perpetually and
unchangeably an undivine manifestation in the Divine Existence. The

368 THE LIFE DIVINE

soul by taking on manhood, perhaps by the very fact of birth itself, has
fallen from the Divine, has committed an original sin or error which it
must be man's spiritual aim, as soon as he is enlightened, thoroughly to
cancel, unflinchingly to eliminate.

In that case, the only reasonable explanation of such a paradoxical
manifestation or creation is that it is a cosmic game, a Lila, a play, an
amusement of the Divine Being. It may be He pretends to be undivine,
wears that appearance like the mask or make-up of an actor for the sole
pleasure of the pretence or the drama. Or else He has created the undi-
vine, created ignorance, sin and suffering just for the joy of a manifold
creation. Or, perhaps, as some religions curiously suppose. He has done
this so that there may be inferior creatures who will praise and glorify
Him for his eternal goodness, wisdom, bliss and omnipotence and try
feebly to come an inch nearer to the goodness in order to share the bliss,
on pain of punishment — by some supposed eternal — if, as the vast ma-
jority must by their very imperfection, they fail in their endeavour. But
to the doctrine of such a Lila so crudely stated there is always possible
the retort that a God, himself all-blissful, who delights in the suffering
of creatures or imposes such suffering on them for the faults of his own
imperfect creation, would be no Divinity and against Him the moral
being and intelligence of humanity must revolt or deny His existence.
But if the human soul is a portion of the Divinity, if it is a divine Spirit
in man that puts on this imperfection and in the form of humanity con-
sents to bear this suffering, or if the soul in humanity is meant to be
drawn to the Divine Spirit and is His associate in the play of imperfec-
tion here, in the delight of perfect being otherwhere, the Lila may still
remain a paradox, but it ceases to be a cruel or revolting paradox; it
can at most be regarded as a strange mystery and to the reason inexplica-
ble. To explain it there must be two missing elements, a conscious assent
by the soul to this manifestation and a reason in the All-Wisdom that
makes the play significant and intelligible.

The strangeness of the play diminishes, the paradox loses its edge
of sharpness if we discover that, although fixed grades exist each with its
appropriate order of nature, they are only firm steps for a progressive
ascent of the souls embodied in forms of matter, a progressive divine
manifestation which rises from the inconscient to the superconscient or
all-conscient status with the human consciousness as its decisive point
of transition. Imperfection becomes then a necessary term of the mani-
festation: for, since all the divine nature is concealed but present in the

THE DIVINE AND THE UNDIVINE 369

Inconscient, it must be gradually delivered out of it; this graduation
necessitates a partial unfolding, and this partial character or incomplete-
ness of the unfolding necessitates imperfection. An evolutionary mani-
festation demands a mid-stage with gradations above and under it,
— ^precisely such a stage as the mental consciousness of man, part knowl-
edge, part ignorance, a middle power of being still leaning on the In-
conscient but slowly rising towards the all-conscious Divine Nature. A
partial unfolding implying imperfection and ignorance may take as its
inevitable companion, perhaps its basis for certain movements, an ap-
parent perversion of the original truth of being. For the ignorance or
imperfection to endure there must be a seeming contrary of all that
characterises the divine nature, its unity, its all-consciousness, its all-
power, its all-harmony, its all-good, its all-delight; there must appear
limitation, discord, unconsciousness, dis-harmony, incapacity, insensi-
bility and suffering, evil. For without that perversion imperfection could
have no strong standing-ground, could not so freely manifest and main-
tain its nature as against the presence of the underlying Divinity. A par-
tial knowledge is imperfect knowledge and imperfect knowledge is to that
extent ignorance, a contrary of the divine nature: but in its outlook on
what is beyond its knowledge, this contrary negative becomes a contrary
positive ; it originates error, wrong knowledge, wrong dealing with things,
with life, with action ; the wrong knowledge becomes a wrong will in the
nature, at first, it may be, wrong by mistake, but afterwards wrong by
choice, by attachment, by delight in the falsehood, — the simple contrary
turns into a complex perversion. Inconscience and ignorance once ad-
mitted, these form a natural result in a logical sequence and have to be
admitted also as necessary factors. The only question is the reason why
this kind of progressive manifestation was itself necessary; that is the
sole point left obscure to the intelligence.

A manifestation of this kind, self-creation or Lila, would not seem
justifiable if it were imposed on the unwilling creature; but it will be
evident that the assent of the embodied spirit must be there already, for
Prakriti cannot act without the assent of the Purusha. There must have
been not only the will of the Divine Purusha to make the cosmic creation
possible, but the assent of the individual Purusha to make the individual
manifestation possible. But it may be said that the reason for the Divine
Will and delight in such a difficult and tormented progressive manifesta-
tion and the reason for the soul's assent to it is still a mystery. But it is
not altogether a mystery if we look at our own nature and can suppose

370 THE LIFE DIVINE

some kindred movement of being in the beginning as its cosmic origin.
On the contrary, a play of self-conceaHng and self-finding is one of the
most strenuous joys that conscious being can give to itself, a play of ex-
treme attractiveness. There is no greater pleasure for man himself than
a victory which is in its very principle a conquest over difficulties, a vic-
tory in knowledge, a victory in power, a victory in creation over the
impossibilities of creation, a delight in the conquest over an anguished
toil and a hard ordeal of suffering. At the end of separation is the intense
joy of union, the joy of a meeting with a self from which we were divided.
There is an attraction in ignorance itself because it provides us with the
joy of discovery, the surprise of new and unforeseen creation, a great ad-
venture of the soul ; there is a joy of the journey and the search and the
finding, a joy of the battle and the crown, the labour and the reward of
labour. If delight of existence be the secret of creation, this too is one de-
light of existence ; it can be regarded as the reason or at least one reason
of this apparently paradoxical and contrary Lila. But, apart from this
choice of the individual Purusha, there is a deeper truth inherent in the
original Existence which finds its expression in the plunge into Incon-
science; its result is a new affirmation of Sachchidananda in its apparent
opposite. If the Infinite's right of various self-manifestation is granted,
this too as a possiblity of its manifestation is intelligible and has its pro-
found significance.

CHAPTER V

THE COSMIC ILLUSION;
MIND, DREAM AND HALLUCINATION

Thou who hast come to this transient and unhappy-
world, turn to Me.

Gita}

This Self is a self of Knowledge, an inner light in the
heart; he is the conscious being common to all the states of
being and moves in both worlds. He becomes a dream-self
and passes beyond this world and its forms of death. . . .
There are two planes of this conscious being, this and the
other worlds; a third state is their place of joining, the state
of dream, and when he stands in this place of their joining,
he sees both planes of his existence, this world and the other
world. When he sleeps, he takes the substance of this world
in which all is and himself undoes and himself builds by his
own illumination, his own light; when this conscious being
sleeps, he becomes luminous with his self-light. . . . There
are no roads nor chariots, nor joys nor pleasures, nor tanks
nor ponds nor rivers, but he creates them by his own light,
for he is the maker. By sleep he casts off his body and un-
sleeping sees those that sleep ; he preserves by his life-breath
this lower nest and goes forth, immortal, from his nest; im-
mortal, he goes where he wills, the golden Purusha, the sol-
itary Swan. They say, "the country of waking only is his,
for the things which he sees when awake, these only he sees
when asleep"; but there he is his own self-light.

Brihadaranyaka Vpanishad?

What is seen and what is not seen, what is experienced
and what is not experienced, what is and what is not, — aU
it sees, it is all and sees.

Prasna Upanishad.^

yiLL human thought, all mental man's experience moves between
J^~\^ a constant affirmation and negation; there is for his mind no truth
of idea, no result of experience that cannot be affirmed, none that cannot
be negated. It has negated the existence of the individual being, negated
the existence of the cosmos, negated the existence of any immanent or un-
derlying Reality, negated any Reality beyond the individual and the cos-

'IX. 33. ^ IV. 3. 7, 9-12, 14. nv. S.

371

372 THE LIFE DIVINE

mos; but it is also constantly affirming these things — sometimes one of
them solely or any two or all of them together. It has to do so because our
thinking mind is in its very nature an ignorant dealer in possibilities, not
possessing the truth behind any of them, but sounding and testing each
in turn or many together if so perchance it may get at some settled belief
or knowledge about them, some certitude; yet, living in a world of rela-
tives and possibilities, it can arrive at no final certainty, no absolute and
abiding conviction. Even the actual, the realised can present itself to our
mentahty as a "may be or may not be," sydd vd na sydd vd, or as an "is"
under the shadow of the "might not have been" and wearing the aspect
of that which will not be hereafter. Our life-being is also afflicted by the
same incertitude; it can rest in no aim of living from which it can derive
a sure or final satisfaction or to which it can assign an enduring value.
Our nature starts from facts and actualities which it takes for real; it is
pushed beyond them into a pursuit of uncertain possibilities and led even-
tually to question all that it took as real. For it proceeds from a funda-
mental ignorance and has no hold on assured truth; all the truths on
which it relies for a time are found to be partial, incomplete and question-
able.

At the outset man lives in his physical mind which perceives the
actual, the physical, the objective and accepts it as fact and this fact as
self-evident truth beyond question ; whatever is not actual, not physical,
not objective it regards as unreal or unrealised, only to be accepted as
entirely real when it has succeeded in becoming actual, becoming a physi-
cal fact, becoming objective: its own being too it regards as an objective
fact, warranted to be real by its existence in a visible and sensible body ;
all other subjective beings and things it accepts on the same evidence in
so far as they can become objects of our external consciousness or accept-
able to that part of the reason which builds upon the data supplied by
that consciousness and relies upon them as the one solid basis of knowl-
edge. Physical Science is a vast extension of this mentality: it corrects
the errors of the sense and pushes beyond the first limitations of the
sense-mind by discovering means of bringing facts and objects not seiz-
able by our corporeal organs into the field of objectivity; but it has the
same standard of reality, the objective, the physical actuality ; its test of
the real is possibility of verification by positive reason and objective
evidence.

But man also has a life-mind, a vital mentality which is an instru-
ment of desire: this is not satisfied with the actual, it is a dealer in possi-

THE COSMIC ILLUSION 373

bilities; it has the passion for novelty and is seeking always to extend
the limits of experience for the satisfaction of desire, for enjoyment, for
an enlarged self-affirmation and aggrandisement of its terrain of power
and profit. It desires, enjoys, possesses actualities, but it hunts also after
unrealised possibilities, is ardent to materialise them, to possess and en-
joy them also. It is not satisfied with the physical and objective only,
but seeks too a subjective, an imaginative, a purely emotive satisfaction
and pleasure. If there were not this factor, the physical mind of man left
to itself would live like the animal, accepting his first actual physical life
and its limits as his whole possibility, moving in material Nature's estab-
lished order and asking for nothing beyond it. But this vital mind, this
unquiet life-will comes in with its demands and disturbs this inert or
routine satisfaction which lives penned within the bounds of actuality ; it
enlarges always desire and craving, creates a dissatisfaction, an unrest, a
seeking for something more than what life seems able to give it: it brings
about a vast enlargement of the field of physical actuality by the actual-
isation of our unrealised possibilities, but also a constant demand for
more and always more, a quest for new worlds to conquer, an incessant
drive towards an exceeding of the bounds of circumstance and a self-
exceeding. To add to this cause of unrest and incertitude there comes in
a thinking mind that inquires into everything, questions everything,
builds up affirmations and unbuilds them, erects systems of certitude but
finally accepts none of them as certain, affirms and questions the evidence
of the sense, follows out the conclusions of the reason but undoes them
again to arrive at different or quite opposite conclusions, and continues
indefinitely if not ad infinitum this process. This is the history of human
thought and human endeavour, a constant breaking of bounds only to
move always in the same spirals enlarged perhaps but following the same
or constantly similar curves of direction. The mind of humanity, ever
seeking, ever active, never arrives at a firmly settled reality of life's aims
and objects or at a settled reality of its own certitudes and convictions, an
established foundation or firm formation of its idea of existence.

At a certain point of this constant unrest and travail even the physi-
cal mind loses its conviction of objective certitude and enters into an ag-
nosticism which questions all its own standards of life and knowledge,
doubts whether all this is real or else whether all, even if real, is not fu-
tile; the vital mind, baffled by life and frustrated or else dissatisfied with
all its satisfactions, overtaken by a deep disgust and disappointment,
finds that all is vanity and vexation of spirit and is ready to reject life

374 THE LIFE DIVINE

and existence as an unreality, all that it hunted after as an illusion,
Maya ; the thinking mind, unbuilding all its affirmations, discovers that
all are mere mental constructions and there is no reality in them or else
that the only reality is something beyond this existence, something that
has not been made or constructed, something Absolute and Eternal, — ^all
that is relative, all that is of time is a dream, a hallucination of the mind
or a vast delirium, an immense cosmic Illusion, a delusive figure of ap-
parent existence. The principle of negation prevails over the principle of
affirmation and becomes universal and absolute. Thence arise the great
world-negating religions and philosophies; thence too a recoil of the
life-motive from itself and a seeking after a life elsewhere flawless and
eternal or a will to annul life itself in an immobile Reality or an original
Non-Existence. In India the philosophy of world-negation has been given
formulations of supreme power and value by two of the greatest of her
thinkers, Buddha and Shankara. There have been, intermediate or later
in time, other philosophies of considerable importance, some of them
widely accepted, formulated with much acumen of thought by men of
genius and spiritual insight, which disputed with more or less force and
success the conclusions of these two great metaphysical systems, but none
has been put forward with an equal force of presentation or drive of per-
sonality or had a similar massive effect. The spirit of these two remark-
able spiritual philosophies — for Shankara in the historical process of
India's philosophical mind takes up, completes and replaces Buddha,
— has weighed with a tremendous power on her thought, religion and
general mentality: everywhere broods its mighty shadow, everywhere is
the impress of the three great formulas, the chain of Karma, escape from
the wheel of rebirth, Maya. It is necessary therefore to look afresh at
the Idea or Truth behind the negation of cosmic existence and to con-
sider, however briefly, what is the value of its main formulations or sug-
gestions, on what reality they stand, how far they are imperative to the
reason or to experience. For the present it will be enough to throw a
regard on the principal ideas which are grouped around the conception of
the great cosmic Illusion, Maya, and to set against them those that are
proper to our own line of thought and vision ; for both proceed from the
conception of the One Reality, but one line leads to a universal Illusion-
ism, the other to a universal Realism, — an unreal or real-unreal universe
reposing on a transcendent Reality or a real universe reposing on a Re-
ality at once universal and transcendent or absolute.

In itself and by itself the vital being's aversion, the life-mind's recoil

THE COSMIC ILLUSION 375

from life cannot be taken as valid or conclusive. Its strongest motive is a
sense of disappointment and an acceptance of frustration which has no
greater claim to conclusiveness than the idealist's opposite motive of in-
variable hope and his faith and will to realise. Nevertheless there is a cer-
tain validity in the mental support of this sense of frustration, in the
perception at which the thinking mind arrives that there is an illusion
behind all human effort and terrestrial endeavour, the illusion of his
political and social gospels, the illusion of his ethical efforts at perfection,
the illusion of philanthropy and service, the illusion of works, the illusion
of fame, power, success, the illusion of all achievement. Human, social
and political endeavour turns always in a circle and leads nowhere; man's
life and nature remain always the same, always imperfect, and neither
laws nor institutions nor education nor philosophy nor morality nor re-
ligious teachings have succeeded in producing the perfect man, still less
a perfect humanity, — straighten the tail of the dog as you will, it has
been said, it always resumes its natural curve of crookedness. Altruism,
philanthropy and service, Christian love or Buddhist compassion have
not made the world a whit happier, they only give infinitesimal bits of
momentary relief here and there, throw drops on the fire of the world's
suffering. All aims are in the end transitory and futile, all achievements
unsatisfying or evanescent; all works are so much labour of effort and
success and failure which consummate nothing definitive: whatever
changes are made in human life are of the form only and these forms
pursue each other in a futile circle; for the essence of life, its general
character remains the same for ever. This view of things may be exag-
gerated, but it has an undeniable force ; it is supported by the experience
of man's centuries and it carries in itself a significance which at one time
or another comes upon the mind with an overwhelming air of self-evi-
dence. Not only so, but if it is true that the fundamental laws and values
of terrestrial existence are fixed or that it must always turn in repeated
cycles, — and this has been for long a very prevalent notion, — then this
view of things in the end is hardly escapable. For imperfection, ignorance,
frustration and suffering are a dominant factor of the existing world-
order, the elements contrary to them, knowledge, happiness, success, per-
fection are constantly found to be deceptive or inconclusive: the two
opposites are so inextricably mixed that, if this state of things is not a
motion towards a greater fulfilment, if this is the permanent character
of the world-order, then it is hard to avoid the conclusion that all here is
either the creation of an inconscient Energy, which would account for

376 THE LIFE DIVINE

the incapacity of an apparent consciousness to arrive at anything, or
intentionally a world of ordeal and failure, the issue being not here but
elsewhere, or even a vast and aimless cosmic Illusion.

Among these alternative conclusions the second, as it is usually put
before us, offers no ground for the philosophic reason, since we have no
satisfying indication of the connection between the here and the else-
where which are posited against each other but not explained in the in-
evitability of their relations, and there is no light cast on the necessity or
fundamental significance of the ordeal and failure. It could only be intel-
ligible,— except as the mysterious will of an arbitrary Creator, — if there
was a choice by immortal spirits to try the adventure of the Ignorance
and a necessity for them to learn the nature of a world of Ignorance in
order that they might reject it. But such a creative motive, necessarily
incidental and quite temporary in its incidence, with the earth as its
casual field of experience, could hardly by itself account for the immense
and enduring phenomenon of this complex universe. It can become an
operative part of a satisfactory explanation if this world is the field
for the working out of a greater creative motive, if it is a manifestation
of a divine Truth or a divine Possibility in which under certain condi-
tions an initiating Ignorance must intervene as a necessary factor, and if
the arrangement of this universe contains in it a compulsion of the Ig-
norance to move towards Knowledge, of the imperfect manifestation to
grow into perfection, of the frustration to serve as steps towards a final
victory, of the suffering to prepare an emergence of the divine Delight
of Being. In that case the sense of disappointment, frustration, illusion
and the vanity of all things would not be valid ; for the aspects that seem
to justify it would be only the natural circumstances of a difficult evolu-
tion: all the stress of struggle and effort, success and failure, joy and
suffering, the mixture of ignorance and knowledge would be the experi-
ence needed for the soul, mind, life and physical part to grow into the
full light of a spiritual perfected being. It would reveal itself as the
process of an evolutionary manifestation; there would be no need to
bring in the fiat of an arbitrary Omnipotence or a cosmic Illusion, a
phantasy of meaningless Maya.

But there is too a higher mental and spiritual basis for the philoso-
phy of world-negation and here we are on more solid ground: for it can
be contended that the world is in its very nature an illusion and no rea-
soning from the features and circumstances of an Illusion could justify it
or raise it into a Reality, — there is only one Reality, the transcendent,

THE COSMIC ILLUSION 377

the supracosmic : no divine fulfilment, even if our life were to grow
into the life of gods, could nullify or cancel the original unreality which
is its fundamental character; for that fulfilment would be only the bright
side of an Illusion. Or even if not absolutely an illusion, it would be a
reality of an inferior order and must come to an end by the soul's recog-
nition that the Brahman alone is true, that there is nothing but the
transcendent and immutable Absolute. If this is the one Truth, then all
ground is cut away from under our feet; the divine Manifestation, the
victory of the soul in Matter, its mastery over existence, the divine life
in Nature would itself be a falsehood or at least something not altogether
real imposed for a time on the sole true Reality. But here all turns on
the mind's conception or the mental being's experience of Reality and
how far that conception is valid or how far that experience is imperative,
— even if it is a spiritual experience, how far it is absolutely conclusive,
solely imperative.

The cosmic Illusion is sometimes envisaged — though that is not the
accepted position — as something that has the character of an unreal sub-
jective experience; it is then — or may be — a figure of forms and move-
ments that arises in some eternal sleep of things or in a dream-conscious-
ness and is temporarily imposed on a pure and featureless self-aware
Existence; it is a dream that takes place in the Infinite. In the philoso-
phies of the Mayavadins — for there are several systems alike in their
basis but not altogether and at every point coincident with each other, —
the analogy of dream is given, but as an analogy only, not as the intrinsic
character of the world-illusion. It is difficult for the positive physical
mind to admit the idea that ourselves, the world and life, the sole thing
to which our consciousness bears positive witness, are inexistent, a cheat
imposed on us by that consciousness: certain analogies are brought for-
ward, the analogies especially of dream and hallucination, in order to
show that it is possible for the experiences of the consciousness to seem to
it real and yet prove to be without any basis or without a sufficient basis
in reality; as a dream is real to the dreamer so long as he sleeps but
waking shows it to be unreal, so our experience of world seems to us
positive and real but, when we stand back from the illusion, we shall find
that it had no reality. But it may be as well to give the dream analogy
its full value and see whether our sense of world-experience has in any
way a similar basis. For the idea of the world as a dream, whether it be a
dream of the subjective mind or a dream of the soul or a dream in the
Eternal, is often entertained and it powerfully enforces the illusionist

378 THE LIFE DIVINE

tendency in human feeling and thinking. If it has no validity, we must
definitely see that and the reasons of its inapplicability and set it aside
well out of the way; if it has some validity, we must see what it is and
how far it goes. If the world is an illusion, but not a dream illusion, that
distinction too must be put on a secure basis.

Dream is felt to be unreal, first, because it ceases and has no farther
validity when we pass from one status of consciousness to another which
is our normal status. But this is not by itself a sufficient reason: for it
may well be that there are different states of consciousness each with its
own realities; if the consciousness of one state of things fades back and
its contents are lost or, even when caught in memory, seem to be illusory
as soon as we pass into another state, that would be perfectly normal,
but it would not prove the reality of the state in which we now are and
the unreality of the other which we have left behind us. If earth circum-
stances begin to seem unreal to a soul passing into a different world or
another plane of consciousness, that would not prove their unreality;
similarly, the fact that world-existence seems unreal to us when we
pass into the spiritual silence or into some Nirvana, does not of itself
prove that the cosmos was all the time an illusion. The world is real
to the consciousness dwelling in it, an unconditioned existence is real
to the consciousness absorbed in Nirvana ; that is all that is established.
But the second reason for refusing credit to our sleep experience is that a
dream is something evanescent without antecedents and without a se-
quel ; ordinarily, too, it is without any sufficient coherence or any signifi-
cance intelligible to our waking being. If our dreams wore like our wak-
ing life an aspect of coherence, each night taking up and carrying farther
a past continuous and connected sleep experience as each day takes up
again our waking world-experience, then dreams would assume to our
mind quite another character. There is therefore no analogy between a
dream and waking life ; these are experiences quite different in their char-
acter, validity, order. Our life is accused of evanescence and often it is
accused too, as a whole, of a lack of inner coherence and significance ; but
its lack of complete significance may be due to our lack or limitation of
understanding: actually, when we go within and begin to see it from
within, it assumes a complete connected significance; at the same time
whatever lack of inner coherence was felt before disappears and we see
that it was due to the incoherence of our own inner seeing and knowledge
and was not at all a character of life. There is no surface incoherence in
life, it rather appears to our minds as a chain of firm sequences, and, if

THE COSMIC ILLUSION 379

that is a mental delusion, as is sometimes alleged, if the sequence
is created by our minds and does not actually exist in life, that does not
remove the difference of the two states of consciousness. For in dream
the coherence given by an observing inner consciousness is absent, and
whatever sense of sequence there is seems to be due to a vague and
false imitation of the connections of waking life, a subconscious mi-
mesis, but this imitative sequence is shadowy and imperfect, fails
and breaks always and is often wholly absent. We see too that the
dream-consciousness seems to be wholly devoid of that control which
the waking consciousness exercises to a certain extent over life-cir-
cumstances; it has the Nature-automatism of a subconscient construc-
tion and nothing of the conscious will and organising force of the evolved
mind of the human being. Again the evanescence of a dream is radical
and one dream has no connection with another; but the evanescence of
the waking life is of details, — there is no evidence of evanescence in the
connected totality of world-experience. Our bodies perish but souls pro-
ceed from birth to birth through the ages: stars and planets may disap-
pear after a lapse of aeons or of many light-cycles, but universe, cosmic
existence may well be a permanent as it is certainly a continuous activity ;
there is nothing to prove that the Infinite Energy which creates it has an
end or a beginning either of itself or of its action. So far there is too great
a disparateness between dream-life and waking life to make the analogy
applicable.

But it may be questioned whether our dreams are indeed totally un-
real and without significance, whether they are not a figure, an image-
record or a symbolic transcript or representation of things that are real.
For that we have to examine, however summarily, the nature of sleep
and of dream phenomena, their process of origination and their prove-
nance. What happens in sleep is that our consciousness withdraws from
the field of its waking experiences; it is supposed to be resting, sus-
pended or in abeyance, but that is a superficial view of the matter. What
is in abeyance is the waking activities, what is at rest is the surface mind
and the normal conscious action of the bodily part of us; but the inner
consciousness is not suspended, it enters into new inner activities, only a
part of which, a part happening or recorded in something of us that is
near to the surface, we remember. There is maintained in sleep, thus
near the surface, an obscure subconscious element which is a receptacle
or passage for our dream experiences and itself also a dream-builder ; but
behind it is the depth and mass of the subliminal, the totality of our

380 THE LIFE DIVINE

concealed inner being and consciousness which is of quite another order.
Normally it is a subconscient part in us, intermediate between conscious-
ness and pure inconscience, that sends up through this surface layer
its formations in the shape of dreams, constructions marked by an ap-
parent inconsequence and incoherence. Many of these are fugitive struc-
tures built upon circumstances of our present life selected apparently at
random and surrounded with a phantasy of variation; others call back
the past, or rather selected circumstances and persons of the past, as a
starting-point for similar fleeting edifices. There are other dreams of the
subconscious which seem to be pure phantasy without any such initiation
or basis; but the new method of psycho-analysis, trying to look for the
first time into our dreams with some kind of scientific understanding, has
established in them a system of meanings, a key to things in us which
need to be known and handled by the waking consciousness; this of it-
self changes the whole character and value of our dream experience. It
begins to look as if there were something real behind it and as if too that
something were an element of no mean practical importance.

But the subconscious is not our sole dream-builder. The subconscious
in us is the extreme border of our secret inner existence where it meets
the Inconscient, it is a degree of our being in which the Inconscient
struggles into a half consciousness; the surface physical consciousness
also, when it sinks back from the waking level and retrogresses towards
the Inconscient, retires into this intermediate subconscience. Or, from
another view-point, this nether part of us may be described as the ante-
chamber of the Inconscient through which its formations rise into our
waking or our subliminal being. When we sleep and the surface physical
part of us, which is in its first origin here an output from the Inconscient,
relapses towards the originating inconscience, it enters into this subcon-
scious element, antechamber or substratum, and there it finds the impres-
sions of its past or persistent habits of mind and experiences, — for all
have left their mark on our subconscious part and have there a power of
recurrence. In its effect on our waking self this recurrence often takes the
form of a reassertion of old habits, impulses dormant or suppressed, re-
jected elements of the nature, or it comes up as some other not so easily
recognisable, some peculiar disguised or subtle result of these suppressed
or rejected but not erased impulses or elements. In the dream conscious-
ness the phenomenon is an apparently fanciful construction, a com-
posite of figures and movements built upon or around the buried impres-
sions with a sense in them that escapes the waking intelligence because it

THE COSMIC ILLUSION 381

has no clue to the subconscient's system of significances. After a time this
subconscious activity appears to sink back into complete inconscience
and we speak of this state as deep dreamless sleep; thenee we emerge
again into the dream-shadows or return to the waking surface.

But, in fact, in what we call dreamless sleep, we have gone into a
profounder and denser layer of the subconscient, a state too involved,
too immersed or too obscure, dull and heavy to bring to the surface its
structures, and we are dreaming there but unable to grasp or retain in
the recording layer of subconscience these more obscure dream figures.
Or else, it may be, the part of our mind which still remains active in the
sleep of the body has entered into the inner domains of our being, the
subliminal mental, the subliminal vital, the subtle-physical, and is there
lost to all active connection with the surface parts of us. If we are still
in the nearer depths of these regions, the surface subconscient which is
our sleep-wakefulness records something of what we experience in these
depths; but it records it in its own transcription, often marred by char-
acteristic incoherences and always, even when most coherent, deformed
or cast into figures drawn from the world of waking experience. But if we
have gone deeper inward, the record fails or cannot be recovered and
we have the illusion of dreamlessness ; but the activity of the inner dream
consciousness continues behind the veil of the now mute and inactive sub-
conscient surface. This continued dream activity is revealed to us when
we become more inwardly conscious, for then we get into connection
with the heavier and deeper subconscient stratum and can be aware — at
the time or by a retracing or recovering through memory — of what hap-
pened when we sank into these torpid depths. It is possible too to become
conscious deeper within our subliminal selves and we are then aware of
experiences on other planes of our being or even in supraphysical worlds
to which sleep gives us a right of secret entry. A transcript of such ex-
periences reaches us; but the transcriber here is not the subconscious,
it is the subliminal, a greater dream-builder.

If the subliminal thus comes to the front in our dream consciousness,
there is sometimes an activity of our subliminal intelligence, — dream be-
comes a series of thoughts, often strangely or vividly figured, problems
are solved which our waking consciousness could not solve, warnings,
premonitions, indications of the future, veridical dreams replace the nor-
mal subconscious incoherence. There can come also a structure of s\Tn-
bol images, some of a mental character, some of a vital nature: the
former are precise in their figures, clear in their significance; the latter

382 THE LIFE DIVINE

are often complex and baffling to our waking consciousness, but, if we
can seize the clue, they reveal their own sense and peculiar system of
coherence. Finally, there can come to us the records of happenings seen
or experienced by us on other planes of our own being or of universal be-
ing into which we enter: these have sometimes, like the symbolic dreams,
a strong bearing on our own inner and outer life or the life of others, re-
veal elements of our or their mental being and life-being or disclose in-
fluences on them of which our waking self is totally ignorant; but some-
times they have no such bearing and are purely records of other organised
systems of consciousness independent of our physical existence. The sub-
conscious dreams constitute the bulk of our most ordinary sleep-experi-
ence and they are those which we usually remember ; but sometimes the
subliminal builder is able to impress our sleep consciousness sufficiently
to stamp his activities on our waking memory. If we develop our inner be-
ing, live more inwardly than most men do, then the balance is changed
and a larger dream consciousness opens before us; our dreams can take
on a subliminal and no longer a subconscious character and can assume a
reality and significance.

It is even possible to become wholly conscious in sleep and follow
throughout from beginning to end or over large stretches the stages of
our dream experience; it is found that then we are aware of ourselves
passing from state after state of consciousness to a brief period of lumi-
nous and peaceful dreamless rest, which is the true restorer of the ener-
gies of the waking nature, and then returning by the same way to the
waking consciousness. It is normal, as we thus pass from state to state,
to let the previous experiences slip away from us ; in the return only the
more vivid or those nearest to the waking surface are remembered: but
this can be remedied, — a greater retention is possible or the power can be
developed of going back in memory from dream to dream, from state to
state, till the whole is once more before us. A coherent knowledge of sleep
life, though difficult to achieve or to keep established, is possible.

Our subliminal self is not, like our surface physical being, an out-
come of the energy of the Inconscient; it is a meeting-place of the con-
sciousness that emerges from below by evolution and the consciousness
that has descended from above for involution. There is in it an inner
mind, an inner vital being of ourselves, an inner or subtle-physical being
larger than our outer being and nature. This inner existence is the con-
cealed origin of almost all in our surface self that is not a construction
of the first inconscient World-Energy or a natural developed functioning

THE COSMIC ILLUSION 383

of our surface consciousness or a reaction of it to impacts from the outside
universal Nature, — and even in this construction, these functionings,
these reactions the subliminal takes part and exercises on them a consider-
able influence. There is here a consciousness which has a power of direct
contact with the universal unlike the mostly indirect contacts which our
surface being maintains with the universe through the sense-mind and
the senses. There are here inner senses, a subliminal sight, touch, hearing ;
but these subtle senses are rather channels of the inner being's direct con-
sciousness of things than its informants: the subliminal is not dependent
on its senses for its knowledge, they only give a form to its direct experi-
ence of objects; they do not, so much as in waking mind, convey forms of
objects for the mind's documentation or as the starting-point or basis for
an indirect constructive experience. The subliminal has the right of entry
into the mental and vital and subtle-physical planes of the universal
consciousness, it is not confined to the material plane and the physical
world; it possesses means of communication with the worlds of being
which the descent towards involution created in its passage and with all
corresponding planes or worlds that may have arisen or been constructed
to serve the purpose of the re-ascent from Inconscience to Supercon-
science. It is into this large realm of interior existence that our mind and
vital being retire when they withdraw from the surface activities whether
by sleep or inward-drawn concentration or by the inner plunge of trance.
Our waking state is unaware of its connection with the sublimi-
nal being, although it receives from it — but without any knowledge of
the place of origin — the inspirations, institutions, ideas, will-suggestions,
sense-suggestions, urges to action that rise from below or from behind
our limited surface existence. Sleep like trance opens the gate of the sub-
liminal to us; for in sleep, as in trance, we retire behind the veil of the
limited waking personality and it is behind this veil that the subliminal
has its existence. But we receive the records of our sleep experience
through dream and in dream figures and not in that condition which
might be called an inner waking and which is the most accessible form
of the trance state, nor through the supernormal clarities of vision and
other more luminous and concrete ways of communication developed by
the inner subliminal cognition when it gets into habitual or occasional
conscious connection with our waking self. The subliminal, with the sub-
conscious as an annexe of itself, — for the subconscious is also part of the
behind-the-veil entity, — is the seer of inner things and of supraphysical
experiences; the surface subconscious is only a transcriber. It is for this

384 THE LIFE DIVINE

reason that the Upanishad describes the subliminal being as the Dream
Self because it is normally in dreams, visions, absorbed states of inner ex-
perience that we enter into and are part of its experiences, — ^just as it
describes the superconscient as the Sleep Self because normally all mental
or sensory experiences cease when we enter this superconscience. For in
the deeper trance into which the touch of the superconscient plunges our
mentality, no record from it or transcript of its contents can normally
reach us ; it is only by an especial or an unusual development, in a super-
normal condition or through a break or rift in our confined normality,
that we can be on the surface conscious of the contacts or messages of the
Superconscience. But, in spite of these figurative names of dream-state
and sleep-state, the field of both these states of consciousness was clearly
regarded as a field of reality no less than that of the waking state in which
our movements of perceptive consciousness are a record or transcript of
physical things and of our contacts with the physical universe. No doubt,
all the three states can be classed as parts of an illusion, our experiences
of them can be ranked together as constructions of an illusory conscious-
ness, our waking state no less illusory than our dream state or sleep
state, since the only true truth or real reality is the incommunicable
Self or One-Existence (Atman, Adwaita) which is the fourth state of the
Self described by the Vedanta. But it is equally possible to regard and
rank them together as three different orders of one Reality or as three
states of consciousness in which is embodied our contact with three dif-
ferent grades of self-experience and world-experience.

If this is a true account of dream experience, dreams can no longer
be classed as a mere unreal figure of unreal things temporarily imposed
upon our half-unconsciousness as a reality; the analogy therefore fails
even as an illustrative support for the theory of the cosmic Illusion. It
may be said, however, that our dreams are not themselves realities but
only a transcript of reality, a system of symbol-images^ and Our waking
experience of the universe is similarly not a reality but only a transcript
of reality, a series of collection of symbol-images. It is quite true that
primarily we see the physical universe only through a system of images
impressed or imposed on our senses and so far the contention is justified ;
it may also be admitted that in a certain sense and from one view-point
our experiences and activities can be considered as symbols of a truth
which our lives are trying to express but at present only with a partial
success and an imperfect coherence. If that were all, life might be de-
scribed as a dream experience of self and things in the consciousness of

THE COSMIC ILLUSION 385

the Infinite. But although our primary evidence of the objects of the
universe consists of a structure of sense images, these are completed,
validated, set in order by an automatic intuition in the consciousness
which immediately relates the image with the thing imaged and gets the
tangible experience of the object, so that we are not merely regarding or
reading a translation or sense-transcript of the reality but looking
through the sense-image to the reality. This adequacy is amplified too
by the action of a reason which fathoms and understands the law of
things sensed and can observe scrupulously the sense-transcript and
correct its errors. Therefore we may conclude that we experience a real
universe through our imaged sense-transcript by the aid of the intuition
and the reason, — an intuition which gives us the touch of things and a
reason which investigates their truth by its conceptive knowledge. But
we must note also that even if our image view of the universe, our sense-
transcript, is a system of symbol images and not an exact reproduction
or transcription, a literal translation, still a symbol is a notation of
something that is, a transcript of realities. Even if our images are incor-
rect, what they endeavour to image are realities, not illusions; when we
see a tree or a stone or an animal, it is not a non-existent figure, a hal-
lucination that we are seeing; we may not be sure that the image is
exact, we may concede that other-sense might very well see it otherwise,
but still there is something there that justifies the image, something with
which it has more or less correspondence. But in the theory of Illusion
the only reality is an indeterminable featureless pure Existence, Brah-
man, and there is no possibility of its being translated or mistranslated
into a system of symbol-figures, for that could only be if this Existence
had some determinate contents or some unmanifested truths of its being
which could be transcribed into the forms or names given to them by our
consciousness: a pure Indeterminable cannot be rendered by a transcript,
a multitude of representative differentiae, a crowd of symbols or Images;
for there is in it only a pure Identity, there is nothing to transcribe, noth-
ing to symbolise, nothing to image. Therefore the dream analogy fails us
altogether and is better put out of the way; it can always be used as a
vivid metaphor of.a certain attitude our mind can take towards its experi-
ences, but it has no value for a metaphysical inquiry into the reality and
fundamental significances or the origin of existence.

If we take up the analogy of hallucination, we find it hardly more
helpful for a true understanding of the theory of cosmic Illusion than the
dream analogy. Hallucinations are of two kinds, mental or ideative and

386 THE LIFE DIVINE

visual or in some way sensory. When we see an image of things where
those things are not, it is an erroneous construction of the senses, a visual
hallucination; when we take for an objective fact a thing which is a sub-
jective structure of the mind, a constructive mental error or an objectiv-
ised imagination or a misplaced mental image, it is a mental hallucina-
tion. An example of the first is the mirage, an example of the second is
the classic instance of a rope taken for a snake. In passing we may note
that there are many things called hallucinations which are not really that
but symbol images sent up from the subliminal or experiences in which
the subliminal consciousness or sense comes to the surface and puts us
into contact with supraphysical realities; thus the cosmic consciousness
which is our entry by a breaking down of our mental limitations into the
sense of a vast reality has been classed, even in admitting it, as a hallu-
cination. But, taking only the common hallucination, mental or visual,
we observe that it seems to be at first sight a true example of what is
called imposition in the philosophic theory; it is the placement of an un-
real figure of things on a reality, of a mirage upon the bare desert air, of
the figure of a non-present snake on the present and real rope. The world,
we may contend, is such a hallucination, an imposition of a non-existent
unreal figure of things on the bare ever-present sole reality of the Brah-
man. But then we note that in each case the hallucination, the false image
is not of something quite non-existent ; it is an image of something exist-
ent and real but not present in the place on which it has been imposed
by the mind's error or by a sense error. A mirage is the image of a city,
an oasis, running water or of other absent things, and if these things did
not exist, the false image of them, whether raised up by the mind or re-
flected in the desert air, would not be there to delude the mind with a
false sense of reality. A snake exists and its existence and form are known
to the victim of the momentary hallucination: if it had not been so, the
delusion would not have been created; for it is a form resemblance of
the seen reality to another reality previously known elsewhere that is the
origin of the error. The analogy therefore is unhelpful ; it would be valid
only if our image of the universe were a falsity reflecting a true universe
which is not here but elsewhere or else if it were a false imaged manifes-
tation of the Reality replacing in the mind or covering with its distorted
resemblance a true manifestation. But here the world is a non-existent
form of things, an illusory construction imposed on the bare Reality, on
the sole Existent which is for ever empty of things and formless: there
would be a true analogy only if our vision constructed in the void air of

THE COSMIC ILLUSION 387

the desert a figure of things that exist nowhere, or else if it imposed on
a bare ground both rope and snake and other figures that equally existed
nowhere.

It is clear that in this analogy two quite different kinds of illusion
not illustrative of each other are mistakenly out together as if they were
identical in nature. All mental or sense hallucinations are really misrepre-
sentations or misplacements or impossible combinations or false develop-
ments of things that are in themselves existent or possible or in some
way within or allied to the province of the real. All mental errors and
illusions are the result of an ignorance which miscombines its data
or proceeds falsely upon a previous or present or possible content of
knowledge. But the cosmic Illusion has no basis of actuality, it is an
original and all-originating illusion; it imposes names, figures, happen-
ings that are pure inventions on a Reality in which there never were and
never will be any happenings, names or figures. The analogy of mental
hallucination would only be applicable if we admit a Brahman without
names, forms or relations and a world of names, forms and relations as
equal realities imposed one upon the other, the rope in the place of the
snake, or the snake in the place of the rope, — an attribution, it might be,
of the activities of the Saguna to the quiescence of the Nirguna. But if
both are real, both must be either separate aspects of the Reality or co-
ordinate aspects, positive and negative poles of the one Existence. Any
error or confusion of Mind between them would not be a creative cosmic
Illusion, but only a wrong perception of realities, a wrong relation cre-
ated by the Ignorance.

If we scrutinise other illustrations or analogies that are offered to
us for a better understanding of the operation of Maya, we detect in all
of them an inapplicability that deprives them of their force and value.
The familiar instance of mother-of-pearl and silver turns also, like the
rope and snake analogy, upon an error due to a resemblance between a
present real and another and absent real; it can have no application to the
imposition of a multiple and mutable unreality upon a sole and unique
immutable Real. In the example of an optical illusion duplicating or mul-
tiplying a single object, as when we see two moons instead of one, there
are two or more identical forms of the one object, one real, one — or the
rest — an illusion: this does not illustrate the juxtaposition of world and
Brahman; for in the operation of Maya there is a much more complex
phenomenon, — there is indeed an illusory multiplication of the Identical
imposed upon its one and ever-unalterable Identity, the One appearing

388 THE LIFE DIVINE

as many, but upon that is imposed an immense organised diversity in
nature, a diversity of forms and movements which have nothing to do
with the original Real. Dreams, visions, the imagination of the artist or
poet can present such an organised diversity which is not real ; but it is
an imitation, a mimesis of a real and already existent organised diver-
sity, or it starts from such a mimesis and even in the richest variation
or wildest invention some mimetic element is observable. There is here
no such thing as the operation attributed to Maya in which there is no
mimesis but a pure and radically original creation of unreal forms and
movements that are non-existent anywhere and neither imitate nor reflect
nor alter and develop anything discoverable in the Reality. There is noth-
ing in the operations of Mind illusion that throws light upon this mystery;
it is, as a stupendous cosmic Illusion of this kind must be, sui generis,
without parallel. What we see in the universe is that a diversity of the
identical is everywhere the fundamental operation of cosmic Nature ; but
here it presents itself, not as an illusion, but as a various real formation
out of a one original substance. A Reality of Oneness manifesting itself
in a reality of numberless forms and powers of its being is what we con-
front everywhere. There is no doubt in its process a mystery, even a
magic, but there is nothing to show that it is a magic of the unreal and
not a working of a Consciousness and Force of being of the omnipotent
Real, a self-creation operated by an eternal self-knowledge.

This at once raises the question of the nature of Mind, the parent
of these illusions, and its relation to the original Existence. Is mind the
child and instrument of an original Illusion, or is it itself a primal mis-
creating Force or Consciousnes? or is the mental ignorance a misprision
of the truths of Existence, a deviation from an original Truth-Conscious-
ness which is the real world-builder? Our own mind, at any rate, is not
an original and primary creative power of Consciousness; it is, and all
mind of the same character must be, derivative, an instrumental demi-
urge, an intermediary creator. It is likely then that analogies from the
errors of mind, which are the outcome of an intermediate Ignorance, may
not truly illustrate the nature or action of an original creative Illusion,
an all-inventing and all-constructing Maya. Our mind stands between
a superconscience and an inconscience and receives from both these op-
posite powers: it stands between an occult subliminal existence and an
outward cosmic phenomenon; it receives inspirations, intuitions, imag-
inations, impulsions to knowledge and action, figures of subjective real-
ities or possibilities from the unknown inner source; it receives the fig-

THE COSMIC ILLUSION 389

ures of realised actualities and their suggestions of further possibility
from the observed cosmic phenomenon. What it receives are truths es-
sential, possible or actual; it starts from the realised actualities of the
physical universe and it brings out from them in its subjective action
the unrealised possibilities which they contain or suggest or to which it
can arrive by proceeding from them as a starting-point: it selects some
out of these possibilities for a subjective action and plays with imagined
or inwardly constructed forms of them ; it chooses others for objectivisa-
tion and attempts to realise them. But it receives inspirations also from
above and within, from invisible sources and not only from the impacts
of the visible cosmic phenomenon; it sees truths other than those sug-
gested by the actual physicality around it, and here too it plays subjec-
tively with transmitted or constructed forms of these truths or it selects
for objectivisation, attempts to realise.

Our mind is an observer and user of actualities, a diviner or recip-
ient of truths not yet known or actualised, a dealer in possibilities that
mediate between the truth and actuality. But it has not the omniscience
of an infinite Consciousness ; it is limited in knowledge and has to supple-
ment its restricted knowledge by imagination and discovery. It does not,
like the infinite Consciousness, manifest the known, it has to discover the
unknown ; it seizes the possibilities of the Infinite, not as results or varia-
tions of forms of a latent Truth, but as constructions or creations, fig-
ments of its own boundless imagination. It has not the omnipotence of
an infinite conscious Energy; it can only realise or actualise what the
cosmic Energy will accept from it or what it has the strength to impose
or introduce into the sum of things because the secret Divinity, super-
conscient or subliminal, which uses it intends that that should be ex-
pressed in Nature. Its limitation of Knowledge constitutes by incom-
pleteness, but also by openness to error, an Ignorance. In dealing with
actualities it may misobserve, misuse, miscreate; in dealing with pos-
sibilities it may miscompose, miscombine, misapply, misplace; in its
dealings with truths revealed to it it may deform, misrepresent, dishar-
monise. It may also make constructions of its own which have no corre-
spondence with the things of actual existence, no potentiality of realisa-
tion, no support from the truth behind them; but still these constructions
start from an illegitimate extension of actualities, catch at unpermitted
possibilities, or turn truths to an application which is not applicable.
Mind creates, but it is not an original creator, not omniscient or omnipo-
tent, not even an always efficient demiurge. IMaya, the Illusive Power,

390 THE LIFE DIVINE

on the contrary, must be an original creator, for it creates all things out
of nothing — unless we suppose that it creates out of the substance of the
Reality, but then the things it creates must be in some way real; it has
a perfect knowledge of what it wishes to create, a perfect power to create
whatever it chooses, omniscient and omnipotent though only over its
own illusions, harmonising them and linking them together with a mag-
ical sureness and sovereign energy, absolutely effective in imposing its
own formations or figments passed off as truths, possibilities, actualities
on the creature intelligence.

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 basis for its operations, or
when it can handle a cosmic force of which it has acquired the knowledge,
— it is sure of its steps when it has to deal with actualities ; this rule of
dealing with objectivised or discovered actualities and proceeding from
them for creation is the reason of the enormous success of physical Sci-
ence. But here there is evidently no creation of illusions, no creation of
non-existence in vacuo and turning them into apparent actualities such as
is attributed to the cosmic Illusion. For Mind can only create out of sub-
stance what is possible to the substance, it can only do with the force of
Nature what is in accordance with her realisable energies; it can only
invent or discover what is already contained in the truth and potential-
ity of Nature. On the other side, it receives inspirations for creation
from within itself or from above: but these can only take form if they
are truths or potentials, not by the mind's own right of invention; for
if the mind erects what is neither true nor potential, that cannot be cre-
ated, cannot become actual in Nature. Maya, on the contrary, if it cre-
ates on the basis of the Reality, yet erects a superstructure which has
nothing to do with the Reality, is not true or potential in it ; if it creates
out of the substance of the Reality, it makes out of it things that are
not possible to it or in accordance with it, — for it creates forms and the
Reality is supposed to be a Formless incapable of form, it creates deter-
minations and the Reality is supposed to be absolutely indeterminable.

But our mind has the faculty of imagination; it can create and take
as true and real its own mental structures: here, it might be thought,
is something analogous to the action of Maya. Our mental imagination
is an instrument of Ignorance; it is the resort or device or refuge of a
limited capacity of knowledge, a limited capacity of effective action.
Mind supplements these deficiencies by its power of imagination: it uses
it to extract from things obvious and visible the things that are not ob-

THE COSMIC ILLUSION 39 1

vious and visible ; it undertakes to create its own figures of the possible
and the impossible; it erects illusory actuals or draws figures of a con-
jectured or constructed truth of things that are not true to outer ex-
perience. That is at least the appearance of its operations; but, in
reality, it is the mind's way or one of its ways of summoning out of
Being its infinite possibilities, even of discovering or capturing the un-
known possibilities of the Infinite. But, because it cannot do this with
knowledge, it makes experimental constructions of truth and possibility
and a yet unrealised actuality: as its power of receiving inspirations of
Truth is limited, it imagines, hypothetises, questions whether this or that
may not be truths ; as its force to summon real potentials is narrow and
restricted, it erects possibilities which it hopes to actualise or wishes it
could actualise; as its power to actualise is cramped and confined by the
material world's oppositions, it figures subjective actualisations to satisfy
its will of creation and delight of self-presentation. But it is to be noted
that through the imagination it does receive a figure of truth, does sum-
mon possibilities which are afterwards realised, does often by its imag-
ination exercise an effective pressure on the world's actualities. Imagina-
tions that persist in the human mind, like the idea of travel in the air,
end often by self-fulfilment ; individual thought- formations can actualise
themselves if there is sufficient strength in the formation or in the mind
that forms it. Imaginations can create their own potentiality, especially
if they are supported in the collective mind, and may in the long run
draw on themselves the sanction of the cosmic Will. In fact all imagina-
tions represent possibilities: some are able one day to actualise in some
form, perhaps a very different form of actuality; more are condemned to
sterility because they do not enter into the figure or scheme of the pres-
ent creation, do not come within the permitted potentiality of the individ-
ual or do not accord with the collective or the generic principle or are
alien to the nature or destiny of the containing world-existence.

Thus the mind's imaginations are not purely and radically illusory:
they proceed on the basis of its experience of actualities or at least set
out from that, are variations upon actuality, or they figure the "may-be"s
or "might-be"s of the Infinite, what could be if other truths had mani-
fested, if existed potentials had been otherwise arranged or other
possibilities than those already admitted became potential. Moreover,
through this faculty forms and powers of other domains than that of the
physical actualities communicate with our mental being. Even when the
imaginations are extravagant or take the form of hallucinations or illu-

392 THE LIFE DIVINE

sions, they proceed with actuals or possibles for their basis. The mind
creates the figure of a mermaid, but the phantasy is composed of two
actualities put together in a way that is outside the earth's normal po-
tentiality; angels, griffins, chimeras are constructed on the same prin-
ciple: sometimes the imagination is a memory of former actualities as in
the mythical figure of the dragon, sometimes it is a figure or a happening
that is real or could be real on other planes or in other conditions of ex-
istence. Even the illusions of the maniac are founded on an extravagant
misfitting of actuals, as when the lunatic combines himself, kingship and
England and sits in imagination on the throne of the Plantagenets and
Tudors. Again, when we look into the origin of mental error, we find
normally that it is a miscombination, misplacement, misuse, misunder-
standing or misapplication of elements of experience and knowledge.
Imagination itself is in its nature a substitute for a truer consciousness's
faculty of intuition of possibility: as the mind ascends towards the truth-
consciousness, this mental power becomes a truth imagination which
brings the colour and light of the higher truth into the limited adequacy
or inadequacy of the knowledge already achieved and formulated and,
finally, in the transforming light above it gives place wholly to higher
truth-powers or itself turns into intuition and inspiration; the Mind in
that uplifting ceases to be a creator of delusions and an architect of error.
Mind then is not a sovereign creator of things non-existent or erected in
a void: it is an ignorance trying to know; its very illusions start from a
basis of some kind and are the results of a limited knowledge or a half-
ignorance. Mind is an instrument of the cosmic Ignorance, but it does
not seem to be or does not act like a power or an instrument of a cosmic
Illusion, It is a seeker and discoverer or a creator or would-be creator of
truths, possibilities and actualities, and it would be rational to suppose
that the original Consciousness and Power, from which mind must be a
derivation, is also a creator of truths, possibilities and actualities, not
limited like mind but cosmic in its scope, not open to error, because free
from all ignorance, a sovereign instrument or a self-power of a supreme
Omniscience and Omnipotence, an eternal Wisdom and Knowledge.

This then is the dual possibility that arises before us. There is, we
may suppose, an original consciousness and power creative of illusions
and unrealities with mind as its instrument or medium in the human and
animal consciousness, so that the differentiated universe we see is unreal,
a fiction of Maya, and only some indeterminable and undifferentiated
Absolute is real. Or there is, we may equally suppose, an original, a su-

THE COSMIC ILLUSION 393

preme or cosmic Truth-Consciousness creative of a true universe, but
with mind acting in that universe as an imperfect consciousness, igno-
rant, partly knowing, partly not knowing, — a consciousness which is by
its ignorance or limitation of knowledge capable of error, mispresenta-
tion, mistaken or misdirected development from the known, of uncer-
tain groupings towards the unknown, of partial creations and buildings,
a constant half-position between truth and error, knowledge and nes-
cience. But this ignorance in fact proceeds, however stumblingly, upon
knowledge and towards knowledge; it is inherently capable of shedding
the limitation, the mixture, and can turn by that liberation into the
Truth-Consciousness, into a power of the original Knowledge. Our in-
quiry has so far led rather in the second direction; it points towards
the conclusion that the nature of our consciousness is not of a character
that would justify the hypothesis of a Cosmic Illusion as the solution of
its problem. A problem exists, but it consists in the mixture of Knowl-
edge with Ignorance in our cognition of self and things, and it is the
origin of this imperfection that we have to discover. There is no need
of bringing in an original power of Illusion always mysteriously existent
in the eternal Reality or else intervening and imposing a world of non-
existent forms on a Consciousness or Superconscience that is for ever
pure, eternal and absolute.

CHAPTER VI

REALITY AND THE COSMIC ILLUSION

The Eternal is true; the world is a lie.

Vivekachudamani}

The Master of Maya creates this world by his Maya and
within it is confined another; one should know his Maya as
Nature and the Master of Maya as the great Lord of all.

Swetaswatara Upanishad?

The Purusha is all this that is, what has been and what
is yet to be ; he is the master of Immortality and he is what-
ever grows by food.

Swetaswatara Upanishad.^

All is the Divine Being.

Gita.''

BUT so far we have only cleared a part of the foreground of the field
of inquiry; in the background the problem remains unsolved and
entire. It is the problem of the nature of the original Consciousness
or Power that has created or conceptively constructed or manifested the
universe, and the relation to it of our world-cognition, — in sum, whether
the universe is a figment of consciousness imposed on our mind by a su-
preme force of Illusion or a true formation of being experienced by us
with a still ignorant but an increasing knowledge. And the true question
is not of Mind alone or a cosmic dream or a cosmic hallucination born
of Mind, but of the nature of the Reality, the validity of the creative
action that takes place in it or is imposed upon it, the presence or ab-
sence of a real content in its or our consciousness and its or our regard
on the universe. On behalf of Illusionism it can be answered to the posi-
tion put forward by us with regard to the truth of existence that all this
might be valid within the bounds of the cosmic Illusion; it is the sys-
tem, the pragmatic machinery by which Maya works and maintains
herself in the Ignorance: but the truths, possibilities, actualities of the
cosmic system are true and actual only within the Illusion, outside that
magic circle they have no validity; they are not abiding and eternal re-

^ Verse 20. ^IV. 9, 10. »III. 15. *VII. 19.

394

REALITY AND THE COSMIC ILLUSION 395

alities; all are temporary figures, the works of Knowledge no less than
the works of Ignorance. It can be conceded that knowledge is a useful
instrument of the Illusion of Maya, for escaping from herself, for de-
stroying herself in the Mind; spiritual knowledge is indispensable: but
the one true truth, the only abiding reality beyond all duality of knowl-
edge and ignorance is the eternal relationless Absolute or the Self, the
eternal pure Existence. All here turns on the mind's conception and the
mental being's experience of reality; for according to the mind's ex-
perience or conception of reality will be its interpretation of data other-
wise identical, the facts of the Cosmos, individual experience, the realisa-
tion of the supi'eme Transcendence. All mental cognition depends on three
elements, the percipient, the perception and the thing perceived or per-
cept. All or any of these three can be affirmed or denied reality; the ques-
tion then is which of these, if any, are real and to what extent or in what
manner. If all three are rejected as instruments of a cosmic Illusion, the
farther and consequent question arises, is there then a reality outside
them and, if so, what is the relation between the Reality and the Illu-
sion?

It is possible to affirm the reality of the percept, of the objective
universe, and deny or diminish the reality of the percipient individual
and his perceptive consciousness. In the theory of the sole reality of
Matter consciousness is only an operation of Matter-energy in Matter,
a secretion or vibration of the brain-cells, a physical reception of images
and a brain response, a reflex action or a reaction of Matter to the con-
tacts of Matter. Even if the rigidity of this affirmation is relaxed and
consciousness otherwise accounted for, still it is no more than a tempo-
rary and derivative phenomenon, not the enduring Reality. The percipi-
ent individual is himself only a body and brain capable of the mechanical
reactions we generalise under the name of consciousness: the individual
has only a relative value and a temporary reality. But if ^Matter turns
out to be itself unreal or derivative and simply a phenomenon of Energy,
as seems now to be the probability, then Energy remains as the sole
Reality; the percipient, his perception, the perceived object are only phe-
nomena of Energy. But an Energy without a Being or Existence possess-
ing it or a Consciousness supplying it, an Energy working originally in
the X^oid, — for the material field in which we see it at work is itself a crea-
tion,— looks itself very much like a mental construction, an unreality: or
it might be a temporary inexplicable outbreak of motion which might
cease at any time to create phenomena; the Void of the Infinite alone

396 THE LIFE DIVINE

would be enduring and real. The Buddhist theory of the percipient and
the perception and the percept as a construction of Karma, the process
of some cosmic fact of Action, gave room to such a conclusion ; for it led
logically to the affirmation of the Non-Being, Void or Nihil. It is possible
indeed that what is at work is not an Energy, but a Consciousness; as
Matter reduces itself to Energy seizable by us not in itself but in its re-
sults and workings, so Energy could be reduced to action of a Conscious-
ness seizable by us not in itself but in its results and workings. But if
this Consciousness is supposed to work similarly in a Void, we are ex-
posed to the same conclusion, that it is a creator of temporary phe-
nomenal illusions and itself illusory; Void, an infinite Zero, an original
Non-Existence is alone the enduring Reality. But these conclusions are
not binding; for behind this Consciousness seizable in its works only
there may be an invisible original Existence: a Conscious-Energy of that
Existence could then be a reality; its creations too, made out of an in-
finitesimal substance of being impalpable to the senses but revealed to
them at a certain stage of the action of Energy as Matter, would be real,
as also the individual emerging as a conscious being of the original Exist-
ence in a world of Matter. This original Reality might be a cosmic spir-
itual Existence, a Pantheos, or it might have some other status; but in
any case there would be, not a universal illusion or mere phenomenoUj
but a true universe.

In the classical theory of lUusionism a sole and supreme spiritual
Existence is accepted as the one Reality: it is by its essentiality the Self,
yet the natural beings of which it is the Self are only temporary appear-
ances; it is in its absoluteness the substratum of all things, but the
universe erected on- the substratum is either a non-existence, a sem-
blance, or else in some way unreally real ; it is a cosmic illusion. For the
Reality is one without a second, it is immutable in eternity, it is the sole
Existence; there is nothing else, there are no true becomings of this
Being: it is and must for ever remain void of name, feature, formation,
relation, happening; if it has a Consciousness, it can only be a pure
consciousness of its own absolute being. But what then is the relation be-
tween the Reality and the Illusion? By what miracle or mystery does the
Illusion come to be or how does it manage to appear or to abide in Time
for ever?

As only Brahman is real, only a consciousness or a power of Brah-
man could be a real creator and a creator of realities. But since there
can be no other reality than Brahman pure and absolute, there can be no

REALITY AND THE COSMIC ILLUSION 397

true creative power of Brahman. A Brahman-consciousness aware of
real beings, forms and happenings would signify a truth of the Becom-
ing, a spiritual and material reality of the universe, which the experience
of the supreme Truth negates and nullifies and with which its sole exist-
ence is logically incompatible. Maya's creation is a presentation of be-
ings, names, forms, happenings, things, impossible to accept as true, con-
tradictory of the indeterminable purity of the One Existence. Maya then
is not real, it is non-existent: Maya is itself an illusion, the parent of
numberless illusions. But still this illusion and its works have some kind
of existence and so must in some way be real: moreover, the universe does
not exist in a Void but stands because it is imposed on Brahman, it is
based in a way on the one Reality; we ourselves in the Illusion attribute
its forms, names, relations, happenings to the Brahman, become aware
of all things as the Brahman, see the Reality through these unrealities.
There is then a reality in Maya; it is at the same time real and unreal,
existent and non-existent; or, let us say, it is neither real nor unreal: it is
a paradox, a suprarational enigma. But what then is this mystery, or is
it insoluble? how comes this illusion to intervene in Brahman-existence?
what is the nature of this unreal reality of Maya?

At first sight one is compelled to suppose that Brahman must be in
some way the percipient of Maya, — for Brahman is the sole Reality, and
if he is not the percipient, who then perceives the Illusion? Any other
percipient is not in existence; the individual who is in us the apparent
witness is himself phenomenal and unreal, a creation of Maya. But if
Brahman is the percipient, how is it possible that the illusion can persist
for a moment, since the true consciousness of the Percipient is conscious-
ness of self, an awareness solely of its own pure self-existence? If Brah-
man perceives the world and things with a true consciousness, then they
must all be itself and real ; but since they are not the pure self-existence,
but at best are forms of it and are seen through a phenomenal Ignorance,
this realistic solution is not possible. Yet we have to accept, provisionally
at least, the universe as a fact, an impossibility as a thing that is, since
Maya is there and her works persist and obsess the spirit with the sense,
however false, of their reality. It is on this basis that we have, then, to
face and solve the dilemma.

If Maya is in some way real, the conclusion imposes itself that
Brahman the Reality is in that way the percipient of ^Maya. Maya may
be his power of differentiating perception, for the power of !Maya con-
sciousness which distinguishes it from the true consciousness of sole

398 THE LIFE DIVINE

spiritual Self is its creative perception of difference. Or Maya must be at
least, if this creation of difference is considered to be only a result and
not the essence of Maya-force, some power of Brahman's consciousness,
— for it is only a consciousness that can see or create an illusion and there
cannot be another original or originating consciousness than that of
Brahman. But since Brahman is also self-aware for ever, there must be
a double status of Brahman-Consciousness, one conscious of the sole
Reality, the other conscious of the unrealities to which by its creative
perception of them it gives some kind of apparent existence. These un-
realities cannot be made of the substance of the Reality, for them they
also must be real. In this view one cannot accept the assertion of the
Upanishads that the world is made out of the supreme Existence, is a be-
coming, an outcome or product of the eternal Being. Brahman is not
the material cause of the universe: our nature — as opposed to our self
— is not made of its spiritual substance; it is constructed out of the un-
real reality of Maya. But, on the contrary, our spiritual being is of that
substance, is indeed the Brahman; Brahman is above Maya, but he is
also the percipient of his creations both from above and from within
Maya. This dual consciousness offers itself as the sole plausible explana-
tion of the riddle of a real eternal Percipient, an unreal Percept, and a
Perception that is a half-real creator of unreal percepts.

If there is not this dual consciousness, if Maya is the sole conscious
power of Brahman, then one of two things must be true: either the reality
of Maya as a power is that it is a subjective action of Brahman-conscious-
ness emerging out of its silence and superconscient immobility and pass-
ing through experiences that are real because they are part of the con-
sciousness of Brahman but unreal because they are not part of Its
being, or else Maya is Brahman's power of cosmic Imagination inherent
in his eternal being creating out of nothing names, forms and happenings
that are not in any way real. In that case Maya would be real, but her
works entirely fictitious, pure imaginations: but can we affirm Imagina-
tion as the sole dynamic or creative power of the Eternal? Imagination
is a necessity for a partial being with an ignorant consciousness; for it
has to supplement its ignorance by imaginations and conjectures: there
can be no place for such a movement in the sole consciousness of a sole
Reality which has no reason to construct unrealities, for it is ever pure
and self-complete. It is difficult to see what in its own being could impel
or induce such a Sole Existence complete in its very essence, blissful
in its eternity, containing nothing to be manifested, timelessly perfect.

REALITY AND THE COSMIC ILLUSION 399

to create an unreal Time and Space and people it to all eternity with an
interminable cosmic show of false images and happenings. This solution
is logically untenable.

The other solution, the idea of a purely subjective unreal reality,
starts from the distinction made by the mind in physical Nature between
its subjective and objective experiences; for it is the objective alone of
which it is sure as entirely and solidly real. But such a distinction could
hardly exist in Brahman-consciousness since here there is either no sub-
ject and no object or Brahman itself is the sole possible subject of its
consciousness and the sole possible object ; there could be nothing exter-
nally objective to Brahman, since there is nothing else than Brahman.
This idea, then, of a subjective action of consciousness creating a world
of fictions other than or distorting the sole true object looks like an im-
position on the Brahman by our mind; it imposes on the pure and
perfect Reality a feature of its own imperfection, not truly attributable
to the perception of a Supreme Being. On the other hand, the distinction
between the consciousness and the being of Brahman could not be valid,
unless Brahman being and Brahman consciousness are two distinct en-
tities,— the consciousness imposing its experiences on the pure existence
of the being but unable to touch or affect or penetrate it. Brahman, then,
whether as the supreme sole Self-Existence or the self of the real-unreal
individual in Maya, would be aware by his true consciousness of the
illusions imposed on him and would know them as illusions; only
some energy of Maya-nature or something in it would be deluded
by its own inventions, — or else, not being really deluded, still per-
sist in behaving and feeling as if it were deluded. This duality is what
happens to our consciousness in the Ignorance when it separates itself
from the works of Nature and is aware within of the Self as the sole truth
and the rest as not-self and not-real, but has on the surface to act as if
the rest too were real. But this solution negates the sole and indivisible
pure existence and pure awareness of the Brahman; it creates a dualism
within its featureless unity which is not other in its purport than the
dualism of the double Principle in the Sankhya view of things, Purusha
and Prakriti, Soul and Nature. These solutions then must be put aside
as untenable, unless we modify our first view of the Reality and concede
to it a power of manifold status of consciousness or a power of manifold
status of existence.

But, again, the dual consciousness, if we admit it, cannot be ex-
plained as a dual power of Knowledge-Ignorance valid for the Supreme

400 THE LIFE DIVINE

Existence as it is for us in the universe. For we cannot suppose that
Brahman is at all subject to Maya, since that would mean a principle
of Ignorance clouding the Eternal's self-awareness; it would be to im-
pose the limitations of our own consciousness on the eternal Reality. An
Ignorance which occurs or intervenes in the course of manifestation as
a result of a subordinate action of Consciousness and as part of a divine
cosmic plan and its evolutionary meaning, is one thing and is logically
conceivable; a meaningless ignorance or illusion eternal in the original
consciousness of the Reality is another thing and not easily conceivable ;
it appears as a violent mental construction which has no likelihood of
validity in the truth of the Absolute. The dual consciousness of Brah-
man must be in no way an ignorance, but a self-awareness co-existent
with a voluntary will to erect a universe of illusions which are held in a
frontal perception aware at once of self and the illusory world, so that
there is no delusion, no feeling of its reality. The delusion takes place
only in the illusory world itself, and the Self or Brahman in the world
either enjoys with a free participation or witnesses, itself separate and in-
tangible, the play which lays its magical spell only upon the Nature-
mind created for her action by Maya. But this would seem to signify that
the Eternal, not content with its pure absolute existence, has the need
to create, to occupy itself throughout Time with a drama of names and
forms and happenings; it needs, being sole, to see itself as many, being
peace and bliss and self-knowledge to observe an experience or repre-
sentation of mingled knowledge and ignorance, delight and suffering, un-
real existence and escape from unreal existence. For the escape is for the
individual being constructed by Maya; the Eternal does not need to es-
cape and the play continues its cycle for ever. Or if not the need, there
is the will to so create, or there is the urge or the automatic action of
these contraries: but, if we consider the sole eternity of pure existence
attributed to the Reality, all alike, need, will, urge or automatism, are
equally impossible and incomprehensible. This is an explanation of a sort,
but it is an explanation which leaves the mystery still beyond logic or
comprehension ; for this dynamic consciousness of the Eternal is a direct
contradiction of its static and real nature. A Will or Power to create
or manifest is undoubtedly there: but, if it is a will or power of the Brah-
man, it can only be for a creation of realities of the Real or a manifesta-
tion of the timeless process of its being in Time-eternity; for it seems
incredible that the sole power of the Reality should be to manifest some-

REALITY AND THE COSMIC ILLUSION 4OI

thing contrary to itself or to create non-existent things in an illusory
universe.

There is so far no satisfying answer to the riddle: but it may be that
we err in attributing any kind of reality, however illusory at bottom, to
Maya or her works: the true solution lies in facing courageously the mys-
tery of its and their utter unreality. This absolute unreality seems to be
envisaged by certain formulations of Illusionism or by certain arguments
put forward in its favour. This side then of the problem has to pass under
consideration before we can examine with confidence the solutions that
rest on a relative or partial reality of the universe. There is indeed a line
of reasoning which gets rid of the problem by excluding it; it affirms that
the question how the Illusion generated, how the universe manages to be
there in the pure existence of Brahman, is illegitimate: the problem does
not exist, because the universe is non-existent, Maya is unreal. Brah-
man is the sole truth, alone and self -existent for ever. Brahman is not
affected by any illusory consciousness, no universe has come into exist-
ence within its timeless reality. But this evasion of the difficulty is either
a sophism which means nothing, an acrobacy of verbal logic, the logical
reason hiding its head in the play of words and ideas and refusing to see
or to solve a real and baffling difficulty, or else it means too much, since
in effect it gets rid of all relation of Maya to Brahman by affirming her
as an independent absolute non-reality along with the universe created
by her. If a real universe does not exist, a cosmic Illusion exists and we
are bound to inquire how it came into being or how it manages to exist,
what is its relation or non-relation to the Reality, what is meant by our
own existence in Maya, by our subjugation to her cycles, by our libera-
tion from her. For in this view we have to suppose that Brahman is not
the percipient of Maya or her works, Maya herself is not a power of
Brahman-consciousness: Brahman is superconscient, immersed in its own
pure being or is conscious only of its own absoluteness; it has nothing to
do with Maya. But in that case either Maya cannot exist even as an illu-
sion or there would be a dual Entity or two entities, a real Eternal super-
conscious or conscious only of itself and an illusive Power that creates
and is conscious of a false universe. We are back on the horns of the
dilemma and with no prospect of getting free from our impalement on it,
unless we escape by concluding that since all philosophy is part of ^Maya,
all philosophy is also an illusion, problems abound but no conclusion is
possible. For what we are confronted with is a pure static and immutable

402 THE LIFE DIVINE

Reality and an illusory dynamism, the two absolutely contradictory of
each other, with no greater Truth beyond them in which their secret can
be found and their contradictions discover a reconciling issue.

If Brahman is not the percipient, then the percipient must be the
individual being: but this percipient is created by the Illusion and un-
real; the percept, the world, is an illusion created by an Illusion and
unreal; the perceiving consciousness is itself an illusion and therefore
unreal. But this deprives everything of significance, our spiritual exist-
ence and our salvation from Maya no less than our temporal existence
and our immersion in Maya; all are of an eqiial unreality and unimpor-
tance. It is possible to take a less rigid stand-point and hold that Brahman
as Brahman has nothing to do with Maya, is eternally free from all illu-
sion or any commerce with illusion, but Brahman as the individual per-
cipient or as the Self of all being here has entered into Maya and can
in the individual withdraw from it, and this withdrawal is for the indi-
vidual an act of supreme importance. But here a dual being is imposed on
Brahman and a reality attributed to something that belongs to the cosmic
Illusion, — to the individual being of Brahman in Maya, for Brahman as
the Self of all is not even phenomenally bound and does not need to es-
cape from her: moreover, salvation cannot be of importance if bondage
is unreal and bondage cannot be real unless Maya and her world are real.
The absolute unreality of Maya disappears and gives place to a very com-
prehensive even if perhaps only a practical and temporal reality. To avoid
this conclusion it may be said that our individuality is unreal, it is Brah-
man who withdraws from a reflection of itself in the figment of indi-
viduality and its extinction is our release, our salvation: but Brahman,
always free, cannot suffer by bondage or profit by salvation, and a reflec-
tion, a figment of individuality is not a thing that can need salvation. A
reflection, a figment, a mere image in the deceptive mirror of Maya can-
not suffer a real bondage or profit by a real salvation. If it be said that it
is a conscious reflection or figment and therefore can really suffer and
enter into the bliss of release, the question arises whose is the conscious-
ness that so suffers in this fictitious existence, — for there can be no real
conciousness except that of the One Existence ; so that once more there is
established a dual consciousness for Brahman, a consciousness or super-
conscience free from the illusion and a consciousness subject to the illu-
sion, and we have again substantiated a certain reality of our existence
and experience in Maya. For if our being is that of the Brahman, our
consciousness something of the consciousness of the Brahman, with what-

REALITY AND THE COSMIC ILLUSION 403

ever qualification, it is to that extent real, — and if our being, why not
the being of the universe?

It may finally be put forward as a solution that the percipient indi-
vidual and the percept universe are unreal, but Maya by imposing itself
on Brahman acquires a certain reality, and that reality lends itself to the
individual and to its experience in the cosmic Illusion which endures so
long as it is subject to the illusion. But, again, for whom is the experience
valid, the reality acquired while it endures, and for whom does it cease
by liberation, extinction or withdrawal? For an illusory unreal being can-
not put on reality and suffer from a real bondage or escape from it by a
real act of evasion or self-extinction; it can only seem to some real self
or being to exist, but in that case this real self must in some way or in
some degree have become subject to Maya. It must either be the con-
sciousness of Brahman that projects itself into a world of Maya and
issues from Maya or it must be the being of Brahman that puts forth
something of itself, its reality, into Maya and withdraws it again from
Maya. Or what again is this Maya that imposes itself on Brahman? from
where does it come if it is not already in Brahman, an action of the eter-
nal Consciousness or the eternal Superconscience? It is only if a being or
a consciousness of the Reality undergoes the consequences of the Illu-
sion that the cycles of the Illusion can put on any reality or have any
importance except as a dance of phantasmagoric marionettes with which
the Eternal amuses himself, a puppet-show in Time. We are driven back
to the dual being of Brahman, the dual consciousness of Brahman in-
volved in the Illusion and free from the Illusion, and a certain phe-
nomenal truth of being for Maya: there can be no solution of our exist-
ence in the universe if that existence and the universe itself have no
reality, — even though the reality be only partial, restricted, derivative.
But what can be the reality of an original universal and fundamentally
baseless Illusion? The only possible answer is that it is a suprarational
mystery, inexplicable and ineffable, — anirvacaniya.

There are, however, two possible replies to the difficulty, if we get
rid of the idea of absolute unreality and admit a qualification or compro-
mise. A basis can be created for a subjective illusion-consciousness which
is yet part of Being, if we accept in the sense of an illusory subjective
world-awareness the account of sleep and dream creation given to us in
the Upanishads. For the affirmation there is that Brahman as Self is four-
fold; the Self is Brahman and all that is is the Brahman, but all that is
is the Self seen by the Self in four states of its being. In the pure self-

404 THE LIFE DIVINE

status neither consciousness nor unconsciousness as we conceive it can be
affirmed about Brahman ; it is a state of superconscience absorbed in its
self-existence, in a self-silence or a self-ecstasy, or else it is the status
of a free Superconscient containing or basing everything but involved
in nothing. But there is also a luminous status of sleep-self, a massed
consciousness which is the origin of cosmic existence ; this state of deep
sleep in which yet there is the presence of an omnipotent Intelligence is
the seed state or causal condition from which emerges the cosmos; —
this and the dream-self which is the continent of all subtle, subjective or
supraphysical experience, and the self of waking which is the support
of all physical experience, can be taken as the whole field of Maya. As a
man in deep sleep passes into dreams in which he experiences self-con-
structed unstable structures of name, form, relation, happenings, and
in the waking state externalises himself in the more apparently stable but
yet transient structures of the physical consciousness, so the Self de-
velops out of a state of massed consciousness its subjective and its ob-
jective cosmic experience. But the waking state is not a true waking from
this original and causal sleep; it is only a full emergence into a gross
external and objective sense of the positive reality of objects of con-
sciousness as opposed to the subtle subjective dream-awareness of those
objects: the true waking is a withdrawal from both objective and subjec-
tive consciousness and from the massed causal Intelligence into the super-
conscience superior to all consciousness ; for all consciousness and all un-
consciousness is Maya. Here, we may say, Maya is real because it is the
self's experience of the Self, something of the Self enters into it, is af-
fected by its happenings because it accepts them, believes in them, they
are to it real experiences, creations out of its conscious being; but it is
unreal because it is a sleep state, a dream state, an eventually transient
waking state, not the true status of the superconscient Reality. Here
there is no actual dichotomy of being itself, but there is a multiplicity of
status of the one Being; there is no original dual consciousness implying
a Will in the Uncreated to create illusory things out of non-existence,
but there is One Being in states of superconscience and consciousness
each with its own nature of self-experience. But the lower states, although
they have a reality, are yet qualified by a building and seeing of sub-
jective self-constructions which are not the Real. The One Self sees itself
as many, but this multiple existence is subjective; it has a multiplicity
of its states of consciousness, but this multiplicity also is subjective;

REALITY AND THE COSMIC ILLUSION 405

there is a reality of subjective experience of a real Being, but no objec-
tive universe.

It may be noted, however, that nowhere in the Upanishads is it actu-
ally laid down that the threefold status is a condition of illusion or the
creation of an unreality; it is constantly affirmed that all this that is, —
this universe we are now supposing to have been constructed by Maya,
— is the Brahman, the Reality. The Brahman becomes all these beings;
all beings must be seen in the Self, the Reality, and the Reality must be
seen in them, the Reality must be seen as being actually all these beings;
for not only the Self is Brahman, but all is the Self, all this that is is the
Brahman, the Reality. That emphatic asseveration leaves no room for an
illusory Maya; but still the insistent denial that there is anything other
than or separate from the experiencing self, certain phrases used and the
description of two of the states of consciousness as sleep and dream may
be taken as if they annulled the emphasis on the universal Reality; these
passages open the gates to the illusionist idea and have been made the
foundation for an uncompromising system of that nature. If we take this
fourfold status as a figure of the Self passing from its superconscient
state, where there is no subject or object, into a luminous trance in which
superconscience becomes a massed consciousness out of which the subjec-
tive status of being and the objective come into emergence, then we get
according to our view of things either a possible process of illusionary
creation or a process of creative Self-knowledge and All-knowledge.

In fact, if we can judge from the description of the three lower states

of Self as the all-wise Intelligence,^ the Seer of the subtle and the Seer

of the gross material existence, this sleep state and this dream state seem

to be figurative names for the superconscient and the subliminal which

are behind and beyond our waking status; they are so named and figured

because it is through dream and sleep — or trance which can be regarded

^ prajM. Yajnavalkya in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad states very positively
that there are two planes or states of the being which are two worlds, and that in
the dream state one can see both worlds, for the dream state is intermediate be-
tween them, it is their joining-plane. This makes it clear that he is speaking of a
subliminal condition of the consciousness which can carry in it communications
between the physical and the supraphysical worlds. The description of the dream-
less sleep state applies both to deep sleep and to the condition of trance in which
one enters into a massed consciousness containing in it all the powers of being but
all compressed within itself and concentrated solely on itself and, when active,
then active in a consciousness where all is the self ; this is, clearly, a state admitting
us into the higher planes of the spirit normally now superconscient to our waking
being.

406 THE LIFE DIVINE

as a kind of dream or sleep — that the surface mental consciousness nor-
mally passes out of the perception of objective things into the inner sub-
liminal and the superior supramental or overmental status. In that inner
condition it sees the supraphysical realities in transcribing figures of
dream or vision or, in the superior status, it loses itself in a massed con-
sciousness of which it can receive no thought or image. It is through this
subliminal and this superconscient condition that we can pass into the
supreme superconscience of the highest state of self-being. If we make
the transition, not through dream trance or sleep trance, but through a
spiritual awakening into these higher states, we become aware in all of
them of the one omnipresent Reality; there need be no perception of an
illusionary Maya, there is only an experience of the passage from Mind
to what is beyond it so that our mental structure of the universe ceases to
be valid and another reality of it is substituted for the ignorant mental
knowledge. In this transition it is possible to be awake to all the states
of being together in a harmonised and unified experience and to see the
Reality everywhere. But if we plunge by a trance of exclusive concentra-
tion into a mystic sleep state or pass abruptly in waking Mind into a
state belonging to the Superconscient, then the mind can be seized in the
passage by a sense of the unreality of the cosmic Force and its creations;
it passes by a subjective abolition of them into the supreme supercon-
science. This sense of unreality and this sublimating passage are the
spiritual justification for the idea of a world created by Maya; but this
consequence is not conclusive, since a larger and more complete conclu-
sion superseding it is possible to spiritual experience.

All these and other solutions of the nature of Maya fail to satisfy
because they have no conclusiveness: they do not establish the inevita-
bility of the illusionist hypothesis which, to be accepted, needs to be in-
evitable ; they do not bridge the chasm between the presumed true nature
of the eternal Reality and the paradoxical and contrary character of the
cosmic Illusion. At the most a process is indicated that claims to make
the co-existence of the two opposites conceivable and intelligible; but
it has no such force of certitude or illuminating convincingness effectively
curing the improbability that its acceptance would be obligatory on the
intelligence. The theory of the cosmic Illusion gets rid of an original
contradiction, a problem and mystery which may be otherwise soluble,
by erecting another contradiction, a new problem and mystery which is
irreconcilable in its terms and insoluble. For we start with the conception
or experience of an absolute Reality which is in its nature eternally one,

REALITY AND THE COSMIC ILLUSION 407

supracosmic, static, immobile, immutable, self-aware of its pure exist-
ence, and a phenomenon of cosmos, dynamism, motion, mutability, modi-
fications of the original pure existence, differentiation, infinite multipli-
city. This phenomenon is got rid of by declaring it to be a perpetual
Illusion, Maya. But this brings in, in effect, a self-contradictory dual sta-
tus of consciousness of the One to annul a self-contradictory dual status
of being of the One. A phenomenal truth of multiplicity of the One is an-
nulled by setting up a conceptual falsehood in the One creating an unreal
multiplicity. The One for ever self-aware of its pure existence entertains
a perpetual imagination or illusory construction of itself as an infinite
multiplicity of ignorant and suffering beings unaware of self who have
to wake one by one to awareness of self and cease individually to be.

In face of this solution of a perplexity by a new perplexity we begin
to suspect that our original premiss must have been somewhere incom-
plete,— not an error, but only a first statement and indispensable foun-
dation. We begin to envisage the Reality as an eternal oneness, status,
immutable essence of pure existence supporting an eternal dynamis, mo-
tion, infinite multiplicity and diversity of itself. The immutable status of
oneness brings out of itself the dynamis, motion and multiplicity, — the
dynamis, motion and multiplicity not abrogating but bringing into relief
the eternal and infinite oneness. If the consciousness of Brahman can be
dual in status or action or even manifold, there seems to be no reason
why Brahman should be incapable of a dual status or a manifold real
self-experience of its being. The cosmic consciousness would then be,
not a creative Illusion, but an experience of some truth of the Absolute.
This explanation, if worked out, might prove to be more comprehensive
and spiritually fecund, more harmonic in its juncture of the two terms
of our self-experience, and it would be at least as logically tenable as the
idea of an eternal Reality supporting in perpetuity an eternal illusion
real only to an infinite multiplicity of ignorant and suffering beings who
escape one by one from the obscurity and pain of Maya, each one by a
separate extinction of itself in Maya.

In a second possible answer on the illusionist basis to the problem,
in the philosophy of Shankara which may be described as a qualified lUu-
sionism, an answer which is presented with a force and comprehensive-
ness that are extraordinarily impressive, we make a first step towards
this solution. For this philosophy affirms a qualified reality for Maya;
it characterises it indeed as an ineffable and unaccountable mystery, but
at the same time it does present us with a rational solution, at first sight

408 THE LIFE DIVINE

thoroughly satisfactory, of the opposition which afflicts our mind; it
accounts for our sense of the persistent and pressing reality of the uni-
verse and our sense of the inconclusiveness, insufficiency, vanity, eva-
nescence, a certain unreality of life and phenomena. For we find a
distinction made between two orders of reality, transcendental and prag-
matic, absolute and phenomenal, eternal and temporal, — the former
the reality of the pure being of Brahman, absolute and supracosmic and
eternal, the latter the reality of Brahman in Maya, cosmic, temporal and
relative. Here we get a reality for ourselves and the universe: for the
individual self is really Brahman; it is Brahman who within the field
of Maya seems phenomenally to be subjected to her as the individual
and in the end releases the relative and phenomenal individual into his
eternal and true being. In the temporal field of relativities our experience
of the Brahman who has become all beings, the Eternal who has become
universal and individual, is also valid; it is indeed a middle step of the
movement in Maya towards liberation from Maya. The universe too and
its experiences are real for the consciousness in Time and that conscious-
ness is real. But the question of the nature and extent of this reality at
once arises: for the universe and ourselves may be a true reality though
of a lesser order, or they may be partly real, partly unreal, or they may
be an unreal reality. If they are at all a true reality, there is no place for
any theory of Maya ; there is no illusory creation. If they are partly real,
partly unreal, the fault must lie in something wrong either in the cosmic
self-awareness or in our own seeing of ourselves and the universe which
produces an error of being, an error of knowledge, an error in the dy-
namis of existence. But that error can amount only to an ignorance or
a mixed knowledge and ignorance, and what needs to be explained then
is not an original Cosmic Illusion but the intervention of Ignorance in
the creative consciousness or in the dynamic action of the Eternal and
Infinite. But if universe and ourselves are an unreal reality, if to a tran-
scendental consciousness all this has no truth of existence and its appar-
ent reality ceases once we step out of the field proper to Maya, then the
concession accorded with one hand is taken away by the other ; for what
was conceded as a truth turns out to have been all the time an illusion.
Maya and cosmos and ourselves are both real and unreal, — but the real-
ity is an unreal reality, real only to our ignorance, unreal to any true
knowledge.

It is difficult to see why, once any reality is conceded to ourselves
and to the universe, it should not be a true reality within its limits. It

REALITY AND THE COSMIC ILLUSION 409

may be admitted that the manifestation must be on its surface a more
restricted reality than the Manifested; our universe is, we may say, one
of the rhythms of Brahman and not, except in its essential being, the
whole reality: but that is not a sufficient reason for it to be set aside as
unreal. It is no doubt so felt by mind withdrawing from itself and its
structures: but this is only because the mind is an instrument of Igno-
rance and, when it withdraws from its constructions, from its ignorant
and imperfect picture of the universe, it is impelled to regard them as
nothing more than its own fictions and formations, unfounded, unreal;
the gulf between its ignorance and the supreme Truth and Knowledge
disables it from discovering the true connections of the transcendent Re-
ality and the cosmic Reality. In a higher status of consciousness the dif-
ficulty disappears, the connection is established; the sense of unreality
recedes and a theory of illusion becomes superfluous and inapplicable.
It cannot be the final truth that the Supreme Consciousness has no re-
gard upon the universe or that it regards it as a fiction which its self in
Time upholds as real. The cosmic can only exist by dependence on the
supracosmic, Brahman in Time must have some significance for Brahman
in timeless eternity; otherwise there could be no self and spirit in things
and therefore no basis for the temporal existence.

But the universe is condemned as ultimately unreal because it is
temporary and not eternal, a perishable form of being imposed on the
Formless and Imperishable. This relation can be illustrated by the
analogy of earth and the pot made out of earth: the pot and other forms
so created perish and go back to the reality, earth, they are only evanes-
cent forms; when they disappear there is left the formless and essential
earth and nothing else. But this analogy can tell more convincingly the
other way ; for the pot is real by right of its being made out of the sub-
stance of earth which is real; it is not an illustration and, even when it is
dissolved into the original earth, its past existence cannot be thought to
have been unreal or an illusion. The relation is not that of an original
reality and a phenomenal unreality, but of an original, — or, if we go
back from earth to the invisible substratum and constituent ether, an
eternal and non-manifest, — to a resultant and dependent, a temporal and
manifested reality. Moreover, the pot form is an eternal possibility of
earth substance, or ethereal substance, and while the substance exists
the form can always be manifested. A form may disappear, but it only
passes out of manifestation into non-manifestation ; a world may disap-
pear, but there is no proof that world-existence is an evanescent phe-

410 THE LIFE DIVINE

nomenon: on the contrary, we may suppose that the power of manifes-
tation is inherent in Brahman and continues to act either continuously
in Time-eternity or in an eternal recurrence. The cosmic is a different
order of the Real from the supracosmic Transcendence, but there is no
need to take it as in any way non-existent or unreal to that Transcend-
ence. For the purely intellectual conception that only the Eternal is
real, whether we take it in the sense that reality depends on perpetual
duration or that the timeless only is true, is an ideative distinction, a
mental construction; it is not binding on a substantial and integral ex-
perience. Time is not necessarily cancelled out of existence by timeless
Eternity; their relation is only verbally a relation of contradiction; in
fact, it is more likely to be a relation of dependence.

Similarly, the reasoning which cancels the dynamics of the Absolute,
the imposition of the stigma of unreal reality on the pragmatic truth of
things because it is pragmatic, is difficult to accept; for the pragmatic
truth is after all not something quite other, quite separate and uncon-
nected with spiritual truth, it is a result of the energy or a motion of
the dynamic activity of the Spirit. A distinction must, no doubt, be made
between the two, but the idea of an entire opposition can rest only on
the postulate that a silent and quiescent status is the Eternal's true and
whole being; but in that case we must conclude that there is nothing
dynamic in the Absolute and all dynamism is a contradiction of the su-
preme nature of the Divine and Eternal. But if a temporal or cosmic
reality of any kind exists, there must be a power, an inherent dynamic
force of the Absolute which brought it into being, and there is no reason
to suppose that the power of the Absolute can do nothing but create
illusions. On the contrary, the Power that creates must be the force of
an omnipotent and omniscient Consciousness ; the creations of the abso-
lutely Real should be real and not illusions, and since it is the One Exist-
ence, they must be self-creations, forms of a manifestation of the Eternal,
not forms of Nothing erected out of the original Void — ^whether a void
being or a void consciousness — by Maya.

At the basis of the refusal to recognise the universe as real is the
concept or experience of the Reality as immutable, featureless, non-active
and realised through a consciousness that has itself fallen into a status
of silence and is immobile. The universe is a result of dynamis in move-
ment, it is force of being throwing itself out in action, energy at work,
whether that energy be conceptive or mechanical or a spiritual, mental,
vital or material dynamis; it can thus be regarded as a contradiction —

REALITY AND THE COSMIC ILLUSION 4 II

or a derogation from self — of the static and immobile eternal Reality,
therefore unreal. But as a concept this position of the thought has no
inevitability; there is no reason why we should not conceive of the Real-
ity as at once static and dynamic. It is perfectly rational to suppose that
the eternal status of being of the Reality contains in it an eternal force
of being, and this dynamis must necessarily carry in itself a power of
action and movement, a kinesis; both status of being and movement
of being can be real. There is no reason either why they should not be
simultaneous; on the contrary, simultaneity is demanded, — for all en-
ergy, all kinetic action has to support itself on status or by status if it is
to be effective or creative; otherwise there will be no solidity of anything
created, only a constant whirl without any formation: status of being,
form of being are necessary to kinesis of being. Even if energy be the
primal reality, as it seems to be in the material world, still it has to create
status of itself, lasting forms, duration of beings in order to have a sup-
port for its action: the status may be temporary, it may be only a balance
or equilibrium of substance created and maintained by a constant kinesis,
but while it endures it is real and, after it ceases, we still regard it as
something that was real. The principle of a supporting status for action
is a permanent principle, and its action is constant in Time-eternity. When
we discover the stable Reality underlying all this movement of energy
and this creation of forms, we do indeed perceive that the status of cre-
ated forms is only temporary; there is a stabiUty of repetition of the
kinesis in a same persistent action and figure of movement which main-
tains substance of being in stable form of itself: but this stability is
created, and the one permanent and self-existent status is that of the
eternal Being whose Energy erected the forms. But we need not there-
fore conclude that the temporary forms are unreal; for the energy of
the being is real and the forms made by it are forms of the being. In
any case the status of the being and the eternal dynamis of the being
are both real, and they are simultaneous; the status admits of action of
dynamis and the action does not abrogate the status. We must therefore
conclude that eternal status and eternal dynamis are both true of the
Reality which itself surpasses both status and dynamis; the immobile
and the mobile Brahman are both the same Reality.

But in experience we find that for us it is, normally, a quiescence
that brings in the stable realisation of the eternal and the infinite: it
is in silence or quietude that we feel most firmly the Something that is
behind the world shown to us by our mind and senses. Our cognitive

412 THE LIFE DIVINE

action of thought, our action of life and being seem to overlay the truth,
the reality; they grasp the finite but not the infinite, they deal with the
temporal and not the eternal R6al. It is reasoned that this is so because
all action, all creation, all determining perception limits ; it does not em-
brace or grasp the Reality, and its constructions disappear when we
enter into the indivisible and indeterminable consciousness of the Real:
these constructions are unreal in eternity, however real they may seem
or be in Time. Action leads to ignorance, to the created and finite; kinesis
and creation are a contradiction of the immutable Reality, the pure un-
created Existence. But this reasoning is not wholly valid because it is
looking at perception and action only as they are in our mental cogni-
tion of the world and its movements; but that is the experience of our
surface being regarding things from its shifting motion in Time, a re-
gard itself superficial, fragmentary and delimited, not total, not plunging
into the inner sense of things. In fact we find that action need not bind
or limit, if we get out of this moment-cognition into a status of cognition
of the eternal proper to the true consciousness. Action does not bind or
limit the liberated man; action does not bind or limit the Eternal: but
we can go farther and say that action does not bind or limit our own
true being at all. Action has no such effect on the spiritual Person or
Purusha or on the psychic entity within us, it binds or limits only the
surface constructed personality. This personality is a temporary expres-
sion of our self-being, a changing form of it, empowered to exist by it,
dependent on it for substance and endurance, — temporary, but not un-
real. Our thought and action are means for this expression of ourselves
and, as the expression is incomplete and evolutive, as it is a development
of our natural being in Time, thought and action help it to develop, to
change, to alter and expand its limits, but at the same time to maintain
limits; in that sense they are limiting and binding; they are themselves
an incomplete mode of self-revelation. But when we go back into our-
selves, into the true self and person, there is no longer a binding or limita-
tion by the limits of action or perception; both arise as expressions of
consciousness and expressions of force of the self-operative for a free self-
determination of its nature-being, for the self-unrolling, the becoming in
time of something that is itself illimitable. The limitation, which is a nec-
essary circumstance of an evolutive self-determination, might be an abro-
gation of self or derogation from self, from Reality, and therefore itself
unreal, if it altered the essentiality or totality of the being; it would be
a bondage of the spirit and therefore illegitimate if it obscured, by an

REALITY AND THE COSMIC ILLUSION 413

alien imposition proceeding from a force that is not-self, the Conscious-
ness that is the inmost witness and creator of our world-existence, or
if it constructed something contrary to the Being's consciousness of self
or will of becoming. But the essence of being remains the same in all
action and formation, and the limitations freely accepted do not take
from the being's totality; they are accepted and self-imposed, not im-
posed from outside, they are a means of expression of our totality in
the movement of Time, an order of things imposed by our inner spirit-
ual being on our outer nature-being, not a bondage inflicted on the ever-
free spirit. There is therefore no reason to conclude from the limitations
of perception and action that the movement is unreal or that the expres-
sion, formation or self-creation of the Spirit is unreal. It is a temporal
order of reality, but it is still a reality of the Real, not something else.
All that is in the kinesis, the movement, the action, the creation, is the
Brahman; the becoming is a movement of the being; Time is a mani-
festation of the Eternal. All is one Being, one Consciousness, one even
in infinite multiplicity, and there is no need to bisect it into an opposition
of transcendent Reality and unreal cosmic Maya.

In the philosophy of Shankara one feels the presence of a conflict,
an opposition which this powerful intellect has stated with full force
and masterfully arranged rather than solved with any finality, — the con-
flict of an intuition intensely aware of an absolute transcendent and in-
most Reality and a strong intellectual reason regarding the world with
a keen and vigorous rational intelligence. The intellect of the thinker
regards the phenomenal world from the stand-point of the reason; rea-
son is there the judge and the authority and no suprarational authority
can prevail against it: but behind the phenomenal world is a transcendent
Reality which the intuition alone can see; there reason — at least a finite
dividing limited reason — cannot prevail against the intuitive experience,
it cannot even relate the two, it cannot therefore solve the mystery of
the universe. The reason has to affirm the reality of the phenomenal ex-
istence, to affirm its truths as valid ; but they are valid only in that phe-
nomenal existence. This phenomenal existence is real because it is a tem-
poral phenomenon of the eternal Existence, the Reality: but it is not
itself that Reality and, when we pass beyond the phenomenon to the
Real, it still exists but is no longer valid to our consciousness ; it is there-
fore unreal. Shankara takes up this contradiction, this opposition which
is normal to our mental consciousness when it becomes aware of both
sides of existence and stands between them; he resolves it by obliging

414 THE LIFE DIVINE

the reason to recognise its limits, in which its unimpaired sovereignty is
left to it within its own cosmic province, and to acquiesce in the soul's
intuition of the transcendent Reality and to support, by a dialectic
which ends by dissolving the whole cosmic phenomenal and rational-
practical edifice of things, its escape from the limitations constructed
and imposed on the mind by Maya. The explanation of cosmic existence
by which this is brought about seems to be — or so we may translate it to
our understanding, for there have been different expositions of this pro-
found and subtle philosophy, — that there is a Transcendence which is
for ever self-existent and immutable and a world which is only phe-
nomenal and temporal. The eternal Reality manifests itself in regard to
the phenomenal world as Self and Ishwara. The Ishwara by his Maya,
his power of phenomenal creation, constructs this world as a temporal
phenomenon, and this phenomenon of things which do not exist in the
utterly Real is imposed by Maya through our conceptive and perceptive
consciousness on the superconscient or purely self-conscient Reality.
Brahman the Reality appears in the phenomenal existence as the Self
of the living individual; but when the individuality of the individual is
dissolved by intuitive knowledge, the phenomenal being is released into
self-being: it is no longer subject to Maya and by its release from the
appearance of individuality it is extinguished in the Reality; but the
world continues to exist without beginning or end as the Mayic creation
of the Ishwara.

This is an arrangement which puts into relation with each other
the data of the spiritual intuition and the data of the reason and sense,
and it opens to us a way out from their contradiction, a spiritual and
practical issue: but it is not a solution, it does not resolve the contradic-
tion. Maya is real and unreal; the world is not a mere illusion, for it
exists and is real in Time, but eventually and transcendentally it turns
out to be unreal. This creates an ambiguity which extends beyond itself
and touches all that is not the pure self-existence. Thus the Ishwara,
though he is undeluded by Maya and the creator of Maya, seems himself
to be a phenomenon of Brahman and not the ultimate Reality, he is real
only with regard to the Time-world he creates; the individual self has
the same ambiguous character. If Maya were to cease altogether from
its operations, Ishwara, the world and the individual would no longer be
there; but Maya is eternal, Ishwara and the world are eternal in Time,
the individual endures so long as he does not annul himself by knowl-
edge. Our thought on these premisses has to take refuge in the concep-

REALITY AND THE COSMIC ILLUSION 415

tion of an ineffable suprarational mystery which is to the intellect in-
soluble. But, faced with this ambiguity, this admission of an insoluble
mystery at the commencement of things and at the end of the process of
thought, we begin to suspect that there is a link missing. Ishwara is not
himself a phenomenon of Maya, he is real ; he must then be the manifes-
tation of a truth of the Transcendence, or he must be the Transcendent
itself dealing wdth a cosmos manifested in his own being. If the world is
at all real, it also must be the manifestation of a truth of the Transcend-
ence; for only that can have any reality. If the individual has the power
of self-discovery and entrance into the transcendent eternity and his
liberation has so great an importance, it must be because he too is a
reality of the Transcendence; he has to discover himself individually,
because his individuality also has some truth of itself in the Transcend-
ence which is veiled from it and which it has to recover. It is an igno-
rance of self and world that has to be overcome and not an illusion, a
figment of individuality and world-existence.

It becomes evident that as the Transcendence is suprarational and
seizable only by an intuitive experience and realisation, so also the mys-
tery of the universe is suprarational. It has to be so since it is a phenome-
non of the transcendent Reality, and it would not, if it were otherwise, be
insoluble by the intellectual reason. But if so, we have to pass beyond the
intellect in order to bridge the gulf and penetrate the mystery; to leave
an unsolved contradiction cannot be the final solution. It is the intellec-
tual reason that crystallises and perpetuates an apparent contradiction
by creating its opposite or dividing concepts of the Brahman, the Self,
the Ishwara, the individual being, the supreme consciousness or super-
conscience and the Mayic world-consciousness. If Brahman alone exists,
all these must be Brahman, and in Brahman-consciousness the division
of these concepts must disappear in a reconciling self-vision ; but we can
arrive at their true unity only by passing beyond the intellectual Reason
and finding out through spiritual experience where they meet and become
one and what is the spiritual reality of their apparent divergence. In fact,
in the Brahman-consciousness the divergences cannot exist, they must
by our passage into it converge into unity; the divisions of the intel-
lectual reason may correspond to a reality, but it must be then the reality
of a manifold Oneness. The Buddha applied his penetrating rational in-
tellect supported by an intuitive vision to the world as our mind and
lense see it and discovered the principle of its construction and the way
of release from all constructions, but he refused to go farther. Shankara

41 6 THE LIFE DIVINE

took the farther step and regarded the suprarational Truth, which Bud-
dha kept behind the veil as realisable by cancellation of the constructions
of consciousness but beyond the scope of the reason's discovery. Shan-
kara, standing between the world and the eternal Reality, saw that the
mystery of the world must be ultimately suprarational, not conceivable
or expressible by our reason, anirvacanlya ; but he maintained the world
as seen by the reason and sense as valid and had therefore to posit an
unreal reality, because he did not take one step still farther. For to know
the real truth of the world, its reality, it must be seen from the supra-
rational awareness, from the view of the Superconscience that maintains
and surpasses and by surpassing knows it in its truth, and no longer
from the view of the consciousness that is maintained by it and surpassed
by it and therefore does not know it or knows it only by its appearance. It
cannot be that to that self-creative supreme consciousness the world is
an incomprehensible mystery or that it is to it an illusion that is yet not
altogether an illusion, a reality that is yet unreal. The mystery of the
universe must have a divine sense to the Divine; it must have a sig-
nificance or a truth of cosmic being that is luminous to the Reality that
upholds it with its transcending and yet immanent superconscience.

If the Reality alone exists and all is the Reality, the world also can-
not be excluded from that Reality; the universe is real. If it does not
reveal to us in its forms and powers the Reality that it is, if it seems only
a persistent and yet changing movement in Space and Time, this must
be not because it is unreal or because it is not at all That, but because
it is a progressive self-expression, a manifestation, an evolving self-devel-
opment of That in Time which our consciousness cannot yet see in its
total or its essential significance. In this sense we can say that it is That
and not That, — because it does not disclose all the Reality through any
form or sum of its forms of self-expression; but still all its forms are forms
of the substance and being of that Reality. All finites are in their spiritual
essence the Infinite and, if we look deep enough into them, manifest to
intuition the Identical and Infinite. It is contended indeed that the uni-
verse cannot be a manifestation because the Reality has no need of mani-
festation, since it is for ever manifest to itself; but so equally it can be
said that the Reality has no need of self-illusion or illusion of any kind,
no need to create a Mayic universe. The Absolute can have no need of
anything ; but still there can be — not coercive of its freedom, not binding
on it, but an expression of its self-force, the result of its Will to become,
— an imperative of a supreme self -effectuating Force, a necessity of self-

REALITY AND THE COSMIC ILLUSION 417

creation born of the power of the Absolute to see itself in Time. This
imperative represents itself to us as a Will to create, a Will of self-expres-
sion; but it may be better represented as a force of being of the Absolute
which displays itself as a power of itself in action. If the Absolute is self-
evident to itself in eternal Timelessness^ it can also be self-manifest to
itself in eternal motion of Time. Even if the universe is only a phe-
nomenal reality, still it is a manifestation or phenomenon of Brahman;
for since all is Brahman, phenomenon and manifestation must be the
same thing: the imputation of unreality is a superfluous conception, oti-
ose and unnecessarily embarrassing, since whatever distinction is needed
is already there in the concept of Time and the timeless Eternal and the
concept of manifestation.

The one thing that can be described as an unreal reality is our indi-
vidual sense of separativeness and the conception of the finite as a self-
existent object in the Infinite. This conception, this sense are pragmati-
cally necessary for the operations of the surface individuality and are
effective and justified by their effects; they are therefore real to its finite
reason and finite self-experience: but once we step back from the finite
consciousness into the consciousness of the essential and infinite, from
the apparent to the true Person, the finite or the individual still exists but
as being and power and manifestation of the Infinite; it has no inde-
pendent or separate reality. Individual independence, entire separative-
ness are not necessary for individual reality, do not constitute it. On the
other hand, the disappearance of these finite forms of the manifestation
is evidently a factor in the problem, but does not by itself convict them
of unreality; the disappearance may be only a withdrawal from mani-
festation. The cosmic manifestation of the Timeless takes place in the
successions of Time: its forms must therefore be temporary in their ap-
pearance on the surface, but they are eternal in their essential power of
manifestation; for they are held always implicit and potential in the
essence of things and in the essential consciousness from which they
emerge: timeless consciousness can always turn their abiding potentiality
into terms of time actuality. The world would be unreal only, if itself and
its forms were images without substance of being, figments of conscious-
ness presented to itself by the Reality as pure figments and then abol-
ished for ever. But if manifestation or the power of manifestation is
eternal, if all is the being of Brahman, the Reality, then this unreality or
illusoriness cannot be the fundamental character of things or of the
cosmos in which they make their appearance.

4l8 THE LIFE DIVINE

A theory of Maya in the sense of illusion or the unreality of cosmic
existence creates more difficulties than it solves; it does not really solve
the problem of existence, but rather renders it for ever insoluble. For,
whether Maya be an unreality or a non-real reality, the ultimate effects
of the theory carry in them a devastating simplicity of nullification. Our-
selves and the universe fade away into nothingness or else keep for a
time only a truth which is little better than a fiction. In the thesis of the
pure unreality of Maya, all experience, all knowledge as well as all ig-
norance, the knowledge that frees us no less than the ignorance that binds
us, world-acceptance and world-refusal, are two sides of an illusion; for
there is nothing to accept or refuse, nobody to accept or refuse it. All
the time it was only the immutable superconscient Reality that at all
existed; the bondage and release were only appearances, not a reality.
All attachment to world-existence is an illusion, but the call for libera-
tion is also a circumstance of the illusion; it is something that was created
in Maya which by its liberation is extinguished in Maya. But this nullifi-
cation cannot be compelled to stop short in its devastating advance at the
boundary fixed for it by a spiritual Illusionism. For if all other experi-
ences of the individual consciousness in the universe are illusions, then
what guarantee is there that its spiritual experiences are not illusions,
including even its absorbed self-experience of the supreme Self which is
conceded to us as utterly real? For if cosmos is untrue, our experience of
the cosmic consciousness, of the universal Self, of Brahman as all these
beings or as the self of all these beings, the One in all, all in the One
has no secure foundation, since it reposes in one of its terms on an illu-
sion, on a construction of Maya. That term, the cosmic term, has to
crumble, for all these beings which we saw as the Brahman were illu-
sions; then what is our assurance of our experience of the other term,
the pure Self, the silent, static or absolute Reality, since that too comes
to us in a mind moulded of delusion and formed in a body created by an
Illusion? An overwhelming self-evident convincingness, an experience
of absolute authenticity in the realisation or experience is not an unan-
swerable proof of sole reality or sole finality: for other spiritual experi-
ences such as that of the omnipresent Divine Person, Lord of a real
Universe, have the same convincing, authentic and final character. It is
open to the intellect which has once arrived at the conviction of the un-
reality of all other things, to take a farther step and deny the reality of
Self and of all existence. The Buddhists took this last step and refused
reality to the Self on the ground that it was as much as the rest a con-

REALITY AND THE COSMIC ILLUSION 419

struction of the mind; they cut not only God but the eternal Self and
impersonal Brahman out of the picture.

An uncompromising theory of Illusion solves no problem of our
existence ; it only cuts the problem out for the individual by showing him
a way of exit: in its extreme form and effect, our being and its action
become null and without sanction, its experience, aspiration, endeavour
lose their significance; all, the one incommunicable relationless Truth
excepted and the turning away to it, become equated with illusion of be-
ing, are part of a universal Illusion and themselves illusions. God and
ourselves and the universe become myths of Maya; for God is only a
reflection of Brahman in Maya, ourselves are only a reflection of Brah-
man in illusory individuality, the world is only an imposition on the
Brahman's incommunicable self-existence. There is a less drastic nulli-
fication if a certain reality is admitted for the being even within the illu-
sion, a certain validity for the experience and knowledge by which we
grow into the spirit: but this is only if the temporal has a valid reality
and the experience in it has a real validity, and in that case what we are
in front of is not an illusion taking the unreal for real but an ignorance
misapprehending the real. Otherwise if the beings of whom Brahman is
the self are illusory, its selfhood is not valid, it is part of an illusion ; the
experience of self is also an illusion: the experience "I am That" is viti-
ated by an ignorant conception, for there is no I, only That; the experi-
ence "I am He" is doubly ignorant, for it assumes a conscious Eternal,
a Lord of the universe, a Cosmic Being, but there can be no such thing
if there is no reality in the universe. A real solution of existence can only
stand upon a truth that accounts for our existence and world-existence,
reconciles their truth, their right relation and the truth of their relation
to whatever transcendent Reality is the source of everything. But this
implies some reality of individual and cosmos, some true relation of the
One Existence and all existences, of relative experience and of the Abso-
lute.

The theory of Illusion cuts the knot of the world problem, it does
not disentangle it; it is an escape, not a solution: a flight of the spirit is
not a sufficient victory for the being embodied in this world of the be-
coming; it effects a separation from Nature, not a liberation and fulfil-
ment of our nature. This eventual outcome satisfies only one element,
sublimates only one impulse of our being; it leaves the rest out in the
cold to perish in the twilight of the unreal reality of Maya. As in Science,
so in metaphysical thought, that general and ultimate solution is likely

420 THE LIFE DIVINE

to be the best which includes and accounts for all so that each truth of
experience takes its place in the whole: that knowledge is likely to be the
highest knowledge which illumines, integralises, harmonises the signifi-
cance of all knowledge and accounts for, finds the basic and, one might
almost say, the justifying reason of our ignorance and illusion while it
cures them ; this is the supreme experience which gathers together all ex-
perience in the truth of a supreme and all-reconciling oneness. Illusionism
unifies by elimination; it deprives all knowledge and experience, except
the one supreme merger, of reality and significance.

But this debate belongs to the domain of the pure reason and the
final test of truths of this order is not reason but spiritual illumination
verified by abiding fact of spirit; a single decisive spiritual experience
may undo a whole edifice of reasonings and conclusions erected by the
logical intelligence. Here the theory of Illusionism is in occupation of a
very solid ground; for, although it is in itself no more than a mental
formulation, the experience it formulates into a philosophy accompanies
a most powerful and apparently final spiritual realisation. It comes upon
us with a great force of awakening to reality when the thought is stilled,
when the mind withdraws from its constructions, when we pass into a
pure selfhood void of all sense of individuality, empty of all cosmic con-
tents: if the spiritualised mind then looks at individual and cosmos, they
may well seem to it to be an illusion, a scheme of names and figures and
movements falsely imposed on the sole reality of the Self-Existent. Or
even the sense of self becomes inadequate ; both knowledge and ignorance
disappear into sheer Consciousness and consciousness is plunged into a
trance of pure superconscient existence. Or even existence ends by be-
coming too limiting a name for that which abides solely for ever ; there is
only a timeless Eternal, a spaceless Infinite, the utterness of the Absolute,
a nameless Peace, an overwhelming single objectless Ecstasy. There can
certainly be no doubt of the validity — complete within itself— of this
experience ; there can be no denial of the overwhelming decisive convinc-
ingness— ekdtmya-pratyaya-sdram — with which this realisation seizes
the consciousness of the spiritual seeker. But still all spiritual experience
is experience of the Infinite and it takes a multitude of directions ; some
of them — and not this alone — are so close to the Divine and the Absolute,
so penetrated with the reality of Its presence or with the ineffable peace
and power of the liberation from all that is less than It, that they carry
with them this overwhelming sense of finality complete and decisive.
There are a hundred ways of approaching the Supreme Reality and, as

REALITY AND THE COSMIC ILLUSION 42 1

is the nature of the way taken, so will be the nature of the ultimate ex-
perience by which one passes into That which is ineffable, That of which
no report can be given to the mind or expressed by any utterance. All
these definitive culminations may be regarded as penultimates of the one
Ultimate ; they are steps by which the soul crosses the limits of Mind into
the Absolute. Is then this realisation of passing into a pure immobile self-
existence or this Nirvana of the individual and the universe one among
these penultimates, or is it itself the final and absolute realisation which
is at the end of every journey and transcends and eliminates all lesser ex-
perience? It claims to stand behind and supersede, to sublate and to
eliminate every other knowledge; if that is really so, then its finality must
be accepted as conclusive. But, against this pretension, it has been
claimed that it is possible to travel beyond by a greater negation or a
greater affirmation, — to extinguish self in Non-Being or to pass through
the double experience of cosmic consciousness and Nirvana of world-
consciousness in the One Existence to a greater Divine Union and Unity
which holds both these realisations in its vast integral Reality. It is said
that beyond the duality and the non-duality there is That in which both
are held together and find their truth in a Truth which is beyond them.
A consummating experience which proceeds by the exceeding and elimi-
nation of all other possible but lesser experiences is, as a step towards the
Absolute, admissible. A supreme experience which affirms and includes
the truth of all spiritual experience, gives to each its own absolute, in-
tegralises all knowledge and experience in a supreme reality, might be the
one step farther that is at once a largest illuminating and transforming
Truth of all things and a highest infinite Transcendence. The Brahman,
the supreme Reality, is That which being known all is known ; but in the
illusionist solution it is That, which being known, all becomes unreal and
an incomprehensible mystery: in this other experience, the Reality being
known, all assumes its true significance, its truth to the Eternal and Ab-
solute.

All truths, even those which seem to be in conflict, have their valid-
ity, but they need a reconciliation in some largest Truth which takes
them into itself; all philosophies have their value, — if for nothing else,
then because they see the Self and the universe from a point of \iew of
the spirit's experience of the many-sided Manifestation and in doing so
shed light on something that has to be known in the Infinite. All spiritual
experiences are true, but they point towards some highest and -VNidest
reality which admits their truth and exceeds it. This is, we may say, a

422 THE LIFE DIVINE

sign of the relativity of all truth and all experience, since both vary with
the outlook and the inlook of the knowing and experiencing mind and
being; each man is said to have his own religion according to his own
nature, but so too each man may be said to have his own philosophy, his
own way of seeing and experience of existence, though only a few can
formulate it. But from another point of view this variety testifies rather
to the infinity of aspects of the Infinite; each catches a partial glimpse or
a whole glimpse of one or more aspects or contacts or enters into it in his
mental or his spiritual experience. To the mind at a certain stage all
these view-points begin to lose their definitiveness in a large catholicity
or a complex tolerant incertitude, or all the rest may fall away from it
and yield place to an ultimate truth or a single absorbing experience. It
is then that it is liable to feel the unreality of all that it has seen and
thought and taken as part of itself or its universe. This "all" becomes to
it a universal unreality or a many-sided fragmental reality without a
principle of unification ; as it passes into the negativing purity of an ab-
solute experience, all falls away from it and there remains only a silent
and immobile Absolute. But the consciousness might be called to go
farther and see again all it has left in the light of a new spiritual vision:
it may recover the truth of all things in the truth of the Absolute; it may
reconcile the negation of Nirvana and the affirmation of the cosmic
consciousness in a single regard of That of which both are the self-expres-
sions. In the passage from mental to overmind cognition this many-sided
unity is the leading experience; the whole manifestation assumes the
appearance of a singular and mighty harmony which reaches its greatest
completeness when the soul stands on the border between overmind and
supermind and looks back with a total view upon existence.

This is at least a possibility that we have to explore and pursue this
view of things to its ultimate consequence. A consideration of the pos-
sibility of a great cosmic Illusion as the explanation of the enigma of
being had to be undertaken because this view and experience of things
presents itself powerfully at the end of the mental spiral where that
reaches its point of breaking or point of cessation ; but once it is ascer-
tained that it is not the obligatory end of a scrupulous enquiry into the
ultimate truth, we can leave it aside or refer to it only when needed in
connection with some line of a more plastic course of thought and reason-
ing. Our regard can now be concentrated on the problem that is left by
the exclusion of the illusionist solution, the problem of the Knowledge
and the Ignorance.

REALITY AND THE COSMIC ILLUSION 423

All turns round the question "What is Reality?" Our cognitive con-
sciousness is limited, ignorant, finite ; our conceptions of reality depend
on our way of contact with existence in this limited consciousness and
may be very different from the way in which an original and ultimate
Consciousness sees it. It is necessary to distinguish between the essential
Reality, the phenomenal reality dependent upon it and arising out of it,
and the restricted and often misleading experience or notion of either
that is created by our sense-experience and our reason. To our sense the
earth is flat and, for most immediate practical purposes, within a limit,
we have to follow the sense reality and deal with the flatness as if it were
a fact; but in true phenomenal reality the flatness of the earth is unreal,
and Science seeking for the truth of the phenomenal reality in things
has to treat it as approximately round. In a host of detafls Science con-
tradicts the evidence of the senses as to the real truth of phenomena; but,
still, we have to accept the cadre provided by our senses because the
practical relations with things which they impose on us have validity
as an effect of reality and cannot be disregarded. Our reason, relying on
the senses and exceeding them, constructs its own canons or notions of the
real and unreal, but these canons vary according to the stand-point taken
by the reasoning observer. The physical scientist probing into phenomena
erects formulas and standards based on the objective and phenomenal
reality and its processes: to his view mind may appear as a subjective
result of Matter and self and spirit as unreal; at any rate he has to act
as if matter and energy alone existed and mind were only an observer of
an independent physical reality which is unaffected by any mental proc-
esses^ or any presence or intervention of a cosmic Intelligence. The
psychologist, probing independently into mind consciousness and mind
unconsciousness, discovers another domain of realities, subjective in its
character, which has its own law and process; to him Mind may even
come to appear as the key of the real, Matter as only a field for mind, and
spirit apart from mind as something unreal. But there is a farther probing
which brings up the truth of self and spirit and establishes a greater order
of the real in which there is a reversal of our view both of the subjective
mind realities and objective physical realities so that they are seen as
things phenomenal, secondary, dependent upon the truth of self and the
realities of the spirit. In this deeper search into things mind and matter

*This position has been shaken by the theory of Relativity, but it must hold
as a pragmatic basis for experiment and affirmation of the scientific fact.

424 THE LIFE DIVINE

begin to wear the appearance of a lesser order of the real and may easily
come to appear unreal.

But it is the reason accustomed to deal with the finite that makes
these exclusions; it cuts the whole into segments and can select one seg-
ment of the whole as if it were the entire reality. This is necessary for its
action since its business is to deal with the finite as finite, and we have to
accept for practical purposes and for the reason's dealings with the
finite and cadre it gives us, because it is valid as an effect of reality and so
cannot be disregarded. When we come to the experience of the spiritual
which is itself the whole or contains the whole in itself, our mind carries
there too its segmenting reason and the definitions necessary to a finite
cognition; it cuts a line of section between the infinite and the finite, the
spirit and its phenomena or manifestations, and dubs those as real and
these as unreal. But an original and ultimate consciousness embracing all
the terms of existence in single integral view would see the whole in its spir-
itual essential reality and the phenomenon as a phenomenon or manifesta-
tion of that reality. If this greater spiritual consciousness saw in things
only unreality and an entire disconnection with the truth of the spirit, it
could not have — if it were itself a Truth-consciousness — any reason for
maintaining them in continuous or recurrent existence through all Time: if
it so maintains them, it is because they are based on the realities of the
spirit. But, necessarily, when thus integrally seen, the phenomenal reality
would take on another appearance than when it is viewed by the reason and
sense of the finite being; it would have another and deeper reality, another
and greater significance, another and more subtle and complex process of
its movements of existence. The canons of reality and all the forms
of thought created by the finite reason and sense would appear to the
greater consciousness as partial constructions with an element of truth in
them and an element of error; these constructions might therefore be
described as at once real and unreal, but the phenomenal world itself
would not become either unreal or unreal-real by that fact: it would put
on another reality of a spiritual character; the finite would reveal itself as
a power, a movement, a process of the Infinite.

An original and ultimate consciousness would be a consciousness of
the Infinite and necessarily unitarian in its view of diversity, integral,
all-accepting, all-embracing, all-discriminating because all-determining,
an indivisible whole-vision. It would see the essence of things and regard
all forms and movements as phenomenon and consequence of the essen-
tial Reality, motions and formations of its power of being. It is held by

REALITY AND THE COSMIC ILLUSION 425

the reason that truth must be empty of any conflict of contradictions: if
so, since the phenomenal universe is or seems to be the contrary of the
essential Brahman it must be unreal; since individual being is the con-
trary of both transcendence and universality, it must be unreal. But
what appear as contradictions to a reason based on the finite may not be
contradictions to a vision or a larger reason based on the infinite. What
our mind sees as contraries may be to the infinite consciousness not con-
traries but complementaries: essence and phenomenon of the essence are
complementary to each other, not contradictory, — the phenomenon mani-
fests the essence; the finite is a circumstance and not a contradiction of
the infinite; the individual is a self-expression of the universal and the
transcendent, — it is not a contradiction or something quite other than it,
it is the universal concentrated and selective, it is one with the Tran-
scendent in its essence of being and its essence of nature. In the view of
this unitarian comprehensive seeing there is nothing contradictory in a
formless Essence of being that carries a multitude of forms, or in a status
of the Infinite supporting a kinesis of the Infinite, or in an infinite One-
ness expressing itself in a multiplicity of beings and aspects and powers
and movements, for they are beings and aspects and powers and move-
ments of the One. A world-creation on this basis is a perfectly natural
and normal and inevitable movement which in itself raises no problem,
since it is exactly what one must expect in an action of the Infinite. All
the intellectual problem and difficulty is raised by the finite reason cut-
ting, separating, opposing the power of the Infinite to its being, its kinesis
to its status, its natural multiplicity to its essential oneness, segmenting
self, opposing Spirit to Nature. To understand truly the world-process
of the Infinite and the Time-process of the Eternal, the consciousness
must pass beyond this finite reason and the finite sense to a larger reason
and spiritual sense in touch with the consciousness of the Infinite and
responsive to the logic of the Infinite which is the very logic of being itself
and arises inevitably from its self-operation of its own realities, a logic
whose sequences are not the steps of thought but the steps of existence.
But what has been thus described, it may be said, is only a cosmic
consciousness and there is the Absolute: the Absolute cannot be limited;
since universe and individual limit and divide the Absolute, they must
be unreal. It is self-evident indeed that the Absolute cannot be limited ; it
can be limited neither by formlessness nor by form, neither by unity nor
by multiplicity, neither by immobile status nor by dynamic mobihty. If
it manifests form, form cannot limit it; if it manifests multiplicity, mul-

426 THE LIFE DIVINE

tiplicity cannot divide it; if it manifests motion and becoming, mo-
tion cannot perturb nor becoming change it: it cannot be limited any-
more than it can be exhausted by self-creation. Even material things
have this superiority to their manifestation; earth is not limited by the
vessels made from it, nor air by the winds that move in it, nor the sea
by the waves that rise on its surface. This impression of limitation be-
longs only to the mind and sense which see the finite as if it were an in-
dependent entity separating itself from the Infinite or something cut out
of it by limitation: it is this impression that is illusory, but neither the
infinite nor the finite is an illusion; for neither exists by the impressions
of the sense or the mind, they depend for their existence on the Absolute.
The Absolute is in itself indefinable by reason, ineffable to the
speech; it has to be approached through experience. It can be approached
through an absolute negation of existence, as if it were itself a supreme
Non-Existence, a mysterious infinite Nihil. It can be approached through
an absolute affirmation of all the fundamentals of our own existence,
through an absolute of Light and Knowledge, through an absolute of
Love or Beauty, through an absolute of Force, through an absolute of
peace or silence. It can be approached through an inexpressible absolute
of being or of consciousness, or of power of being, or of delight of be-
ing, or through a supreme experience in which these things become in-
expressibly one; for we can enter into such an ineffable state and,
plunged into it as if into a luminous abyss of existence, we can reach
a superconscience which may be described as the gate of the Absolute.
It is supposed that it is only through a negation of individual and cos-
mos that we can enter into the Absolute. But in fact the individual need
only deny his own small separate ego-existence; he can approach the
Absolute through a sublimation of his spiritual individuality taking up
the cosmos into himself and transcending it; or he may negate himself
altogether, but even so it is still the individual who by self-exceeding
enters into the Absolute. He may enter also by a sublimation of his be-
ing into a supreme existence or super-existence, by a sublimation of his
consciousness into a supreme consciousness or super-conscience, by a
sublimation of his and all delight of being into a super-delight or su-
preme ecstasy. He can make the approach through an ascension in which
he enters into cosmic consciousness, assumes it into himself and raises
himself and it into a state of being in which oneness and multiplicity are
in perfect harmony and unison in a supreme status of manifestation
where all are in each and each in all and all in the one without any de-

REALITY AND THE COSMIC ILLUSION 427

termining individuation — for the dynamic identity and mutuality have
become complete; on the path of affirmation it is this status of the mani-
festation that is nearest to the Absolute. This paradox of an Absolute
which can be realised through an absolute negation and through an
absolute affirmation, in many ways, can only be accounted for to the
reason if it is a supreme Existence which is so far above our notion and
experience of existence that it can correspond also to our negation of it,
to our notion and experience of non-existence, but also, since all that
exists is That, whatever its degree of manifestation, it is itself the su-
preme of all things and can be approached through supreme affirmations
as through supreme negations. The Absolute is the ineffable x overtop-
ping and underlying and immanent and essential in all that we can call
existence or non-existence.

It is our first premiss that the Absolute is the supreme reality; but
the issue is whether all else that we experience is real or unreal. A distinc-
tion is sometimes made between being and existence, and it is supposed
that being is real but existence or what manifests as such is unreal. But this
can stand only if there is a rigid distinction, a cut and separation between
the uncreated Eternal and created existences; the uncreated Being can
then be taken as alone real. This conclusion does not follow if what exists
is form of Being and substance of Being; it would be unreal only if it
were a form of Non-Being, asat, created out of the Void, iunya. The
states of existence through which we approach and enter into the Abso-
lute must have their truth, for the untrue and unreal cannot lead into the
Real: but also what issues from the Absolute, what the Eternal supports
and informs and manifests in itself, must have a reality. There is the
unmanifest and there is the manifestation, but a manifestation of the
Real must itself be real; there is the Timeless and there is the process
of things in Time, but nothing can appear in Time unless it has a basis
in the timeless Reality. If my self and spirit are real, my thoughts, feel-
ings, powers of all kinds, which are its expressions, cannot be unreal ; my
body, which is the form it puts out in itself and which at the same time it
inhabits, cannot be a nothing or a mere unsubstantial shadow. The only
reconciling explanation is that timeless eternity and time eternity are two
aspects of the Eternal and Absolute and both are real, but in a different
order of reality: what is unmanifest in the Timeless manifests itself in
Time; each thing that exists is real in its own degree of the manifestation
and is so seen by the consciousness of the Infinite.

All manifestation depends upon being, but also upon consciousness

428 THE LIFE DIVINE

and its power or degree; for as is the status of consciousness, so will be
the status of being. Even the Inconscient is a status and power of in-
volved consciousness in which being is plunged into an other and opposite
state of non-manifestation resembling non-existence so that out of it all
in the material universe may be manifested; so too the superconscient is
consciousness taken up into an absolute of being. For there is a super-
conscient status in which consciousness seems to be luminously involved
in being and as if unaware of itself; all consciousness of being, all knowl-
edge, self-vision, force of being, seem to emerge from that involved state
or to appear in it: this emergence, in our view of it, may appear to be
an emergence into a lesser reality, but in fact both the superconscience
and the consciousness are and regard the same Real. There is also a status
of the Supreme in which no distinction can be made between being and
consciousness, — for they are too much one there to be thus differentiated,
— but this supreme status of being is also a supreme status of the power
of being and therefore of the power of consciousness; for the force of
being and the force of its consciousness are one there and cannot be
separated: it is this unification of eternal Being with the eternal Con-
sciousness-Force that is the status of the supreme Ishwara, and its force
of being is the dynamis of the Absolute. This status is not a negation of
cosmos ; it carries in itself the essence and power of all cosmic existence.
But still unreality is a fact of cosmic existence, and if all is the
Brahman, the Reality, we have to account for this element of unreality
in the Real. If the unreal is not a fact of being, it must be an act or a
formation of consciousness, and is there not then a status or degree of
consciousness in which its acts and formations are wholly or partly un-
real? If this unreality cannot be attributed to an original cosmic Illusion,
to Maya, there is still in the universe itself a power of illusion of Igno-
rance. It is in the power of the Mind to conceive things that are not real,
it is in its power even to create things that are not real or not wholly
real; its very view of itself and universe is a construction that is not
wholly real or wholly unreal. Where does this element of unreality begin
and where does it stop, and what is its cause and what ensues on the re-
moval of both the cause and the consequence? Even if all cosmic exist-
ence is not in itself unreal, cannot that description be applied to the
world of Ignorance in which we live, this world of constant change and
birth and death and frustration and suffering, and does not the removal
of the Ignorance abolish for us the reality of the world which it creates,
or is not a departure out of it the natural and only issue? This would be

REALITY AND THE COSMIC ILLUSION 429

valid, if our ignorance were a pure ignorance without any element of
truth or knowledge in it. But in fact our consciousness is a mixture of the
true and the false; its acts and creations are not a pure invention, a base-
less structure. The structure it builds, its form of things or form of the
universe, is not a mixture of reality and the unreal so much as a half
comprehension, a half expression of the real, and, since all consciousness
is force and therefore potentially creative, our ignorance has the result of
wrong creation, wrong manifestation, wrong action or misconceived and
misdirected energy of the being. All world-existence is manifestation, but
our ignorance is the agent of a partial, limited and ignorant manifesta-
tion,— in part an expression but in part also a disguise of the original be-
ing, consciousness and delight of existence. If this state of things is per-
manent and unalterable, if our world must always move in this circle, if
some Ignorance is the cause of all things and all action here and not a
condition and circumstance, then indeed the cessation of individual ig-
norance could only come by an escape of the individual from world-being,
and a cessation of the cosmic ignorance would be the destruction of
world-being. But if this world has at its root an evolutionary principle, if
our ignorance is a half-knowledge evolving towards knowledge, another
account and another issue and spiritual result of our existence in material
Nature, a greater manifestation here becomes possible.

A farther distinction has to be made in our conceptions of unreality,
so as to avoid a possible confusion in our dealings with this problem
of the Ignorance. Our mind, or a part of it, has a pragmatic standard of
reality; it insists on a standard of fact, of actuality. All that is face of
existence is to it real, but for it this factuality or reality of the actual is
limited to the phenomena of this terrestrial existence in the material
universe. But terrestrial or material existence is only a part manifesta-
tion, it is a system of actualised possibilities of the Being which does not
exclude all other possibilities not yet actualised or not actualised here. In
a manifestation in Time new realities can emerge, truths of being not yet
realised can put forth their possibilities and become actual in the physical
and terrestrial existence; other truths of being there may be that are
supraphysical and belong to another domain of manifestation, not re-
alised here but still real. Even what is nowhere actual in any universe,
may be a truth of being, a potential of being, and cannot, because it is
not yet expressed in form of existence, be taxed as unreal. But our mind
or this part of it still insists on its pragmatic habit or conception of the
real which admits only the factual and actual as true and is prone to re-

430 THE LIFE DIVINE

gard all else as unreal. There is then for this mind an unreality which is
of a purely pragmatic nature: it consists in the formulation of things
which are not necessarily unreal in themselves but are not realised or
perhaps cannot be realised by ourselves or in present circumstances or in
our actual world of being; this is not a true unreality, it is not an unreal
but an unrealised, not an unreal of being but only an unreal of present
or known fact. There is, again, an unreality which is conceptual and per-
ceptive and is caused by an erroneous conception and perception of the
real: this too is not or need not be an unreality of being, it is only a false
construction of consciousness due to limitation by Ignorance. These and
other secondary movements of our ignorance are not the heart of the
problem, for that turns upon a more general affliction of our conscious-
ness and the world-consciousness here; it is the problem of the cosmic
Ignorance. For our whole view and experience of existence labours under
a limitation of consciousness which is not ours alone but seems to be at
the basis of the material creation. Instead of the original and ultimate
Consciousness which sees reality as a whole, we see active here a limited
consciousness and either a partial and unfinished creation or a cosmic
kinesis that moves in a perpetual circle of meaningless change. Our con-
sciousness sees a part and parts only of the Manifestation, — if manifes-
tation it be, — and treats it or them as if they were separate entities;
all our illusions and errors arise from a limited separative awareness
which creates unrealities or misconceives the Real. But the problem
becomes still more enigmatic when we perceive that our material world
seems to arise directly, not out of any original Being and Consciousness,
but out of a status of Inconscience and apparent Non-Existence, our
ignorance itself is something that has appeared as if with difficulty and
struggle out of the Inconscience.

This then is the mystery, — how did an illimitable consciousness and
force of integral being enter into this limitation and separativeness? how
could this be possible and, if its possibility has to be admitted, what is its
justification in the Real and its significance? It is the mystery not of an
original Illusion, but of the origin of the Ignorance and Inconscience and
of the relations of Knowledge and Ignorance to the original Conscious-
ness or Superconscience.

CHAPTER VII

THE KNOWLEDGE AND THE IGNORANCE

Let the Knower distinguish the Knowledge and the Ig-
norance.

Rig Veda}

Two are there, hidden in the secrecy of the Infinite, the
Knowledge and the Ignorance; but perishable is the Igno-
rance, immortal is the Knowledge; another than they is He
who rules over both the Knowledge and the Ignorance.

Swetaswatara Upanishad.^

Two Unborn, the Knower and one who knows not, the
Lord and one who has not mastery: one Unborn and in her
are the object of enjoyment and the enjoyer.

Swetaswatara Vpanishad?

Two are joined together, powers of Truth, powers of
Maya, — they have built the Child and given him birth and
they nourish his growth.

Rig Veda.^

IN OUR scrutiny cf the seven principles of existence it was found
that they are one in their essential and fundamental reality: for if
even the matter of the most material universe is nothing but a status of
being of Spirit made an object of sense, envisaged by the Spirit's own
consciousness as the stuff of its forms, much more must the life-force that
constitutes itself into form of Matter, and the mind-consciousness that
throws itself out as Life, and the Supermind that develops Mind as one
of its powers, be nothing but Spirit itself modified in apparent substance
and in dynamism of action, not modified in real essence. All are powers of
one Power of being and not other than that All-Existence, All-Conscious-
ness, All-Will, All-Delight which is the true truth behind every ap-
pearance. And they are not only one in their reality, but also inseparable
in the sevenfold variety of their action. They are the seven colours of
the light of the divine consciousness, the seven rays of the Infinite, and
by them the Spirit has filled in on the canvas of his self-existence concep-
tually extended, woven of the objective warp of Space and the subjective

^IV. 2. II. ^^V. I. n. 9. "X. 5. 3-

431

432 THE LIFE DIVINE

woof of Time, the myriad wonders of his self-creation great, simple,
symmetrical in its primal laws and vast framings, infinitely curious and
intricate in its variety of forms and actions and the complexities of rela-
tion and mutual effect of all upon each and each upon all. These are the
seven Words of the ancient sages; by them have been created and in
the light of their meaning are worked out and have to be interpreted
the developed and developing harmonies of the world we know and the
worlds behind of which we have only an indirect knowledge. The Light,
the Sound is one; their action is sevenfold.

But here there is a world based upon an original Inconscience ; here
consciousness has formulated itself in the figure of an ignorance labour-
ing towards knowledge. We have seen that there is no essential reason
either in the nature of Being itself or in the original character and funda-
mental relations of its seven principles for this intrusion of Ignorance,
of discord into the harmony, of darkness into the light, of division and
limitation into the self-conscious infinity of the divine creation. For we
can conceive, and since we can, the Divine can still more conceive — and
since there is the conception, there must somewhere be the execution, the
creation actual or intended, — a universal harmony into which these con-
trary elements do not enter. The Vedic seers were conscious of such a di-
vine self-manifestation and looked on it as the greater world beyond this
lesser, a freer and wider plane of consciousness and being, the truth-
creation of the Creator which they described as the seat or own home
of the Truth, as the vast Truth, or the Truth, the Right, the Vast,^ or
again as a Truth hidden by a Truth where the Sun of Knowledge finishes
his journey and unyokes his horses, where the thousand rays of con-
sciousness stand together so that there is That One, the supreme form of
the Divine Being. But this world in which we live seemed to them to be
a mingled weft in which truth is disfigured by an abundant falsehood,
anrtasya bhureh,;^ here the one light has to be born by its own vast force
out of an initial darkness or sea of Inconscience ; '^ immortality and god-
head have to be built up out of an existence which is under the yoke of
death, ignorance, weakness, suffering and limitation. This self-building
they figured as the creation by man in himself of that other world or high
ordered harmony of infinite being which already exists perfect and
eternal in the Divine Infinite. The lower is for us the first condition of
the higher; the darkness is the dense body of the light, the Inconscient

^ sadanam rtasya, sve dame rtasya, rtasya brhate, rtam satyam brhat.
^ Rig Veda, VII. 60. 5. '' apraketam salilam.

THE KNOWLEDGE AND THE IGNORANCE 433

guards in itself all the concealed Superconscient, the powers of the di-
vision and falsehood hold from us but also for us and to be conquered
from them the riches and substance of the unity and truth in their
cave of subconscience. This was in their view, expressed in the highly-
figured enigmatic language of the early mystics, the sense and justifica-
tion of man's actual existence and his conscious or unconscious God-
ward effort, his conception so paradoxical at first sight in a world which
seems its very opposite, his aspiration so impossible to a superficial view
in a creature so ephemeral, weak, ignorant, limited, towards a plenitude
of immortality, knowledge, power, bliss, a divine and imperishable exist-
ence.

For, as a matter of fact, while the very keyword of the ideal crea-
tion is a plenary self-consciousness and self-possession in the infinite
Soul and a perfect oneness, the keyword of the creation of which we have
present experience is the very opposite; it is an original inconscience
developing in life into a limited and divided self-consciousness, an orig-
inal inert subjection to the drive of a blind self-existent Force develop-
ing in life into a struggle of the self-conscious being to possess himself
and all things and to establish in the kingdom of this unseeing mechanic
Force the reign of an enlightened Will and Knowledge. And because the
blind mechanic Force — ^we know now really that it is no such thing —
confronts us everywhere, initial, omnipresent, the fundamental law, the
great total energy, and because the only enlightened will we know, our
own, appears as a subsequent phenomenon, a result, a partial, subordi-
nate, circumscribed, sporadic energy, the struggle seems to us at the best
a very precarious and doubtful venture. The Inconscient to our percep-
tions is the beginning and the end ; the self-conscious soul seems hardly
more than a temporary accident, a fragile blossom upon this great, dark
and monstrous Ashwattha-tree of the universe. Or if we suppose the soul
to be eternal, it appears at least as a foreigner, an alien and not over
well-treated guest in the reign of this vast Inconscience. If not an acci-
dent in the Inconscient Darkness, it is perhaps a mistake, a stumble
downwards of the superconscient Light.

If this view of things had a complete validity, then only the abso-
lute idealist, sent perhaps out of some higher existence, unable to forget
his mission, stung into indomitable enthusiasm by a divine oestrus or sus-
tained in a calm and infinite fortitude by the light and force and voice
of the unseen Godhead, could persist under such circumstances in hold-
ing up before himself, much more before an incredulous or doubting

434 THE LIFE DIVINE

world, the hope of a full success for the human endeavour. Actually, for
the most part, men either reject it from the beginning or turn away from
it eventually, after some early enthusiasm, as a proved impossibility.
The consistent materialist seeks a partial and short-lived power, knowl-
edge, happiness, so much only as the dominant inconscient order of Na-
ture will allow to the struggling self-consciousness of man if he accepts
his limitations, obeys her laws and makes as good a use of them by his
enlightened will as their inexorable mechanism will tolerate. The re-
ligionist seeks his reign of enlightened will, love or divine being, his
kingdom of God, in that other world where they are unalloyed and
eternal. The philosophic mystic rejects all as a mental illusion and as-
pires to self-extinction in some Nirvana or else an immersion in the
featureless Absolute; if the soul or mind of the illusion-driven individual
has dreamed of a divine realisation in this ephemeral world of the Igno-
rance, it must in the end recognise its mistake and renounce its vain en-
deavour. But still, since there are these two sides of existence, the igno-
rance of Nature and the light of the Spirit, and since there is behind them
the One Reality, the reconciliation or at any rate the bridging of the
gulf forecast in the mystic parables of the Veda ought to be possible.
It is a keen sense of this possibility which has taken different shapes and
persisted through the centuries, — the perfectibility of man, the perfecti-
bility of society, the Alwar's vision of the descent of Vishnu and the
Gods upon earth, the reign of the saints, sddhundm rdjyam, the city of
God, the millennium, the new heaven and earth of the Apocalypse. But
these intuitions have lacked a basis of assured knowledge and the mind
of man has remained swinging between a bright future hope and a grey
present certitude. But the grey certitude is not so certain as it looks
and a divine life evolving or preparing in earth Nature need not be a
chimera. All acceptations of our defeat or our limitation start from the
implied or expUcit recognition, first, of an essential dualism and, then,
of an irreconcilable opposition between the dual principles, between the
Conscient and the Inconscient, between Heaven and Earth, between
God and the World, between the limitless One and the limited Many, be-
tween the Knowledge and the Ignorance. We have arrived by the train
of our reasoning at the conclusion that this need be no more than an
error of the sense-mind and the logical intellect founded upon a partial
experience. We have seen that there can be and is a perfectly rational
basis for the hope of our victory; for the lower term of being in which
we now live contains in itself the principle and intention of that which

THE KNOWLEDGE AND THE IGNORANCE 435

exceeds it and it is by its own self-exceeding and transformation into that
that it can find and develop into a complete form its own real essence.

But there is one point in the reasoning which till now we have left
somewhat obscure, and it is precisely in this matter of the co-existence
of the Knowledge and the Ignorance. Admittedly, we start here from
conditions which are the opposite of the ideal divine Truth and all the
circumstances of that opposition are founded upon the being's ignorance
of himself and of the Self of all, outcome of an original cosmic Ignorance
whose result is self-limitation and the founding of life on division in
being, division in consciousness, division in will and force, division in the
light, division and limitation in knowledge, power, love with, as conse-
quence, the positive opposite phenomena of egoism, obscuration, incapac-
ity, misuse of knowledge and will, disharmony, weakness and suffering.
We have found that this Ignorance, although shared by Matter and Life,
has its roots in the nature of Mind whose very office it is to measure off,
limit, particularise and thereby divide. But Mind also is a universal
principle, is One, is Brahman, and therefore it has a tendency to a unify-
ing and universalising knowledge as well as to that which marks off and
particularises. The particularising faculty of Mind only becomes Ig-
norance when it separates itself from the higher principles of which it is
a power and acts not only with its characteristic tendency, but also with
a tendency to exclude the rest of knowledge, to particularise first and
foremost and always and to leave unity as a vague concept to be
approached only afterwards, when particularisation is complete, and
through the sum of particulars. This exclusiveness is the very soul of
Ignorance.

We must then seize hold on this strange power of Consciousness
which is the root of our ills, examine the principle of its operation and
detect not only its essential nature and origin, but its power and process
of operation and its last end and means of removal. How is it that the
Ignorance exists? How has any principle or power in the infinite self-
awareness been able to put self-knowledge behind it and exclude all
but its own characteristic limited action? Certain thinkers^ have de-

® Buddha refused to consider the metaphysical problem; the process by which
our unreal individuality is constructed and a world of suffering maintained in ex-
istence and the method of escape from it is all that is of importance. Karma is a
fact; the construction of objects, of an individuality not truly existent is the cause
of suffering: to get rid of Karma, individuality and suffering must be our one
objective; by that elimination we shall pass into whatever may be free from these
things, permanent, real: the way of hberation alone matters.

436 THE LIFE DIVINE

dared that the problem is insoluble, it is an original mystery and is in-
trinsically incapable of explanation; only the fact and the process can
be stated: or else the question of the nature of the supreme original Exist-
ence or Non-existence is put aside as either unanswerable or unnecessary
to answer. One can say that Maya with its fundamental principle of
ignorance or illusion simply is, and this power of Brahman has the
double force of Knowledge and Ignorance inherently potential in it; all
we have to do is to recognise the fact and find a means of escape out of
the Ignorance — through the Knowledge, but into what is beyond both
Knowledge and Ignorance — by renunciation of life, by recognition of the
universal impermanency of things and the vanity of cosmic existence.
But our mind cannot remain satisfied — the mind of Buddhism itself
did not remain satisfied — with this evasion at the very root of the whole
matter. In the first place, these philosophies, while thus putting aside
the root question, do actually make far-reaching assertions that assume,
not only a certain operation and symptoms, but a certain fundamental
nature of the Ignorance from which their prescription of remedies pro-
ceeds; and it is obvious that without such a radical diagnosis no pre-
scription of remedies can be anything but an empiric dealing. But if we
are to evade the root-question, we have no means of judging whether
the assertions advanced are correct or the remedies prescribed the right
ones, or whether there are not others which without being so violent, de-
structively radical or of the nature of a surgical mutilation or extinction
of the patient may yet bring a more integral and natural cure. Secondly,
it is always the business of man the thinker to know. He may not be able
by mental means to know the essentiality of the Ignorance or of anything
in the universe in the sense of defining it, because the mind can only
know things in that sense by their signs, characters, forms, properties,
functionings, relations to other things, not in their occult self-being and
essence. But we can pursue farther and farther, clarify more and more
accurately our observation of the phenomenal character and operation
of the Ignorance until we get the right revealing word, the right indi-
cating sense of the thing and so come to know it, not by intellect but by
vision and experience of the truth, by realising the truth in our own
being. The whole process of man's highest intelleetual knowledge is
through this mental manipulation and discrimination to the point where
the veil is broken and he can see; at the end spiritual knowledge comes
in to help us to become what we see, to enter into the Light in which
there is no Ignorance.

THE KNOWLEDGE AND THE IGNORANCE 437

It is true that the first origin of the Ignorance is beyond us as men-
tal beings because our intelligence lives and moves within the Ignorance
itself and does not reach up to the point or ascend on to the plane where
that separation took place of which the individual mind is the result.
But this is true of the first origin and fundamental truth of all things,
and on this principle we should have to rest satisfied with a general ag-
nosticism. Man has to work in the Ignorance, to learn under its condi-
tions, to know it up to its farthest point so that he may arrive at its bor-
ders where it meets the Truth, touch its final lid of luminous obscuration
and develop the faculties which enable him to overstep that powerful
but really unsubstantial barrier.

We have them to scrutinise more closely than we have yet done
the character and operation of this principle or this power of Ignorance
and arrive at a clearer conception of its nature and origin. And first we
must fix firmly in our minds what we mean by the word itself. The dis-
tinction between the Knowledge and the Ignorance begins with the hymns
of the Rig Veda. Here knowledge appears to signify a consciousness of
the Truth, the Right, satyam rtam, and of all that is of the order of the
Truth and Right; ignorance is an unconsciousness, acitti, of the Truth
and Right, an opposition to its workings and a creation of false or ad-
verse workings. Ignorance is the absence of the divine eye of perception
which gives us the sight of the supramental Truth ; it is the non-perceiv-
ing principle in our consciousness as opposed to the truth-perceiving
conscious vision and knowledge.^ In its actual operation this non-perceiv-
ing is not an entire inconscience, the inconscient sea from which this
world has arisen,^^ but either a limited or a false knowledge, a knowl-
edge based on the division of undivided being, founded upon the frag-
mentary, the little, opposed to the opulent, vast and luminous com-
pleteness of things ; it is a cognition which by the opportunity of its limi-
tations is turned into falsehood and supported in that aspect by the Sons
of Darkness and Division, enemies of the divine endeavour in man, the
assailants, robbers, coverers of his light of knowledge. It was therefore
regarded as an undivine Maya,^^ that which creates false mental forms
and appearances, — and hence the later significance of this word which
seems to have meant originally a formative power of knowledge, the true
magic of the supreme Mage, the divine Magician, but was also used for
the adverse formative power of a lower knowledge, the deceit, illusion
and deluding magic of the Rakshasa. The divine Maya is the knowl-

^ acitti and citti. ^° apraketam salilam. ^^ adevi mdyd.

438 THE LIFE DIVINE

edge of the Truth of things, its essence, law, operation, which the gods
possess and on which they found their own eternal action and creation^^
and their building of their powers in the human being. This idea of the
Vedic mystics can in a more metaphysical thought and language be trans-
lated into the conception that the Ignorance is in its origin a dividing
mental knowledge which does not grasp the unity, essence, self-law of
things in their one origin and in their universality, but works rather upon
divided particulars, separate phenomena, partial relations, as if they
were the truth we had to seize or as if they could really be understood
at all without going back behind the division to the unity, behind
the dispersion to the universality. The Knowledge is that which tends
towards unification and, attaining to the supramental faculty, seizes
the oneness, the essence, the self-law of existence and views and deals
with the multiplicity of things out of that light and plenitude, in some
sort as does the Divine Himself from the highest height whence He
embraces the world. It must be noted, however, that the Ignorance in
this conception of it is still a kind of knowledge, but, because it is limited,
it is open at any point to the intrusion of falsehood and error; it turns
into a wrong conception of things which stands in opposition to the true
Knowledge.

In the Vedantic thought of the Upanishad we find the original Vedic
terms replaced by the familiar antinomy of Vidya and Avidya, and with
the change of terms there has come a certain development of significance:
for since the nature of the Knowledge is to find the Truth and the funda-
mental Truth is the One, — the Veda speaks repeatedly of it as "That
Truth" and "That One", — Vidya, Knowledge in its highest spiritual
sense, came to mean purely and trenchantly the knowledge of the
One, Avidya, Ignorance, purely and trenchantly the knowledge of
the divided Many divorced, as in our world it is divorced, from the
unifying consciousness of the One Reality. The complex associations,
the rich contents, the luminous penumbra of varied and corollary
ideas and significant figures which belonged to the conception of the
Vedic words, were largely lost in a language more precise and meta-
physical, less psychological and flexible. Still the later exaggerated idea
of absolute separation from the true truth of Self and Spirit, of an orig-
inal illusion, of a consciousness that can be equated with dream or with
hallucination, did not at first enter into the Vedantic conception of the
Ignorance. If in the Upanishads it is declared that the man who lives

" devdndm adabdha vratdni.

THE KNOWLEDGE AND THE IGNORANCE 439

and moves within the Ignorance, wanders about stumbling like a blind
man led by the blind and returns ever to the net of Death which is
spread wide for him, it is also affirmed elsewhere in the Upanishads that
he who follows after the Knowledge only, enters as if into a blinder dark-
ness than he who follows after the Ignorance and that the man who knows
Brahman as both the Ignorance and the Knowledge, as both the One
and the Many, as both the Becoming and the Non-becoming, crosses by
the Ignorance, by the experience of the Multiplicity, beyond death and
by the Knowledge takes possession of Immortality. For the Self-existent
has really become these many existences; the Upanishad can say to the
Divine Being, in all solemnity and with no thought to mislead, ''Thou
art this old man walking with his staff, yonder boy and girl, this blue-
winged bird, that red of eye," not "Thou seemest to be these things" to
the self-deluding mind of the Ignorance. The status of becoming is in-
ferior to the status of Being, but still it is the Being that becomes all that
is in the universe.

But the development of the separative distinction could not stop
here ; it had to go to its logical extreme. Since the knowledge of the One
is Knowledge and the knowledge of the Many is Ignorance, there can
be, in a rigidly analytic and dialectical view, nothing but pure opposition
between the things denoted by the two terms; there is no essential unity
between them, no reconciliation possible. Therefore Vidya alone is Knowl-
edge, Avidya is pure Ignorance ; and, if pure Ignorance takes a positive
form, it is because it is not merely a not-knowing of Truth, but a creation
of illusions and delusions, of seemingly real unrealities, of temporarily
valid falsehoods. Obviously then, the object matter of Avidya can have
no true and abiding existence; the Many are an illusion, the world
has no real being. Undoubtedly it has a sort of existence while it lasts, as
a dream- has or the long-continued hallucination of a delirious or a de-
mented brain, but no more. The One has not become and can never be-
come Many; the Self has not and cannot become all these existences;
Brahman has not manifested and cannot manifest a real world in itself:
it is only the Mind or some principle of which Mind is a result that
thrusts names and forms upon the featureless unity which is alone real
and, being essentially featureless, cannot manifest real feature and varia-
tion ; or else, if it manifests these things, then that is a temporal and tem-
porary reality which vanishes and is convicted of unreality by the illu-
mination of true knowledge.

Our view of the ultimate Reality and of the true nature of Maya

440 THE LIFE DIVINE

has compelled us to depart from these later fine excesses of the dialectical
intellect and return to the original Vedantic conception. While giving
every tribute to the magnificent fearlessness of these extreme conclusions,
to the uncompromising logical force and acuity of these speculations, in-
expugnable so long as the premisses are granted, admitting the truth of
two of the main contentions, the sole Reality of the Brahman and the
fact that our normal coneeptions about ourselves and world-existence are
stamped with ignorance, are imperfect, are misleading, we are obliged to
withdraw from the hold so powerfully laid by this conception of Maya on
the intelligence. But the obsession of this long-established view of things
cannot be removed altogether so long as we do not fathom the true nature
of the Ignorance and the true and total nature of the knowledge. For if
these two are independent, equal and original powers of the Conscious-
ness, then the possibility of a cosmic Illusion pursues us. If Ignorance
is the very character of cosmic existence, then our experience of the
universe, if not the universe itself, becomes illusory. Or, if Ignorance is
not the very grain of our natural being, but still an original and eternal
power of Consciousness, then, while there can be a truth of cosmos, it
may be impossible for a being in the universe, while he is in it, to know
its truth: he can only arrive at real knowledge by passing beyond mind
and thought, beyond this world-formation, and viewing all things from
above in some supracosmic or supercosmic consciousness like those who
have become of one nature with the Eternal and dwell in Him, unborn in
the creation and unafflicted by the cataclysmic destruction of the worlds
below them.^^ But the solution of this problem cannot be satisfactorily
pursued and reached on the basis of an examination of words and ideas
or a dialectical discussion; it must be the result of a total observation and
penetration of the relevant facts of consciousness — both those of the
surface and those below or above our surface level or behind our frontal
surface — and a successful fathoming of their significance.

For the dialectical intellect is not a sufficient judge of essential or
spiritual truths ; moreover, very often, by its propensity to deal with words
and abstract ideas as if they were binding realities, it wears them as chains
and does not look freely beyond them to the essential and total facts of
our existence. Intellectual statement is an account to our intelligence and
a justification by reasoning of a seeing of things which pre-exists in our
turn of mind or temperament or in some tendency of our nature and
" Gita.

THE KNOWLEDGE AND THE IGNORANCE 441

secretly predetermines the very reasoning that claims to lead to it. That
reasoning itself can be conclusive only if the perception of things on
which it rests is both a true and a whole seeing. Here what we have to
see truly and integrally is the nature and validity of our consciousness,
the origin and scope of our mentality; for then alone can we know the
truth of our being and nature and of world-being and world-nature. Our
principle in such an inquiry must be to see and know; the dialectical in-
tellect is to be used only so far as it helps to clarify our arrangement and
justify our expression of the vision and the knowledge, but it cannot be
allowed to govern our conceptions and exclude truth that does not fall
within the rigid frame of its logic. Illusion, knowledge and ignorance
are terms or results of our consciousness, and it is only by looking deeply
into our consciousness that we can discover and determine the character
and relations of the Knowledge and the Ignorance or of the Illusion, if it
exists, and the Reality. Being is no doubt the fundamental object of in-
quiry, things in themselves and things in their nature; but it is only
through consciousness that we can approach Being. Or if it be maintained
that we can only reach Being, enter into the Real, because it is su-
perconscient, through extinction or transcendence of consciousness or
through its self-transcendence and self-transformation, it is still through
consciousness that we must arrive at the knowledge of this necessity and
the process or power of execution of this extinction or this self-transcend-
ence, this transformation: then, through consciousness, to know of the
Superconscient Truth becomes the supreme need and to discover the
power and process of consciousness by which it can pass into super-
conscience, the supreme discovery.

But in ourselves consciousness seems to be identical with Mind; in
any case Mind is so dominant a factor of our being that to examine
its fundamental movements is the first necessity. In fact, however, mind
is not the whole of us; there is also in us a life and a body, a subcon-
science and an inconscience ; there is a spiritual entity whose origin and
secret truth carry us into an occult inward consciousness and a super-
conscience. If Mind were all or if the nature of the original Consciousness
in things were of the nature of Mind, Illusion or Ignorance might con-
ceivably be regarded as the source of our natural existence: for limita-
tion of knowledge and obscuration of knowledge by Mind-nature create
error and illusion, illusions created by Mind-action are among the first
facts of our consciousness. It might therefore be conceivably held that

442 THE LIFE DIVINE

Mind is the matrix of an Ignorance which makes us create or represent
to ourselves a false world, a world that is nothing more than a subjective
construction of the consciousness. Or else Mind might be the matrix
in which some original Illusion or Ignorance, Maya or Avidya, cast the
seed of a false impermanent universe; Mind would still be the mother, — a.
"barren mother" since the child would be unreal, — and Maya or Avidya
could be looked at as a sort of grandmother of the universe ; for Mind it-
self would be a production or reproduction of Maya. But it is difficult to
discern the physiognomy of this obscure and enigmatic ancestress ; for we
have then to impose a cosmic imagination or an illusion-consciousness on
the eternal Reality; Brahman the Reality must itself either be or have or
support a constructing Mind or some constructive consciousness greater
than Mind but of an analogous nature, must be by its activity or its sanc-
tion the creator and even perhaps in some sort by participation a victim,
like Mind, of its own illusion and error. It would not be less perplexing
if Mind were simply a medium or mirror in which there falls the reflec-
tion of an original illusion or a false image or shadow of the Reality. For
the origin of this medium of reflection would be inexplicable and the ori-
gin also of the false image cast upon it would be inexplicable. An indeter-
minable Brahman could only be reflected as something indeterminable,
not as a manifold universe. Or if it be the inequality of the reflecting
medium, its nature as of rippling and restless water that creates broken
images of the Reality, still it would be broken and distorted reflections
of the Truth that would appear there, not a pullulation of false names
and images of things that had no source or basis of existence in the
Reality. There must be some manifold truth of the one Reality which is
reflected, however falsely or imperfectly, in the manifold images of the
mind's universe. It could then very well be that the world might be a
reality and only the mind's construction of it or picture of it erroneous or
imperfect. But this would imply that there is a Knowledge, other than
our mental thought and perception which is only an attempt at knowing,
a true cognition which is aware of the Reality and aware also in it of the
truth of a real universe.

For if we found that the highest Reality and an ignorant Mind
alone exist, we might have no choice but to admit the Ignorance as an
original power of the Brahman and to accept as the source of all things
Avidya or Maya. Maya would be an eternal power of the self-aware
Brahman to delude itself or rather to delude something that seems to be
itself, something created by Maya; Mind would be the ignorant con-

THE KNOWLEDGE AND THE IGNORANCE 443

sciousness of a soul that exists only as a part of Maya. Maya would be
the Brahman's power to foist name and form upon itself. Mind its power
to receive them and take them for realities. Or Maya would be Brah-
man's power to create illusions knowing them to be illusions, Mind its
power to receive illusions forgetting that they are illusions. But if Brah-
man is essentially and always one in self-awareness, this trick would not
be possible. If Brahman can divide itself in that fashion, at once know-
ing and not knowing or one part knowing and the other not knowing, or
even if it can put something of itself into Maya, then Brahman must be
capable of a double — or a manifold — action of consciousness, one a
consciousness of Reality, the other a consciousness of illusion, or one an
ignorant consciousness and the other a superconscience. This duality or
manifoldness seems at first sight logically impossible, yet it must be on
this hypothesis the crucial fact of existence, a spiritual mystery, a
suprarational paradox. But once we admit the origin of things as a
suprarational mystery, we can equally or preferably accept this other
crucial fact of the One becoming or being always many and the Many
being or becoming the One; this too is at first view dialectically impos-
sible, a suprarational paradox, yet it presents itself to us as an eternal
fact and law of existence. But if that is accepted, there is then no longer
any need for the intervention of an illusive Maya. Or, equally, we can
accept, as we have accepted, the conception of an Infinite and Eternal
which is capable, by the infinite power of its consciousness, of manifest-
ing the fathomless and illimitable Truth of its being in many aspects and
processes, in innumerable expressive forms and movements; these as-
pects, processes, forms, movements could be regarded as real expressions,
real consequences of its infinite Reality; even the Inconscience and Ig-
norance could then be accepted among them as reverse aspects, as powers
of an involved consciousness and a self-limited knowledge brought for-
ward because necessary to a certain movement in Time, a movement of
involution and evolution of the Reality. If suprarational in its basis,
this total conception is not altogether a paradox; it only demands a
change, an enlargement in our conceptions of the Infinite.

But the real world cannot be known and none of these possibilities
can be put to the test if we consider Mind alone or only Mind's power
for ignorance. Mind has a power also for truth; it opens its thought-
chamber to Vidya as well as to Avidya, and if its starting-point is Igno-
rance, if its passage is through crooked ways of error, still its goal is
always Knowledge: there is in it an impulse of truth-seeking, a power —

444 THE LIFE DIVINE

even though secondary and limited — of truth-finding and truth-creation.
Even if it is only images or representations or abstract expressions of
truth that it can show us, still these are in their own manner truth-
reflections or truth-fomations, and the realities of which they are forms
are present in their more concrete truth in some deeper depth or on some
higher level of power of our consciousness. Matter and life may be the
form of realities of which Mind touches only an incomplete figure; Spirit
may have secret and supernal realities of which Mind is only a partial
and rudimentary receiver, transcriber or transmitter. It would then be
only by an examination of other supramental and inframental as well
as higher and deeper mental powers of consciousness that we can arrive
at the whole reality. And in the end all depends on the truth of the
supreme Consciousness — or the superconscience — that belongs to the
highest Reality and the relation to it of Mind, Supermind, Infra-Mind
and the Inconscience.

All indeed changes when we penetrate the lower and the higher
depths of consciousness and unite them in the one omnipresent Reality.
If we take the facts of our and the world's being, we find existence to be
one always, — a unity governs even its utmost multiplicity; but the mul-
tiplicity is also on the face of things undeniable. We have found unity
pursuing us everywhere: even, when we go below the surface, we find
that there is no binding dualism; the contradictories and oppositions
which the intellect creates exist only as aspects of the original Truth;
oneness and multiplicity are poles of the same Reality; the dualities that
trouble our consciousness are contrasted truths of one and the same
Truth of being. All multiplicity resolves itself into a manifoldness of the
one Being, the one Consciousness of Being, the one Delight of Being.
Thus in the duality of pleasure and pain, we have seen that pain is a
contrary effect of the one delight of existence resulting from the weak-
ness of the recipient, his inability to assimilate the force that meets him,
his incapacity to bear the touch of delight that would otherwise be felt
in it; it is a perverse reaction of Consciousness to Ananda, not itself a
fundamental opposite of Ananda: this is shown by the significant fact
that pain can pass into pleasure and pleasure into pain and both resolve
into the original Ananda. So too every form of weakness is really a par-
ticular working of the one divine Will-Force or the one Cosmic Energy;
weakness in that Force means its power to hold back, measure, relate in
a particular way its action of Force ; incapacity or weakness is the Self's

THE KNOWLEDGE AND THE IGNORANCE 445

withholding of its force-completeness or an insufficient reaction of Force,
not its fundamental opposite. If this is so, then also it may be, and
should be in the nature of things, that what we call Ignorance is not
really anything else than a power of the one divine Knowledge-Will or
Maya ; it is the capacity of the One Consciousness similarly to regulate,
to hold back, measure, relate in a particular way the action of its Knowl-
edge. Knowledge and Ignorance will then be, not two irreconcilable
principles, one creative of world-existence, the other intolerant and
destructive of it, but two co-existent powers both present in the universe
itself, diversely operating in the conduct of its processes but one in their
essence and able to pass by a natural transmutation into each other. But
in their fundamental relation Ignorance would not be an equal co-exist-
ent, it would be dependent on Knowledge, a limitation or a contrary
action of Knowledge.

To know, we have always to dissolve the rigid constructions of the
ignorant and self-willed intellect and look freely and flexibly at the facts
of existence. Its fundamental fact is consciousness which is power, and
we actually see that this power has three ways operating. First, we find
that there is a consciousness behind all, embracing all, within all, which
is eternally, universally, absolutely aware of itself whether in unity or
multiplicity or in both simultaneously or beyond both in its sheer abso-
lute. This is the plenitude of the supreme divine self-knowledge; it is
also the plenitude of the divine all-knowledge. Next, at the other pole
of things, we see this consciousness dwelling upon apparent oppositions
in itself, and the most extreme antinomy of all reaches its acme in what
seems to us to be a complete nescience of itself, an effective, dynamic,
creative Inconscience, though we know that this is merely a surface
appearance and that the divine Knowledge works with a sovereign se-
curity and sureness within the operations of the Inconscient. Between
these two oppositions and as a mediary term we see Consciousness work-
ing with a partial, limited self-awareness which is equally superficial,
for behind it and acting through it is the divine All- Knowledge. Here in
its intermediate status, it seems to be a standing compromise between
the two opposites, between the supreme Consciousness and the Nescience,
but may prove rather in a larger view of our data to be an incomplete
emergence of the Knowledge to the surface. This compromise or imper-
fect emergence we call the Ignorance, from our own point of view, be-
cause ignorance is our own characteristic way of the soul's self-withhold-

446 THE LIFE DIVINE

ing of complete self-knowledge. The origin of these three poises of the
power of consciousness and their exact relation is what we have, if pos-
sible, to discover.

If we discovered that Ignorance and Knowledge were two independ-
ent powers of Consciousness, it might then be that we would have to
pursue their difference up to the highest point of Consciousness where
they would cease only in an Absolute from which both of them had
issued together.^* It might then be concluded that the only real knowl-
edge is the truth of the superconscient Absolute and that truth of con-
sciousness, truth of cosmos, truth of ourselves in cosmos is at best a
partial figure burdened always with a concomitant presence, an encir-
cling penumbra, a pursuing shadow of Ignorance. It might even be that
an absolute Knowledge establishing truth, harmony, order and an abso-
lute Inconscience basing a play of fantasy, disharmony and disorder,
supporting inexorably its extreme of falsehood, wrong and suffering, a
Manichean double principle of conflicting and intermingling light and
darkness, good and evil, stand at the root of cosmic existence. The idea
of certain thinkers that there is an absolute good but also an absolute
evil, both of them an approach to the Absolute, might assume consistence.
But if we find that Knowledge and Ignorance are light and shadow of
the same consciousness, that the beginning of Ignorance is a limitation
of Knowledge, that it is the limitation that opens the door to a subordi-
nate possibility of partial illusion and error, that this possibility takes
full body after a purposeful plunge of Knowledge into a material In-
conscience but that Knowledge too emerges along with an emerging
Consciousness out of the Inconscience, then we can be sure that this
fullness of Ignorance is by its own evolution changing back into a lim-
ited Knowledge and can feel the assurance that the limitation itself will
be removed and the full truth of things become apparent, the cosmic
Truth free itself from the cosmic Ignorance. In fact, what is happening
is that the Ignorance is seeking and preparing to transform itself by a
progressive illumination of its darknesses into the Knowledge that is
already concealed within it; the cosmic truth manifested in its real
essence and figure would by that transformation reveal itself as essence
and figure of the supreme omnipresent Reality. It is from this interpreta-

" In the Upanishads Vidya and Avidya are spoken of as eternal in the supreme
Brahman; but this can be accepted in the sense of the consciousness of the multi-
plicity and the consciousness of the Oneness which by co-existence in the supreme
self-awareness became the basis of the Manifestation; they would there be two
sides of an eternal self-knowledge.

THE KNOWLEDGE AND THE IGNORANCE 447

tioR of existence that we have started, but to verify it we must observe
the structure of our surface consciousness and its relation to what is
within it and above and below it; for so best we can distinguish the
nature and scope of the Ignorance. In that process there will appear the
nature and scope also of that of which the Ignorance is a limitation and
deformation, the Knowledge, — in its totality the spiritual being's abiding
self-knowledge and world-knowledge.

CHAPTER VIII

MEMORY, SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE IGNORANCE

Some speak of the self-nature of things, others say that
it is Time.

Swetaswatara V panishad}

Two are the forms of Brahman, Time and the Timeless.

Maitri Upanishad?

Night was born and from Night the flowing ocean of
being and on the ocean Time was born to whom is subjected
every seeing creature.

Rig Veda?

Memory is greater: without memory men could think
and know nothing. ... As far as goes the movement of
Memory, there he ranges at will.

Chhandogya Upanishad.*

This is he who is that which sees, touches, hears, smells,
tastes, thinks, understands, acts in us, a conscious being, a
self of knowledge.

Prasna Vpanishad?

IN ANY survey of the dual character of our consciousness we have
first to look at the Ignorance, — for Ignorance trying to turn into
Knowledge is our normal status. To begin with, it is necessary to con-
sider some of the essential movements of this partial awareness of self
and things which works in us as a mediator between the complete self-
knowledge and all-knowledge and the complete Inconscience, and, from
that starting-point, find its relation to the greater Consciousness below
our surface. There is a line of thought in which great stress is laid upon
the action of memory: it has even been said that Memory is the man, — ■
it is memory that constitutes our personality and holds cemented the
foundation of our psychological being; for it links together our experi-
ences and relates them to one and the same individual entity. This is an
idea which takes its stand on our existence in the succession of Time
and accepts process as the key to essential Truth, even when it does not
regard the whole of existence as process or as cause and effect in the

^VI. I. =^VI. IS. «X. 190. I, 2. *VII. 13. 'IV. 9.

448

MEMORY, SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE IGNORANCE 449

development of some kind of self-regulating Energy, as Karma. But
process is merely a utility; it is a habitual adoption of certain effective
relations which might in the infinite possibility of things have been
arranged otherwise, for the production of effects which might equally
have been quite different. The real truth of things lies not in their
process, but behind it, in whatever determines, effects or governs the
process ; not in effectuation so much as in the Will or Power that effects,
and not so much in Will or Power as in the Consciousness of which Will
is the dynamic form and in the Being of which Power is the dynamic
value. But memory is only a process of consciousness, a utility ; it cannot
be the substance of being or the whole of our personality: it is simply
one of the workings of consciousness as radiation is one of the workings
of Light. It is Self that is the man: or, if we regard only our normal
surface existence. Mind is the man, — for man is the mental being. Mem-
ory is only one of the many powers and processes of the Mind, which is
at present the chief action of Consciousness-Force in our dealings with
self, world and Nature.

Nevertheless, it is as well to begin with this phenomenon of memory
when we consider the nature of the Ignorance in which we dwell; for it
may give the key to certain important aspects of our conscious existence.
We see that there are two applications which the mind makes of its
faculty or process of memory, memory of self, memory of experience.
First, radically, it applies memory to the fact of our conscious-being and
relates that to Time. It says, "I am now, I was in the past, I shall there-
fore be in the future, it is the same I in all the three ever unstable divi-
sions of Time." Thus it tries to render to itself in the terms of Time an
account of that which it feels to be the fact, but cannot know or prove
to be true, the eternity of the conscious being. By memory Mind can
only know of itself in the past, by direct self-awareness only in the
moment of the present, and it is only by extension of and inference from
this self-awareness and from the memory which tells us that for some
time awareness has been continuously existent that mind can conceive
of itself in the future. The extent of the past and the future it cannot
fix; it can only carry back the past to the limit of its memory and infer
from the evidence of others and the facts of life it observes around it
that the conscious being already was in times which it can no longer
remember. It knows that it existed in an infant unreasoning state of the
mind to which memory has lost its link ; whether it existed before physi-
cal birth, the mortal mind owing to the gap of memory cannot determine.

450 THE LIFE DIVINE

Of the future it knows nothing at all ; of its existing in the next moment
it can only have a moral certainty which some happening of that moment
can prove to be an error because what it saw was no more than a domi-
nant probability; much less can it know whether or no physical dissolu-
tion is the end of the conscious being. Yet it has this sense of a persistent
continuity which easily extends itself into a conviction of eternity.

This conviction may be either the reflection in the mind of an end-
less past which it has forgotten but of which something in it retains the
formless impression, or it may be the shadow of a self-knowledge which
comes to the mind from a higher or a deeper plane of our being where we
are really aware of our eternal self-existence. Or, conceivably, it might
be a hallucination; just as we cannot sense or realise in our foreseeing
consciousness the fact of death and can only live in the feeling of con-
tinued existence, cessation being to us an intellectual conception we
can hold with certainty, even imagine with vividness, but never actually
realise because we live only in the present, yet death, cessation or in-
terruption at least of our actual mode of being is a fact and the sense
or prevision of continued existence in the future in the physical body
becomes beyond a point we cannot now fix a hallucination, a false exten-
sion or a misapplication of our present mental impression of conscious
being, — so conceivably it might be with this mental idea or impression
of conscious eternity. Or it might be a false transference to ourselves
of the perception of a real eternity conscient or inconscient other than
ourselves, the eternity of the universe or of something which exceeds the
universe. The mind seizing this fact of eternity may falsely transfer it
to our own conscious being which may be nothing more than a transient
phenomenon of that only true eternal.

These questions our surface mind by itself has no means of solving;
it can only speculate upon them endlessly and arrive at more or less well-
reasoned opinions. The belief in our immortality is only a faith, the
belief in our mortality is only a faith. It is impossible for the materialist
to prove that our consciousness ends with the death of the body; for he
may indeed show that there is as yet no convincing proof that anything
in us consciously survives, but equally there is and there can be in the
nature of things no proof that our conscious self does not outlast the
physical dissolution. Survival of the body by the human personality may
hereafter be proved even to the satisfaction of the sceptic; but even then
what will be established will only be a greater continuity and not the
eternity of the conscious being.

MEMORY, SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE IGNORANCE 45 1

In fact, if we look at the mind's concept of this eternity, we see that
it comes only to a continuous succession of moments of being in an
eternal Time. Therefore it is Time that is eternal and not the continu-
ously momentary conscious being. But, on the other hand, there is noth-
ing in mind-evidence to show that eternal Time really exists or that
Time itself is anything more than the conscious being's way of looking
at some uninterrupted continuity or, it may be, eternity of existence as
an indivisible flow which it conceptually measures by the successions
and simultaneities of the experiences through which alone that existence
is represented to it. If there is an eternal Existence which is a conscious
being, it must be beyond Time which it contains, timeless as we say ; it
must be the Eternal of the Vedanta who, we may then conjecture, uses
Time only as a conceptual perspective for His view of His self-manifesta-
tion. But the timeless self-knowledge of this Eternal is beyond mind;
it is a supramental knowledge superconscient to us and only to be ac-
quired by the stilling or transcending of the temporal activity of our
conscious mind, by an entry into Silence or a passage through Silence
into the consciousness of eternity.

From all this the one great fact emerges that the very nature of our
mind is Ignorance; not an absolute nescience, but a limited and condi-
tioned knowledge of being, limited by a realisation of its present, a
memory of its past, an inference of its future, conditioned therefore by a
temporal and successive view of itself and its experiences. If real exist-
ence is a temporal eternity, then the mind has not the knowledge of real
being: for even its own past it loses in the vague of oblivion except for
the little that memory holds; it has no possession of its future which is
withheld from it in a great blank of ignorance ; it has only a knowledge
of its present changing from moment to moment in a helpless succession
of names, forms, happenings, the march or flux of a cosmic kinesis which
is too vast for its control or its comprehension. On the other hand, if real
existence is a time-transcending eternity, the mind is still more ignorant
of it; for it only knows the little of it that it can itself seize from moment
to moment by fragmentary experience of its surface self-manifestation in
Time and Space.

If, then, mind is all or if the apparent mind in us is the index of the
nature of our being, we can never be anything more than an Ignorance
fleeting through Time and catching at knowledge in a most scanty and
fragmentary fashion. But if there is a power of self-knowledge beyond
mind which is timeless in essence and can look on Time, perhaps with

452 THE LIFE DIVINE

a simultaneous all-relating view of past, present and future, but in any
case as a circumstance of its own timeless being, then we have two pow-
ers of consciousness, Knowledge and Ignorance, the Vedantic Vidya and
Avidya. These two must be, then, either different and unconnected pow-
ers, separately born as well as diverse in their action, separately self-
existent in an eternal dualism, or else, if there is a connection between
them, it must be this that consciousness as Knowledge knows its timeless
self and sees Time within itself, while consciousness as Ignorance is a
partial and superficial action of the same Knowledge which sees rather
itself in Time, veiling itself in its own conception of temporal being, and
can only by the removal of the veil return to eternal self-knowledge.

For it would be irrational to suppose that the superconscient Knowl-
edge is so aloof and separate as to be incapable of knowing Time and
Space and Causality and their works; for then it would be only another
kind of Ignorance, the blindness of the absolute being answering to the
blindness of the temporal being as positive pole and negative pole of a
conscious existence which is incapable of knowing all itself, but either
knows only itself and does not know its works or knows only its works
and does not know itself, — an absurdly symmetrical equipollence in
mutual rejection. From the larger point of view, the ancient Vedantic,
we must conceive of ourselves not as a dual being, but as one conscious
existence with a double phase of consciousness: one of them is conscient
or partly conscient in our mind, the other superconscient to mind; one,
a knowledge situated in Time, works under its conditions and for that
purpose puts its self-knowledge behind it, the other, timeless, works out
with mastery and knowledge its own self-determined conditions of Time;
one knows itself only by its growth in Time-experience, the other knows
its timeless self and consciously manifests itself in Time-experience.

We realise now what the Upanishad meant when it spoke of Brah-
man as being both the Knowledge and the Ignorance and of the simul-
taneous knowledge of Brahman in both as the way to immortality.
Knowledge is the inherent power of consciousness of the timeless, space-
less, unconditioned Self which shows itself in its essence as a unity of
being; it is this consciousness that alone is real and complete knowledge
because it is an eternal transcendence which is not only self-aware but
holds in itself, manifests, originates, determines, knows the temporally
eternal successions of the universe. Ignorance is the consciousness of
being in the successions of Time, divided in its knowledge by dwelling
in the moment, divided in its conception of self-being by dwelling in the

MEMORY, SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE IGNORANCE 453

divisions of Space and the relations of circumstance, self-prisoned in the
multiple working of the unity. It is called the Ignorance because it has
put behind it the knowledge of unity and by that very fact is unable
to know truly or completely either itself or the world, either the tran-
scendent or the universal reality. Living within the Ignorance, from
moment to moment, from field to field, from relation to relation, the
conscious soul stumbles on in the error of a fragmentary knowledge.*^
It is not a nescience, but a view and experience of the reality which is
partly true and partly false, as all knowledge must be which ignores the
essence and sees only fugitive parts of the phenomenon. On the other
hand, to be shut up in a featureless consciousness of unity, ignorant of
the manifest Brahman, is described as itself also a blind darkness. In
truth, neither is precisely darkness, but one is the dazzling by a concen-
trated Light, the other the illusive proportions of things seen in a dis-
persed, hazy and broken light, half mist, half seeing. The divine con-
sciousness is not shut up in either, but holds the immutable One and
the mutable Many in one eternal all-relating, all-uniting self-knowledge.
Memory, in the dividing consciousness, is a crutch upon which
mind supports itself as it stumbles on driven helplessly, without possi-
bility of stay or pause, in the rushing speed of Time. Memory is a
poverty-stricken substitute for an integral direct abiding consciousness
of self and a direct integral or global perception of things. Mind can
only have the direct consciousness of self in the moment of its present
being; it can only have some half-direct perception of things as they are
offered to it in the present moment of time and the immediate field of
space and seized by the senses. It makes up for its deficiency by mem-
ory, imagination, thought, idea-symbols of various kinds. Its senses are
devices by which it lays hold on the appearance of things in the present
moment and in the immediate space; memory, imagination, thought are
devices by which it represents to itself, still less directly, the appearances
of things beyond the present moment and the immediate space. The one
thing which is not a device is its direct self-consciousness in the present
moment. Therefore through that it can most easily lay hold on the fact
of eternal being, on the reality; all the rest it is tempted, when it con-
siders things narrowly, to look on not merely as phenomenon, but as,

° avidydydm antare vartamdndh jahghanyamdndh pariyanti mudhdh

andhenaiva nlyamdndh yathdndhdh. "Living and mo\'ing within the Ignorance,
they go round and round stumbling and battered, men deluded, like the blind led
by one who is blind." — Mundaka Upanishad, I. 2. 8.

454 THE LIFE DIVINE

possibly, error, ignorance, illusion, because they no longer appear to it
directly real. So the Illusionist considers them; the only thing he holds
to be truly real is that eternal self which lies behind the mind's direct
present self-consciousness. Or else, like the Buddhist, one comes to re-
gard even that eternal self as an illusion, a representation, a subjective
image, a mere imagination or false sensation and false idea of being.
Mind becomes to its own view a fantastic magician, its works and itself
at once strangely existent and non-existent, a persistent reality and yet
a fleeting error which it accounts for or does not account for, but in any
case is determined to slay and get done with both itself and its works
so that it may rest, may cease in the timeless repose of the Eternal from
the vain representation of appearances.

But, in truth, our sharp distinctions made between the without and
the within, the present and the past self-consciousness are tricks of the
limited unstable action of mind. Behind the mind and using it as its own
surface activity there is a stable consciousness in which there is no bind-
ing conceptual division between itself in the present and itself in the
past and future; and yet it knows itself in Time, in the present, past
and future, but at once, with an undivided view which embraces all the
mobile experiences of the Time-self and holds them on the foundation
of the immobile timeless self. This consciousness we can become aware
of when we draw back from the mind and its activities or when these fall
silent. But we see first its immobile status, and if we regard only the
immobility of the self, we may say of it that it is not only timeless, but
actionless, without movement of idea, thought, imagination, memory,
will, self-sufficient, self-absorbed and therefore void of all action of the
universe. That then becomes alone real to us and the rest a vain sym-
bolising in non-existent forms — or forms corresponding to nothing truly
existent — and therefore a dream. But this self-absorption is only an act
and resultant state of our consciousness, just as much as was the self-
dispersion in thought and memory and will. The real self is the eternal
who is obviously capable of both the mobility in Time and the im-
mobility basing Time, — simultaneously, otherwise they could not both
exist; nor, even, could one exist and the other create seemings. This is
the supreme Soul, Self and Being"^ of the Gita who upholds both the
immobile and the mobile being as the self and lord of all existence.

So far we arrive by considering mind and memory mainly in regard
''para purusa, paramdtman, parabrahman.

MEMORY, SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE IGNORANCE 455

to the primary phenomenon of mental self-consciousness in Time. But
if we consider them with regard to self -experience as well as conscious-
ness and other-experience as well as self-experience, we shall find that
we arrive at the same result with richer contents and a still clearer light
on the nature of the Ignorance. At present, let us thus express what we
have seen, — an eternal conscious being who supports the mobile action
of mind on a stable immobile self-consciousness free from the action of
Time and who, while with a knowledge superior to mind he embraces all
the movement of Time, dwells by the action of mind in that movement.
As the surface mental entity moving from moment to moment, not ob-
serving his essential self but only his relation to his experiences of the
Time-movement, in that movement keeping the future from himself in
what appears to be a blank of Ignorance and non-existence but is an
unrealised fullness, grasping knowledge and experience of being in the
present, putting it away in the past which again appears to be a blank
of Ignorance and non-existence partly lighted, partly saved and stored
up by memory, he puts on the aspect of a thing fleeting and uncertain
seizing without stability upon things fleeting and uncertain. But in
reality we shall find, he is always the same Eternal who is for ever stable
and self-possessed in His supramental knowledge and what he seizes on
is also for ever stable and eternal; for it is himself that he is mentally
experiencing in the succession of Time.

Time is the great bank of conscious existence turned into values of
experience and action: the surface mental being draws upon the past
(and the future also) and coins it continually into the present; he ac-
counts for and stores up the gains he has gathered in what we call the
past, not knowing how ever-present is the past in us; he uses as much
of it as he needs as coin of knowledge and realised being and pays it out
as coin of mental, vital and physical action in the commerce of the pres-
ent which creates to his view the new wealth of the future. Ignorance is
a utilisation of the Being's self-knowledge in such a way as to make it
valuable for Time-experience and valid for Time-activity; what we do
not know is what we have not yet taken up, coined and used in our
mental experience or have ceased to coin or use. Behind, all is known
and all is ready for use according to the will of the Self in its dealings
with Time and Space and Causality. One might almost say that our
surface being is only the deeper eternal Self in us throwing itself out as
the adventurer in Time, a gambler and speculator in infinite possibilities,

456 THE LIFE DIVINE

limiting itself to the succession of moments so that it may have all the
surprise and delight of the adventure, keeping back its self-knowledge
and complete self-being so that it may win again what it seems to have
lost, reconquering all itself through the chequered joy and pain of an
aeonic passion and seeking and endeavour.

CHAPTER IX

MEMORY, EGO AND SELF-EXPERIENCE

Here this God, the Mind, in its dream experiences again
and again what once was experienced, what has been seen
and what has not been seen, what has been heard and what
has not been heard; what has been experienced and what
has not been experienced, what is and what is not, all it
sees, it is all and sees.

Prasna Upanishad}

To dwell in our true being is liberation; the sense of
ego is a fall from the truth of our being.

Mahopanishad.^

One in many births, a single ocean holder of all streams
of movement, sees our hearts.

Rig Veda?

THE direct self-consciousness of the mental being, that by which
it becomes aware of its own nameless and formless existence be-
hind the flow of a differentiated self-experience, of its eternal soul-
substance behind the mental formations of that substance, of its self
behind the ego, goes behind mentality to the timelessness of an eternal
present; it is that in it which is ever the same and unaffected by the
mental distinction of past, present and future. It is also unaffected by
the distinctions of space or of circumstance; for if the mental being
ordinarily says of itself, "I am in the body, I am here, I am there, I
shall be elsewhere," yet when it learns to fix itself in this direct self-
consciousness, it very soon perceives that this is the language of its
changing self-experience which only expresses the relations of its surface
consciousness to the environment and to externalities. Distinguishing
these, detaching itself from these, it perceives that the self of which it is
directly conscious does not in any way change by these outward changes,
but is always the same, unaffected by the mutations of the body or of
the mentality or of the field in which these move and act. It is in its
essence featureless, relationless, without any other character than that
of pure conscious existence self-sufficient and eternally satisfied with

'IV. 5. ^V. 2. ^X. s. I.

457

458 THE LIFE DIVINE

pure being, self-blissful. Thus we become aware of the stable Self, the
eternal "Am," or rather the immutable "Is" without any category of
personality or Time.

But this consciousness of Self, as it is timeless, so is capable also
of freely regarding Time as a thing reflected in it and as either the cause
or the subjective field of a changing experience. It is then the eternal
"I am," the unchanging consciousness on whose surface changes of con-
scious experience occur in the process of Time. The surface conscious-
ness is constantly adding to its experience or rejecting from its experi-
ence, and by every addition it is modified and by every rejection also it
is modified; although that deeper self which supports and contains this
mutation remains unmodified, the outer or superficial self is constantly
developing its experience so that it can never say of itself absolutely,
"I am the same that I was a moment ago." Those who live in this surface
Time-self and have not the habit of drawing back inward towards the
immutable or the capacity of dwelling in it, are even incapable of think-
ing of themselves apart from this ever self-modifying mental experience.
That is for them their self and it is easy for them, if they look with
detachment at its happenings, to agree with the conclusion of the Bud-
dhist Nihilists that this self is in fact nothing but a stream of idea and
experience and mental action, the persistent flame which is yet never
the same flame, and to conclude that there is no such thing as a real self,
but only a flow of experience and behind it Nihil: there is experience of
knowledge without a Knower, experience of being without an Existent;
there are simply a number of elements, parts of a flux without a real
whole, which combine to create the iflusion of a Knower and Knowledge
and the Known, the illusion of an Existent and existence and the experi-
ence of existence. Or they can conclude that Time is the only real exist-
ence and they themselves are its creatures. This conclusion of an illusory
existent in a real or unreal world is as inevitable to this kind of with-
drawal as is the opposite conclusion of a real Existence but an illusory
world to the thinker who, dwelling on the immobile self, observes every-
thing else as a mutable not-self ; he comes eventually to regard the latter
as the result of a deluding trick of consciousness.

But let us look a little at this surface consciousness without theoris-
ing, studying it only in its facts. We see it first as a purely subjective
phenomenon. There is a constant rapid shifting of Time-point which it
is impossible to arrest for a moment. There is a constant changing, even
when there is no shifting of Space-circumstance, a change both in the

MEMORY, EGO AND SELF-EXPERIENCE 459

body or form of itself which the consciousness directly inhabits and the
environing body or form of things in which it less directly lives. It is
equally affected by both, though more vividly, because directly, by the
smaller than by the larger habitation, by its own body than by the body
of the world, because only of the changes in its own body is it directly
conscious and of the body of the world only indirectly through the senses
and the effects of the macrocosm on the microcosm. This change of the
body and the surroundings is not so insistently obvious or not so obvi-
ously rapid as the swift mutation of Time; yet it is equally real from
moment to moment and equally impossible to arrest. But we see that
the mental being only regards all this mutation so far as it produces
effects upon its own mental consciousness, generates impressions and
changes in its mental experience and mental body, because only through
the mind can it be aware of its changing physical habitation and its
changing world-experience. Therefore there is, as well as a shifting or
change of Time-point and Space-field, a constant modifying change of
the sum of circumstances experienced in Time and Space and as the
result a constant modification of the mental personality which is the
form of our superficial or apparent self. All this change of circumstance
is summed up in philosophical language as causality; for in this stream
of the cosmic movement the antecedent state seems to be the cause of
a subsequent state, or else this subsequent state seems to be the result
of a previous action of persons, objects or forces: yet in fact what we
call cause may very well be only circumstance. Thus the mind has over
and above its direct self-consciousness a more or less indirect mutable
self-experience which it divides into two parts, its subjective experience
of the ever-modified mental states of its personality and its objective
experience of the ever-changing environment which seems partly or
wholly to cause and is yet at the same time itself affected by the work-
ings of that personality. But all this experience is at bottom subjective ;
for even the objective and external is only known to mind in the form
of subjective impressions.

Here the part played by Memory increases greatly in importance;
for while all that it can do for the mind with regard to its direct self-
consciousness is to remind it that it existed and was the same in the past
as in the present, it becomes in our differentiated or surface self-experi-
ence an important power linking together past and present experiences,
past and present personality, preventing chaos and dissociation and
assuring the continuity of the stream in the surface mind. Still even here

460 THE LIFE DIVINE

we must not exaggerate the function of memory or ascribe to it that
part of the operations of consciousness which really belongs to the activ-
ity of other power-aspects of the mental being. It is not the memory
alone which constitutes the ego-sense; memory is only a mediator be-
tween the sense-mind and the co-ordinating intelligence: it offers to the
intelligence the past data of experience which the mind holds somewhere
within but cannot carry with it in its running from moment to moment
on the surface.

A little analysis will make this apparent. We have in all function-
ings of the mentality four elements, the object of mental consciousness,
the act of mental consciousness, the occasion and the subject. In the
self-experience of the self-observing inner being, the object is always
some state or movement or wave of the conscious being, anger, grief or
other emotion, hunger or other vital craving, impulse or inner life reac-
tion or some form of sensation, perception or thought activity. The act is
some kind of mental observation and conceptual valuation of this move-
ment or wave or else a mental sensation of it in which observation and
valuation may be involved and even lost, — so that in this act the mental
person may either separate the act and the object by a distinguishing
perception or confuse them together indistinguishably. That is to say,
he may either simply become a movement, let us put it, of angry con-
sciousness, not at all standing back from that activity, not reflecting or
observing himself, not controlling the feeling or the accompanying action,
or he may observe what he becomes and reflect on it, with this seeing or
perception in his mind "I am angry." In the former case the subject or
mental person, the act of conscious self-experience and the substantial
angry becoming of the mind which is the object of the self-experience,
are all rolled up into one wave of conscious-force in movement; but in
the latter there is a certain rapid analysis of its constituents and the act
of self-experience partly detaches itself from the object. Thus by this
act of partial detachment we are able not only to experience ourselves
dynamically in the becoming, in the process of movement of conscious-
force itself, but to stand back, perceive and observe ourselves and, if the
detachment is sufficient, to control our feeling and action, control to
some extent our becoming.

However, there is usually a defect even in this act of self-observa-
tion; for there is indeed a partial detachment of the act from the object,
but not of the mental person from the mental act: the mental person
and the mental action are involved or rolled up in each other ; nor is the

MEMORY, EGO AND SELF-EXPERIENCE 46 1

mental person sufficiently detached or separated either from the emo-
tional becoming. I am aware of myself in an angry becoming of my
conscious stuff of being and in a thought-perception of this becoming:
but all thought-perception also is a becoming and not myself, and this
I do not yet sufficiently realise; I am identified with my mental activities
or involved in them, not free and separate. I do not yet directly become
aware of myself apart from my becomings and my perception of them,
apart from the forms of active consciousness which I assume in the
waves of the sea of conscious force which is the stuff of my mental and
life nature. It is when I entirely detach the mental person from his act
of self-experience that I become fully aware first, of the sheer ego and,
in the end, of the witness self or the thinking mental Person, the some-
thing or someone who becomes angry and observes it but is not limited
or determined in his being by the anger or the perception. He is, on the
contrary, a constant factor aware of an unlimited succession of conscious
movements and conscious experiences of movements and aware of his
own being in that succession; but he can be aware of it also behind that
succession, supporting it, containing it, always the same in fact of being
and force of being beyond the changing forms or arrangements of his
conscious force. He is thus the Self that is immutably and at the same
time the Self that becomes eternally in the succession of Time.

It is evident that there are not really two selves, but one conscious
being which throws itself up in the waves of conscious force so as to
experience itself in a succession of changing movements of itself, by
which it is not really changed, increased or diminished, — any more than
the original stuff of Matter or Energy in the material world is increased
or diminished by the constantly changing combinations of the elements,
— although it seems to be changed to the experiencing consciousness so
long as it lives only in the knowledge of the phenomenon and does not
get back to the knowledge of the original being, substance or Force.
When it does get back to that deeper knowledge, it does not condemn
the observed phenomenon as unreal, but it perceives an immutable
being, energy or real substance not phenomenal, not subject in itself to
the senses; it sees at the same time a becoming or real phenomenon of
that being, energy or substance. This becoming we call phenomenon
because, actually, as things are with us now, it manifests itself to the
consciousness under the conditions of sense-perception and sense-relation
and not directly to the consciousness itself in its pure and unconditioned
embracing and totally comprehending knowledge. So with the Self, — it

462 THE LIFE DIVINE

is, immutably, to our direct self-consciousness; it manifests itself muta-
bly in various becomings to the mind-sense and the mental experience —
therefore, as things are with us now, not directly to the pure uncondi-
tioned knowledge of the consciousness, but to it under the conditions of
our mentality.

It is this succession of experiences and it is this fact of an indirect
or secondary action of the experiencing consciousness under the condi-
tions of our mentality that bring in the device of Memory. For a primary
condition of our mentality is division by the moments of Time ; there is
an inability to get its experience or to hold its experiences together except
under the conditions of this self-division by the moments of Time. In
the immediate mental experience of a wave of becoming, a conscious
movement of being, there is no action or need of memory; I become
angry, — it is an act of sensation, not of memory; I observe that I am
angry, — it is an act of perception, not of memory. Memory only comes
in when I begin to relate my experience to the successions of Time, when
I divide my becoming into past, present and future, when I say, "I was
angry a moment ago," or "I have become angry and am still in anger,"
or ''I was angry once and will be again if there is the same occasion."
Memory may indeed come immediately and directly into the becoming,
if the occasion of the movement of consciousness is itself wholly or
partly a thing of the past, — for example, if there is a recurrence of emo-
tion, such as grief or anger, caused by memory of past wrong or suffer-
ing and not by any immediate occasion in the present or else caused by
an immediate occasion reviving the memory of a past occasion. Because
we cannot keep the past in us on the surface of the consciousness, —
though it is always there behind, within, subliminally present and often
even active, — therefore we have to recover it as something that is lost or
is no longer existent, and this we do by that repetitive and linking action
of the thought-mind which we call memory, — ^just as we summon things
which are not within the actual field of our limited superficial mind-
experience by the action of the thought-mind which we call imagination,
that greater power in us and high summoner of all possibilities realisable
or unrealisable into the field of our ignorance.

Memory is not the essence of persistent or continuous experience
even in the succession of Time and would not be necessary at all if our
consciousness were of an undivided movement, if it had not to run from
moment to moment with a loss of direct grasp on the last and an entire
ignorance or non-possession of the next. All experience or substance of

MEMORY, EGO AND SELF-EXPERIENCE 463

becoming in Time is a flowing stream or sea not divided in itself, but
only divided in the observing consciousness by the limited movement of
the Ignorance which has to leap from moment to moment like a dragon-
fly darting about on the surface of the stream: so too all substance of
being in Space is a flowing sea not divided in itself, but only divided in
the observing consciousness because our sense-faculty is limited in its
grasp, can see only a part and is therefore bound to observe forms of
substance as if they were separate things in themselves, independent of
the one substance. There is indeed an arrangement of things in Space
and Time, but no gap or division except to our ignorance, and it is to
bridge the gaps and connect the divisions created by the ignorance of
Mind that we call in the aid of various devices of the mind-conscious-
ness, of which memory is only one device.

There is then in me this flowing stream of the world-sea, and anger
or grief or any other inner movement can occur as a long-continued wave
of the continuous stream. This continuity is not constituted by force of
memory, although memory may help to prolong or repeat the wave when
by itself it would have died away into the stream; the wave simply occurs
and continues as a movement of conscious-force of my being carried
forward by its own original impulsion of disturbance. Memory comes in
to prolong the disturbance by a recurrence of the thinking mind to the
occasion of anger or of the feeling mind to the first impulse of anger by
which it justifies itself in a repetition of the disturbance; otherwise the
perturbation would spend itself and only recur when the occasion itself
was actually repeated. The natural recurrence of the wave, the same or
a similar occasion causing the same disturbance, is not any more than
its isolated occurrence a result of memory, although memory may help
to fortify it and make the mind more subject to it. There is rather the
same relation of repeated occasion and repeated result and movement in
the more fluid energy and variable substance of mind as that we see
presented mechanically by the repetition of the same cause and effect in
the less variable operations of the energy and substance of the material
world. We may say, if we like, that there is a subconscious memory in
all energy of Nature which repeats invariably the same relation of energy
and result ; but then we enlarge illimitably the connotation of the word.
In reality, we can only state a law of repetition in the action of the waves
of conscious-force by which it regularises these movements of its own
substance. Memory, properly speaking, is merely the device by which
the witnessing Mind helps itself to link together these movements and

464 THE LIFE DIVINE

their occurrence and recurrences in the successions of Time for Time-
experience, for increasing use by a more and more co-ordinating will and
for a constantly developing valuation by a more and more co-ordinating
reason. It is a great, an indispensable but not the only factor in the
process by which the Inconscience from which we start develops full
self-consciousness, and by which the Ignorance of the mental being de-
velops conscious knowledge of itself in its becomings. This development
continues until the co-ordinating mind of knowledge and mind of will are
fully able to possess and use all the material of self-experience. Such at
least is the process of evolution as we see it governing the development
of Mind out of the self-absorbed and apparently mindless energy in the
material world.

The ego-sense is another device of mental Ignorance by which the
mental being becomes aware of himself, — not only of the objects, occa-
sions and acts of his activity, but of that which experiences them. At first
it might seem as if the ego-sense were actually constituted by memory,
as if it were memory that told us, "It is the same I who was angry some
time ago and am again or still angry now." But, in reality, all that the
memory can tell us by its own power is that it is the same limited field of
conscious activity in which the same phenomenon has occurred. What
happens is that there is a repetition of the mental phenomenon, of that
wave of becoming in the mind-substance of which the mind sense is
immediately aware; memory comes in to link these repetitions together
and enables the mind-sense to realise that it is the same mind-substance
which is taking the same dynamic form and the same mind-sense which
is experiencing it. The ego-sense is not a result of memory or built by
memory, but already and always there as a point of reference or as some-
thing in which the mind-sense concentrates itself so as to have a co-
ordinant centre instead of sprawling incoherently all over the field of
experience ; ego-memory reinforces this concentration and helps to main-
tain it, but does not constitute it. Possibly, in the lower animal the sense
of ego, the sense of individuality would not, if analysed, go much farther
than a sensational imprecise or less precise realisation of continuity and
identity and separateness from others in the moments of Time. But in
man there is in addition a co-ordinating mind of knowledge which, basing
itself on the united action of the mind-sense and the memory, arrives at
the distinct idea — while it retains also the first constant intuitive per-
ception— of an ego which senses, feels, remembers, thinks, and which is
the same whether it remembers or does not remember. This conscious

MEMORY, EGO AND SELF-EXPERIENCE 465

mind-substance, it says, is always that of one and the same conscious
person who feels, ceases to feel, remembers, forgets, is superficially con-
scious, sinks back from superficial consciousness into sleep; he is the
same before the organisation of memory and after it, in the infant and
in the dotard, in sleep and in waking, in apparent consciousness and
apparent unconsciousness; he and no other did the acts which he forgets
as well as the acts which he remembers; he is persistently the same
behind all changes of his becoming or his personality. This action of
knowledge in man, this co-ordinating intelligence, this formulation of
self-consciousness and self-experience is higher than the memory-ego
and sense-ego of the animal and therefore, we may suppose, nearer to
real self-knowledge. We may even come to realise, if we study the veiled
as well as the uncovered action of Nature, that all ego-sense, all ego-
memory has at its back, is in fact a pragmatic contrivance of a secret
co-ordinating power or mind of knowledge, present in the universal
conscious-force, of which the reason in man is the overt form at which
our evolution arrives, — a form still limited and imperfect in its modes of
action and constituting principle. There is a subconscious knowledge
even in the Inconscient, a greater intrinsic Reason in things which im-
pose co-ordination, that is to say, a certain rationality, upon the wildest
movements of the universal becoming.

The importance of Memory becomes apparent in the well-observed
phenomenon of double personality or dissociation of personality in which
the same man has two successive or alternating states of his mind and
in each remembers and co-ordinates perfectly only what he was or did
in that state of mind and not what he was or did in the other. This can
be associated with an organised idea of different personality, for he
thinks in one state that he is one person and in the other that he is quite
another with a different name, life and feelings. Here it would seem
that memory is the whole substance of personality. But, on the other
side, we must see that dissociation of memory occurs also without dis-
sociation of personality, as when a man in the state of hypnosis takes up
a range of memories and experiences to which his waking mind is a
stranger but does not therefore think himself another person, or as when
one who has forgotten the past events of his life and perhaps even his
name, still does not change his ego-sense and personality. And there is
possible too a state of consciousness in which, although there is no gap
of memory, yet by a rapid development the whole being feels itself
changed in every mental circumstance and the man feels born into a new

466 THE LIFE DIVINE

personality, so that, if it were not for the co-ordinating mind, he would
not at all accept his past as belonging to the person he now is, although
he remembers perfectly well that it was in the same form of body and
same field of mind-substance that it occurred. Mind-sense is the basis,
memory the thread on which experiences are strung by the self-experi-
encing mind: but it is the co-ordinating faculty of mind which, relating
together all the material that memory provides and all its linkings of
past, present and future, relates them also to an "I" who is the same in
all the moments of Time and in spite of all the changes of experience and
personality.

The ego-sense is only a preparatory device and a first basis for the
development of real self-knowledge in the mental being. Developing from
inconscience to self-conscience, from nescience of self and things to
knowledge of self and things, the Mind in forms arrives thus far that it
is aware of all its superficially conscious becoming as related to an "I"
which it always is. That "I" it partly identifies with the conscious be-
coming, partly thinks of it as something other than the becoming and
superior to it, even perhaps eternal and unchanging. In the last resort,
by the aid of its reason which distinguishes in order to co-ordinate, it
may fix its self-experience on the becoming only, on the constantly chang-
ing self and reject the idea of something other than it as a fiction of the
mind; there is then no being, only becoming. Or it may fix its self-
experience into a direct consciousness of its own eternal being and reject
the becoming, even when it is compelled to be aware of it, as a fiction of
the mind and the senses or the vanity of a temporary inferior existence.

But it is evident that a self-knowledge based on the separative ego-
sense is imperfect and that no knowledge founded upon it alone or
primarily or on a reaction against it can be secure or assured of com-
pleteness. First, it is a knowledge of our superficial mental activity and
its experiences and, with regard to all the large rest of our becoming that
is behind, it is an Ignorance. Secondly, it is a knowledge only of being
and becoming as limited to the individual self and its experiences; all
the rest of the world is to it not-self, something, that is to say, which it
does not realise as part of its own being but as some outside existence
presented to its separate consciousness. This happens because it has no
direct conscious knowledge of this larger existence and nature such as the
individual has of his own being and becoming. Here too there is a limited
knowledge asserting itself in the midst of a vast Ignorance. Thirdly, the
true relation between the being and the becoming has not been worked

MEMORY, EGO AND SELF-EXPERIENCE 467

out on the basis of perfect self-knowledge but rather by the Ignorance,
by a partial knowledge. As a consequence the mind in its impetus to-
wards an ultimate knowledge attempts through the co-ordinating and
dissociating will and reason on the basis of our present experience and
possibilities to drive at a trenchant conclusion which cuts away one side
of existence. All that has been established is that the mental being can
on one side absorb himself in direct self-consciousness to the apparent
exclusion of all becoming and can on the other side absorb himself in the
becoming to the apparent exclusion of all stable self-consciousness. Both
sides of the mind, separating as antagonists, condemn what they reject as
unreal or else as only a play of the conscious mind; to one or the other,
either the Divine, the Self, or the world is only relatively real so long as
the mind persists in creating them, the world an effective dream of
Self, or God and Self a mental construction or an effective hallucination.
The true relation has not been seized, because these two sides of exist-
ence must always appear discordant and unreconciled to our intelligence
so long as there is only a partial knowledge. An integral knowledge is
the aim of the conscious evolution; a clean cut of the consciousness
shearing apart one side and leaving the other cannot be the whole truth
of self and things. For if some immobile Self were all, there could be no
possibility of world-existence; if mobile Nature were all, there might be
a cycle of universal becoming, but no spiritual foundation for the evolu-
tion of the Conscient out of the Inconscient and for the persistent aspira-
tion of our partial Consciousness or Ignorance to exceed itself and arrive
at the whole conscious Truth of its being and the integral conscious
knowledge of all Being.

Our surface existence is only a surface and it is theue that there is
the full reign of the Ignorance; to know we have to go within ourselves
and see with an inner knowledge. All that is formulated on the surface
is a small and diminished representation of our secret greater existence.
The immobile self in us is found only when the outer mental and vital
activities are quieted; for since it is seated deep within and is repre-
sented on the surface only by the intuitive sense of self-existence and
misrepresented by the mental, vital, physical ego-sense, its truth has to
be experienced in the mind's silence. But also the dynamic parts of our
surface being are similarly diminished figures of greater things that are
there in the depths of our secret nature. The surface memorj^ itself is
a fragmentary and ineffective action pulling out details from an inner
subliminal memory which receives and records all our world-experience,

468 THE LIFE DIVINE

receives and records even what the mind has not observed, understood
or noticed. Our surface imagination is a selection from a vaster more
creative and effective subliminal image-building power of consciousness.
A mind with immeasurably wider and more subtle perceptions, a life-
energy with a greater dynamism, a subtle-physical substance with a
larger and finer receptivity are building out of themselves our surface
evolution. A psychic entity is there behind these occult activities which
is the true support of our individualisation ; the ego is only an outward
false substitute : for it is this secret soul that supports and holds together
our self-experience and world-experience; the mental, vital, physical,
external ego is a superficial construction of Nature. It is only when we
have seen both our self and our nature as a whole, in the depths as well
as on the surface, that we can acquire a true basis of knowledge.

CHAPTER X

KNOWLEDGE BY IDENTITY AND
SEPARATIVE KNOWLEDGE

They see the Self in the Self by the Self.

Gita}

Where there is duality, there other sees other, other
hears, touches, thinks of, knows other. But when one sees
all as the Self, by what shall one know it? it is by the Self
that one knows all this that is . . . All betrays him who
sees all elsewhere than in the Self; for all this that is is the
Brahman, all beings and all this that is are this Self.

Brihadaranyaka UpanishadJ^

The Self-Existent has pierced the doors of sense out-
ward, therefore one sees things outwardly and sees not in
one's inner being. Rarely a sage desiring immortality, his
sight turned inward, sees the Self face to face.

Katha Upaniskad.'

There is no annihilation of the seeing of the seer, the
speaking of the speaker . . . the hearing of the hearer . . .
the knowing of the knower, for they are indestructible ; but
it is not a second or other than and separate from himself
that he sees, speaks to, hears, knows.

Brihadaranyaka Upanishad.*

OUR surface cognition, our limited and restricted mental way of
looking at our self, at our inner movements and at the world out-
side us and its objects and happenings, is so constituted that it derives
in different degrees from a fourfold order of knowledge. The original and
fundamental way of knowing, native to the occult self in things, is a
knowledge by identity; the second, derivative, is a knowledge by direct
contact associated at its roots with a secret knowledge by identity or
starting from it, but actually separated from its source and therefore
powerful but incomplete in its cognition; the third is a knowledge by
separation from the object of observation, but still with a direct contact
as its support or even a partial identity; the fourth is a completely sepa-
rative knowledge which relies on a machinery of indirect contact, a

'VI. 20. 2 IV. s. IS. 7. 'IV I. *IV. 3. 23-30.

469

470 THE LIFE DIVINE

knowledge by acquisition which is yet, without being conscious of it, a
rendering or bringing up of the contents of a pre-existent inner aware-
ness and knowledge. A knowledge by identity, a knowledge by intimate
direct contact, a knowledge by separative direct contact, a wholly sepa-
rative knowledge by indirect contact are the four cognitive methods of
Nature.

The first wa}^ of knowing in its purest form is illustrated in the
surface mind only by our direct awareness of our own essential existence:
it is a knowledge empty of any other content than the pure fact of self
and being; of nothing else in the world has our surface mind the same
kind of awareness. But in the knowledge of the structure and move-
ments of our subjective consciousness some element of awareness by
identity does enter ; for we can project ourselves with a certain identifi-
cation into these movements. It has already been noted how this can
happen in the case of an uprush of wrath which swallows us up so that
for the moment our whole consciousness seems to be a wave of anger:
other passions, love, grief, joy have the same power to seize and occupy
us; thought also absorbs and occupies, we lose sight of the thinker and
become the thought and the thinking. But very ordinarily there is a
double movement; a part of our selves becomes the thought or the pas-
sion, another part of us either accompanies it with a certain adherence
or follows it closely and knows it by an intimate direct contact which
falls short of identification or entire self-oblivion in the movement.

This identification is possible, and also this simultaneous separation
and partial identification, because these things are becomings of our
being, determinations of our mind stuff and mind energy, of our life stuff
and life energy; but, since they are only a small part of us, we are not
bound to be identified and occupied, — ^we can detach ourselves, separate
the being from its temporary becoming, observe itj control it, sanction
or prevent its manifestation: we can, in this way, by an inner detach-
ment, a mental or spiritual separateness, partially or even fundamentally
liberate ourselves from the control of mind nature or vital nature over
the being and assume the position of the witness, knower and ruler.
Thus we have a double knowledge of the subjective movement: there is
an intimate knowledge, by identity, of its stuff and its force of action,
more intimate than we could have by any entirely separative and objec-
tive knowledge such as we get of things outside us, things that are to us
altogether not-self; there is at the same time a knowledge by detached
observation, detached but with a power of direct contact, which frees

KNOWLEDGE BY IDENTITY AND SEPARATIVE KNOWLEDGE 47 1

US from engrossment by the Nature-energy and enables us to relate the
movement to the rest of our own existence and world existence. If we
are without this detachment, we lose our self of being and mastering
knowledge in the nature self of becoming and movement and action and,
though we know intimately the movement, we do not know it dominat-
ingly and fully. This would not be the case if we carried into our identifi-
cation with the movement our identity with the rest of our subjective
existence, — if, that is to say, we could plunge wholly into the wave of
becoming and at the same time be in the very absorption of the state or
act the mental witness, observer, controller; but this we cannot easily
do, because we live in a divided consciousness in which the vital part of
us — our life nature of force and desire and passion and action — tends
to control or swallow up the mind, and the mind has to avoid this sub-
jection and control the vital, but can only succeed in the effort by keep-
ing itself separate; for if it identifies itself, it is lost and hurried away
in the life movement. Nevertheless a kind of balanced double identity
by division is possible, though it is not easy to keep the balance; there
is a self of thought which observes and permits the passion for the sake
of the experience — or is obliged by some life-stress to permit it, — and
there is a self of life which allows itself to be carried along in the move-
ment of Nature. Here, then, in our subjective experience, we have a field
of the action of consciousness in which three movements of cognition
can meet together, a certain kind of knowledge by identity, a knowledge
by direct contact and, dependent upon them, a separative knowledge.

In thought separation of the thinker and the thinking is more diffi-
cult. The thinker is plunged and lost in the thought or carried in the
thought current, identified with it; it is not usually at the time of or in
the very act of thinking that he can observe or review his thoughts, — he
has to do that in retrospect and with the aid of memory or by a critical
pause of corrective judgment before he proceeds further: but still a
simultaneity of thinking and conscious direction of the mind's action can
be achieved partially when the thought does not engross, entirely when
the thinker acquires the faculty of stepping back into the mental self
and standing apart there from the mental energy. Instead of being ab-
sorbed in the thought with at most a vague feeling of the process of
thinking, we can see the process by a mental vision, watch our thoughts
in their origination and movement and, partly by a silent insight, partly
by a process of thought upon thought, judge and evaluate them. But
whatever the kind of identification, it is to be noted that the knowledge

472 THE LIFE DIVINE

of our internal movements is of a double nature, separation and direct
contact: for even when we detach ourselves, this close contact is main-
tained; our knowledge is always based on a direct touch, on a cognition
by direct awareness carrying in it a certain element of identity. The
more separative attitude is ordinarily the method of our reason in ob-
serving and knowing our inner movements; the more intimate is the
method of our dynamic part of mind associating itself with our sensa-
tions, feelings and desires: but in this association too the thinking
mind can intervene and exercise a separative dissociated observation
and control over both the dynamic self-associating part of mind and the
vital or physical movement. All the observable movements of our physi-
cal being also are known and controlled by us in both these ways, the
separative and the intimate; we feel the body and what it is doing in-
timately as part of us, but the mind is separate from it and can exercise
a detached control over its movements. This gives to our normal knowl-
edge of our subjective being and nature, incomplete and largely super-
ficial though it still is, yet, so far as it goes, a certain intimacy, immedi-
acy and directness. That is absent in our knowledge of the world outside
us and its movements and objects: for there, since the thing seen or
experienced is not-self, not experienced as part of us, no entirely direct
contact of consciousness with the object is possible; an instrumentation
of sense has to be used which offers us, not immediate intimate knowl-
edge of it, but a figure of it as a first datum for knowledge.

In the cognition of external things, our knowledge has an entirely
separative basis; its whole machinery and process are of the nature of
an indirect perception. We do not identify ourselves with external ob-
jects, not even with other men though they are beings of our own nature ;
we cannot enter into their existence as if it were our own, we cannot
know them and their movements with the directness, immediateness,
intimacy with which we know — even though incompletely — ourselves
and our movements. But not only identification lacks, direct contact also
is absent; there is no direct touch between our consciousness and their
consciousness, our substance and their substance, our self of being and
their self-being. The only seemingly direct contact with them or direct
evidence we have of them is through the senses ; sight, hearing, touch seem
to initiate some kind of a direct intimacy with the object of knowledge:
but this is not so really, not a real directness, a real intimacy, for what
we get by our sense is not the inner or intimate touch of the thing itself, but
an image of it or a vibration or nerve message in ourselves through which

KNOWLEDGE BY IDENTITY AND SEPARATIVE KNOWLEDGE 473

we have to learn to know it. These means are so ineffective, so exiguous in
their poverty that, if that were the whole machinery, we could know lit-
tle or nothing or only achieve a great blur of confusion. But there inter-
venes a sense-mind intuition which seizes the suggestion of the image
or vibration and equates it with the object, a vital intuition which seizes
the energy or figure of power of the object through another kind of vibra-
tion created by the sense contact, and an intuition of the perceptive mind
which at once forms a right idea of the object from all this evidence.
Whatever is deficient in the interpretation of the image thus constructed
is filled up by the intervention of the reason or the total understanding
intelligence. If the first composite intuition were the result of a direct con-
tact or if it summarised the action of a total intuitive mentality master of
its perceptions, there would be no need for the intervention of the reason
except as a discoverer or organiser of knowledge not conveyed by the
sense and its suggestions: it is, on the contrary, an intuition working on
an image, a sense document, an indirect evidence, not working upon a
direct contact of consciousness with the object. But since the image or
vibration is a defective and summary documentation and the intuition
itself limited and communicated through an obscure medium, acting in a
blind light, the accuracy of our intuitional interpretative construction of
the object is open to question or at least likely to be incomplete. Man has
had perforce to develop his reason in order to make up for the deficiencies
of his sense instrumentation, the fallibility of his physical mind's per-
ceptions and the paucity of its interpretation of its data.

Our world-knowledge is therefore a difficult structure made up of
the imperfect documentation of the sense image, an intuitional interpre-
tation of it by perceptive mind, life-mind and sense-mind, and a supple-
mentary filling up, correction, addition of supplementary knowledge,
coordination, by the reason. Even so our knowledge of the world we live
in is narrow and imperfect, our interpretations of its significances doubt-
ful: imagination, speculation, reflection, impartial weighing and reason-
ing, inference, measurement, testing, a further correction and amplifica-
tion of sense evidence by Science, — all this apparatus had to be called
in to complete the incompleteness. After all that the result still remains
a half-certain, half-dubious accumulation of acquired indirect knowl-
edge, a mass of significant images and ideative representations, abstract
thought counters, hypotheses, theories, generalisations, but also with
all that a mass of doubts and a never-ending debate and inquiry. Power
has come with knowledge, but our imperfection of knowledge leaves us

474 THE LIFE DIVINE

without any idea of the true use of the power, even of the aim towards
which our utilisation of knowledge and power should be turned and made
effective. This is worsened by the imperfection of our self-knowledge
which, such as it is, meagre and pitifully insufficient, is of our surface
only, of our apparent phenomenal self and nature and not of our true
self and the true meaning of our existence. Self-knowledge and self-
mastery are wanting in the user, wisdom and right will in his use of
world-power and world-knowledge.

It is evident that our state on the surface is indeed a state of knowl-
edge, so far as it goes, but a limited knowledge enveloped and invaded
by ignorance and, to a very large extent, by reason of its limitation, itself
a kind of ignorance, at best a mixed knowledge-ignorance. It could not
be otherwise since our awareness of the world is born of a separative and
surface observation with only an indirect means of cognition at its dis-
posal ; our knowledge of ourselves, though more direct, is stultified by its
restriction to the surface of our being, by an ignorance of our true self,
the true sources of our nature, the true motive-forces of our action. It is
quite evident that we know ourselves with only a superficial knowledge,
— the sources of our consciousness and thought are a mystery; the true
nature of our mind, emotions, sensations is a mystery; our cause of being
and our end of being, the significance of our life and its activities are a
mystery: this could not be if we had a real self-knowledge and a real
world-knowledge.

If we look for the reason of this limitation and imperfection, we shall
find first that it is because we are concentrated on our surface ; the depths
of self, the secrets of our total nature are shut away from us behind a wall
created by our externalising consciousness — or created for it so that it
can pursue its activity of ego-centric individualisation of the mind, life
and body uninvaded by the deeper and wider truth of our larger exist-
ence: through this wall we can look into our inner self and reality only
through crevices and portholes and we see little there but a mysterious
dimness. At the same time our consciousness has to defend its ego-centric
individualisation, not only against its own deeper self of oneness and
infinity, but against the cosmic infinite; it builds up a wall of division
here also and shuts out all that is not centred round its ego, excludes it
as the not-self. But since it has to live with this not-self, — for it belongs
to it, depends upon it, is an inhabitant within it,' — it must maintain some
means of communication; it has too to make excursions out of its wall
of ego and wall of self-restriction within the body in order to cater for

KNOWLEDGE BY IDENTITY AND SEPARATIVE KNOWLEDGE 475

those needs which the not-self can supply to it: it must learn to know in
some way all that surrounds it so as to be able to master it and make
it as far as possible a servant to the individual and collective human
life and ego. The body provides our consciousness with the gates of
the senses through which it can establish the necessary communication
and means of observation and action upon the world, upon the not-self
outside it; the mind uses these means and invents others that supple-
ment them and it succeeds in establishing some construction, some system
of knowledge which serves its immediate purpose or its general will to
master partially and use this huge alien environmental existence or deal
with it where it cannot master it. But the knowledge it gains is objective ;
it is mainly a knowledge of the surface of things or of what is just below
the surface, pragmatic, limited and insecure. Its defence against the in-
vasion of the cosmic energy is equally insecure and partial : in spite of its
notice of no entry without permission, it is subtly and invisibly invaded
by the world, enveloped by the not-self and moulded by it ; its thought,
its will, its emotional and its life energy are penetrated by waves and cur-
rents of thought, will, passion, vital impacts, forces of all kinds from
others and from universal Nature. Its wall of defence becomes a wall of
obscuration which prevents it from knowing all this interaction ; it knows
only what comes through the gates of sense or through mental perceptions
of which it cannot be sure or through what it can infer or build up from
its gathered sense data; all the rest is to it a blank of nescience.

It is, then, this double wall of self-imprisonment, this self-fortifica-
tion in the bounds of a surface ego, that is the cause of our limited knowl-
edge or ignorance, and if this self-imprisonment were the whole character
of our existence, the ignorance would be irremediable. But, in fact, this
constant outer ego-building is only a provisional device of the Con-
sciousness-Force in things so that the secret individual, the spirit within,
may establish a representative and instrumental formation of itself in
physical nature, a provisional individualisation in the nature of the Ig-
norance, which is all that can at first be done in a world emerging out of
a universal Inconscience. Our self-ignorance and our world-ignorance can
only grow towards integral self-knowledge and integral world-knowledge
in proportion as our limited ego and its half -blind consciousness open to
a greater inner existence and consciousness and a true self-being and
become aware too of the not-self outside it also as self, — on one side a
Nature constituent of our own nature, on the other an Existence which
is a boundless continuation of our own self-being. Our being has to break

476 THE LIFE DIVINE

the walls of ego-consciousness which it has created, it has to extend itself
beyond its body and inhabit the body of the universe. In place of its
knowledge by indirect contact, or in addition to it, it must arrive at a
knowledge by direct contact and proceed to a knowledge by identity. Its
limited finite of self has to become a boundless finite and an infinite.

But the first of these two movements, the awakening to our inner
realities, imposes itself as the prior necessity because it is by this inward
self-finding that the second — the cosmic self-finding-^— can become en-
tirely possible: we have to go into our inner being and learn to live in it
and from it; the outer mind and life and body must become for us only
an antechamber. All that we are on the outside is indeed conditioned by
what is within, occult, in our inner depths and recesses; it is thence that
come the secret initiatives, the self-effective formations; our inspirations,
our intuitions, our life-motives, our mind's preferences, our will's selec-
tions are actuated from there, — in so far as they are not shaped or influ-
enced by an insistence, equally hidden, of a surge of cosmic impacts: but
the use we make of these emergent powers and these influences is con-
ditioned, largely determined and, above all, very much limited by our
outermost nature. It is then the knowledge of this inner initiating self
coupled with the accurate perception of the outer instrumental self and
the part played by both of them in our building that we have to discover.

On the surface we know only so much of our self as is formulated
there and of even this only a portion ; for we see our total surface being
in a general vagueness dotted and sectioned by points or figures of pre-
cision : even what we discover by a mental introspection is only a sum of
sections; the entire figure and sense of our personal formulation escapes
our notice. But there is also a distorting action which obscures and dis-
figures even this limited self-knowledge; our self- view is vitiated by the
constant impact and intrusion of our outer life-self, our vital being, which
seeks always to make the thinking mind its tool and servant: for our vital
being is not concerned with self-knowledge but with self-affirmation, de-
sire, ego. It is therefore constantly acting on mind to build for it a mental
structure of apparent self that will serve these purposes; our mind is
persuaded to present to us and to others a partly fictitious representative
figure of ourselves which supports our self-affirmation, justifies our de-
sires and actions, nourishes our ego. This vital intervention is not indeed
always in the direction of self-justification and assertion; it turns some-
times towards self-depreciation and a morbid and exaggerated self-criti-
cism: but this too is an ego-structure, a reverse or negative egoism, a

KNOWLEDGE BY IDENTITY AND SEPARATIVE KNOWLEDGE 477

poise or pose of the vital ego. For in this vital ego there is frequently a
mixture of the charlatan and mountebank, the poser and actor; it is con-
stantly taking up a role and playing it to itself and to others as its public.
An organised self-deception is thus added to an organised self-ignorance;
it is only by going within and seeing these things at their source that we
can get out of this obscurity and tangle.

For a larger mental being is there within us, a larger inner vital
being, even a larger inner subtle-physical being other than our surface
body-consciousness, and by entering into this or becoming it, identify-
ing ourselves with it, we can observe the springs of our thoughts and
feelings, the sources and motives of our action, the operative energies
that build up our surface personality. For we discover and can know the
inner being that secretly thinks and perceives in us, the vital being that
secretly feels and acts upon life through us, the subtle-physical being
that secretly receives and responds to the contacts of things through our
body and its organs. Our surface thought, feeling, emotion is a complex-
ity and confusion of impulsions from within and impacts from outside
us; our reason, our organising intelligence can impose on it only an
imperfect order: but here within we find the separate sources of our
mental, our vital and our physical energisms and can see clearly the pure
operations, the distinct powers, the composing elements of each and their
interplay in a clear light of self-vision. We find that the contradictions
and the struggles of our surface consciousness are largely due to the con-
trary or mutually discordant tendencies of our mental, vital and physical
parts opposing and unreconciled with each other and these again to the
discord of many different inner possibilities of our being and even of
different personalities on each level in us which are behind the intermixed
disposition and differing tendencies of our surface nature. But while on
the surface their action is mixed together, confused and conflicting, here
in our depths they can be seen and worked upon in their independent and
separate nature and action and a harmonisation of them by the mental
being in us, leader of the life and body,^ — or, better, by the central psy-
chic entity, — is not so difficult, provided we have the right psychic and
mental will in the endeavour: for if it is with the vital-ego motive that
we make the entry into the subliminal being, it may result in serious
dangers and disaster or at the least an exaggeration of ego, self-affirma-
tion and desire, an enlarged and more powerful ignorance instead of an
enlarged and more powerful knowledge. Moreover, we find in this inner
^ manomayak prdnasariranetd — Mundaka Upanishad, 2. 2. 7.

478 THE LIFE DIVINE

or subliminal being the means of directly distinguishing between what
rises from within and what comes to us from outside, from others or
from universal Nature, and it becomes possible to exercise a control, a
choice, a power of willed reception, rejection and selection, a clear power
of self-building and harmonisation which we do not possess or can operate
very imperfectly in our composed surface personality but which is the
prerogative of our inner Person. For by this entry into the depths the
inner being, no longer quite veiled, no longer obliged to exercise a frag-
mentary influence on its outer instrumental consciousness, is able to
formulate itself more luminously in our life in the physical universe.

In its essence the inner being's knowledge has the same elements
as the outer mind's surface knowledge, but there is between them the
difference between a half blindness and a greater clarity of consciousness
and vision due to a more direct and powerful instrumentation and a
better arrangement of the elements of knowledge. Knowledge by identity,
on the surface a vague inherent sense of our self-existence and a partial
identification with our inner movements, can here deepen and enlarge
itself from that indistinct essential perception and limited sensation to
a clear and direct intrinsic awareness of the whole entity within: we can
enter into possession of our whole conscious mental being and life being
and arrive at a close intimacy of direct penetrating and enveloping con-
tact with the total movements of our mental and vital energy; we meet
clearly and closely and are — but more freely and understandingly — all
the becomings of ourself , the whole self-expression of the Purusha on the
present levels of our nature. But also there is or can be along with this
intimacy of knowledge a detached observation of the actions of the na-
ture by the Purusha and a great possibility, through this double status of
knowledge, of a complete control and understanding. All the movements
of the surface being can be seen with a complete detachment, but also
with a direct sight in the consciousness by which the self-delusions and
mistakes of self of the outer consciousness can be dispelled; there is a
keener mental vision, a clearer and more accurate mental feeling of our
subjective becoming, a vision which at once knows, commands and con-
trols the whole nature. If the psychic and mental parts in us are strong,
the vital comes under mastery and direction to an extent hardly possible
to the surface mentality ; even the body and the physical energies can be
taken up by the inn<>r m'^id and will and turned into a more plastic instru-
mentation of the soul, thr/ psychic being. On the other hand, if the mental

KNOWLEDGE BY IDENTITY AND SEPARATIVE KNOWLEDGE 479

and psychic parts are weak and the vital strong and unruly, power is
increased by entry into the inner vital, but discrimination and detached
vision are deficient; the knowledge, even if increased in force and range,
remains turbid and misleading ; intelligent self-control may give place to
a vast undisciplined impetus or a rigidly disciplined but misguided ego-
istic action. For the subliminal is still a movement of the Knowledge-
Ignorance ; it has in it a greater knowledge, but the possibility also of a
greater because more self-affirming ignorance. This is because, though
an increased self-knowledge is normal here, it is not at once an integral
knowledge: an awareness by direct contact, which is the principal power
of the subliminal, is not sufficient for that; for it may be contact with
greater becomings and powers of Knowledge, but also with greater be-
comings and powers of the Ignorance.

But the subliminal being has also a larger direct contact with the
world; it is not confined like the surface Mind to the interpretation of
sense-images and sense-vibrations supplemented by the mental and vital
intuition and the reason. There is indeed an inner sense in the subliminal
nature, a subtle sense of vision, hearing, touch, smell and taste ; but these
are not confined to the creation of images of things belonging to the
physical environment, — they can present to the consciousness visual,
auditory, tactual and other images and vibrations of things beyond the
restricted range of the physical senses or belonging to other planes or
spheres of existence. This inner sense can create or present images, scenes,
sounds that are symbolic rather than actual or that represent possibilities
in formation, suggestions, thoughts, ideas, intentions of other beings,
image forms also of powers or potentialities in universal Nature; there
is nothing that it cannot image or visualise or turn into sensory forma-
tions. It is the subliminal in reality and not the outer mind that possesses
the powers of telepathy, clairvoyance, second sight and other supernormal
faculties whose occurrence in the surface consciousness is due to openings
or rifts in the wall erected by the outer personality's unseeing labour of
individualisation and interposed between itself and the inner domain of
our being. It should be noted, however, that owing to this complexity
the action of the subliminal sense can be confusing or misleading, espe-
cially if it is interpreted by the outer mind to which the secret of its opera-
tions is unknown and its principles of sign construction and symbolic
figure-languages foreign; a greater inner power of intuition, tact, dis-
crimination is needed to judge and interpret rightly its images and ex-

48o THE LIFE DIVINE

periences. It is still the fact that they add immensely to our possible scope
of knowledge and widen the narrow limits in which our sense-bound outer
physical consciousness is circumscribed and imprisoned.

But more important is the power of the subliminal to enter into a
direct contact of consciousness with other consciousness or with objects,
to act without other instrumentation, by an essential sense inherent in its
own substance, by a direct mental vision, by a direct feeling of things,
even by a close envelopment and intimate penetration and a return with
the contents of what is enveloped or penetrated, by a direct intimation
or impact on the substance of mind itself, not through outward signs
or figures, — a revealing intimation or a self-communicating impact of
thoughts, feelings, forces. It is by these means that the inner being achieves
an immediate, intimate and accurate spontaneous knowledge of persons,
of objects, of the occult and to us intangible energies of world-Nature
that surround us and impinge upon our own personality, physicality,
mind-force and life-force. In our surface mentality we are sometimes
aware of a consciousness that can feel or know the thoughts and inner re-
actions of others or become aware of objects or happenings without any
observable sense-intervention or otherwise exercise powers supernormal
to our ordinary capacity; but these capacities are occasional, rudimen-
tary, vague. Their possession is proper to our concealed subliminal self
and, when they emerge, it is by a coming to the surface of its powers or
operations. These emergent operations of the subliminal being or some
of them are now fragmentarily studied under the name of psychic phe-
nomena,— although they have ordinarily nothing to do with the psyche,
the soul, the inmost entity in us, but only with the inner mind, the inner
vital, the subtle-physical parts of our subliminal being; but the results
cannot be conclusive or sufficiently ample because they are sought for by
methods of inquiry and experiment and standards of proof proper to the
surface mind and its system of knowledge by indirect contact. Under
these conditions they can be investigated only in so far as they are able
to manifest in that mind to which they are exceptional, abnormal or
supernormal, and therefore comparatively rare, difficult, incomplete in
their occurrence. It is only if we can open up the wall between the outer
mind and the inner consciousness to which such phenomena are normal,
or if we can enter freely within or dwell there, that this realm of knowl-
edge can be truly explained and annexed to our total consciousness and
included in the field of operation of our awakened force of nature.

In our surface mind we have no direct means of knowing even other

KNOWLEDGE BY IDENTITY AND SEPARATIVE KNOWLEDGE 48 1

men who are of our own kind and have a similar mentality and are vitally
and physically built on the same model. We can acquire a general knowl-
edge of human mind and the human body and apply it to them with the
aid of the many constant and habitual outer signs of the human inner
movements with which we are familiar; these summary judgments can
be farther eked out by our experience of personal character and habits,
by instinctive application of what self-knowledge we have to our under-
standing and judgment of others, by inference from speech and conduct,
by insight of observation and insight of sympathy. But the results are
always incomplete and very frequently deceptive: our inferences are as
often as not erroneous constructions, our interpretation of the outward
signs a mistaken guess-work, our application of general knowledge or our
self-knowledge baffled by elusive factors of personal difference, our very
insight uncertain and unreliable. Human beings therefore live as strangers
to each other, at best tied by a very partial sympathy and mutual experi-
ence; we do not know enough, do not know as well as we know ourselves
— and that itself is little — even those nearest to us. But in the subliminal
inner consciousness it is possible to become directly aware of the thoughts
and feelings around us, to feel their impact, to see their movements; to
read a mind and a heart becomes less difficult, a less uncertain venture.
There is a constant mental, vital, subtle-physical interchange going on
between all who meet or live together, of which they are themselves un-
aware except in so far as its impacts and interpenetrations touch them as
sensible results of speech and action and outer contact: for the most
part it is subtly and invisibly that this interchange takes place; for it
acts indirectly, touching the subliminal parts and through them the outer
nature. But when we grow conscious in these subliminal parts, that brings
consciousness also of all this interaction and subjective interchange and
intermingling, with the result that we need no longer be involuntary sub-
jects of their impact and consequence, but can accept or reject, defend
ourselves or isolate. At the same time, our action on others need no longer
be ignorant or involuntary and often unintentionally harmful ; it can be
a conscious help, a luminous interchange and a fruitful accommodation,
an approach towards an inner understanding or union, not as now a
separative association with only a limited intimacy or unity, restricted
by much non-understanding and often burdened or endangered by a mass
of misunderstanding, of mutual misinterpretation and error.

Equally important would be the change in our dealings with the
impersonal forces of the world that surround us. These we know only

482 THE LIFE DIVINE

by their results, by the little that we can seize of their visible action and
consequence. Among them it is mostly the physical world-forces of which
we have some knowledge, but we live constantly in the midst of a whirl
of unseen mind-forces and life-forces of which we know nothing, we are
not even aware of their existence. To all this unseen movement and action
the subliminal inner consciousness can open our awareness, for it has a
knowledge of it by direct contact, by inner vision, by a psychic sensitive-
ness; but at present it can only enlighten our obtuse superficiality and
outwardness by unexplained warnings, premonitions, attractions and re-
pulsations, ideas, suggestions, obscure intuitions, the little it can get
through imperfectly to the surface. The inner being not only contacts
directly and concretely the immediate motive and movement of these
universal forces and feels the results of their present action, but it can
to a certain extent forecast or see ahead their farther action; there is a
greater power in our subliminal parts to overcome the time barrier, to
have the sense or feel the vibration of coming events, of distant happen-
ings, even to look into the future. It is true that this knowledge proper
to the subliminal being is not complete; for it is a mixture of knowledge
and ignorance and it is capable of erroneous as well as of true perception,
since it works not by knowledge by identity, but by a knowledge through
direct contact and this is also a separative knowledge, though more inti-
mate even in separation than anything that is commanded by our surface
nature. But the mixed capacity of the inner mental and vital nature for
a greater ignorance as well as a greater knowledge can be cured by going
still deeper behind it to the psychic entity which supports our individual
life and body. There is indeed a soul-personality, representative of this
entity, already built up within us, which puts forward a fine psychic ele-
ment in our natural being: but this finer factor in our normal make-up
is not yet dominant and has only a limited action. Our soul is not the
overt guide and master of our thought and acts; it has to rely on the
mental, vital, physical instruments for self-expression and is constantly
overpowered by our mind and life-force: but if once it can succeed in
remaining in constant communion with its own larger occult reality, —
and this can only happen when we go deep into our subliminal parts, —
it is no longer dependent, it can become powerful and sovereign, armed
with an intrinsic spiritual perception of the truth of things and a sponta-
neous discernment which separates that truth from the falsehood of the
Ignorance and Inconscience, distinguishes the divine and the undivine in
the manifestation and so can be the luminous leader of our other parts of

KNOWLEDGE BY IDENTITY AND SEPARATIVE KNOWLEDGE 483

nature. It is indeed when this happens that there can be the turning-point
towards an integral transformation and an integral knowledge.

These are the dynamic functionings and pragmatic values of the
subliminal cognition; but what concerns us in our present inquiry is to
learn from its way of action the exact character of this deeper and larger
cognition and how it is related to true knowledge. Its main character is a
knowledge by the direct contact of consciousness with its object or of
consciousness with other consciousness; but in the end we discover that
this power is an outcome of a secret knowledge by identity, a translation
of it into a separative awareness of things. For as in the indirect contact
proper to our normal consciousness and surface cognition it is the meet-
ing or friction of the living being with the existence outside it that
awakens the spark of conscious knowledge, so here it is some contact that
sets in action a pre-existent secret knowledge and brings it to the surface.
For consciousness is one in the subject and the object, and in the contact
of existence with existence this identity brings to light or awakens in the
self the dormant knowledge of this other self outside it. But while this
pre-existent knowledge comes up in the surface mind as a knowledge ac-
quired, it arises in the subliminal as a thing seen, caught from within,
remembered as it were, or, when it is fully intuitive, self-evident to the
inner awareness; or it is taken in from the object contacted but with an
immediate response as to something intimately recognisable. In the sur-
face consciousness knowledge represents itself as a truth seen from out-
side, thrown on us from the object, or as a response to its touch on the
sense, a perceptive reproduction of its objective actuality. Our surface
mind is obliged to give to itself this account of its knowledge, because the
wall between itself and the outside world is pierced by the gates of sense
and it can catch through these gates the surface of outward objects
though not what is within them, but there is no such ready-made opening
between itself and its own inner being: since it is unable to see what is
within its deeper self or observe the process of the knowledge coming
from within, it has no choice but to accept what it does see, the external
object, as the cause of its knowledge. Thus all our mental knowing of
things represents itself to us as objective, a truth imposed on us from out-
side; our knowledge is a reflection or responsive construction reproduc-
ing in us a figure or picture or a mental scheme of something that is not
in our own being. In fact, it is a hidden deeper response to the contact, a
response coming from within that throws up from there an inner knowl-
edge of the object, the object being itself part of our larger self; but

484 THE LIFE DIVINE

owing to the double veil, the veil between our inner self and our ignorant
surface self and the veil between that surface self and the object con-
tacted, it is only an imperfect figure or representation of the inner knowl-
edge that is formed on the surface.

This affiliation, this concealed method of our knowledge, obscure
and non-evident to our present mentality, becomes clear and evident
when the subliminal inner being breaks its boundaries of individuality
and, carrying our surface mind with it, enters into the cosmic conscious-
ness. The subliminal is separated from the cosmic through a limitation
by the subtler sheaths of our being, its mental, vital, subtle-physical
sheaths, just as the surface nature is separated from universal Nature by
the gross physical sheath, the body; but the circumscribing wall around
it is more transparent, is indeed less a wall than a fence. The subliminal
has besides a formation of consciousness which projects itself beyond all
these sheaths and forms a circumconscient, an environing part of itself,
through which it receives the contracts of the world and can become
aware of them and deal with them before they enter. The subliminal is
able to widen indefinitely this circumconscient envelope and more and
more enlarge its self-projection into the cosmic existence around it. A
point comes where it can break through the separation altogether, unite,
identify itself with cosmic being, feel itself universal, one with all exist-
ence. In this freedom of entry into cosmic self and cosmic nature there is
a great liberation of the individual being ; it puts on a cosmic conscious-
ness, becomes the universal individual. Its first result, when it is com-
plete, is the realisation of the cosmic spirit, the one self inhabiting the
universe, and this union may even bring about a disappearance of the
sense of individuality, a merger of the ego into the world-being. Another
common result is an entire openness to the universal Energy so that it is
felt acting through the mind and life and body and the sense of individual
action ceases. But more usually there are results of less amplitude ; there
is a direct awareness of universal being and nature, there is a greater
openness of the mind to the cosmic Mind and its energies, to the cosmic
Life and its energies, to cosmic Matter and its energies. A certain sense
of unity of the individual with the cosmic, a perception of the world held
within one's consciousness as well as of one's own intimate inclusion in
the world consciousness can become frequent or constant in this opening;
a greater feeling of unity with other beings is its natural consequence. It
is then that the existence of the cosmic Being becomes a certitude and a
reality and is no longer an ideative perception.

KNOWLEDGE BY IDENTITY AND SEPARATIVE KNOWLEDGE 485

But the cosmic consciousness of things is founded upon knowledge
by identity; for the universal Spirit knows itself as the Self of all, knows
all as itself and in itself, knows all nature as part of its nature. It is one
with all that it contains and knows it by that identity and by a containing
nearness; for there is at the same time an identity and an exceeding, and,
while from the point of view of the identification there is a oneness and
complete knowledge, so from the point of view of the exceeding there is
an inclusion and a penetration, an enveloping cognition of each thing
and all things, a penetrating sense and vision of each thing and all things.
For the cosmic Spirit inhabits each and all, but is more than all ; there is
therefore in its self-view and world-view a separative power which pre-
vents the cosmic consciousness from being imprisoned in the objects and
beings in which it dwells: it dwells within them as an all-pervading spirit
and power; whatever individualisation takes place is proper to the per-
son or object, but is not binding on the cosmic Being. It becomes each
thing without ceasing from its own larger all-containing existence. Here
then is a large universal identity containing smaller identities ; for what-
ever separative cognition eixsts in or enters into the cosmic consciousness
must stand on this double identity and does not contradict it. If there is
any need of a drawing back and a knowledge by separation plus contact,
it is yet a separateness in identity, a contact in identity; for the object
contained is part of the self of that which contains it. It is only when a
more drastic separativeness intervenes, that the identity veils itself and
throws up a lesser knowledge, direct or indirect, which is unaware of its
source ; yet is it always the sea of identity which throws up to the surface
the waves or the spray of a direct or an indirect knowledge.

This is on the side of consciousness; on the side of action, of the
cosmic energies, it is seen that they move in masses, waves, currents con-
stantly constituting and reconstituting beings and objects, movements
and happenings, entering into them, passing through them, forming
themselves in them, throwing themselves out from them on other beings
and objects. Each natural individual is a receptacle of these cosmic forces
and a dynamo for their propagation; there passes from each to each a
constant stream of mental and vital energies, and these run too in cosmic
waves and currents no less than the forces of physical Nature. All this
action is veiled from our surface mind's direct sense and knowledge, but
it is known and felt by the inner being, though only through a direct
contact; when the being enters into the cosmic consciousness, it is still
more widely, inclusively, intimately aware of this play of cosmic forces.

486 THE LIFE DIVINE

But although the knowledge is then more complete, the dynamisation of
this knowledge can only be partial; for while a fundamental or static
unification with the cosmic self is possible, the active dynamic unification
with cosmic Nature must be incomplete. On the level of mind and life,
even with the loss of the sense of a separate self-existence, the energisms
must be in their very nature a selection through individualisation ; the
action is that of the cosmic Energy, but the individual formation of it in
the living dynamo remains the method of its working. For the very use
of the dynamo of individuality is to select, to concentrate and formulate
selected energies and throw them out in formed and canalised currents:
the flow of a total energy would mean that this dynamo had no further
use, could be abolished or put out of action; instead of an activity of
individual mind, life, body there would be only an individual but imper-
sonal centre or channel through which the universal forces would flow
unimpeded and unselective. This can happen, but it would imply a higher
spiritualisation far exceeding the normal mental level. In the static sei-
zure of the cosmic knowledge by identity, the subliminal universalised
may feel itself one with the cosmic self and the secret self of all others:
but the dynamisation of that knowledge would not go farther than a
translation of this sense of identity into a greater power and intimacy
of direct contact of consciousness with all, a greater, more intimate, more
powerful and efficient impact of the force of consciousness on things and
persons, a capacity too of an effective inclusion and penetration, of a
dynamised intimate vision and feeling and other powers of cognition
and action proper to this larger nature.

In the subliminal, therefore, even enlarged into the cosmic con-
sciousness, we get a greater knowledge but not the complete and original
knowledge. To go farther and see what the knowledge by identity is in
its purity and in what way and to what extent it originates, admits or uses
the other powers of knowledge, we have to go beyond the inner mind and
life and subtle-physical to the two other ends of the subliminal, interro-
gate the subconscient and contact or enter into the superconscient. But
in the subconscient all is blind, an obscure universalism such as is seen
in the mass consciousness, an obscure individuahsm either abnormal to
us or ill-formed and instinctive: here, in the subconscient, a dark knowl-
edge by identity, such as we find already in the Inconscience, is the basis,
but it does not reveal itself and its secret. The superior superconscient
ranges are based upon the spiritual consciousness free and luminous, and
it is there that we can trace the original power of knowledge and perceive

KNOWLEDGE BY IDENTITY AND SEPARATIVE KNOWLEDGE 487

the origin and difference of the two distinct orders, knowledge by identity
and separative knowledge.

In the supreme timeless Existence, as far as we know it by reflection
in spiritual experience, existence and consciousness are one. We are ac-
customed to identify consciousness with certain operations of mentality
and sense and, where these are absent or quiescent, we speak of that state
of being as unconscious. But consciousness can exist where there are no
overt operations, no signs revealing it, even where it is withdrawn from
objects and absorbed in pure existence or involved in the appearance of
non-existence. It is intrinsic in being, self-existent, not abolished by
quiescence, by inaction, by veiling or covering, by inert absorption or in-
volution ; it is there in the being, even when its state seems to be dreamless
sleep or a blind trance or an annulment of awareness or an absence. In
the supreme timeless status where consciousness is one with being and im-
mobile, it is not a separate reality, but simply and purely the self-aware-
ness inherent in existence. There is no need of knowledge nor is there any
operation of knowledge. Being is self-evident to itself: it does not need
to look at itself in order to know itself or learn that it is. But if this is
evidently true of pure existence, it is also true of the primal All-Exist-
ence; for just as spiritual Self-Existence is intrinsically aware of its self,
so it is intrinsically aware of all that is in its being: this is not by an act
of knowledge formulated in a self-regard, a self-observation, but by the
same inherent awareness ; it is intrinsically all-conscious of all that is by
the very fact that all is itself. Thus conscious of its timeless self-exist-
ence, the Spirit, the Being is aware in the same way — intrinsically, abso-
lutely, totally, without any need of a look or act of knowledge, because
it is all, — of Time-Existence and of all that is in Time. This is the es-
sential awareness by identity; if applied to cosmic existence, it would
mean an essential self-evident automatic consciousness of universe by
the Spirit because it is everything and everything is its being.

But there is another status of spiritual awareness which seems to
us to be a development from this state and power of pure self-conscious-
ness, perhaps even a first departure, but is in fact normal and intimate
to it; for the awareness by identity is always the very stuff of all the
Spirit's self-knowledge, but it admits within itself, without changing or
modifying its own eternal nature, a subordinate and simultaneous aware-
ness by inclusion and by indwelling. The Being, the Self-existent sees all
existences in its one existence; it contains them all and knows them as
being of its being, consciousness of its consciousness, power of its power,

488 THE LIFE DIVINE

bliss of its bliss; it is at the same time, necessarily, the Self in them and
knows all in them by its pervadingly indwelling self ness : but still all this
awareness exists intrinsically, self-evidently, automatically, without the
need of any act, regard or operation of knowledge; for knowledge here
is not an act, but a state pure, perpetual and inherent. At the base of all
spiritual knowledge is this consciousness of identity and by identity,
which knows or is simply aware of all as itself. Translated into our way
of consciousness this becomes the triple knowledge thus formulated in
the Upanishad, "He who sees all existence in the Self," "He who sees the
Self in all existences," "He in whom the Self has become all existences,"
— inclusion, indwelling and identity: but in the fundamental conscious-
ness this seeing is a spiritual self-sense, a seeing that is self-light of being,
not a separative regard or a regard upon self turning that self into object.
But in this fundamental self-experience a regard of consciousness can
manifest which, though inherently possible, an inevitably self-contained
power of spirit, is not a first active element of the absorbed intrinsic
self-luminousness and self-evidence of the supreme consciousness. This
regard belongs to or brings in another status of the supreme spiritual
consciousness, a status in which knowledge as we know it begins; there
is a state of consciousness and in it, intimate to it there is an act of know-
ing: the Spirit regards itself, it becomes the knower and the known, in
a way the subject and object — or rather the subject-object in one — of its
own self-knowledge. But this regard, this knowledge is still intrinsic, still
self-evident, an act of identity; there is no beginning of what we experi-
ence as separative knowledge.

But when the subject draws a little back from itself as object, then
certain tertiary powers of spiritual knowledge, of knowledge by identity,
take their first origin. There is a spiritual intimate vision, a spiritual
pervasive entry and penetration, a spiritual feeling in which one sees all as
oneself, feels all as oneself, contacts all as oneself. There is a power of
spiritual perception of the object and all that it contains or is, perceived
in an enveloping and pervading identity, the identity itself constituting
the perception. There is a spiritual conception that is the original sub-
stance of thought, not the thought that discovers the unknown, but that
which brings out the intrinsically known from oneself and places it in
self-space, in an extended being of self -awareness, as an object of con-
ceptual self-knowledge. There is a spiritual emotion, a spiritual sense,
there is an intermingling of oneness with oneness, of being with being, of
consciousness with consciousness, of delight of being with delight of be-

KNOWLEDGE BY IDENTITY AND SEPARATIVE KNOWLEDGE 489

ing. There is a joy of intimate separateness in identity, of relations of
love joined with love in a supreme unity, a delight of the many powers,
truths, beings of the eternal oneness, of the forms of the Formless; all the
play of the becoming in the being founds its self-expression upon these
powers of the consciousness of the Spirit. But in their spiritual origin all
these powers are essential, not instrumental, not organised, devised or
created; they are the luminous self-aware substance of the spiritual Iden-
tical made active on itself and in itself, spirit made sight, spirit vibrant
as feeling, spirit self-luminous as perception and conception. All is in fact
the knowledge by identity, self-powered, self-moving in its multitudinous
selfhood of one-awareness. The Spirit's infinite self-experience moves be-
tween sheer identity and a multiple identity, a delight of intimately
differentiated oneness and an absorbed self-rapture.

A separative knowledge arises when the sense of differentiation over-
powers the sense of identity; the self still cognises its identity with the
object but pushes to its extreme the play of intimate separateness. At first
there is not a sense of self and not-self, but only of self and other-self.
A certain knowledge of identity and by identity is still there, but it tends
to be first overstructured, then submerged, then so replaced by knowledge
through interchange and contact that it figures as a secondary awareness,
as if it were a result and no longer the cause of the mutual contact, the
still pervasive and enveloping touch, the inter-penetrating intimacy of the
separate selves. Finally, identity disappears behind the veil and there is
the play of being with other beings, consciousness with other conscious-
ness: an underlying identity is still there, but it is not experienced; its
place is taken by a direct seizing and penetrating contact, intermingling,
interchange. It is by this interaction that a more or less intimate knowl-
edge, mutual awareness or awareness of the object remains possible.
There is no feeling of self meeting self, but there is a mutuality; there
is not yet an entire separateness, a complete otherness and ignorance. This
is a diminished consciousness, but it retains some power of the original
knowledge curtailed by division, by the loss of its primal and essential
completeness, operating by division, effecting closeness but not oneness.
The power of inclusion of the object in the consciousness, of an envelop-
ing awareness and knowledge is there; but it is the inclusion of a now
externalised existence which has to be made an element of our self by an
attained or recovered knowledge, by a dwelling of consciousness upon the
object, a concentration, a taking possession of it as part of the existence.
The power of penetration is there, but it has no natural pervasiveness

490 THE LIFE DIVINE

and does not lead to identity; it gathers what it can, takes what is thus
acquired and carries the contents of the object of knowledge to the sub-
ject. There can still be a direct and penetrating contact of consciousness
with consciousness creating a vivid and intimate knowledge, but it is
confined to the points or to the extent of the contact. There is still a direct
sense, consciousness-sight, consciousness-feeling which can see and feel
what is within the object as well as its outside and surface. There is still
a mutual penetration and interchange between being and being, between
consciousness and consciousness, waves of thought, of feeling, of energy
of all kinds which may be a movement of sympathy and union or of op-
position and struggle. There can be an attempt at unification by posses-
sion of others or through one's own acceptance of possession by other
consciousness or other being; or there can be a push towards union by
reciprocal inclusion, pervasion, mutual possession. Of all this action and
interaction the knower by direct contact is aware and it is on this basis
that he arranges his relations with the world around him. This is the
origin of knowledge by direct contact of consciousness with its object,
which is normal to our inner being but foreign or only imperfectly known
to our surface nature.

This first separative ignorance is evidently still a play of knowledge
but of a limited separative knowledge, a play of divided being working
upon a reality of underlying unity and arriving only at an imperfect re-
sult or outcome of the concealed oneness. The complete intrinsic aware-
ness of identity and the act of knowledge by identity belong to the
higher hemisphere of existence: this knowledge by direct contact is the
main character of the highest supraphysical mental planes of conscious-
ness, those to which our surface being is closed in by a wall of igno-
rance; in a diminished and more separative form it is a property of
the lesser supraphysical planes of mind; it is or can be an element in all
that is supraphysical. It is the main instrumentation of our subliminal
self, its central means of awareness; for the subliminal self or inner being
is a projection from these higher planes to meet the subconscience and
it inherits the character of consciousness of its planes of origin with
which it is intimately associated and in touch by kinship. In our outer
being we are children of the Inconscience ; our inner being makes us in-
heritors of the higher heights of mind and life and spirit: the more we
open inwards, go inwards, live inwards, receive from within, the more we
draw away from subjection to our inconscient origin and move towards
all which is now superconscient to our ignorance.

KNOWLEDGE BY IDENTITY AND SEPARATIVE KNOWLEDGE 49 1

Ignorance becomes complete with the entire separation of being
from being: the direct contact of consciousness with consciousness is then
entirely veiled or heavily overlaid, even though it still goes on within our
subliminal parts, just as there is also, though wholly concealed and not
directly operative, the underlying secret identity and oneness. There is
on the surface a complete separateness, a division into self and not-self;
there is the necessity of dealing with the not-self, but no direct means of
knowing it or mastering it. Nature then creates indirect means, a contact
by physical organs of sense, a penetration of outside impacts through the
nerve currents, a reaction of mind and its co-ordinations acting as an aid
and supplement to the activity of the physical organs, — all of them
methods of an indirect knowledge ; for the consciousness is forced to rely
on these instruments and cannot act directly on the object. To these
means is added a reason, intelligence and intuition which seize on the
communications thus indirectly brought to them, put all in order and uti-
lise their data to get as much knowledge and mastery and possession of
the not-self or as much partial unity with it as the original division allows
to the separated being. These means are obviously insufficient and often
inefficient, and the indirect basis of the mind's operations afflicts knowl-
edge with a fundamental incertitude; but this initial insufficiency is
inherent in the very nature of our material existence and of all still un-
delivered existence that emerges from the Inconscience.

The Inconscience is an inverse reproduction of the supreme super-
conscience: it has the same absoluteness of being and automatic action,
but in a vast involved trance ; it is being lost in itself, plunged in its own
abyss of infinity. Instead of a luminous absorption in self-existence there
is a tenebrous involution in it, the darkness veiled within darkness of
the Rig Veda, tama dsit tamasd gildham, which makes it look like Xon-
Existence; instead of a luminous inherent self-awareness there is a
consciousness plunged into an abyss of self-oblivion, inherent in being
but not awake in being. Yet is this involved consciousness still a con-
cealed knowledge by identity; it carries in it the awareness of all the
truths of existence hidden in its dark infinite and, when it acts and
creates, — but it acts first as Energy and not as Consciousness, — every-
thing is arranged with the precision and perfection of an intrinsic knowl-
edge. In all material things reside a mute and involved Real-Idea, a
substantial and self-effective intuition, an eyeless exact perception, an
automatic intelligence working out its unexpressed and unthought con-
ceptions, a blindly seeing sureness of sight, a dumb infallible sureness of

492 THE LIFE DIVINE

suppressed feeling coated in insensibility, which effectuate all that has
to be effected. All this state and action of the Inconscient corresponds
very evidently with the same state and action of the pure Supercon-
science, but translated into terms of self-darkness in place of the original
self-light. Intrinsic in the material form, these powers are not possessed
by the form, but yet work in its mute subconscience.

We can, in this knowledge, understand more clearly the stages of
the emergence of consciousness from involution to its evolved appearance,
of which we have already attempted some general conception. The ma-
terial existence has only a physical, not a mental individuality, but there
is a subliminal Presence in it, the one Conscious in unconscious things,
that determines the operation of its indwelling energies. If, as has been
affirmed, a material object receives and retains the impression of the con-
tacts of things around it and energies emanate from it, so that an occult
knowledge can become aware of its past, can make us conscious of these
emanating influences, the intrinsic unorganised Awareness pervading
the form but not yet enlightening it must be the cause of this receptivity
and these capacities. What we see from outside is that material objects
like plants and minerals have their powers, properties and inherent in-
fluences, but as there is no faculty or means of communication, it is only
by being brought into contact with person or object or by a conscious
utilisation by living beings that their influences can become active, —
such a utilisation is the practical side of more than one human science.
But still these powers and influences are attributes of Being, not of mere
indeterminate substance, they are forces of the Spirit emerging by Energy
from its self-absorbed Inconscience. This first crude mechanical action
of an inherent absorbed conscious energy opens in the primary forms of
life into submental life- vibrations that imply an involved sensation ; there
is a seeking for growth, light, air, life-room, a blind feeling out, which
is still internal and confined within the immobile being, unable to for-
mulate its instincts, to communicate, to externalise itself. An immobility
not organised to establish living relations, it endures and absorbs con-
tacts, involuntarily inflicts but cannot voluntarily impose them; the in-
conscience is stfll dominant, still works out everything by the secret
involved knowledge by identity, it has not yet developed the surface con-
tactual means of a conscious knowledge. This further development be-
gins with overtly conscious life; what we see in it is the imprisoned con-
sciousness struggling out to the surface: it is under the compulsion of
this struggle that the separated living being strives, however blindly at

KNOWLEDGE BY IDENTITY AND SEPARATIVE KNOWLEDGE 493

first and within narrow limits, to enter into conscious relations with the
rest of the world-being outside it. It is by the growing amount of contacts
that it can receive and respond to and by the growing amount of con-
tacts that it can put out from itself or impose in order to satisfy its needs
and impulsions that the being of living matter develops its consciousness,
grows from inconscience or subconscience into a limited separative
knowledge.

We see then all the powers inherent in the original self-existent spir-
itual Awareness slowly brought out and manifested in this growing separa-
tive consciousness; they are activities suppressed but native to the secret
and involved knowledge by identity and they now emerge by degrees in
a form strangely diminished and tentative. First, there emerges a crude
or veiled sense which develops into precise sensations aided by a vital in-
stinct or concealed intuition; then a life-mind perception manifests and
at its back an obscure consciousness-sight and feeling of things ; emotion
vibrates out and seeks an interchange with others ; last arises to the sur-
face conception, thought, reason comprehending and apprehending the
object, combining its data of knowledge. But all are incomplete, still
maimed by the separative ignorance and the first obscuring inconscience ;
all are dependent on the outward means, not empowered to act in their
own right: consciousness cannot act directly on consciousness; there is a
constructive envelopment and penetration of things by the mind con-
sciousness, but not a real possession; there is no knowledge by identity.
Only when the subliminal is able to force upon the frontal mind and sense
some of its secret activities pure and untranslated into the ordinary
forms of mental intelligence, does a rudimentary action of the deeper
methods lift itself to the surface; but such emergences are still an ex-
ception, they strike across the normality of our acquired and learned
knowledge with a savour of the abnormal and the supernormal. It is
only by an opening to our inner being or an entry into it that a direct in-
timate awareness can be added to the outer indirect awareness. It is only
by our awakening to our inmost soul or superconscient self that there
can be a beginning of the spiritual knowledge with identity as its basis,
its constituent power, its intrinsic substance.

CHAPTER XI

THE BOUNDARIES OF THE IGNORANCE

One who thinks there is this world and no other.

Katha Upanishad}

Extended within the Infinite, . . . headless and footless,
concealing his two ends.^

Rig Veda^

He who has the knowledge "I am Brahman" becomes
all this that is; but whoever worships another divinity than
the One Self and thinks, "Other is he and I am other," he
knows not.

Brihadaranyaka Upanishad.^

This Self is fourfold — the Self of Waking who has the
outer intelligence and enjoys external things, is its first part ;
the Self of Dream who has the inner intelUgence and enjoys
things subtle, is its second part; the Self of Sleep, unified, a
massed intelligence, blissful and enjoying bliss, is the third
part . . . the lord of all, the omniscient, the inner Control.
That which is unseen, indefinable, self-evident in its one self-
hood, is the fourth part: this is the Self, this is that which
has to be known.

Mandukya Upanishad.^

A conscious being, no larger than a man's thumb, stands
in the centre of our self; he is master of the past and the
present; ... he is today and he is tomorrow.

Katha Upanishad.^

IT IS now possible to review in its larger lines this Ignorance, or this
separative knowledge labouring towards identical knowledge, which
constitutes our human mentality and, in an obscurer form, all conscious-
ness that has evolved below our level. We see that in us it consists of a
succession of waves of being and force, pressing from outside and rising
from within, which become stuff of consciousness and formulate in a men-
tal cognition and mentalised sensation of self and things in Time and
Space. Time presents itself to us as a flow of dynamic movement, Space
as an objective field of contents for the experience of this imperfect and
developing awareness. By immediate awareness the mental being mobile

^ II. 6. ^ Head and feet, the superconscient and the inconscient.

'IV. 1. 7, II. *I. 4. 10. ''Verses 2-7. "TV. 12, 13.

494

THE BOUNDARIES OF THE IGNORANCE 495

in Time lives perpetually in the present; by memory he saves a certain
part of his experience of self and things from streaming away from him
entirely into the past; by thought and will and action, by mind energy,
life energy, body energy he utilises it for what he becomes in the present
and is yet to become hereafter ; the force of being in him that has made
him what he is works to prolong, develop and amplify his becoming in
the future. All this insecurely held material of self-expression and experi-
ence of things, this partial knowledge accumulated in the succession of
Time, is co-ordinated for him by perception, memory, intelligence and
will to be utiHsed for an ever-new or ever-repeated becoming and for the
mental, vital, physical action which helps him to grow into what he is to
be and to express what he already is. The present totality of all this ex-
perience of consciousness and output of energy is co-ordinated for rela-
tion to his being, gathered into consistency around an ego-sense which
formulates the habit of response of self-experience to the contacts of
Nature in a persistent limited field of conscious being. It is this ego-
sense that gives a first basis of coherence to what otherwise might be a
string or mass of floating impressions: all that is so sensed is referred to
a corresponding artificial centre of mental consciousness in the under-
standing, the ego-idea. This ego-sense in the life stuff and this ego-
idea in the mind maintain a constructed symbol of self, the separative
ego, which does duty for the hidden real self, the spirit or true being.
The surface mental individuality is, in consequence, always ego-centric;
even its altruism is an enlargement of its ego : the ego is the lynch-pin in-
vented to hold together the motion of our wheel of nature. The necessity
of centralisation around the ego continues until there is no longer need
of any such device or contrivance because there has emerged the true
self, the spiritual being, which is at once wheel and motion and that
which holds all together, the centre and the circumference.

But the moment we study ourselves, we find that the self-experi-
ence which we thus co-ordinate and consciously utilise for life, is a small
part even of our waking individual consciousness. We fasten only upon
a very limited number of the mental sensations and perceptions of self
and things which come up into our surface consciousness in our continual
present: of these again memory saves up only a scanty part from the
oblivious gulf of the past; of the storings of memory our intelligence
utilises only a small portion for co-ordinated knowledge, will utilises a
smaller percentage for action. A narrow selection, a large rejection or
reservation, a miserly-spendthrift system of waste of material and unem-

496 THE LIFE DIVINE

ployment of resources and a scanty and disorderly modicum of useful
spending and utilisable balance seems to be the method of Nature in our
conscious becoming even as it is in the field of the material universe. But
this is only in appearance, for it would be a wholly untrue account to
say that all that is not thus saved up and utilised is destroyed, becomes
null and has passed away ineffectually and in vain. A great part of it
has been quietly used by Nature herself to form us and actuates that
sufficiently large mass of our growth and becoming and action for which
our conscious memory, will and intelligence are not responsible. A still
greater part is used by her as a store from which she draws and which
she utilises, while we ourselves have utterly forgotten the origin and
provenance of this material which we find ourselves employing with a
deceptive sense of creation; for we imagine we are creating this new
material of our work, when we are only combining results out of that
which we have forgotten but Nature in us has remembered. If we admit
rebirth as part of her system, we shall realise that all experience has its
use; for all experience counts in this prolonged building and nothing is
rejected except what has exhausted its utility and would be a burden
on the future. A judgment from what appears now in our conscious sur-
face is fallacious: for when we study and understand, we perceive that
only a little of her action and growth in us is conscious; the bulk of it is
carried on subconsciously as in the rest of her material life. We are not
only what we know of ourselves but an immense more which we do not
know; our momentary personality is only a bubble on the ocean of our
existence.

A superficial observation of our waking consciousness shows us that
of a great part of our individual being and becoming we are quite ig-
norant ; it is to us the Inconscient, just as much as the life of the plant,
the metal, the earth, the elements. But if we carry our knowledge farther,
pushing psychological experiment and observation beyond their normal
bounds, we find how vast is the sphere of this supposed Inconscient or this
subconscient in our total existence, — the subconscient, so seeming and
so called by us because it is a concealed consciousness, — and what a small
and fragmentary portion of our being is covered by our waking self-
awareness. We arrive at the knowledge that our waking mind and ego
are only a superimposition upon a submerged, a subliminal self, — for so
that self appears to us, — or, more accurately, an inner being, with a much
vaster capacity of experience; our mind and ego are like the crown and

THE BOUNDARIES OF THE IGNORANCE 497

dome of a temple jutting out from the waves while the great body of the
building is submerged under the surface of the waters.

This concealed self and consciousness is our real or whole being,
of which the outer is a part and a phenomenon, a selective formation for
a surface use. We perceive only a small number of the contacts of things
which impinge upon us; the inner being perceives all that enters or
touches us and our. environment. We perceive only a part of the work-
ings of our life and being; the inner being perceives so much that we
might almost suppose that nothing escapes its view. We remember only a
small selection from our perceptions, and of these even we keep a great
part in a store-room where we cannot always lay our hand upon what
we need ; the inner being retains everything that it has ever received and
has it always ready to hand. We can form into co-ordinated understand-
ing and knowledge only so much of our perceptions and memories as our
trained intelligence and mental capacity can grasp in their sense and ap-
preciate in their relations: the intelligence of the inner being needs no
training, but preserves the accurate form and relations of all its percep-
tions and memories and, — though this is a proposition which may be
considered doubtful or difficult to concede in its fullness, — can grasp
immediately, when it does not possess already, their significance. And
its perceptions are not confined, as are ordinarily those of the waking
mind, to the scanty gleanings of the physical senses, but extend far be-
yond and use, as telepathic phenomena of many kinds bear witness, a
subtle sense the limits of which are too wide to be easily fixed. The rela-
tions between the surface will or impulsion and the subliminal urge, mis-
takenly described as unconscious or subconscious, have not been properly
studied except in regard to unusual and unorganised manifestations and
to certain morbidly abnormal phenomena of the diseased human mind;
but if we pursue our observation far enough, we shall find that the cog-
nition and will or impulsive force of the inner being really stand behind
the whole conscious becoming ; the latter represents only that part of its
secret endeavour and achievement which rises successfully to the surface
of our life. To know our inner being is the first step towards a real self-
knowledge.

If we undertake this self-discovery and enlarge our knowledge of the
subliminal self, so conceiving it as to include in it our lower subconscient
and upper superconscient ends, we shall discover that it is really this
which provides the whole material of our apparent being and that our

498 THE LIFE DIVINE

perceptions, our memories, our effectuations of will and intelligence are
only a selection from its perceptions, memories, activities and relations
of will and intelligence ; our very ego is only a minor and superficial for-
mulation of its self-consciousness and self -experience. It is, as it were,
the urgent sea out of which the waves of our conscious becoming arise.
But what are its limits? how far does it extend? what is its fundamental
nature? Ordinarily, we speak of a subconscious existence and include in
this term all that is not on the waking surface. But the whole or the
greater part of the inner or subliminal self can hardly be characterised
by that epithet; for when we say subconscious, we think readily of an
obscure unconsciousness or half-consciousness or else a submerged con-
sciousness below and in a way inferior to and less than our organised wak-
ing awareness or, at least, less in possession of itself. But we find, when
we go within, that somewhere in our subliminal part, — though not co-ex-
tensive with it since it has also obscure and ignorant regions, — there is a
consciousness much wider, more luminous, more in possession of itself
and things than that which wakes upon our surface and is the percipient
of our daily hours; that is our inner being, and it is this which we must
regard as our subliminal self and set apart the subconscient as an inferior,
a lowest occult province of our nature. In the same way there is a super-
conscient part of our total existence in which there is what we discover
to be our highest self, and this too we can set apart as a higher occult
province of our nature.

But what then is the subconscient and where does it begin and how
is it related to our surface being or to the subliminal of which it would
seem more properly to be a province? We are aware of our body and
know that we have a physical existence, even very largely identify our-
selves with it, and yet most of its operations are really subconscious to
our mental being; not only does the mind take no part in them but, as
we suppose, our most physical being has no awareness of its own hidden
operations or, by itself, of its own existence; it knows or rather feels only
so much of itself as is enlightened by mind-sense and observable by in-
telligence. We are aware of a vitality working in this bodily form and
structure as in the plant or lower animal, a vital existence which is also
for the most part subconscious to us, for we only observe some of its
movements and reactions. We are partly aware of its operations, but
not by any means of all or most of them, and rather of those which are
abnormal than those which are normal; its wants impress themselves
more forcibly upon us than its satisfactions, its diseases and disorders

THE BOUNDARIES OF THE IGNORANCE 499

than its health and its regular rhythm, its death is more poignant to us
than its life is vivid: we know as much of it as we can consciously observe
and use or as much as forces itself upon us by pain and pleasure and other
sensations or as a cause of nervous or physical reaction and disturbance,
but no more. Accordingly, we suppose that this vital-physical part of us
also is not conscious of its own operations or has only a suppressed con-
sciousness or no-consciousness like the plant or an inchoate consciousness
like the incipient animal; it becomes conscious only so far as it is en-
lightened by mind and observable by intelligence.

This is an exaggeration and a confusion due to our identification of
consciousness with mentality and mental awareness. ]Mind identifies it-
self to a certain extent with the movements proper to physical life and
body and annexes them to its mentality, so that all consciousness seems
to us to be mental. But if we draw back, if we separate the mind as wit-
ness from these parts of us, we can discover that life and body — even the
most physical parts of life — have a consciousness of their own, a con-
sciousness proper to an obscurer vital and to a bodily being, even such
an elemental awareness as primitive animal forms may have, but in us
partly taken up by the mind and to that extent mentalised. Yet it has
not, in its independent motion, the mental awareness which we enjoy;
if there is mind in it, it is mind involved and implicit in the body and in
the physical life: there is no organised self-consciousness, but only a sense
of action and reaction, movement, impulse and desire, need, necessary
activities imposed by Nature, hunger, instinct, pain, insensibility and
pleasure. Although thus inferior, it has this awareness obscure, limited
and automatic; but since it is less in possession of itself, void of what to
us is the stamp of mentality, we may justly call it the submental, but not
so justly the subconscious part of our being. For when we stand back
from it, when we can separate our mind from its sensations, we perceive
that this is a nervous and sensational and automatically dynamic mode
of consciousness, a gradation of awareness different from the mind : it has
its own separate reactions to contacts and is sensitive to them in its own
power of feeling; it does not depend for that on the mind's perception and
response. The true subconscious is other than this vital or physical sub-
stratum; it is the Inconscient vibrating on the borders of consciousness,
sending up its motions to be changed into conscious stuff, swallowing into
its depths impressions of past experience as seeds of unconscious habit
and returning them constantly but often chaotically to the surface con-
sciousness, missioning upwards much futile or perilous stuff of which

500 THE LIFE DIVINE

the origin is obscure to us, in dream, in mechanical repetitions of all
kinds, in untraceable impulsions and motives, in mental, vital, physical
perturbations and upheavals, in dumb automatic necessities of our ob-
scurest parts of nature.

But the subliminal self has not at all this subconscious character: it
is in full possession of a mind, a life-force, a clear subtle-physical sense
of things. It has the same capacities as our waking being, a subtle sense
and perception, a comprehensive extended memory and an intensive
selecting intelligence, will, self-consciousness; but even though the same
in kind, they are wider, more developed, more sovereign. And it has other
capacities which exceed those of our mortal mind because of a power of
direct awareness of the being, whether acting in itself or turned upon its
object, which arrives more swiftly at knowledge, more swiftly at effec-
tivity of will, more deeply at understanding and satisfaction of impulse.
Our surface mind is hardly a true mentality, so involved, bound, ham-
pered, conditioned is it by the body and bodily life and the limitations of
the nerve-system and the physical organs. But the subliminal self has a
true mentality superior to these limitations ; it exceeds the physical mind
and physical organs although it is aware of them and their works and is,
indeed, in a large degree their cause or creator. It is only subconscious
in the sense of not bringing all or most of itself to the surface, it works
always behind the veil: it is rather a secret intraconscient and circum-
conscient than a subconscient ; for it envelops quite as much as it sup-
ports the outer nature. This description is no doubt truest of the deeper
parts of the subliminal; in other layers of it nearer to our surface there
is a more ignorant action and those who, penetrating within, pause in the
zones of lesser coherence or in the No-man's-land between the subliminal
and the surface, may fall into much delusion and confusion: but that too,
though ignorant, is not of the nature of the subconscious ; the confusion
of these intermediate zones has no kinship to the Inconscience.

We might say then that there are three elements in the totality of
our being: there is the submental and the subconscient which appears
to us as if it were inconscient comprising the material basis and a good
part of our life and body; there is the subliminal, which comprises the
inner being, taken in its entirety of inner mind, inner life, inner physical
with the soul or psychic entity supporting them; there is this waking
consciousness which the subliminal and the subconscient throw up on the
surface, a wave of their secret surge. But even this is not an adequate ac-
count of what we are; for there is not only something deep within behind

THE BOUNDARIES OF THE IGNORANCE 5OI

our normal self-awareness, but something also high above it: that too is
ourselves, other than our surface mental personality, but not outside our
true self; that too is a country of our spirit. For the subliminal proper is
no more than the inner being on the level of the Knowledge-Ignorance
luminous, powerful and extended indeed beyond the poor conception of
our waking mind but still not the supreme or the whole sense of our being,
not its ultimate mystery. We become aware, in a certain experience, of a
range of being superconscient to all these three, aware too of something,
a supreme highest Reality sustaining and exceeding them all, which hu-
manity speaks of vaguely as Spirit, God, the Oversoul: from these super-
conscient ranges we have visitations and in our highest being we tend
towards them and to that supreme Spirit. There is then in our total range
of existence a superconscience as well as a subconscience and inconscience,
overarching and perhaps enveloping our subliminal and our waking
selves, but unknown to us, seemingly unattainable and incommunicable.
But with the extension of our knowledge we discover what this
spirit or oversoul is: it is ultimately our own highest deepest vastest
Self, it is apparent on its summits or by reflection in ourselves as Sach-
chidananda creating us and the world by the power of His divine Knowl-
edge-Will, spiritual, supramental, truth-conscious, infinite. That is
the real Being, Lord and Creator, who, as the Cosmic Self veiled in ]Mind
and Life and Matter, has descended into that which we call the Incon-
scient and constitutes and directs its subconscient existence by His supra-
mental will and knowledge, has ascended out of the Inconscient and
dwells in the inner being constituting and directing its subliminal exist-
ence by the same will and knowledge, has cast up out of the subliminal
our surface existence and dwells secretly in it overseeing with the same
supreme light and mastery its stumbling and groping movements. If the
subliminal and subconscient may be compared to a sea which throws up
the waves of our surface mental existence, the superconscience may be
compared to an ether which constitutes, contains, overroofs, inhabits and
determines the movements of the sea and its waves. It is there in this
higher ether that we are inherently and intrinsically conscious of our self
and spirit, not as here below by a reflection in silent mind or by acquisi-
tion of the knowledge of a hidden Being within us; it is through it,
through that ether of superconscience, that we can pass to a supreme
status, knowledge, experience. Of this superconscient existence through
which we can arrive at the highest status of our real, our supreme Self, we
are normally even more ignorant than of the rest of our being ; yet is it

502 THE LIFE DIVINE

into the knowledge of it that our being emerging out of the involution in
Inconscience is struggling to evolve. This limitation to our surface exist-
ence, this unconsciousness of our highest as of our inmost self, is our first,
our capital ignorance.

We exist superficially by a becoming in Time ; but here again out of
that becoming in Time the surface mind, which we call ourselves, is ig-
norant of all the long past and the long future, aware only of the little
life which it remembers and not of all even of that; for much of it is lost
to its observation, much to its memory. We readily believe, — for the
simple and compelling but insufficient reason that we do not remember,
have not perceived, are not informed of anything else, — that we cam'e
into existence first by our physical birth into this life and shall cease to
exist by the death of this body and the cessation of this brief physical
activity. But while this is true of our physical mentality and physical
vitality, our corporeal sheath, for they have been constituted at our birth
and are dissolved by death, it is not true of our real becoming in Time.
For our real self in the cosmos is the Superconscient which becomes the
subliminal self and throws up this apparent surface self to act out the
brief and limited part assigned to it between birth and death as a present
living and conscious self-formation of the being in the stuff of a world o'f
inconscient Nature. The true being which we are no more dies by the
cessation of one life than the actor ceases to exist when he has finished
one of his parts or the poet when he has poured out something of himself
in one of his poems; our mortal personality is only such a role or such a
creative self-expression. Whether or no we accept the theory of many
births of the same soul or psychic being in various human bodies upon
this earth, certain it is that our becoming in Time goes far back into the
past and continues far on into the future. For neither the superconscient
nor the subliminal can be limited by a few moments of Time: the one is
eternal and Time is only one of its modes; to the other, to the subliminal,
it is an infinite field of various experience and the very existence of the
being presupposes all the past for its own and equally all the future. Yet
of this past which alone explains our present being, our mind knows, of
knowledge it can be called, only this actual physical existence and its
memories: of the future which alone explains the constant trend of our
becoming, it knows nothing. So fixed are we in the experience of our
ignorance that we even insist that the one can be known only by its
vestiges and the other cannot be known, because the future is not yet
and the past is no longer in existence; yet are they both here in us, the

THE BOUNDARIES OF THE IGNORANCE 503

past involved and active, the future ready to evolve in the continuity of
the secret spirit. This is another limiting and frustrating ignorance.

But even here the self-ignorance of man does not end ; for not only
is he ignorant of his superconscient Self, of his subliminal self, of his sub-
conscient self, he is ignorant of his world in which he presently lives,
which constantly acts on and through him and on which and by which
he has to act. And the stamp of his ignorance is this, that he regards it as
something quite separate from him, as not-self because it is other than
his individual nature-formation and his ego. So too when he confronts
his superconscient Self, he thinks of it first as something quite other than
he, an external, even extracosmic God; when he confronts and becomes
aware of his subliminal self, it seems to him at first another greater per-
son or another consciousness than his own which can support and guide
him. Of the world he regards only one little foam-bubble, his hfe and
body, as himself. But when we get into our subliminal consciousness, we
find it extending itself to be commensurate with its world ; when we get
into our superconscient Self, we find that the world is only its manifesta-
tion and that all in it is the One, all in it is our self. We see that there is
one indivisible Matter of which our body is a knot, one indivisible Life
of which our life is an eddy, one indivisible Mind of which our mind is
a receiving and recording, forming or translating and transmitting station,
one indivisible Spirit of which our soul and individual being are a portion
or a manifestation. It is the ego-sense which clinches the division and in
which the ignorance we superficially are finds its power to maintain the
strong though always permeable walls it has created to be its own prison.
Ego is the most formidable of the knots which keep us tied to the Igno-
rance.

As we are ignorant of our existence in Time except the small hour
which we remember, so we are ignorant of ourselves in Space except the
small span of which we are mentally and sensationally conscious, the
single body that moves there and the mind and life which are identified
with it, and we regard the environment as a not-self we have to deal with
and use: it is this identification and this conception that form the life of
the ego. Space according to one view is only the co-existence of things or
of souls; the Sankhya affirms the plurality of souls and their independent
existence, and their co-existence is thea only possible by the unity of
Nature-force, their field of experience, Prakriti: but, even granting this,
the co-existence is there and it is in the end co-existence in one Being.
Space is the self-conceptive extension of that one Being; it is the one

504 THE LIFE DIVINE

spiritual Existence displaying the field of movement of its Conscious-
Force in its own self as Space. Because that Conscious-Force concen-
trates in manifold bodies, lives, minds and the soul presides over one of
them, therefore our mentality is concentrated in this and regards this as
itself and all the rest as not-self, just as it regards its one life on which it
concentrates by a similar ignorance as its whole term of existence cut off
from the past and the future. Yet we cannot really know our own men-
tality without knowing the one Mind, our own vitality without knowing
the one Life, our own body without knowing the one Matter ; for not only
is their nature determined by the nature of that, but by that their activi-
ties are at every moment being influenced and determined. But, with all
this sea of being flowing in on us, we do not participate in its conscious-
ness, but know of it only so much as can be brought into the surface of
our minds and co-ordinated there. The world lives in us, thinks in us,
forms itself in us; but we imagine that it is we who live, think, become
separately by ourselves and for ourselves. As we are ignorant of our time-
less, of our superconscient, of our subliminal and subconscient selves, so
are we ignorant of our universal self. This alone saves us that ours is an
ignorance which is full of the impulse and strives irresistibly, eternally, by
the very law of its being towards the realisation of self-possession and
self-knowledge. A many-sided Ignorance striving to become an all-em-
bracing Knowledge is the definition of the consciousness of man the
mental being, — or, looking at it from another side, we may say equally
that it is a limited separative awareness of things striving to become an
integral consciousness and an integral Knowledge.

CHAPTER XII

THE ORIGIN OF THE IGNORANCE

By energism of Consciousness^ Brahman is massed;
from that Matter is born and from Matter Life and Mind
and the worlds.

Mundaka Upanishad.^

He desired, "May I be Many," He concentrated in
Tapas, by Tapas he created the world; creating, he entered
into it; entering, he became the existent and the beyond-
existence, he became the expressed and the unexpressed, he
became knowledge and ignorance, he became the truth and
the falsehood: he became the truth, even all this whatso-
ever that is. "That Truth" they call him.

Taittiriya Upanishad.^

Energism of consciousness^ is Brahman.

Taittiriya Upanishad*

IT BECOMES necessary and possible, now that so much has been
fixed, to consider at close quarters the problem of the Ignorance from
the point of view of its pragmatic origin, the process of consciousness
which brought it into existence. It is on the basis of an integral Oneness
as the truth of existence that we have to consider the problem and see how
far the different possible solutions are on this basis applicable. How could
this manifold ignorance or this narrowly self-limiting and separative
knowledge arise and come into action or maintain itself in action in an
absolute Being who must be absolute consciousness and therefore cannot
be subject to ignorance? How is even an apparent division effectively
operated and kept in continuance in the Indivisible? The Being, inte-
grally one, cannot be ignorant of itself; and since all things are itself,
conscious modifications, determinations of its being, it cannot either be
ignorant of things, of their true nature, of their true action. But though
we say that we are That, that the Jivatman or individual self is no other
than the Paramatman, no other than the Absolute, yet w^e are certainly
ignorant both of ourselves and things, from which this contradiction
results that what must be in its very grain incapable of ignorance is

'Tapas. '1. I. 8. 'II. 6. *III. 2-5.

50s

506 THE LIFE DIVINE *

yet capable of it, and has plunged itself into it by some will of its being
or some necessity or possibility of its nature. We do not ease the difficulty
if we plead that Mind, which is the seat of ignorance, is a thing of Maya,
non-existent, not-Brahman, and that Brahman, the Absolute, the sole
Existence cannot in any way be touched by the Ignorance of mind which
is part of the illusory being, Asat, the non-existence. This is an escape
which is not open to us if we admit an integral Oneness: for then it is
evident that, in making so radical a distinction and at the same time
cancelling it by terming it illusory, we are using the magic or Maya of
thought and word in order to conceal from ourselves the fact that we are
dividing and denying the unity of the Brahman; for we have erected two
opposite powers, Brahman incapable of illusion and self-illusive Maya,
and pitchforked them into an impossible unity. If Brahman is the sole
existence, Maya can be nothing but a power of Brahman, a force of his
consciousness or a result of his being; and if the Jivatman, one with
Brahman, is subject to its own Maya, the Brahman in it is subject to
Maya. But this is not intrinsically or fundamentally possible: the sub-
jection can only be a submission of something in Nature to an action of
Nature which is part of the conscious and free movement of the Spirit in
things, a play of its own self -manifesting Omniscience. Ignorance must be
part of the movement of the One, a development of its consciousness
knowingly adopted, to which it is not forcibly subjected but which it uses
for its cosmic purpose.

It is not open to us to get rid of the whole difficulty by saying that
the Jivatman and the Supreme are not One, but eternally different, the
one subject to ignorance, the other absolute in being and consciousness
and therefore in knowledge; for this contradicts the supreme experience
and the whole experience which is that of unity in being, whatever dif-
ference there may be in the action of Nature. It is easier to accept the
fact of unity in difference which is so evident and pervasive in all the
building of the universe and satisfy ourselves with the statement that we
are one, yet different, one in essential being and therefore in essential na-
ture, different in soul-form and therefore in active nature. But we thereby
only state the fact, leaving the difficulty raised by the fact unsolved, how
that which belongs in the essence of its being to the unity of the Absolute
and should therefore be one with it and with all in consciousness, comes
to be divided in its dynamic form of self and its activity and subject to
Ignorance. It is also to be noted that the statement would not be wholly
true, since it is possible for the Jivatman to enter into unity with the

THE ORIGIN OF THE IGNORANCE 507

active nature of the One and not only into a static essential oneness. Or
we may escape the difficulty by saying that beyond or above existence
and its problems there is the Unknowable which is beyond or above our
experience, and that the action of Maya has already begun in the Un-
knowable before the world began and therefore is itself unknowable and
inexplicable in its cause and its origin. This would be a sort of idealistic
as opposed to a materialistic Agnosticism. But all Agnosticism is subject
to this objection that it may be nothing but our refusal to know, a too
ready embracing of an apparent and present restriction or constriction of
consciousness, a sense of impotence which may be permitted to the im-
mediate limitations of the mind but not to the Jivatman who is one with
the Supreme. The Supreme must surely know himself and the cause of
ignorance, and therefore the Jivatman has no ground to despair of any
knowledge or deny his capacity of knowing the integral Supreme and the
original cause of his own present ignorance.

The Unknowable, if it is at all, may be a supreme state of Sachchi-
dananda beyond our highest conceptions of existence, consciousness and
bliss ; that is what was evidently meant by the Asat, the Non-Existent of
the Taittiriya Upanishad, which alone was in the beginning and out of
which the existent was born, and possibly too it may be the inmost sense
of the Nirvana of the Buddha: for the dissolution of our present state
by Nirvana may be a reaching to some highest state beyond all notion or
experience of self even, an ineffable release from our sense of existence.
Or it may be the Upanishad's absolute and unconditioned bliss which is
beyond expression and beyond understanding, because it surpasses all
that we can conceive of or describe as consciousness and existence. This
is the sense in which we have already accepted it; for the acceptation
commits us only to a refusal to put a limit to the ascension of the Infinite.
Or, if it is not this, if it is something quite different from existence, even
from an unconditioned existence, it must be the absolute Non-Being of
the nihilistic thinker.

But out of absolute Nothingness nothing can come, not even any-
thing merely apparent, not even an illusion; and if the absolute Non-
existence is not that, then it can only be an absolute eternally unrealised
Potentiality, an enigmatic zero of the Infinite out of which relative poten-
tialities may at any time emerge, but only some actually succeed in emerg-
ing into phenomenal appearance. Out of this Non-existence anything may
arise, and there is no possibility of saying what or why; it is for all prac-
tical purposes a seed of absolute chaos out of which by some happy-

508 THE LIFE DIVINE

rather unhappy — accident there has emerged the order of a universe. Or
we may say that there is no real order of the universe; what we take for
such is a persistent habit of the senses and the Hfe and a figment of the
mind and it is useless to seek for an ultimate reason of things. Out of an
absolute chaos all paradox and absurdity can be born, and the world is
such a paradox, a mysterious sum of contraries and puzzles, or, it may
be, in effect, as some have felt or thought, a huge error, a monstrous, an
infinite delirium. Of such a universe not an absolute Consciousness and
Knowledge, but an absolute Inconscience and Ignorance may be the
source. Anything may be true in such a cosmos: everything may have
been born out of nothing; thinking mind may be only a disease of un-
thinking Force or inconscient Matter; dominant order, which we suppose
to be existence according to the truth of things, may be really the me-
chanical law of an eternal self -ignorance and not the self-evolution of a
supreme self-ruling conscious Will ; perpetual existence may be the con-
stant phenomenon of an eternal Nihil. All opinions about the origins of
things become of an equal force, since all are equally valid or invalid;
for all become equally possible where there is no sure starting-point and
no ascertainable goal of the revolutions of the becoming. All these
opinions have been held by the human mind and in all there has been
profit, even if we regard them as errors ; for errors are permitted to the
mind because they open doors upon truth, negatively by destroying op-
posite errors, positively by preparing an element in a new constructive
h5^othesis. But, pushed too far, this view of things leads to the negation
of the whole aim of philosophy, which seeks for knowledge and not for
chaos and which cannot fulfil itself if the last word of knowledge is the
Unknowable, but only if it is something, to use the words of the Upani-
shad, which being known all is known. The Unknowable — ^not absolutely
unknowable, but beyond mental knowledge — can only be a higher degree
in the intensity of being of that Something, a degree beyond the loftiest
summit attainable by mental beings, and, if it were known as it must be
known to itself, that discovery would not destroy entirely what is given
us by our supreme possible knowledge but rather carry it to a higher ful-
filment and larger truth of what it has already gained by self-vision and
self-experience. It is then this something, an Absolute which can be so
known that all truths can stand in it and by it and find there their recon-
ciliation, that we must discover as our starting-point and keep as our
constant base of thinking and seeing and by it find a solution of the prob-

THE ORIGIN OF THE IGNORANCE 509

lem; for it is That alone that can carry in it a key to the paradoxes of
the universe.

This Something is, as Vedanta insists and as we have throughout
insisted, in its manifest nature Sachchidananda, a trinity of absolute
existence, consciousness and bliss. It is from this primal truth that we
must start in approaching the problem, and it is evident then that the
solution must be found in an action of consciousness manifesting itself as
knowledge and yet limiting that knowledge in such a way as to create the
phenomenon of the Ignorance, — and since the Ignorance is a phenomenon
of the dynamic action of Force of Consciousness, not an essential fact but
a creation, a consequence of that action, it is this Force aspect of Con-
sciousness that it will be fruitful to consider. Absolute consciousness is in
its nature absolute power; the nature of Chit is Shakti: Force or Shakti
concentrated and energised for cognition or for action in a realising power
effective or creative, the power of conscious being dwelling upon itself
and bringing out, as it were, by the heat of its incubation^ the seed and
development of all that is within it or, to use a language convenient to
our minds, of all its truths and potentialities, has created the universe.
If we examine our own consciousness, we shall see that this power of its
energy applying itself to its object is really the most positive dynamic
force it has; by that it arrives at all its knowledge and its action and its
creation. But for us there are two objects on which the dynamism within
can act, ourselves, the internal world, and others^ whether creatures or
things, the external world around us. To Sachchidananda this distinction
with its effective and operative consequences does not apply in the same
way as for us, because all is himself and within himself and there is no
such division as we make by the limitations of our mind. Secondly, in us
only a part of the force of our being is identified with our voluntary ac-
tion, with our will engaged in mental or other activity, the rest is to our

^ Tapas means literally heat, afterwards any kind of energism, askesis, austerity
of conscious force acting upon itself or its object. The world was created by Tapas
in the form, says the ancient image, of an egg, which being broken, again by
Tapas, heat of incubation of conscious force, the Purusha emerged, Soul in Nature,
like a bird from the egg. It may be observed that the usual translation of the word
tapasyd in English books, "penance," is quite misleading — the idea of penance en-
tered rarely into the austerities practised by Indian ascetics. Nor was mortification
of the body the essence even of the most severe and self-afflicting austerities; the
aim was rather an overpassing of the hold of the bodily nature on the consciousness
or else a supernormal energising of the consciousness and will to gain some spiritual
or other object.

510 THE LIFE DIVINE

surface mental awareness involuntary in its action or subconscient or
superconscient, and from this division also a great number of important
practical consequences emerge: but in Sachchidananda this division too
and its consequences do not apply, since all is his one indivisible self and
all action and result are movements of his one indivisible will, his con-
sciousness-force in dynamic operation. Tapas is the nature of action of
his consciousness as of ours, but it is the integral Tapas of an integral
consciousness in an indivisible Existence.

But here a question may arise, since there is a passivity in Existence
and in Nature as well as an activity, immobile status as well as kinesis,
what is the place and role of this Force, this power and its concentra-
tion in regard to a status where there is no play of energy, where all is
immobile. In ourselves we habitually associate our Tapas, our conscious
force, with active consciousness, with energy in play and in internal
or external act and motion. That which is passive in us produces no action
or only an involuntary or mechanical action, and we do not associate
it with our will or conscious force; still, since there too there is the possi-
bility of action or the emergence of an automatic activity, it must have
at least a passively responsive or automatic conscious force in it; or there
is in it either a secretly positive or a negative and inverse Tapas. It may
also be that there is a larger conscious force, power or will in our being
unknown to us which is behind this involuntary action, — if not a will, at
least a force of some kind which itself initiates action or else responds to
the contacts, suggestions, stimulations of the universal Energy. In Nature
also we know that things stable, inert or passive are yet maintained in
~ their energy by a secret and unceasing motion, an energy in action up-
holding the apparent immobility. Here too, then, all is due to the pres-
ence of Shakti, to the action of its power in concentration, its Tapas.
But beyond this, beyond this relative aspect of status and kinesis, we
find that we have the power to arrive at what seems to us an absolute
passivity or immobility of our consciousness in which we cease from all
mental and physical activity. There seem, then, to be an active con-
sciousness in which consciousness works as an energy throwing up
knowledge and activity out of itself and of which therefore Tapas is the
character, and a passive consciousness in which consciousness does not
act as an energy, but only exists as a status and of which therefore ab-
sence of Tapas or force in action is the character. Is the apparent absence
of Tapas in this state real, or is there such an effective distinction in
Sachchidananda? It is affirmed that there is: the dual status of Brahman,

THE ORIGIN OF THE IGNORANCE 5 II

quiescent and creative, is indeed one of the most important and fruitful
distinctions in Indian philosophy; it is besides a fact of spiritual experi-
ence.

Here let us observe, first, that by this passivity in ourselves we arrive
from particular and broken knowledge at a greater, a one and a unifying
knowledge ; secondly, that if, in the state of passivity, we open ourselves
entirely to what is beyond, we can become aware of a Power acting upon
us which we feel to be not our own in the limited egoistic sense, but uni-
versal or transcendental, and that this Power works through us for a
greater play of knowledge, a greater play of energy, action and result,
which also we feel to be not our own, but that of the Divine, of Sach-
chidananda, ourselves only its field or channel. The result happens in
both cases because our individual consciousness rests from an ignorant
limited action and opens itself to the supreme status or to the supreme
action. In the latter, the more dynamic opening, there is power and play
of knowledge and action, and that is Tapas; but in the former also, in
the static consciousness, there is evidently a power for knowledge and a
concentration of knowledge or at least a concentration of consciousness
in immobility and a self-realisation, and that too is Tapas. Therefore it
would seem that Tapas, concentration of power of consciousness, is the
character of both the passive and the active consciousness of Brahman,
and that our own passivity also has a certain character of an unseen sup-
porting or instrumentalising Tapas. It is a concentration of energy of
consciousness that sustains, while it lasts, all creation, all action and kine-
sis; but it is also a concentration of power of consciousness that supports
inwardly or informs all status, even the most immobile passivity, even in
infinite stillness or an eternal silence.

But still, it may be said, these are in the end two different things,
and this is shown by their difference of opposite results; for a resort to
the passivity of Brahman leads to the cessation of this existence and a
resort to the active Brahman leads to its continuance. But here too, let
us observe that this distinction arises by a movement of the individual
soul from one poise to another, from the poise of Brahman-consciousness
in the world, where it is a fulcrum for the universal action, to or towards
the poise of Brahman-consciousness beyond the world, where it is a power
for the withholding of energy from the universal action. Moreover, if it
is by energy of Tapas that the dispensing of force of being in the world-
action is accomplished, it is equally by the energy of Tapas that the
drawing back of that force of being is accompHshed. The passive con-

512 THE LIFE DIVINE

sciousness of Brahman and its active consciousness are not two different,
conflicting and incompatible things; they are the same consciousness,
the same energy, at one end in a state of self-reservation, at the other
cast into a motion of self-giving and self-deploying, like the stillness of a
reservoir and the coursing of the channels which flow from it. In fact, be-
hind every activity there is and must be a passive power of being from
which it arises, by which it is supported, which even, we see in the end,
governs it from behind without being totally identified with it — ^in the
sense at least of being itself all poured out into the action and indis-
tinguishable from it. Such a self-exhausting identification is impossible;
for no action, however vast, exhausts the original power from which it
proceeds, leaving nothing behind it in reserve. When we get back into
our own conscious being, when we stand back from our own action and
see how it is done, we discover that it is our whole being which stands
behind any particular act or sum of activities, passive in the rest of its
integrality, active in its limited dispensation of energy; but that passiv-
ity is not an incapable inertia, it is a poise of self-reserved energy. A
similar truth must apply still more completely to the conscious being of
the Infinite, whose power, in silence of status as in creation, must also
be infinite.

It is immaterial for the moment to inquire whether the passivity out
of which all emerges is absolute or only relative to the observable action
from which it holds back. It is enough to note that, though we make the
distinction for the convenience of our minds, there is not a passive Brah-
man and an active Brahman, but one Brahman, an Existence which
reserves Its Tapas in what we call passivity and gives Itself in what we
call Its activity. For the purposes of action, these are two poles of one
being or a double power necessary for creation; the action proceeds on its
circuit from the reservation and returns to it, presumably, the energies
that were derived, to be again thrown out in a fresh circuit. The passivity
of Brahman is Tapas or concentration of Its being dwelling upon Itself
in a self-absorbed concentration of Its immobile energy; the activity is
Tapas of Its being releasing what It held out of that incubation into
mobility and travelling in a million waves of action, dwelling still upon
each as It travels and liberating in it the being's truths and potentialities.
There too is a concentration of force, but a multiple concentration, which
seems to us a diffusion. But it is not really a diffusion, but a deploying;
Brahman does not cast Its energy out of Itself to be lost in some unreal
exterior void, but keeps it at work within Its being, conserving it un-

THE ORIGIN OF THE IGNORANCE 513

abridged and undiminished in all its continual process of conversion and

transmutation. The passivity is a great conservation of Shakti, of Tapas
supporting a manifold initiation of movement and transmutation into
forms and happenings ; the activity is a conservation of Shakti, of Tapas
in the movement and transmutation. As in ourselves, so in Brahman,
both are relative to each other, both simultaneously co-exist, pole and
pole in the action of one Existence.

The Reality then is neither an eternal passivity of immobile Being
nor an eternal activity of Being in movement, nor is It an alternation in
Time between these two things. Neither in fact is the sole absolute truth
of Brahman's reality; their opposition is only true of It in relation to the
activities of Its consciousness. When we perceive Its deployment of the
conscious energy of Its being in the universal action, we speak of It as
the mobile active Brahman ; when we perceive Its simultaneous reserva-
tion of the conscious energy of Its being kept back from the action, we
speak of It as the immobile passive Brahman, — Saguna and Nirguna,
Kshara and Akshara: otherwise the terms would have no meaning; for
there is one reality and not two independent realities, one immobile, the
other mobile. In the ordinary view of the soul's evolution into the action,
pravrtti, and its invoution into the passivity, nivrtti, it is supposed that
in the action the individual soul becomes ignorant, nescient of its passive
which is supposed to be its true being, and in the passivity it becomes
finally nescient of its active which is supposed to be its false or only ap-
parent being. But this is because these two movements take place alter-
nately for us, as in our sleep and waking; we pass in waking into
nescience of our sleeping condition, in sleep into nescience of our waking
being. But this happens because only part of our being performs this
alternative movement and we falsely think of ourselves as only that par-
tial existence: but we can discover by a deeper psychological experience
that the larger being in us is perfectly aware of all that happens even in
what is to our partial and superficial being a state of unconsciousness ; it
is limited neither by sleep nor by waking. So it is in our relations with
Brahman who is our real and integral being. In the ignorance we identify
ourselves with only a partial consciousness, mental or spiritual-mental in
its nature, which becomes nescient of its self of status by movement ; in
this part of us, when we lose the movement, we lose at the same time our
hold on our self of action by entering into passivity. By an entire passiv-
ity the mind falls asleep or enters into trance or else is liberated into a
spiritual silence ; but though it is a liberation from the ignorance of the

514 THE LIFE DIVINE

partial being in its flux of action, it is earned by putting on a luminous
nescience of the dynamic Reality or a luminous separation from it: the
spiritual-mental being remains self-absorbed in a silent essential status
of existence and becomes either incapable of active consciousness or
repugnant to all activity; this release of silence is a status through which
the soul passes in its journey towards the Absolute. But there is a greater
fulfilment of our true and integral being in which both the static and the
dynamic sides of the self are liberated and fulfilled in That which up-
holds both and is limited neither by action nor by silence.

For Brahman does not pass alternately from passivity to activity
and back to passivity by cessation of Its dynamic force of being. If that
were really true of the integral Reality, then, while the universe con-
tinued, there would be no passive Brahman in existence, all would be ac-
tion, and, if our universe were dissolved, there would be no active Brah-
man, all would become cessation and immobile stillness. But this is not
so, for we can become aware of an eternal passivity and self-concentrated
calm penetrating and upholding all the cosmic activity and all its mul-
tiple concentrated movement, — and this could not be if, so long as any
activity continued, the concentrated passivity did not exist supporting it
and within it. Integral Brahman possesses both the passivity and the ac-
tivity simultaneously and does not pass alternately from one to the other
as from a sleep to a waking: it is only some partial activity in us which
seems to do that, and we by identifying ourselves with that partial ac-
tivity have the appearance of this alternation from one nescience to an-
other nescience; but our true, our integral being is not subject to these
opposites and it does not need to become unaware of its dynamic self in
order to possess its self of silence. When we get the integral knowledge
and the integral liberation of both soul and nature free from the disabili-
ties of the restricted partial and ignorant being, we too can possess the
passivity and the activity with a simultaneous possession, exceeding both
these poles of the universality, limited by neither of these powers of the
Self in its relation or non-relation to Nature.

The Supreme, it has been declared in the Gita, exceeds both the im-
mobile self and the mobile being; even put together they do not represent
all he is. For obviously we do not mean, when we speak of his possessing
them simultaneously, that he is the sum of a passivity and an activity,
an integer made of those two fractions, passive with three fourths of him-
self, active with one fourth of his existence. In that case, Brahman might
be a sum of nesciences, the passive three fourths not only indifferent to

THE ORIGIN OF THE IGNORANCE 515

but quite ignorant of all that the activity is doing, the active one fourth
quite unaware of the passivity and unable to possess it except by ceasing
from action. Even, Brahman the sum might amount to something quite
different from his two fractions, something, as it were, up and aloof, ig-
norant of and irresponsible for anything which some mystic Maya was
at once obstinately doing and rigidly abstaining from doing in the two
fractions of his existence. But it is clear that Brahman the Supreme
Being must be aware both of the passivity and the activity and regard
them not as his absolute being, but as opposite, yet mutually satisfying
terms of his universalities. It cannot be true that Brahman, by an eter-
nal passivity, is unaware, entirely separated from his own activities ; free,
he contains them in himself, supports them with his eternal power of
calm, initiates them from his eternal poise of energy. It must be equally
untrue that Brahman in his activity is unaware of or separated from his
passivity; omnipresent, he is there supporting the action, possesses it al-
ways in the heart of the movement and is eternally calm and still and free
and blissful in all the whirl of its energies. Nor in either silence or action
can he be at all unaware of his absolute being, but knows that all he
expresses through them draws its value and power from the power of
that absolute existence. If it seems otherwise to our experience, it is
because we identify with one aspect and by that exclusiveness fail to
open ourselves to the integral Reality.

There necessarily follows an important first result, already arrived
at from other view-points, that the Ignorance cannot have the origin of
its existence or the starting-point of its dividing activities in the absolute
Brahman or in integral Sachchidananda ; it belongs only to a partial
action of the being with which we identify ourselves, just as in the body
we identify ourselves with that partial and superficial consciousness
which alternates between sleep and w^aking: it is indeed this identifica-
tion putting aside all the rest of the Reality behind us that is the con-
stituting cause of the Ignorance. And if Ignorance is not an element or
power proper to the absolute nature of the Brahman or to Its integrality,
there can be no original and primal Ignorance. Maya, if it be an original
power of the consciousness of the Eternal, cannot itself be an ignorance
or in any way akin to the nature of ignorance, but must be a transcend-
ent and universal power of self-knowledge and all-knowledge ; ignorance
can only intervene as a minor and subsequent movement, partial and
relative. Is it then something inherent in the multiplicity of souls? Does
it come into being immediately Brahman views himself in the multi-

5l6 THE LIFE DIVINE

plicity, and does that multiplicity consist of a sum of souls each in its
very nature fractional and divided from all the others in consciousness,
unable to become aware of them at all except as things external to it,
linked at most by communication from body to body or mind to mind,
but incapable of unity? But we have seen that this is only what we seem
to be in our most superficial layer of consciousness, the external mind
and the physical ; when we get back into a subtler, deeper, larger action
of our consciousness, we find the walls of division becoming thinner and
in the end there is left no wall of division, no Ignorance.

Body is the outward sign and lowest basis of the apparent division
which Nature plunging into ignorance and self-nescience makes the
starting-point for the recovery of unity by the individual soul, unity
even in the midst of the most exaggerated forms of her multiple con-
sciousness. Bodies cannot communicate with each other except by ex-
ternal means and through a gulf of externality; cannot penetrate each
other except by division of the penetrated body or by taking advantage
of some gap in it, some pre-existent division; cannot unite except by a
breaking up and devouring, a swallowing and absorption and so an
assimilation, or at most a fusion in which both forms disappear. Mind
too, when identified with body, is hampered by its limitations; but in
itself it is more subtle and two minds can penetrate each other without
hurt or division, can interchange their substance without mutual injury,
can in a way become parts of each other: still mind too has its own
form which is separative of it from other minds and is apt to take its
stand on this separateness. When we get back to soul-consciousness the
obstacles to unity lessen and finally cease to exist altogether. The soul
can in its consciousness identify itself with other souls, can contain them
and enter into and be contained by them, can realise its unity with
them; and this can take place, not in a featureless and indistinguishable
sleep, not in a Nirvana in which all distinctions and individualities of
soul and mind and body are lost, but in a perfect waking which observes
and takes account of all distinctions but exceeds them.

Therefore ignorance and self-limiting division are not inherent and
insuperable in the multiplicity of souls, are not the very nature of the
multiplicity of Brahman. Brahman, as he exceeds the passivity and the
activity, so too exceeds the unity and multiplicity. He is one in himself,
but not with a self-limiting unity exclusive of the power of multiplicity,
such as is the separated unity of the body and the mind; he is not the
mathematical integer, one, which is incapable of containing the hundred

THE ORIGIN OF THE IGNORANCE 517

and is therefore less than the hundred. He contains the hundred, is one
in all the hundred. One in himself, he is one in the many and the many
are one in him. In other words, Brahman in his unity of spirit is aware
of his multiplicity of souls and in the consciousness of his multiple souls
is aware of the unity of all souls. In each soul he, the immanent Spirit,
the Lord in each heart, is aware of his oneness. The Jivatman illumined
by him, aware of its unity with the One, is also aware of its unity with
the many. Our superficial consciousness, identified with body and with
divided life and dividing mind, is ignorant; but that also can be illu-
mined and made aware. Multiplicity, then, is not the necessary cause
of the ignorance.

Ignorance, as we have already stated, comes in at a later stage, as
a later movement, when mind is separated from its spiritual and supra-
mental basis, and culminates in this earth-life where the individual con-
sciousness in the many identifies itself by dividing mind with the form,
which is the only safe basis of division. But what is the form? It is, at
least as we see it here, a formation of concentrated energy, a knot of
the force of consciousness in its movement, a knot maintained in being
by a constant whirl of action; but whatever transcendent truth or reality
it proceeds from or expresses, it is not in any part of itself in manifesta-
tion durable or eternal. It is not eternal in its integrality, nor in its
constituting atoms; for they can be disintegrated by dissolving the knot
of energy in constant concentrated action which is the sole thing that
maintains their apparent stability. It is a concentration of Tapas in
movement of force on the form maintaining it in being which sets up the
physical basis of division. But all things in the activity are, we have
seen, a concentration of Tapas in movement of force upon its object.
The origin of the Ignorance must then be sought for in some self-
absorbed concentration of Tapas, of Conscious-Force in action on a
separate movement of the Force; to us this takes the appearance of
mind identifying itself with the separate movement and identifying itself
also in the movement separately with each of the forms resulting from
it. So it builds a wall of separation which shuts out the consciousness in
each form from awareness of its own total self, of other embodied con-
sciousnesses and of universal being. It is here that we must look for the
secret of the apparent ignorance of the embodied mental being as well
as of the great apparent inconscienoe of physical Nature. We have to
ask ourselves what is the nature of this absorbing, this separating, this
self-forgetful concentration which is the obscure miracle of the universe.

CHAPTER XIII

EXCLUSIVE CONCENTRATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS-FORCE
AND THE IGNORANCE

From the kindled fire of Energy of Consciousness Truth
was born and the Law of Truth ; from that the Night, from
the Night the flowing ocean of being.

Rig Veda}

SINCE Brahman is in the essentiality of its universal being a unity
and a multiplicity aware of each other and in each other and since
in its reality it is something beyond the One and the Many, containing
both, aware of both. Ignorance can only come about as a subordinate
phenomenon by some concentration of consciousness absorbed in a part
knowledge or a part action of the being and excluding the rest from its
awareness. There may be either a concentration of the One in itself to
the exclusion of the Many or of the Many in their own action to the
exclusion of the all-awareness of the One, or of the individual being in
himself to the exclusion both of the One and the rest of the Many who
are then to him separated units not included in his direct awareness. Or
again there may be or there may intervene at a certain point some gen-
eral rule of exclusive concentration, operative in all these three direc-
tions, a concentration of separative active consciousness in a separative
movement; but this takes place not in the true self, but in the force of
active being, in Prakriti.

This hypothesis we adopt in preference to the others, because none
of the others taken by itself will hold or will square with all the facts of
existence. Integral Brahman cannot be in its integrality the source of the
Ignorance, because its integrality is in its very nature all-consciousness.
The One cannot in its integral conscious being exclude the Many from
itself, because the Many would not then at all exist; at most it can
stand back somewhere in its consciousness from the cosmic play so as to
enable a similar movement in the individual being. The Many in the
integrality or in each self of the Many cannot be really ignorant of the

*X. 190. I.

S18

TAPAS AND THE IGNORANCE 519

One or of others, because by the Many we mean the same divine Self in
all, individualised indeed, but still one in conscious being with all in a
single universality and one too with the original and transcendent Being.
Ignorance is therefore not the natural character of the consciousness of
the soul, even of the individual soul ; it is the outcome of some particu-
larising action in the executive Conscious-Force when it is absorbed in
its works and forgetful of self and of the total reality of the nature.
This action cannot be that of the whole being or of the whole force of
being, — for the character of that completeness is whole consciousness and
not partial consciousness, — it must be a superficial or partial movement
absorbed in a superficial or partial action of the consciousness and the
energy, concentrated in its formation, oblivious of all else that is not
included in the formation or not there overtly operative. Ignorance is
Nature's purposeful oblivion of the Self and the All, leaving them aside,
putting them behind herself in order to do solely what she has to do in
some outer play of existence.

In the infinity of being and its infinite awareness concentration of
consciousness, Tapas, is always present as an inherent power of Con-
sciousness-Force: it is a self-held or self-gathered dwelling of the eternal
Awareness in itself and on itself or on its object; but the object is always
in some way itself, its own being or a manifestation and movement of
its being. The concentration may be essential; it may be even a sole
indwelling or an entire absorption in the essence of its own being, a
luminous or else a self-oblivious self-immersion. Or it may be an integral
or else a total-multiple or a part-multiple concentration. Or it may be
a single separative regard on one field of its being or movement, a single-
pointed concentration in one centre or an absorption in one objective
form of its self-existence. The first, the essential, is at one end the super-
conscient Silence and at the other end the Inconscience; the second, the
integral, is the total consciousness of Sachchidananda, the supramental
concentration ; the third, the multiple, is the method of the totalising or
global overmental awareness; the fourth, the separative, is the charac-
teristic nature of the Ignorance. The supreme integrality of the Absolute
holds all these states or powers of its consciousness together as a single
indivisible being looking at all itself in manifestation with a simultane-
ous self-vision.

Concentration in this sense of self-held dwelling in itself or on itself
as object may be said then to belong to the very nature of conscious
being. For, although there is an infinite extension of consciousness and

520 THE LIFE DIVINE

a diffusion of consciousness, it is a self-held self-contained extension or a
self-held self-contained diffusion. Although there may seem to be a dis-
persion of its energies, that is in reality a form of distribution, and is
only possible in a superficial field because it is supported by an under-
lying self-held concentration. An exclusive concentration on or in a
single subject or object or domain of being or movement is not a denial
or departure from the Spirit's awareness, it is one form of the self-gath-
ering of the power of Tapas. But when the concentration is exclusive,
it brings about a holding back behind it of the rest of self-knowledge. It
may be aware of the rest all the time, yet act as if it were not aware of
it; that would not be a state or act of Ignorance: but if the consciousness
erects by the concentration a wall of exclusion limiting itself to a single
field, domain or habitation in the movement so that it is aware only of
that or aware of all the rest as outside itself, then we have a principle
of self-limiting knowledge which can result in a separative knowledge
and culminate in a positive and effective ignorance.

We can get some glimpse of what this means, to what it amounts in
action, when we look at the nature of exclusive concentration in mental
man, in our own consciousness. First of all, we must note that what we
mean ordinarily by the man is not his inner self, but only a sum of ap-
parent continuous movement of consciousness and energy in past, pres-
ent and future to which we give this name. It is this that in appearance
does all the works of the man, thinks all his thoughts, feels all his emo-
tions. This energy is a movement of Consciousness-Force concentrated
on a temporal stream of inward and outward workings. But we know that
behind this stream of energy there is a whole sea of consciousness which
is aware of the stream, but of which the stream is unaware; for this sum
of surface energy is a selection, an outcome from all the rest that is invisi-
ble. That sea is the subliminal self, the superconscient, the subconscient,
the intraconscient and circumconscient being, and holding it all together
the soul, the psychic entity. The stream is the natural, the superficial
man. In this superficial man Tapas, the being's dynamic force of con-
sciousness, is concentrated on the surface in a certain mass of superficial
workings; all the rest of itself it has put behind and may be vaguely
aware of it there in the unformulated back of its conscious existence, but
is not aware of it in this superficial absorbed movement in front. It is not
precisely, at any rate in that back or in the depths, ignorant of itself in
any essential sense of the word, but for the purposes of its superficial
movement and within that movement only it is oblivious of its real, its

TAP AS AND THE IGNORANCE 52 I

greater self, by absorption, by exclusive concentration on what it is super-
ficially doing. Yet it is really the hidden sea and not the superficial stream
which is doing all the action : it is the sea that is the source of this move-
ment, not the conscious wave it throws up, whatever the consciousness of
the wave, absorbed in its movement, living in that, seeing nothing else
but that, may think about the matter. And that sea, the real self, the
integral conscious being, the integral force of being, is not ignorant ; even
the wave is not essentially ignorant, — for it contains within itself all the
consciousness it has forgotten and but for that it could not act or endure
at all, — but it is self-oblivious, absorbed in its own movement, too
absorbed to note anything else than the movement while that continues
to preoccupy it. A limited practical self-oblivion, not an essential and
binding self-ignorance, is the nature of this exclusive concentration which
is yet the root of that which works as the Ignorance.

So too we see that man, though a really indivisible stream of Tapas,
of conscious energy in Time, capable of acting in the present only by the
sum of his past force of working, creating already his future by his past
and his present action, yet lives absorbed in the present moment, lives
from moment to moment, and is therefore in this superficial action of
consciousness ignorant of his future and ignorant of his past except for
that small part of it which at any moment he may recall to him by mem-
ory. He does not, however, live in the past; what he recalls is not the
past itself, but only the ghost of it, a conceptual shadow of a reality
which is now to him dead, non-existent, no longer in being. But all this
is an action of the superficial ignorance. The true consciousness within is
not unaware of its past; it holds it there, not necessarily in memory but
in being, still active, living, ready with its fruits, and sends it up from time
to time in memory or more concretely in result of past action or past causes
to the superficial conscious being — that is indeed the true rationale of
what is called Karma. It is or can be aware too of the future, for there
is somewhere in the inner being a field of cognition open to future knowl-
edge, a prospective as well as a retrospective Time-sense, Time- vision,
Time-perception ; something in it lives indivisibly in the three times and
contains all their apparent divisions, holds the future ready for manifes-
tation within it. Here, then, in this habit of living in the present, we have
a second absorption, a second exclusive concentration which complicates
and farther limits the being, but simplifies the apparent course of the
action by relating it not to the whole infinite course of Time, but to a
definite succession of moments.

522 THE LIFE DIVINE

Therefore in his superficial consciousness man is to himself dy-
namically, practically, the man of the moment, not the man of the past
who once was but is no longer in existence, nor the man of the future
who is not yet in being; it is by memory that he links himself with the
one, by anticipation with the other: a continuous ego-sense runs through
the three times, but this is a centralising mental construction, not an
essential or an extended existence containing what was, is and will be. An
intuition of self is behind it, but that is an underlying identity, unaffected
by the changes of his personality; in his surface formation of being he
is not that but what he is at the moment. Yet all the time this existence
in the moment is not the real or the whole truth of his being, but only a
practical or pragmatic truth for the purposes of the superficial move-
ment of his life and within its limits. It is a truth, not an unreality, but
a truth only in its positive part; in its negative parts it is an ignorance,
and this negative ignorance limits and often distorts even the practical
truth, so that the conscious life of man proceeds according to an igno-
rance, a partial, a half-true half-false knowledge, not according to the
real truth of himself of which he is oblivious. Yet because his real self
is the true determinator and governs all secretly from behind, it is after
all a knowledge behind which really determines the formed course of his
existence; the superficial ignorance erects a necessary limiting outline
and supplies the factors by which the outward colour and turn needed
for his present human life and his present moment are given to his con-
sciousness and his action. In the same way and for the same reason man
identifies himself solely with the name and form he wears in his present
existence; he is ignorant of his past before birth even as of his future
after death. Yet all that he forgets is contained, present and effective, in
the all-retaining integral consciousness within him.

There is a minor pragmatic use of exclusive concentration on the
surface which may also give us an indication in spite of its temporary
character. The superficial man living from moment to moment plays, as
it were, several parts in his present life and, while he is busy with each
part, he is capable of an exclusive concentration, an absorption in it, by
which he forgets the rest of himself, puts it behind him for the moment,
is to that extent self-oblivious. The man is for the moment the actor, the
poet, the soldier or whatever else he may have been constituted and formed
into by some peculiar and characteristic action of his force of being, his
Tapas, his past conscious energy and by the action which develops from
it. Not only is he apt to deliver himself up to this exclusive concentration

TAPAS AND THE IGNORANCE 523

in a part of himself for the time being, but his success in the action very
largely depends on the completeness with which he can thus put aside the
rest of himself and live only in his immediate work. Yet all the time we
can see that it is the whole man who is really doing the action and not
merely this particular part of him; what he does, the way he does it, the
elements he brings into it, the stamp he gives to his work depends on his
whole character, mind, information, genius, all that the past of him has
made him, — and not his past in this life only, but in other lives, and
again not only his past, but the past, the present and the predestined
future both of himself and the world around him are the determinants of
his work. The present actor, poet or soldier in him is only a separative
determination of his Tapas; it is his force of being organised for a par-
ticular kind of action of its energy, a separative movement of Tapas
which is able — and this ability is not a weakness, a deficiency, but a great
power of the consciousness — to absorb itself in that particular working
to the temporary self-oblivion of the rest of itself, even though that rest
is present all the time at the back of the consciousness and in the work
itself and is active or has its influence in the shaping of the work. This
active self-oblivion of the man in his work and the part he plays, differs
from the other, the deeper self-oblivion, in that the wall of separation is
less phenomenally and not at all enduringly complete ; the mind can dis-
solve its concentration and go back from its work at any time to the con-
sciousness of the larger self of which this was a partial action. The super-
ficial or apparent man cannot so go back at will to the real man within
him ; he can only do it to some extent abnormally or supernormally in ex-
ceptional conditions of his mentality or, more permanently and com-
pletely, as the fruit of a long and arduous self-training, self-deepening,
self-heightening, self-expansion. Still he can go back; therefore the differ-
ence is phenomenal only, not essential: it is, in essence, in both cases the
same movement of exclusive concentration, of absorption in a particular
aspect of himself, action, movement of force, though with different cir-
cumstances and another manner of working.

This power of exclusive concentration is not confined to absorption
in a particular character or type of working of one's larger self, but
extends to a complete self-forgetfulness in the particular action in which
we happen at the moment to be engaged. The actor in moments of great
intensity forgets that he is an actor and becomes the part that he is play-
ing on the stage; not that he really thinks himself Rama or Ravana, but
that he identifies himself for the time being with the form of character

524 THE LIFE DIVINE

and action which the name represents and so completely as to forget the
real man who is playing it. So the poet forgets himself, the man, the
worker, in his work and is for the moment only the inspired impersonal
energy which works itself out in formation of word and rhythm; of all
else he is oblivious. The soldier forgets himself in the act and becomes the
charge and the fury and the slaying. In the same way the man who is
overcome by intense anger, forgets himself as it is commonly said, or as
it has been still more aptly and forcibly put, becomes anger: and these
terms express a real truth which is not the whole truth of the man's being
at the time, but a practical fact of his conscious energy in action. He does
forget himself, forgets all the rest of himself with its other impulses and
powers of self-restraint and self-direction, so that he acts simply as the
energy of the passion which preoccupies him, becomes that energy for
the time being. This is as far as self-forgetfulness can go in the normal
active human psychology; for it must return soon to the wider self-aware
consciousness of which this self-forgetfulness is only a temporary move-
ment.

But in the larger universal consciousness there must be a power of
carrying this movement to its absolute point, to the greatest extreme pos-
sible for any relative movement to reach, and this point is reached, not
in human unconsciousness which is not abiding and always refers back
to the awakened conscious being that man normally and characteristically
is, but in the inconscience of material Nature. This inconscience is no
more real than the ignorance of exclusive concentration in our temporary
being which limits the waking consciousness of man; for as in us, so in
the atom, the metal, the plant, in every form of material Nature, in every
energy of material Nature, there is, we know, a secret soul, a secret will,
a secret intelligence at work, other than the mute self-oblivious form, the
Conscient— conscient even in unconscious things — of the Upanishad,
without whose presence and informing conscious-force or Tapas no work
of Nature could be done. What is inconscient there is the Prakriti, the
formal, the motional action of the energy absorbed in the working, identi-
fied with it, to such an extent as to be bound in a sort of trance or swoon
of concentration, unable to go back, while imprisoned in that form, to its
real self, to the integral conscious being and the integral force of con-
scious being which it has put behind it, of which in its ecstatic trance of
mere working and energy it has become oblivious. Prakriti, the executive
Force, becomes unaware of Purusha, the Conscious Being, holds him
hidden within herself and becomes again slowly aware only with the

TAPAS AND THE IGNORANCE 525

emergence of consciousness from this swoon of the Inconscience. Purusha
indeed consents to assume the apparent form of itself which Prakriti con-
structs for it; it seems to become the Inconscient, the physical being, the
vital being, the mental being: but in all these it remains still in reality
itself; the light of the secret conscious Being supports and informs the
action of the inconscient or emergingly conscious energy of Nature.

The inconscience is superficial like the ignorance of the waking hu-
man mind or the inconscience or subconscience of his sleeping mind, and
within it is the All-conscient; it is entirely phenomenal, but it is the com-
plete phenomenon. So complete is it that it is only by an impulsion of
evolutionary consciousness emerging into other forms less imprisoned by
this inconscient method of working that it can come back to itself, recover
in the animal a partial awareness, then in man at his highest some possi-
bility of approach to a first more complete though still superficial initia-
tion of a truly conscious working. But still, as in the case of the super-
ficial and the real man where there is also a similar though lesser inability,
the difference is phenomenal only. Essentially, in the universal order of
things, the inconscience of material Nature is the same exclusive concen-
tration, the same absorption in the work and the energy as in the self-
limitation of the waking human mind, or the concentration of the self-
forgetting mind in its working; it is only that self-limitation carried to a
farthest point of self-forgetfulness which becomes, not a temporary ac-
tion, but the law of its action. Nescience in Nature is the complete self-
ignorance; the partial knowledge and general ignorance of man is a par-
tial self-ignorance marking in her evolutionary order a return towards
self-knowledge: but both are and all ignorance is, when examined, a
superficially exclusive self-forgetful concentration of Tapas, of the con-
scious energy of being in a particular line or section of its movement
of which alone it is aware or which alone it seems to be on the surface.
The ignorance is effective within the bounds of that movement and valid
for its purposes, but phenomenal, partial, superficial, not essentially real,
not integral. We have to use the word "real'^ necessarily in a quite limited
and not in its absolute sense ; for the ignorance is real enough, but it is
not the whole truth of our being and by regarding it by itself even its
truth is misrepresented to our outer awareness. In that true truth of itself
it is an involved Consciousness and Knowledge evolving back to itself,
but it is dynamically effective as an Inconscience and an Ignorance.

This being the root-nature of the Ignorance, a practical truth of a
phenomenally but not really dividing, of a limiting and separative con-

526 THE LIFE DIVINE

scious energy absorbed in its works to the apparent forgetfulness of its
integral and real self, we may answer the questions that arise of the why,
the where and the how of this movement. The reason for the Ignorance,
its necessity, becomes clear enough once we have seen that without it
the object of the m.anifestation of our world would be impossible, could
not be done at all, or not completely, or not in the way in which it should
be and is done. Each side of the manifold Ignorance has its justification,
w^hich is only a part of the one general necessity. Man, living in his time-
less being, could not have thrown himself into the stream of Time with
that movement of subjection to its flux from moment to moment which
is the nature of his present living. Living in his superconscient or sub-
liminal self, he could not have worked out from the knot of his individual
mentality the relations which he has to ravel and unravel with the world
about him, or would have to do it in a radically different fashion. Living
in the universal self and not in the egoistic separative consciousness, he
could not evolve that separate action, personality, outlook from himself
as the sole or the initial centre and point of reference which is the con-
tribution of the ego-sense to the world-workings. He has to put on the
temporal, the psychological, the egoistic ignorance in order to protect
himself against the light of the infinite and the largeness of the universal,
so as to develop behind this defence his temporal individuality in the
cosmos. He has to live as if in this one life and put on the ignorance of
his infinite past and his future: for otherwise, if the past were present to
him, he could not work out his present selected relations with his environ-
ment in the way intended ; his knowledge would be too great for him, it
would necessarily alter the whole spirit and balance and form of his ac-
tion. He has to live in the mind absorbed by this bodily life and not in the
supermind ; for otherwise all these protecting walls of ignorance created
by the limiting, dividing, differentiating power of mind would not be
built or would become too thin and transparent for his purpose.

That purpose for which all this exclusive concentration we call the
Ignorance is necessary is to trace the cycle of self-oblivion and self-dis-
covery for the joy of which the Ignorance is assumed in Nature by the
secret spirit. It is not that all cosmic manifestation would otherwise be-
come impossible; but it would be a quite different manifestation from
the one in which we live; it would be confined to the higher worlds of the
divine Existence or to a typal non-evolving cosmos where each being lived
in the whole light of its own law of nature, and this obverse manifesta-
tion;, this evolving cycle, would be impossible. What is here the goal would

TAP AS AND THE IGNORANCE 527

be then the eternal condition; what is here a stage would be the per-
petuated type of existence. It is to find himself in the apparent opposites
of his being and his nature that Sachchidananda descends into the ma-
terial Nescience and puts on its phenomenal ignorance as a superficial
mask in which he hides himself from his own conscious energy, leaving it
self-forgetful and absorbed in its works and forms. It is in those forms
that the slowly awaking soul has to accept the phenomenal action of an
ignorance which is really knowledge awaking progressively out of the
original nescience, and it is in the new conditions created by these work-
ings that it has to rediscover itself and divinely transform by that light
the life which is thus labouring to fulfil the purpose of its descent into the
Inconscience. Not to return as speedily as may be to heavens where per-
fect light and joy are eternal or to the supracosmic bliss is the object of
this cosmic cycle, nor merely to repeat a purposeless round in a long
unsatisfactory groove of ignorance seeking for knowledge and never find-
ing it perfectly, — ^in that case the ignorance would be either an inexpli-
cable blunder of the All-conscient or a painful and purposeless Necessity
equally inexplicable, — but to realise the Ananda of the Self in other con-
ditions than the supracosmic, in cosmic being, and to find its heaven of
joy and light even in the oppositions offered by the terms of an embodied
material existence, by struggle therefore towards the joy of self-discovery,
would seem to be the true object of the birth of the soul in the human
body and of the labour of the human race in the series of its cycles. The
Ignorance is a necessary, though quite subordinate term which the uni-
versal Knowledge has imposed on itself that that movement might be
possible, — not a blunder and a fall, but a purposeful descent, not a curse,
but a divine opportunity. To find and embody the All-Delight in an in-
tense summary of its manifoldness, to achieve a possibility of the infinite
Existence which could not be achieved in other conditions, to create out
of Matter a temple of the Divinity would seem to be the task imposed
on the spirit born into the material universe.

The ignorance, we see, is not in the secret soul, but in the apparent
Prakriti; nor does it belong to the whole of that Prakriti, — it can-
not, for Prakriti is the action of the All-conscient, — but arises is some
development from its original integrality of light and power. Where
does that development take place, in what principle of being does it
find its opportunity and starting-point? Not, certainly, in the infinite
being, the infinite consciousness, the infinite delight which are the su-
preme planes of existence and from which all else derives or descends

528 THE LIFE DIVINE

into this obscurer ambiguous manifestation. There it can have no place.
Not in the supermind ; for in the supermind the infinite light and power
are always present even in the most finite workings, and the conscious-
ness of unity embraces the consciousness of diversity. It is on the plane
of mind that this putting back of the real self-consciousness becomes
possible. For mind is that power of the conscious being which differ-
entiates and runs along the lines of differentiation with the sense of
diversity prominent and characteristic and the sense of unity behind it
only, not characteristic, not the very stuff of its workings. If by any
chance this supporting sense of unity could be drawn back, — it is pos-
sessed by mind not in its own separate right, but because it has the super-
mind behind it, because it reflects the light of the supermind of which
it is a derivative and secondary power, — if a veil could fall between mind
and supermind shutting off the light of the Truth or letting it come
through only in rays diffused, scattered, reflected but with distortion and
division, then the phenomenon of the Ignorance would intervene. Such
a veil exists, says the Upanishad, constituted by the action of Mind itself:
it is in Overmind a golden lid which hides the face of the supramental
Truth but reflects its image; in Mind it becomes a more opaque and
smoky-luminous coverture. That action is the absorbed looking down-
ward of Mind on the diversity which is its characteristic movement and
away from the supreme unity which that diversity expresses, until it for-
gets altogether to remember and support itself by the unity. Even then
the unity supports it and makes its activities possible, but the absorbed
Energy is unaware of its own origin and greater, real self. Since Mind
forgets that from which it derived, because of absorption in the workings
of formative Energy, it becomes so far identified with that Energy as to
lose hold even on itself, to become totally oblivious in a trance of work
which it still supports in its somnambulist action, but of which it is no
longer aware. This is the last stage of the descent of consciousness, an
abysmal sleep, a fathomless trance of consciousness which is the profound
basis of the action of material Nature.

It must be remembered, however, that when we speak of a partial
movement of Consciousness- Force absorbed in its forms and actions, in a
limited field of its working, this does not imply any real division of its
integrality. The putting of the rest of itself behind it has only the effect
of making all that rest occult to the frontal immediately active energy in
the limited field of movement, but not of shutting it out of the field ; in
fact the integral Force is there though veiled by the Inconscience, and it

TAPAS AND THE IGNORANCE 529

is that integral Force supported by the integral self-being which through
its frontal energy does all the work and inhabits all the forms created
by the movement. It is to be noted also that in order to remove the veil
of the Ignorance the conscious Force of being in us uses a reverse action
of its power of exclusive concentration ; it quiets the frontal movement of
Prakriti in the individual consciousness and concentrates exclusively on
the concealed inner being,-^— on the Self or on the true inner, psychic or
mental or vital being, the Purusha, — to disclose it. But when it has done
so, it need not remain in this opposite exclusiveness ; it can resume its
integral consciousness or a global consciousness which includes both
being of Purusha and action of Prakriti, the soul and its instruments, the
Self and the dynamisms of the Self -Power, dtmasakti: it can then em-
brace its manifestation with a larger consciousness free from the previous
limitation, free from the results of Nature's forgetfulness of the indwell-
ing Spirit. Or it may quiet the whole working it has manifested, concen-
trate on a higher level of Self and Nature, raise the being to it and bring
down the powers of the higher level to transform the previous mani-
festation: all that is so transformed is still included, but as a part of
the higher dynamism and its higher values, in a new and greater self-
creation. This is what can happen when the Consciousness-Force in our
being decides to raise its evolution from the mental to the supramen-
tal level. In each case it is Tapas that is effective, but it acts in a different
manner according to the thing that has to be done, according to the
predetermined process, dynamism, self-deploying of the Infinite.

But still, even if this is the mechanism of the Ignorance, it may be
asked whether it does not remain a mystery how the All-conscient could,
though in only a partial action of his conscious energy, succeed in arriv-
ing at even this superficial ignorance and inconscience. Even if it were so,
it would be worth while to fix the exact action of this mystery, its nature,
its limits, so that we may not be appalled by it and misled from the real
purpose it serves and the opportunity it gives. But the mystery is a fic-
tion of the dividing intellect which, because it finds or creates a logical
opposition between two concepts, thinks there is a real opposition of the
two facts observed and therefore an impossibility of co-existence and
unity between them. This Ignorance is, as we have seen, really a power
of the Knowledge to limit itself, to concentrate itself on the work in hand,
an exclusive concentration in practice which does not prevent the full
existence and working of the whole conscious being behind, but a working
in the conditions chosen and self-imposed on the nature. All conscious

530 THE LITE DIVINE

self-limitation is a power for its special purpose, not a weakness; all con-
centration is a force of conscious being, not a disability. It is true that
while the Supermind is capable of an integral, comprehensive, multiple,
infinite self-concentration, this is dividing and limited ; it is true also that
it creates perverse as well as partial and, in so far, false or only half-true
values of things: but we have seen the object of the limitation and of this
partiality of knowledge; and the object being admitted, the power to ful-
fil it must be admitted also in the absolute force of the absolute Being.
This power of self-limitation for a particular working, instead of being
incompatible with the absolute conscious-force of that Being, is precisely
one of the powers we should expect to exist among the manifold energies
of the Infinite.

The Absolute is not really limited by putting forth in itself a cosmos
of relations; it is the natural play of its absolute being, consciousness,
force, self-delight. The Infinite is not limited by building up in itself an
infinite series of interplaying finite phenomena ; rather that is its natural
self-expression. The One is not limited by its capacity for multiplicity in
which it enjoys variously its own being; rather that is part of the true
description of an infinite as opposed to a rigid, finite and conceptual
unity. So too the Ignorance, considered as a power of manifoldly self-
absorbed and self-limiting concentration of the conscious being, is a
natural capacity of variation in his self-conscious knowledge, one of the
possible poises of relation of the Absolute in its manifestation, of the
Infinite in its series of finite workings, of the One in its self -enjoyment in
the Many. The power by self-absorption to become unaware of the world
which yet at the same time continues in the being, is one extreme of this
capacity of consciousness; the power by absorption in the cosmic work-
ings to become ignorant of the self which all the time is carrying on those
workings, is the reverse extreme. But neither really limits the integral
self-aware existence of Sachchidananda which is superior to these appar-
ent oppositions ; even in their opposition they help to express and mani-
fest the Ineffable.

CHAPTER XIV

THE ORIGIN AND REMEDY OF FALSEHOOD,
ERROR, WRONG AND EVIL

The Lord accepts the sin and the virtue of none; be-
cause knowledge is veiled by Ignorance, mortal men are de-
luded.

Gita}

They live according to another idea of self than the
reality, deluded, attached, expressing a falsehood, — as if by
an enchantment they see the false as the true.

Maitri Upanishad.^

They live and move in the Ignorance and go round and
round, battered and stumbling, like blind men led by one
who is blind.

Mundaka Upanishad.^

One whose intelligence has attained to Unity, casts away
from him both sin and virtue.

Gita.*

He who has found the bliss of the Eternal is afflicted
no more by the thought, "Why have I not done the good?
Why have I done evil?" One who knows the self extricates
himself from both these things.

Taittiriya Upanishad.^

These are they who are conscious of the much falsehood
in the world; they grow in the house of Truth, they are
the strong and invincible sons of Infinity.

Rig Veda'

The first and the highest are truth ; in the middle there
is falsehood, but it is taken between the truth on both sides
of it and it draws its being from the truth.'^

Brihadaranyaka Upanishad.^

IF IGNORANCE is in its nature a self-limiting knowledge oblivious
of the integral self-awareness and confined to an exclusive concen-
tration in a single field or upon a concealing surface of cosmic movement,

^v.15. 'VII. 10. n. 2. 8. m. so. ^11. 9, mi. 60. 5-

'The truth of the physical reality and the truth of the spiritual and super-
conscient reality. Into the intermediate subjective and mental realities which stand
between them, falsehood can enter, but it takes either truth from above or truth
from below as the substance out of which it builds itself and both are pressing
upon it to turn its misconstructions into truth of life and truth of spirit.

'V 5. I.

531

532 THE LIFE DIVINE

what, in this view, are we to make of the problem which most poignantly
preoccupies the mind of man when it is turned on the mystery of his own
existence and of cosmic existence, the problem of evil? A limited knowl-
edge supported by a secret All-Wisdom as an instrument for working out
within the necessary limitations a restricted world-order may be admitted
as an intelligible process of the universal Consciousness and Energy; but
the necessity of falsehood and error, the necessity of wrong and evil or
their utility in the workings of the omnipresent Divine Reality is less
easily admissible. And yet if that Reality is what we have supposed it
to be, there must be some necessity for the appearance of these contrary
phenomena, some significance, some function that they had to serve in
the economy of the universe. For in the complete and inalienable self-
knowledge of the Brahman which is necessarily all-knowledge, since all
this that is is the Brahman, such phenomena cannot have come in as a
chance, an intervening accident, an involuntary forgetfulness or confu-
sion of the Consciousness-Force of the All-Wise in the cosmos or an
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. Nor can it be an inexplicable mystery of being, original and
eternal, of which the divine All-Teacher is incapable of giving an account
to himself or to us. There must be behind it a significance of the All- Wis-
dom itself, a power of the All- Consciousness which permits and uses
it for some indispensable function in the present workings of our self-
experience and world-experience. This aspect of existence needs now to
be examined more directly and determined in its origins and the limits of
its reality and its place in Nature.

This problem may be taken up from three points of view, — its rela-
tion to the Absolute, the supreme Reality, its origin and place in the cos-
mic workings, its action and point of hold in the individual being. It is
evident that these contrary phenomena have no direct root in the supreme
Reality itself, there is nothing there that has this character; they are
creations of the Ignorance and Inconscience, not fundamental or primary
aspects of the Being, not native to the Transcendence or to the infinite
power of the Cosmic Spirit. It is sometimes reasoned that as Truth and
Good have their absolutes, so Falsehood and Evil must also have their
absolutes, or, if it is not so, then both must belong to the relativity only;
Knowledge and Ignorance, Truth and Falsehood, Good and Evil exist
only in relation to each other and beyond the dualities here they have no
existence. But this is not the fundamental truth of the relation of these

ORIGIN OF FALSEHOOD AND EVIL 533

opposites; for, in the first place, Falsehood and Evil are, unlike Truth
and Good, very clearly results of the Ignorance and cannot exist where
there is no Ignorance: they can have no self-existence in the Divine Be-
ing, they cannot be native elements of the Supreme Nature. If, then, the
limited Knowledge which is the nature of Ignorance renounces its limi-
tations, if Ignorance disappears into Knowledge, evil and falsehood can
no longer endure: for both are fruits of unconsciousness and wrong con-
sciousness and, if true or whole consciousness is there replacing Igno-
rance, they have no longer any basis for their existence. There can there-
fore be no absolute of falsehood, no absolute of evil; these things are a
by-product of the world-movement: the sombre flowers of falsehood and
suffering and evil have their root in the black soil of the Inconscient. On
the other hand, there is no such intrinsic obstacle to the absoluteness of
Truth and Good: the relativity of truth and error, good and evil is a fact
of our experience, but it is similarly a by-product, it is not a permanent
factor native to existence; for it is true only of the valuations made by
the human consciousness, true only of our partial knowledge and partial
ignorance.

Truth is relative to us because our knowledge is surrounded by ig-
norance. Our exact vision stops short at outside appearances which are
not the complete truth of things, and, if we go deeper, the illuminations
we arrive at are guesses or inferences or intimations, not a sight of un-
dubitable realities: our conclusions are partial, speculative or constructed,
our statement of them, which is the expression of our indirect contact
with the reality, has the nature of representations or figures, word-images
of thought perceptions that are themselves images, not embodiments of
Truth itself, not directly real and authentic. These figures or representa-
tions are imperfect and opaque and carry with them their shadow of nes-
cience or error ; for they seem to deny or shut out other truths and even
the truth they express does not get its full value: it is an end or edge of
it that projects into form and the rest is left in the shadow unseen or dis-
figured or uncertainly visible. It might almost be said that no mental
statement of things can be altogether true ; it is not Truth bodied, pure
and nude, but a draped figure, — often it is only the drapery that is visi-
ble. But this character does not apply to truth perceived by a direct action
of consciousness or to the truth of knowledge by identity; our seeing
there may be limited, but so far as it extends, it is authentic, and authen-
ticity is a first step towards absoluteness: error may attach itself to a
direct or identical vision of things by a mental accretion, by a mistaken

534 THE LIFE DIVINE

or illegitimate extension or by the mind's misinterpretation, but it does
not enter into the substance. This authentic or identical vision or experi-
ence of this is the true nature of knowledge and it is self-existent within
the being, although rendered in our minds by a secondary formation that
is unauthentic and derivative. Ignorance in its origin has not this self-
existence or this authenticity; it exists by a limitation or absence or
abeyance of knowledge, error by a deviation from truth, falsehood by a
distortion of truth or its contradiction and denial. But it cannot be simi-
larly said of knowledge that in its very nature it exists only by a limita-
tion or absence or abeyance of ignorance: it may indeed emerge in the
human mind partly by a process of such limitation or abeyance, by the
receding of darkness from a partial light, or it may have the aspect of
ignorance turning into knowledge; but in fact, it rises by an independent
birth from our depths where it has a native existence.

Again, of good and evil it can be said that one exists by true con-
sciousness, the other survives only by wrong consciousness: if there is an
unmixed true consciousness, good alone can exist; it is no longer mixed
with evil or formed in its presence. Human values of good and evil, as of
truth and error, are indeed uncertain and relative: what is held as truth
in one place or time is held in another place or time to be error ; what is
regarded as good is elsewhere or in other times regarded as evil. We find
too that what we call evil results in good, what we call good results in
evil. But this untoward outcome of good producing evil is due to the con-
fusion and mixture of knowledge and ignorance, to the penetration of true
consciousness by wrong consciousness, so that there is an ignorant or
mistaken application of our good, or it is due to the intervention of afflict-
ing forces. In the opposite case of evil producing good, the happier and
contradictory result is due to the intervention of some true consciousness
and force acting behind and in spite of wrong consciousness and wrong
will or it is due to the intervention of redressing forces. This relativity,
this mixture is a circumstance of human mentality and the workings of
the Cosmic Force in human life; it is not the fundamental truth of good
and evil. It might be objected that physical evil, such as pain and most
bodily suffering, is independent of knowledge and ignorance, of right and
wrong consciousness, inherent in physical Nature: but, fundamentally,
all pain and suffering are the result of an insufficient consciousness-force
in the surface being which makes it unable to deal rightly with self and
Nature or unable to assimilate and to harmonise itself with the contacts
of the universal Energy; they would not exist if in us there were an in-

ORIGIN OF FALSEHOOD AND EVIL 535

tegral presence of the luminous Consciousness and the divine Force of an
integral Being. Therefore the relation of truth to falsehood, of good to
evil is not a mutual dependence, but is in the nature of a contradiction as
of light and shadow; a shadow depends on light for its existence, but
light does not depend for its existence on the shadow. The relation be-
tween the Absolute and these contraries of some of its fundamental as-
pects is not that they are opposite fundamental aspects of the Absolute ;
falsehood and evil have no fundamentality, no power of infinity or eternal
being, no self-existence even by latency in the Self-Existent, no authentic-
ity of an original inherence.

It is no doubt a fact that once truth or good manifests, the concep-
tion of falsehood and evil becomes a possibility ; for whenever there is an
affirmation, its negation becomes conceivable. As the manifestation of
existence, consciousness and delight made the manifestation of non-exist-
ence, inconscience, insensibility conceivable and, because conceivable,
therefore in a way inevitable, for all possibilities push towards actuality
until they reach it, so is it with these contraries of the aspects of the Di-
vine Existence. It may be said on this ground that these opposites, since
they must be immediately perceivable by the manifesting Consciousness
on the very threshold of manifestation, can take rank as implied absolutes
and are inseparable from all cosmic existence. But it must first be noted
that it is only in cosmic manifestation that they become possible; they
cannot pre-exist in the timeless being, for they are incompatible with the
unity and bhss that are its substance. In cosmos also they cannot come
into being except by a limitation of truth and good into partial and rela-
tive forms and by a breaking up of the unity of existence and conscious-
ness into separative consciousness and separative being. For where there
is oneness and complete mutuality of consciousness-force even in multi-
plicity and diversity, there truth of self-knowledge and mutual knowl-
edge is automatic and error of self-ignorance and mutual ignorance is im-
possible. So too where truth exists as a whole on a basis of self-aware
oneness, falsehood cannot enter and evil is shut out by the exclusion of
wrong consciousness and wrong will and their dynamisation of falsehood
and error. As soon as separateness enters, these things also can enter; but
even this simultaneity is not inevitable. If there is sufficient mutuality,
even in the absence of an active sense of oneness, and if the separate be-
ings do not transgress or deviate from their norms of limited knowledge,
harmony and truth can still be sovereign and evil will have no gate of
entry. There is, therefore, no authentic inevitable cosmicity of falsehood

536 THE LIFE DIVINE

and evil even as there is no absoluteness; they are circumstances or re-
sults that arise only at a certain stage when separativeness culminates
in opposition and ignorance in a primitive unconsciousness of knowledge
and a resultant wrong consciousness and wrong knowledge with its con-
tent of wrong will, wrong feeling, wrong action and wrong reaction. The
question is at what juncture of cosmic manifestation the opposites enter
in ; for it may be either at some stage of the increasing involution of con-
sciousness in separative mind and life or only after the plunge into in-
conscience. This resolves itself into the question whether falsehood, error,
wrong and evil exist originally in the mental and vital planes and are na-
tive to mind and life or are proper only to the material manifestation
because inflicted on mind and life there by the obscurity arising from the
Inconscience. It may be questioned too whether, if they do exist in supra-
physical mind and life, they were original and inevitable there ; for they
may rather have entered in as a consequence or a supraphysical extension
from the material manifestation. Or, if that is untenable, it may be that
they arose as an enabling supraphysical affirmation in the universal Mind
and Life, a precedent necessity for their appearance in that manifestation
to which they more naturally belong as an inevitable outcome of the
creative Inconscience.

It was for a long time held by the human mind as a traditional
knowledge that when we go beyond the material plane, these things are
found to exist there also in worlds beyond us. There are in these planes of
supraphysical experience powers and forms of vital mind and life that
seem to be the pre-physical foundation of the discordant, defective or per-
verse forms and powers of life-mind and life-force which we find in the
terrestrial existence. These are forces, and subliminal experience seems to
show that there are supraphysical beings embodying those forces, that
are attached in their root-nature to ignorance, to darkness of conscious-
ness, to misuse of force, to perversity of delight, to all the causes and con-
sequences of the things that we call evil. These powers, beings or forces
are active to impose their adverse constructions upon terrestrial crea-
tures ; eager to maintain their reign in the manifestation, they oppose the
increase of light and truth and good and, still more, are antagonistic to
the progress of the soul towards a divine consciousness and divine exist-
ence. It is this feature of existence that we see figured in the tradition of
the conflict between the Powers of Light and Darkness, Good and Evil,
cosmic Harmony and cosmic Anarchy, a tradition universal in ancient
myth and in religion and common to all systems of occult knowledge.

ORIGIN OF FALSEHOOD AND EVIL 537

The theory of this traditional knowledge is perfectly rational and
verifiable by inner experience, and it imposes itself if we admit the
supraphysical and do not cabin ourselves in the acceptation of material
being as the only reality. As there is a cosmic Self and Spirit pervading
and upholding the universe and its beings, so too there is a cosmic Force
that moves all things, and on this original cosmic Force depend and act
many cosmic Forces that are its powers or arise as forms of its universal
action. Whatever is formulated in the universe has a Force or Forces that
support it, seek to fulfil or further it, find their foundation in its func-
tioning, their account of success in its success and growth and domina-
tion, their self-fulfilment or their prolongation of being in its victory or
survival. As there are Powers of Knowledge or Forces of the Light, so
there are Powers of Ignorance and tenebrous Forces of the Darkness
whose work is to prolong the reign of Ignorance and Inconscience. As
there are Forces of Truth, so there are Forces that live by the Falsehood
and support it and work for its victory; as there are powers whose life
is intimately bound up with the existence, the idea and the impulse of
Good, so there are Forces whose life is bound up with the existence and
the idea and the impulse of Evil. It is this truth of the cosmic Invisible
that was symbolised in the ancient belief of a struggle between the powers
of Light and Darkness, Good and Evil for the possession of the world and
the government of the life of man; — this was the significance of the con-
test between the Vedic Gods and their opponents, sons of Darkness and
Division, figured in a later tradition as Titan and Giant and Demon,
Asura, Rakshasa, Pisacha; the same tradition is found in the Zoroastrian
Double Principle and the later Semitic opposition of God and his Angels
on the one side and Satan and his hosts on the other, — invisible Personal-
ities and Powers that draw man to the divine Light and Truth and Good
or lure him into subjection to the undivine principle of Darkness and
Falsehood and Evil. Modern thought is aware of no invisible forces other
than those revealed or constructed by Science; it does not believe that
Nature is capable of creating any other beings than those around us in
the physical world, men, beasts, birds, reptiles, fishes, insects, germs and
animalculae. But if there are invisible cosmic forces physical in their na-
ture that act upon the body of inanimate objects, there is no valid reason
why there should not be invisible cosmic forces mental and \atal in their
nature that act upon his mind and his life force. And if ^lind and Life,
impersonal forces, form conscious beings or use persons to embody them
in physical forms and in a physical world and can act upon flatter and

538 THE LIFE DIVINE

through Matter, it is not impossible that on their own planes they should
form conscious beings whose subtler substance is invisible to us or that
they should be able to act from those planes on beings in physical Nature.
Whatever reality or mythical unreality we may attach to the traditional
figures of past human belief or experience, they would then be representa-
tions of things that are true in principle. In that case the first source of
good and evil would be not in terrestrial life or in the evolution from the
Inconscience, but in Life itself their source would be supraphysical and
they would be reflected here from a larger supraphysical Nature.

This is certain that when we go back into ourselves very deep away
from the surface appearance, we find that the mind, heart and sensational
being of man are moved by forces not under his own control and that he
can become an instrument in the hands of Energies of a cosmic character
without knowing the origin of his actions. It is by stepping back from the
physical surface into his inner being and subliminal consciousness that he
becomes directly aware of them and is able to know directly and deal
with their action upon him. He grows aware of interventions which seek
to lead him in one direction or another, of suggestions and impulsions
which had disguised themselves as original movements of his own mind
and against which he had to battle. He can realise that he is not a con-
scious creature inexplicably produced in an unconscious world out of a
seed of inconscient Matter and moving about in an obscure self-igno-
rance, but an embodied soul through whose action cosmic Nature is
seeking to fulfil itself, the living ground of a vast debate between a dark-
ness of Ignorance out of which it emerges here and a light of Knowledge
which is growing upwards towards an unforeseen termination. The Forces
which seek to move him, and among them the Forces of good and evil,
present themselves as powers of universal Nature; but they seem to be-
long not only to the physical universe, but to planes of Life and Mind
beyond it.

The first thing that we have to note of importance to the problem
preoccupying us is that these Forces in their action seem often to surpass
the measures of human relativity; they are in their larger action super-
human, divine, titanic or demoniac, but they may create their forma-
tions in him in large or in little, in his greatness or his smallness, they
may seize and drive him at moments or for periods, they may influence
his impulses or his acts or possess his whole nature. If that possession
happens, he may himself be pushed to an excess of the normal humanity
of good or evil; especially the evil takes forms which shock the sense of

ORIGIN OF FALSEHOOD AND EVIL 539

human measure, exceed the bounds of human personaHty, approach the
gigantic, the inordinate, the immeasurable. It may then be questioned
whether it is not a mistake to deny absoluteness to evil; for as there is a
drive, an aspiration, a yearning in man towards an absolute truth, good,
beauty, so these movements — as also the transcending intensities attain-
able by pain and suffering — seem to indicate the attempt at self-realisa-
tion of an absolute evil. But the immeasurable is not a sign of absolute-
ness: for the absolute is not in itself a thing of magnitude; it is beyond
measure, not in the sole sense of vastness, but in the freedom of its essen-
tial being; it can manifest itself in the infinitesimal as well as in the in-
finite. It is true that as we pass from the mental to the spiritual, — and
that is a passage towards the absolute, — a subtle wideness and an increas-
ing intensity of light, of power, of peace, of ecstasy mark our passing out
of our limitations: but this is at first only a sign of freedom, of height, of
universality, not yet of an inward absoluteness of self-existence which is
the essence of the matter. To this absoluteness pain and evil cannot attain,
they are bound to limitation and they are derivative. If pain becomes im-
measurable, it ends itself or ends that in which it manifests, or collapses
into insensibility or, in rare circumstances, it may turn into an ecstasy
of Ananda. If evil became sole and immeasurable, it would destroy the
world or destroy that which bore and supported it ; it would bring things
and itself back by disintegration into non-existence. No doubt the Powers
that support darkness and evil attempt by the magnitude of their self-
aggrandisement to reach an appearance of infinity, but immensity is all
they can achieve and not infinity; or, at most, they are able to represent
their element as a kind of abysmal infinite commensurate with the In-
conscient, but it is a false infinite. Self-existence, in essence or by an
eternal inherence in the Self-Existent, is the condition of absoluteness:
error, falsehood, evil are cosmic powers, but relative in their nature, not
absolute, since they depend for existence on the perversion or contradic-
tion of their opposites and are not like truth and good self-existent abso-
lutes, inherent aspects of the supreme Self-existent.

A second point of questioning emerges from the evidence given for the
supraphysical and prephysical existence of these dark opposites: for that
suggests that they may be after all original cosmic principles. But it is to
be noted that their appearance does not extend higher than the lower su-
praphysical life-planes ; they are "powers of the Prince of Air," — air being
in the ancient symbolism the principle of life and therefore of the mid-
worlds where the vital principle is predominant and essential. The adverse

540 THE LIFE DIVINE

opposites are not, then, primal powers of the cosmos, but creations of Life
or of Mind in life. Their supraphysical aspects and influences on earth-
nature can be explained by the co-existence of worlds of a descending in-
volution with parallel worlds of an ascending evolution, not precisely
created by earth-existence, but created as an annexe to the descending
world-order and a prepared support for the evolutionary terrestrial for-
mations; here evil may appear, not as inherent in all life, but as a pos-
sibility and a preformation that makes inevitable its formation in the
evolutionary emergence of consciousness out of the Inconscient. However
this may be, it is as an outcome of the Inconscience that we can best
watch and understand the origin of falsehood, error, wrong and evil, for
it is in the return of Inconscience towards Consciousness that they can be
seen taking their formation and it is there that they seem to be normal
and even inevitable.

The first emergence from the Inconscient is Matter, and in Matter it
would seem that falsehood and evil cannot exist, because both are created
by a divided and ignorant surface consciousness and its reactions. There
is no such active surface organisation of consciousness, no such reactions
in material forces or objects: whatever indwelling secret consciousness
there may be in them seems to be one, undifferentiated, mute; inertly
inherent and intrinsic in the Energy that constitutes the object, it effec-
tualises and maintains the form by the silent occult Idea in it, but is
otherwise self-rapt in the form of energy it has created, uncommunicating
and inexpressive. Even if it differentiates itself according to the form of
Matter in a corresponding form of self-being, rupam rupam pratirupo
hahhuva^ there is no psychological organisation, no system of conscious
actions or reactions. It is only by contact with conscious beings that^
material objects exercise powers or influences which can be called good
or evil: but that good or evil is determined by the contacted being's sense
of help or harm, of benefit or injury from them; these values do not be-
long to the material object but to some Force that uses it or they are
created by the consciousness that contacts it. Fire warms a man or burns
him, but that is as involuntarily he meets it or voluntarily uses it; a
medicinal herb cures or a poison kills, but the value of good or evil is
brought into action by the user: it is to be observed too that a poison
can cure as well as kill, a medicine kill or harm as well as cure or benefit.
The world of pure Matter is neutral, irresponsible ; these values insisted
on by the human being do not exist in material Nature: as a superior
Nature transcends the duality of good and evil, so this inferior Nature
^ Katha Upanishad, V. 9.

ORIGIN OF FALSEHOOD AND EVIL 54 1

falls below it. The question may begin to assume a different aspect if we
go behind physical knowledge and accept the conclusions of an occult
inquiry, — for here we are told that there are conscious influences that
attach themselves to objects and these can be good or evil ; but it might
still be held that this does not affect the neutrality of the object which
does not act by an individualised consciousness but only as it is utilised
for good or for evil or for both together : the duality of good and evil is
not native to the material principle, it is absent from the world of Matter.
The duality begins with conscious life and emerges fully with the
development of mind in life; the vital mind, the mind of desire and sen-
sation, is the creator of the sense of evil and of the fact of evil. Moreover,
in animal life, the fact of evil is there, the evil of suffering and the sense
of suffering, the evil of violence and cruelty and strife and deception, but
the sense of moral evil is absent ; in animal life there is no duality of sin or
virtue, all action is neutral and permissible for the preservation of life
and its maintenance and for the satisfaction of the life-instincts. The
sensational values of good and evil are inherent in the form of pain and
pleasure, vital satisfaction and vital frustration, but the mental idea, the
moral response of the mind to these values are a creation of the human
being. It does not follow, as might be hastily inferred, that they are un-
realities, mental constructions only, and that the only true way to receive
the activities of Nature is either a neutral indifference or an equal accept-
ance or, intellectually, an admission of all that she may do as a divine or
a natural law in which everything is impartially admissible. That is
indeed one side of the truth: there is an infrarational truth of Life and
Matter which is impartial and neutral and admits all things as facts of
Nature and serviceable for the creation, preservation or destruction of
life, three necessary movements of the universal Energy which are all
connectedly indispensable and, each in its own place, of equal value.
There is too a truth of the detached reason which can look on all that
is thus admitted by Nature as serviceable to her processes in life and mat-
ter and observe everything that is with an unmoved neutral impartiality
and acceptance ; this is a philosophic and scientific reason that witnesses
and seeks to understand but considers it futile to judge the activities of
the cosmic Energy. There is too a suprarational truth formulating itself
in spiritual experience which can observe the play of universal possibility,
accept all impartially as the true and natural features and consequences
of a world of ignorance and inconscience or admit all with calm and com-
passion as a part of the divine working, but, while it awaits the awaken-

542 THE LIFE DIVINE

ing of a higher consciousness and knowledge as the sole escape from what
presents itself as evil, is ready with help and intervention where that is
truly helpful and possible. But, nonetheless, there is also this other mid-
dle truth of consciousness which awakens us to the values of good and
evil and the appreciation of their necessity and importance ; this awaken-
ing, whatever may be the sanction or the validity of its particular judg-
ments, is one of the indispensable steps in the process of evolutionary
Nature.

But from what then does this awakening proceed? what is it in the
human being that originates and gives its power and place to the sense
of good and evil? If we regard only the process, we may agree that it is
the vital mind that makes the distinction. Its first valuation is sensational
and individual, — all that is pleasant, helpful, beneficial to the life-ego is
good, all that is unpleasant, malefic, injurious or destructive is evil. Its
next valuation is utilitarian and social: all that is considered helpful to
the associated life, all that it demands from the individual in order to
remain in association and to regulate association for the best mainte-
nance, satisfaction, development, good order of the associated life and its
units, is good; all that has in the view of the society a contrary effect or
tendency is evil. But thinking mind then comes in with its own valuation
and strives to find out an intellectual basis, an idea of law or principle,
rational or cosmic, a law of Karma perhaps or an ethical system founded
on reason or on an aesthetic, emotional or hedonistic basis. Religion brings
in her sanctions ; there is a word or law of God that enjoins righteousness
even though Nature permits or stimulates its opposite, — or perhaps
Truth and Righteousness are themselves God and there is no other Divin-
ity. But, behind all this practical or rational enforcement of the human
ethical instinct, there is a feeling that there is something deeper: all these,
standards are either too narrow and rigid or complex and confused, un-
certain, subject to alteration by a mental or a vital change or evolution;
yet it is felt that there is a deeper abiding truth and something within
us that can have the intuition of that truth, — in other words, that the
real sanction is inward, spiritual and psychic. The traditional account of
this inner witness is conscience, a power of perception in us half mental,
half intuitive; but this is something superficial, constructed, unreliable:
there is certainly within us, though less easily active, more masked by
surface elements, a deeper spiritual sense, the soul's discernment, an in-
born light within our nature.

What then is this spiritual or psychic witness or what is to it the

ORIGIN OF FALSEHOOD AND EVIL 543

value of the sense of good and evil? It may be maintained that the one
use of the sense of sin and evil is that the embodied being may become
aware of the nature of this world of inconscience and ignorance, awake
to a knowledge of its evil and suffering and the relative nature of its good
and happiness and turn away from it to that which is absolute. Or else
its spiritual use may be to purify the nature by the pursuit of good and
the negation of evil until it is ready to perceive the supreme good and
turn from the world towards God, or, as in the Buddhistic ethical insist-
ence, it may serve to prepare the dissolution of the ignorant ego-com-
plex and the escape from personality and suffering. But also it may be
that this awakening is a spiritual necessity of the evolution itself, a step
towards the growth of the being out of the Ignorance into the truth of
the divine unity and the evolution of a divine consciousness and a divine
being. For much more than the mind or life which can turn either to good
or to evil, it is the soul-personality, the psychic being, which insists on
the distinction, though in a larger sense than the mere moral difference. It
is the soul in us which turns always towards Truth, Good and Beauty,
because it is by these things that it itself grows in stature ; the rest, their
opposites, are a necessary part of experience, but have to be outgrown
in the spiritual increase of the being. The fundamental psychic entity in
us has the delight of life and all experience as part of the progressive
manifestation of the spirit, but the very principle of its delight of life is
to gather out of all contacts and happenings their secret divine sense and
essence, a divine use and purpose so that by experience our mind and
life may grow out of the Inconscience towards a supreme consciousness,
out of the divisions of the Ignorance towards an integralising conscious-
ness and knowledge. It is there for that and it pursues from life to life its
ever-increasing upward tendency and insistence; the growth of the soul
is a growth out of darkness into light, out of falsehood into truth, out of
suffering into its own supreme and universal Ananda. The soul's percep-
tion of good and evil may not coincide with the mind's artificial stand-
ards, but it has a deeper sense, a sure discrimination of what points to
the higher Light and what points away from it. It is true that as the in-
ferior light is below good and evil, so the superior spiritual light is beyond
good and evil ; but this is not in the sense of admitting all things with an
impartial neutrality or of obeying equally the impulses of good and evil,
but in the sense that a higher law of being intervenes in which there is no
longer any place or utility for these values. There is a self-law of supreme
Truth which is above all standards; there is a supreme and universal

544 THE LIFE DIVINE

Good inherent, intrinsic, self-existent, self-aware, self-moved and deter-
mined, infinitely plastic with the pure plasticity of the luminous con-
sciousness of the supreme Infinite.

If, then, evil and falsehood are natural products of the Inconscience,
automatic results of the evolution of life and mind from it in the pro-
cessus of the Ignorance, we have to see how they arise, on what they de-
pend for their existence and what is the remedy or escape. In the surface
emergence of mental and vital consciousness from the Inconscience is to
be found the process by which these phenomena come into being. Here
there are two determining factors, — and it is these that are the efficient
cause of the simultaneous emergence of falsehood and evil. First, there
is an underlying, a still occult consciousness and power of inherent knowl-
edge, and there is also an over-lying layer of what might be called in-
determinate or else ill-formed stuff of vital and physical consciousness;
through this obscure difficult medium the emerging mentality has to force
its way and has to impose itself on it by a constructed and no longer an
inherent knowledge, because this stuff is still full of nescience, heavily
burdened and enveloped with the inconscience of Matter. Next, the
emergence takes place in a separated form of life which has to affirm it-
self against a principle of inanimate material inertia and a constant pull
of that material inertia towards disintegration and a relapse into the
original inanimate Inconscience. This separated life-form has also to
affirm itself, supported only by a limited principle of association, against
an outside world which is, if not hostile to its existence, yet full of dan-
gers and on which it has to impose itself, conquer life-room, arrive at ex-
pression and propagation, if it wishes to survive. The result of an emer-
gence of consciousness in these conditions is the growth of a self-affirming
vital and physical individual, a construction of Nature of life and matter
with a concealed psychic or spiritual true individual behind it for whi
Nature is creating this outward means of expression. As mentality in
creases, this vital and material individual takes the more developed form
of a constantly self-affirming mental, vital and physical ego. Our surface
consciousness and type of existence, our natural being, has developed its
present character under the compulsion of these two initial and basic
facts of the evolutionary emergence.

In its first appearance consciousness has the semblance of a miracle,
a power alien to Matter that manifests unaccountably in a world of in-
conscient Nature and grows slowly and with difficulty. Knowledge is ac-
quired, created out of nothing as it were, learned, increased, accumulated

ORIGIN OF FALSEHOOD AND EVIL 545

by an ephemeral ignorant creature in whom at birth it is entirely absent
or present only, not as knowledge, but in the form of an inherited capac-
ity proper to the stage of development of this slowly learning ignorance.
It might be conjectured that consciousness is only the original Incon-
science mechanically recording the facts of existence on the brain-cells
with a reflex or response in the cells automatically reading the record
and dictating their answer; the record, reflex, response together con-
stitute what appears to be consciousness. But this is evidently not the
whole truth, for it might account for observation and mechanical action,
— although it is not clear how an unconscious record and response can
turn into a conscious observation, a conscious sense of things and sense
of self, — but does not credibly account for ideation, imagination, specu-
lation, the free play of intellect with its observed material. The evolution
of consciousness and knowledge cannot be accounted for unless there is
already a concealed consciousness in things with its inherent and native
powers emerging little by little. Further, the facts of animal life and
the operations of the emergent mind in life impose on us the conclusion
that there is in this concealed consciousness an underlying Knowledge or
power of knowledge which by the necessity of the life-contacts with the
environment comes to the surface.

The individual animal being in its first conscious self-affirmation has
to rely on two sources of knowledge. As it is nescient and helpless, a small
modicum of uninformed surface consciousness in a world unknown to
it, the secret Conscious-Force sends up to this surface the minimum of
intuition necessary for it to maintain its existence and go through the
operations indispensable to life and survival. This intuition is not pos-
sessed by the animal, but possesses and moves it; it is something that
manifests of itself in the grain of the vital and physical substance of
consciousness under pressure of a need and for the needed occasion: but
at the same time a surface result of this intuition accumulates and takes
the form of an automatic instinct which works whenever the occasion
for it recurs; this instinct belongs to the race and is imparted at birth to
its individual members. The intuition, when it occurs or recurs, is un-
erring; the instinct is automatically correct as a rule, but can err, for it
fails or blunders when the surface consciousness or an ill-developed in-
telligence interferes or if the instinct continues to act mechanically when,
owing to changed circumstances, the need or the necessary circumstances
are no longer there. The second source of knowledge is surface contact
with the world outside the natural individual being; it is this contact

546 THE LIFE DIVINE

which is the cause first of a conscious sensation and sense-perception
and then of intelligence. If there were not an underlying consciousness,
the contact would not create any perception or reaction; it is because the
contact stimulates into a feeling and a surface response the subliminal
of a being already vitalised by the subconscious life-principle and its first
needs and seekings that a surface awareness begins to form and develop.
Intrinsically the emergence of a surface consciousness by force of life
contacts is due to the fact that in both subject and object of the contact
consciousness-force is already existent in a subliminal latency: when the
life-principle is ready, sufficiently sensitive in the subject, the recipient
of the contact, this subliminal consciousness emerges in a response to
the stimulus which begins to constitute a vital or life mind, the mind
of the animal, and then, in the course of the evolution, a thinking intelli-
gence. The secret consciousness is rendered into surface sensation and
perception, the secret force into surface impulse.

If this underlying subliminal consciousness were to come itself to
the surface, there would be a direct meeting between the consciousness
of the subject and the contents of the object and the result would be a
direct knowledge; but this is not possible, first, because of the veto or
obstruction of the Inconscience and, secondly, because the evolutionary
intention is to develop slowly through an imperfect but growing surface
awareness. The secret consciousness-force has therefore to limit itself to
imperfect renderings in a surface vital and mental vibration and opera-
tion and is forced by the absence, holding back or insufficiency of the
direct awareness to develop organs and instincts for an indirect knowl-
edge. This creation of an external knowledge and intelligence takes place
in an already prepared indeterminate conscious structure which is the
earliest formation on the surface. At first this structure is only a mini-
mum formation of consciousness with a vague sensational perception and
a response-impulse; but, as more organised forms of life appear, thts\
grows into a life-mind and vital intelligence largely mechanical and auto-
matic in the beginning and concerned only with practical needs, desires
and impulses. All this activity is in its initiation intuitive and instinctive ;
the underlying consciousness is translated in the surface substratum into
automatic movements of the conscious stuff of life and body: the mind
movements, when they appear, are involved in these automatisms, they
occur as a subordinate mental notation within the predominant vital
sense-notation. But slowly mind starts its task of disengaging itself; it
still works for the life-instinct, Hfe-need and life-desire, but its own

ORIGIN OF FALSEHOOD AND EVIL 547

special characters emerge, observation, invention, device, intention, exe-
cution of purpose, while sensation and impulse add to themselves emotion
and bring a subtler and finer affective urge and value into the crude
vital reaction. Mind is still much involved in life and its highest purely
mental operations are not in evidence; it accepts a large background of
instinct and vital intuition as its support, and the intelligence developed,
though always growing as the animal life-scale rises, is an added super-
structure.

When human intelligence adds itself to the animal basis, this basis
still remains present and active, but it is largely changed, subtilised and
uplifted by conscious will and intention; the automatic life of instinct
and vital intuition diminishes and cannot keep its original predominant
proportion to the self-aware mental intelligence. Intuition becomes less
purely intuitive: even when there is still a strong vital intuition, its vital
character is concealed by mentalisation, and mental intuition is most
often a mixture, not the pure article, for an alloy is added to make it
mentally current and serviceable. In the animal also the surface con-
sciousness can obstruct or alter the intuition but, because its capacity is
less, it interferes less with the automatic, mechanical or instinctive action
of Nature: in mental man when the intuition rises towards the surface, it
is caught at once before it reaches and is translated into terms of mind-
intelligence with a gloss or mental interpretation added which conceals
the origin of the knowledge. Instinct also is deprived of its intuitive char-
acter by being taken up and mentalised and by that change becomes less
sure, though more assisted, when not replaced, by the plastic power of
adaptation of things and self-adaptation proper to the intelligence. The
emergence of mind in life brings an immense increase of the range and
capacity of the evolving consciousness- f orce ; but it also brings an im-
mense increase in the range and capacity of error. For evolving mind trails
constantly error as its shadow, a shadow that grows with the growing
body of consciousness and knowledge.

If in the evolution the surface consciousness were always open to
the action of intuition, the intervention of error would not be possible.
For intuition is an edge of light thrust out by the secret supermind, and
an emergent truth-consciousness, however limited, yet sure in its action,
would be the consequence. Instinct, if it had to form, would be plastic to
the intuition and adapt itself freely to evolutionary change and the
change of inner or environing circumstance. Intelligence, if it had to
form, would be subservient to intuition and would be its accurate mental

548 THE LIFE DIVINE

expression ; its brilliancy would perhaps be modulated to suit a diminished
action serving as a minor, not, as it is now, a major function and move-
ment, but it would not be erratic by deviation, would not by its parts of
obscurity sink into the false or fallible. But this could not be, because
the hold of Inconscience on the matter, the surface substance, in which
mind and life have to express themselves, makes the surface con-
sciousness obscure and unresponsive to the light within; it is impelled
moreover to cherish this defect, to substitute more and more its own in-
complete but better grasped clarities for the unaccountable inner intima-
tions, because a rapid development of the truth-consciousness is not the
intention in Nature. For the method chosen by her is a slow and difficult
evolution of Inconscience developing into Ignorance and Ignorance form-
ing itself into a mixed, modified and partial knowledge before it can be
ready for transformation into a higher truth-consciousness and truth-
knowledge. Our imperfect mental intelligence is a necessary stage of tran-
sition before this higher transformation can be made possible.

There are, in practical fact, two poles of the conscious being between
which the evolutionary process works, one a surface nescience which has
to change gradually into knowledge, the other a secret Consciousness-
Force in which all power of knowledge is and which has slowly to mani-
fest in the nescience. The surface nescience full of incomprehension and
inapprehension can change into knowledge because consciousness is there
involved in it; if it were intrinsically an entire absence of consciousness,
the change would be impossible: but still it works as an inconscience
trying to be conscious; it is at first a nescience compelled by need and
outer impact to feeling and response and then an ignorance labouring to
know. The means used is a contact with the world and its forces and ob-
jects which, 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 incom-
plete; there is an imperfect seizure or a misprision of the intuition that
answers to the contact: still by this process an initiation of responsive
consciousness, a first accumulation of ingrained or habitual instinctive
knowledge begins, and there follows upon it first a primitive and then
a developed capacity of receptive awareness, understanding, reply of
action, previsional initiation of action, — an evolving consciousness which
is half-knowledge, half-ignorance. All that is unknown is met on the
basis of what is known; but as this knowledge is imperfect, as it receives

ORIGIN OF FALSEHOOD AND EVIL 549

imperfectly and responds imperfectly to the contacts of things, there
can be a misprision of the new contact as well as a misprision or defor-
mation of the intuitive response, a double source of error.

It is evident, in these conditions, that Error is a necessary accom-
paniment, almost a necessary condition and instrumentation, an indis-
pensable step or stage in the slow evolution towards knowledge in a
consciousness that begins from nescience and works in the stuff of a gen-
eral nescience. The evolving consciousness has to acquire knowledge by
an indirect means which does not give even a fragmentary certitude;
for there is at first only a figure or a sign, an image or a vibration physical
in character created by contact with the object and a resulting vital sen-
sation which have to be interpreted by mind and sense and turned into a
corresponding mental idea or figure. Things thus experienced and men-
tally known have to be related together; things unknown have to be
observed, discovered, fitted into the already acquired sum of experience
and knowledge. At each step different possibilities of fact, significance,
judgment, interpretation, relation present themselves; some have to be
tested and rejected, others accepted and confirmed: to shut out error is
impossible without limiting the chances of acquisition of knowledge.
Observation is the first instrument of the mind, but observation itself
is a complex process open at every step to the mistakes of the ignorant
observing consciousness; misprision of the fact by the senses and the
sense-mind, omission, wrong selection and putting together, unconscious
additions made by a personal impression or personal reaction create a
false or an imperfect composite picture; to these errors are added the
errors of inference, judgment, interpretation of facts by the intelligence:
when even the data are not sure or perfect, the conclusions built on them
must also be insecure and imperfect.

Consciousness in its acquisition of knowledge proceeds from the
known to the unknown; it builds a structure of acquired experience,
memories, impressions, judgments, a composite mental plan of things
which is of the nature of a shifting and ever modifiable fixity. In the
reception of new knowledge, what comes in to be received is judged in
the light of past knowledge and fitted into the structure; if it cannot
properly fit, it is either dovetailed in anyhow or rejected: but the exist-
ing knowledge and its structures or standards may not be applicable to
the new object or new field of knowledge, the fitting may be a misfitting
or the rejection may be an erroneous response. To misprision and wrong
interpretation of facts, there is added misapplication of knowledge, mis-

550 THE LIFE DIVINE

combination, misconstruction, misrepresentation, a complicated machin-
ery of mental error. In all this enlightened obscurity of our mental parts
a secret intuition is at work, a truth-urge that corrects or pushes the in-
telligence to correct what is erroneous, to labour towards a true picture of
things and a true interpretative knowledge. But intuition itself is limited
in the human mind by mental misprision of its intimations and is unable to
act in its own right; for whether it be physical, vital or mental intuition,
it has to present itself in order to be received, not nude and pure, but
garbed with a mental coating or entirely enveloped in an ample mental
vesture; so disguised, its true nature cannot be recognised and its rela-
tion to mind and its office are not understood, its way of working is ig-
nored by the hasty and half-aware human intelligence. There are intui-
tions of actuality, of possibility, of the determining truth behind things,
but all are mistaken by the mind for each other. A great confusion of
half-grasped material and an experimental building with it, a representa-
tion or mental structure of the figure of self and things rigid and yet
chaotic, half formed and arranged half jumbled, half true half erroneous,
but always imperfect, is the character of human knowledge.

Error by itself, however, would not amount to falsehood; it would
only be an imperfection of truth, a trying, an essay of possibilities: for
when we do not know, untried and uncertain possibilities have to be ad-
mitted and, even if as a result an imperfect or inapt structure of thought
is built, yet it may justify itself by opening to fresh knowledge in unex-
pected directions and either its dissolution and rebuilding or the discovery
of some truth it concealed might increase our cognition or our experience.
In spite of the mixture created the growth of consciousness, intelligence
and reason could arrive through this mixed truth to a clearer and truer
figure of self-knowledge and world-knowledge. The obstruction of the
original and enveloping inconscience would diminish, and an inxreasing
mental consciousness would reach a clarity and wholeness which would en-
able the concealed powers of direct knowledge and intuitive process to
emerge, utilise the prepared and enlightened instruments and make mind-
intelligence their true agent and truth-builder on the evolutionary surface.

But here the second condition or factor of the evolution intervenes;
for this seeking for knowledge is not an impersonal mental process ham-
pered only by the general limitations of mind-intelligence: the ego is
there, the physical ego, the life ego bent, not on self-knowledge and the
discovery of the truth of things and the truth of life, but on vital self-
affirmation; a mental ego is there also bent on its own personal self-

ORIGIN OF FALSEHOOD AND EVIL 55I

affirmation and largely directed and used by the vital urge for its life-
desire and life-purpose. For as mind develops, there develops also a
mental individuality with a personal drive of mind-tendency, a mental
temperament, a mind formation of its own. This surface mental indi-
viduality is ego-centric ; it looks at the world and things and happenings
from its own stand-point and sees them not as they are but as they affect
itself: in observing things it gives them the turn suitable to its own
tendency and temperament, selects or rejects, arranges truth according
to its own mental preference and convenience; observation, judgment,
reason are all determined or affected by this mind-personality and as-
similated to the needs of the individuality and the ego. Even when the
mind aims most at a pure impersonality of truth and reason, a sheer
impersonality is impossible to it; even the most trained, severe and vigi-
lant intellect fails to observe the twists and turns it gives to truth in the
reception of fact and idea and the construction of its mental knowledge.
Here we have an almost inexhaustible source of distortion of truth, a
cause of falsification, an unconscious or half-conscious will to error, an
acceptance of ideas or facts not by a clear perception of the true and
the false, but by preference, personal suitability, temperamental choice,
prejudgment. Here is a fruitful seed-plot for the growth of falsehood or a
gate or many gates through which it can enter by stealth or by an usurp-
ing but acceptable violence. Truth too can enter in and take up its dwell-
ing, not by its own right, but at the mind's pleasure.

In the terms of the Sankhya psychology we can distinguish three
types of mental individuality, — that which is governed by the principle
of obscurity and inertia, first-born of the Inconscience, tamasic; that
which is governed by a force of passion and activity, kinetic, rajasic;
that which is cast in the mould of the sattwic principle of light, harmony,
balance. The tamasic intelligence has its seat in the physical mind: it is
inert to ideas, — except to those which it receives inertly, blindly, pas-
sively from a recognised source or authority, — obscure in their reception,
unwilling to enlarge itself, recalcitrant to new stimulus, conservative
and immobile; it clings to its received structure of know^ledge and its one
power is repetitive practicality, but it is a power limited by the accus-
tomed, the obvious, the established and familiar and already secure; it
thrusts away all that is new and likely to disturb it. The rajasic intelli-
gence has its main seat in the vital mind and is of two kinds: one kind is
defensive with violence and passion, assertive of its mental individuality
and all that is in agreement with it, preferred by its volition, adapted to

552 THE LIFE DIVINE

its outlook, but aggressive against all that is contrary to its mental ego-
structure or unacceptable to its personal intellectuality; the other kind is
enthusiastic for new things, passionate, insistent, impetuous, often mobile
beyond measure, inconstant and ever restless, governed in its idea not by
truth and light but by the zest of intellectual battle and movement and
adventure. The sattwic intelligence is eager for knowledge, as open as it
can be to it, careful to consider and verify and balance, to adjust and
adapt to its view whatever confirms itself as truth, receiving all that it
can assimilate, skilful to build truth in a harmonious intellectual struc-
ture: but, because its light is limited, as all mental light must be, it is un-
able to enlarge itself so as to receive equally all truth and all knowledge ;
it has a mental ego, even an enlightened one, and is determined by it in
its observation, judgment, reasoning, mental choice and preference. In
most men there is a predominance of one of these qualities but also a
mixture; the same mind can be open and plastic and harmonic in one
direction, kinetic and vital, hasty and prejudiced and ill-balanced in an-
other, in yet another obscure and unreceptive. This limitation by per-
sonality, this defence of personality and refusal to receive what is unas-
similable, is necessary for the individual being because in its evolution,
at the stage reached, it has a certain self-expression, a certain type of ex-
perience and use of experience which must, for the mind and life at least,
govern nature; that for the moment is its law of being, its dharma. This
limitation of mind-consciousness by personality and of truth by mental
temperament and preference must be the rule of our nature so long as
the individual has not reached universality, is not yet preparing for
mind-transcendence. But it is evident that this condition is inevitably a
source of error and can at any moment be the cause of a falsification
of knowledge, an unconscious or half-wilful self-deception, a refusal to
admit true knowledge, a readiness to assert acceptable wrong knowledge
as true knowledge. ^-^

This is in the field of cognition, but the same law applies to will and
action. Out of ignorance a wrong consciousness is created which gives
a wrong dynamic reaction to the contact of persons, things, happenings:
the surface consciousness develops the habit of ignoring, misunderstand-
ing or rejecting the suggestions to action or against action that come
from the secret inmost consciousness, the psychic entity; it answers in-
stead to unenlightened mental and vital suggestions, or acts in accord-
ance with the demands and impulsions of the vital ego. Here the second
of the primary conditions of the evolution, the law of a separate life-being

ORIGIN OF FALSEHOOD AND EVIL 553

affirming itself in a world which is not-self to it, comes into prominence
and assumes an immense importance. It is here that the surface vital per-
sonality or life-self asserts its dominance, and this dominance of the ig-
norant vital being is a principal active source of discord and disharmony,
a cause of inner and outer perturbations of the life, a mainspring of
wrong-doing and evil. The natural vital element in us, in so far as it is
unchecked or untrained or retains its primitive character, is not con-
cerned with truth or right consciousness or right action ; it is concerned
with self-affirmation, with life-growth, with possession, with satisfaction
of impulse, with all satisfactions of desire. This main need and demand
of the life-self seems all-important to it; it would readily carry it out
without any regard to truth or right or good or any other consideration:
but because mind is there and has these conceptions, because the soul
is there and has these soul-perceptions, it tries to dominate mind and get
from it by dictation a sanction and order of execution for its own will of
self-affirmation, a verdict of truth and right and good for its own vital
assertions, impulses, desires; it is concerned with self-justification in
order that it may have room for full self-affirmation. But if it can get the
assent of mind, it is quite ready to ignore all these standards and set up
only one standard, the satisfaction, growth, strength, greatness of the
vital ego. The life-individual needs place, expansion, possession of its
world, dominance and control of things and beings ; it needs life-room, a
space in the sun, self-assertion, survival. It needs these things for itself
and for those with whom it associates itself, for its own ego and for the
collective ego; it needs them for its ideas, creeds, ideals, interests, imag-
inations: for it has to assert these forms of I-ness and my-ness and im-
pose them on the world around it or, if it is not strong enough to do that,
it has at least to defend and maintain them against others to the best
of its power and contrivance. It may try to do it by methods it thinks or
chooses to think or represent as right; it may try to do it by the naked
use of violence, ruse, falsehood, destructive aggression, crushing of other
life-formations: the principle is the same whatever the means or the moral
attitude. It is not only in the realm of interests, but in the realm of ideas
and the realm of religion that the vital being of man has introduced this
spirit and attitude of self-affirmation and struggle and the use of violence,
oppression and suppression, intolerance, aggression; it has imposed the
principle of life-egoism on the domain of intellectual truth an-d the do-
main of the spirit. Into its self-affirmation the self-asserting life brings
in hatred and dislike towards all that stands in the way of its expansion

554 THE LIFE DIVINE

or hurts its ego ; it develops as a means or as a passion or reaction of the
life-nature cruelty, treachery and all kinds of evil: its satisfaction of
desire and impulse takes no account of right and wrong, but only of the
fulfilment of desire and impulse. For this satisfaction it is ready to face
the risk of destruction and the actuality of suffering; for what it is
pushed by Nature to aim at is not self-preservation alone, but life-affir-
mation and life-satisfaction, formulation of life-force and life-being.

It does not follow that this is all that the vital personality is in its
native composition or that evil is its very nature. It is not primarily con-
cerned with truth and good, but it can have the passion for truth and
good as it has, more spontaneously, the passion for joy and beauty. In
all that is developed by the life-force there is developed at the same time
a secret delight somewhere in the being, a delight in good and a delight
in evil, a delight in truth and a delight in falsehood, a delight in life and
an attraction to death, a delight in pleasure and a delight in pain, in
one's own suffering and the suffering of others, but also in one's own joy
and happiness and good and the joy and happiness and good of others.
For the force of life-affirmation affirms alike the good and the evil: it has
its impulses of help and association, of generosity, affection, loyalty, self-
giving; it takes up altruism as it takes up egoism, sacrifices itself as well
as destroys others; and in all its acts there is the same passion for life-
affirmation, the same force of action and fulfilment. This character of
vital being and its trend of existence in which what we term good and
evil are items but not the mainspring, is evident in subhuman life ; in the
human being, since there a mental, moral and psychic discernment has
developed, it is subjected to control or to camouflage, but it does not
change its character. The vital being and its life-force and their drive
towards self-affirmation are, in the absence of an overt action of soul-
power and spiritual power, Atmashakti, Nature's chief means of effectua-
tion, and without its support neither mind nor body can utiHse their
possibilities or realise their aim here in existence. It is only if the inner
or true vita*! being replaces the outer life-personality that the drive of the
vital ego can be wholly overcome and the life-force become the servant
of the soul and a powerful instrumentation for the action of our true
spiritual being.

This then is the origin and nature of error, falsehood, wrong and
evil in the consciousness and will of the individual ; a limited conscious-
ness growing out of nescience is the source of error, a personal attachment
to the limitation and the error born of it the source of falsity, a wrong

ORIGIN OF FALSEHOOD AND EVIL 555

consciousness governed by the life-ego the source of evil. But it is evi-
dent that their relative existence is only a phenomenon thrown up by
the cosmic Force in its drive towards evolutionary self-expression, and it
is there that we have to look for the significance of the phenomenon. For
the emergence of the life-ego is, as we have seen, a machinery of cosmic
Nature for the affirmation of the individual, for his self-disengagement
from the indeterminate mass substance of the subconscient, for the ap-
pearance of a conscious being on a ground prepared by the Inconscience;
the principle of life-affirmation of the ego is the necessary consequence.
The individual ego is a pragmatic and effective fiction, a translation of
the secret self into the terms of surface consciousness, or a subjective
substitute for the true self in our surface experience: it is separated by
ignorance from other-self and from the inner Divinity, but it is still
pushed secretly towards an evolutionary unification in diversity; it has
behind itself, though finite, the impulse to the infinite. But this in the
terms of an ignorant consciousness translates itself into the will to ex-
pand, to be a boundless finite, to take everything it can into itself, to
enter into everything and possess it, even to be possessed if by that it
can feel itself satisfied and growing in or through others or can take into
itself by subjection the being and power of others or get thereby a help or
an impulse for its life-affirmation, its life-delight, its enrichment of its
mental, vital or physical existence.

But because it does these things as a separate ego for its separate
advantage and not by conscious interchange and mutuality, not by
unity, life-discord, conflict, disharmony arise, and it is the products of
this life-discord and disharmony that we call wrong and evil. Nature ac-
cepts them because they are necessary circumstances of the evolution,
necessary for the growth of the divided being; they are products of igno-
rance, supported by an ignorant consciousness that founds itself on divi-
sion, by an ignorant will that works through division, by an ignorant
' delight of existence that takes the joy of division. The evolutionary inten-
tion acts through the evil as through the good ; it has to utilise all because
confinement to a limited good would imprison and check the intended
evolution; it uses any available material and does what it can with it:
this is the reason why we see evil coming out of what we call good and
good coming out of what we call evil; and, if we see even what was
thought to be evil coming to be accepted as good, what was thought to be
good accepted as evil, it is because our standards of both are evolu-
tionary, limited and mutable. Evolutionary Nature, the terrestrial cosmic

556 THE LIFE DIVINE

Force, seems then at first to have no preference for either of these op-
posites, it uses both alike for its purpose. And yet it is the same Nature,
the same Force that has burdened man with the sense of good and evil
and insists on its importance: evidently, therefore, this sense also has
an evolutionary purpose; it too must be necessary, it must be there so
that man may leave certain things behind him, move towards others, un-
til out of good and evil he can emerge into some Good that is eternal and
infinite.

But how is this evolutionary intention in Nature to fulfil itself, by
what power, means, impulsion, what principle and process of selection
and harmonisation? The method adopted by the mind of man through
the ages has been always a principle of selection and rejection, and this
has taken the forms of a religious sanction, a social or moral rule of life
or an ethical ideal. But this is an empirical means which does not touch
the root of the problem because it has no vision of the cause and origin
of the malady it attempts to cure ; it deals with the symptoms, but deals
with them perfunctorily, not knowing what function they serve in the
purpose of Nature and what it is in the mind and life that supports them
and keeps them in being. Moreover, human good and evil are relative
and the standards erected by ethics are uncertain as well as relative:
what is forbidden by one religion or another, what is regarded as good
or bad by social opinion, what is thought useful to society or noxious to
it, what some temporary law of man allows or disallows, what is or is
considered helpful or harmful to self or others, what accords with this
or that ideal, what is prompted or discouraged by an instinct which we
call conscience, — an amalgam of all these view-points is the determin-
ing heterogeneous idea, constitutes the complex substance, of morality;
in all of them there is the constant mixture of truth and half-truth and
error which pursues all the activities of our limiting mental Knowledge-
Ignorance. A mental control over our vital and physical desires and in-
stincts, over our personal and social action, over our dealings with others
is indispensable to us as human beings, and morality creates a standard
by which we can guide ourselves and establish a customary control ; but
the control is always imperfect and it is an expedient, not a solution: man
remains always what he is and has ever been, a mixture of good and evil,
sin and virtue, a mental ego with an imperfect command over his mental,
vital and physical nature.

The endeavour to select, to retain from our consciousness and action
all that seems to us good and reject all that seems to us evil and so to re-

ORIGIN OF FALSEHOOD AND EVIL 557

form our being, to reconstitute and shape ourselves into the image of an
ideal, is a more profound ethical motive, because it comes nearer to the
true issue; it rests on the sound idea that our life is a becoming and
that there is something which we have to become and be. But the ideals
constructed by the human mind are selective and relative ; to shape our
nature rigidly according to them is to limit ourselves and make a con-
struction where there should be growth into larger being. The true call
upon us is the call of the Infinite and the Supreme; the self-affirmation
and self-abnegation imposed on us by Nature are both movements to-
wards that, and it is the right way of self-affirmation and self-negation
taken together in place of the wrong, because ignorant, way of the ego
and in place of the conflict between the yes and the no of Nature that we
have to discover. If we do not discover that, either the push of life will
be too strong for our narrow ideal of perfection, its instrumentation will
break and it will fail to consummate and perpetuate itself, or at best a
half result will be all that we shall obtain, or else the push away from
life will present itself as the only remedy, the one way out of the other-
wise invincible grasp of the Ignorance. This indeed is the way out usu-
ally indicated by religion; a divinely enjoined morality, a pursuit of
piety, righteousness and virtue as laid down in a religious code of con-
duct, a law of God determined by some human inspiration, is put for-
ward as a part of the means, the direction, by which we can tread the
way that leads to the exit, the issue. But this exit leaves the problem
where it was; it is only a way of escape for the personal being out of the
unsolved perplexity of the cosmic existence. In ancient Indian spiritual
thought there was a clearer perception of the difficulty; the practice of
truth, virtue, right will and right doing was regarded as a necessity of the
approach to spiritual realisation, but in the realisation itself the being
arises to the greater consciousness of the Infinite and Eternal and shakes
away from itself the burden of sin and virtue, for that belongs to the rela-
tivity and the Ignorance. Behind this larger truer perception lay the in-
tuition that a relative good is a training imposed by World-Nature upon
us so that we may pass through it towards the true Good which is abso-
lute. These problems are of the mind and the ignorant life, they do not
accompany us beyond mind; as there is a cessation of the duality of
truth and error in an infinite Truth-Consciousness, so there is a libera-
tion from the duality of good and evil in an infinite Good, there is tran-
scendence.

There can be no artificial escape from this problem which has al-

558 THE LIFE DIVINE

ways troubled humanity and from which it has found no satisfying issue.
The tree of the knowledge of good and evil with its sweet and bitter
fruits is secretly rooted in the very nature of the Inconscience from which
our being has emerged and on which it still stands as a nether soil and
basis of our physical existence; it has grown visibly on the surface in
the manifold branchings of the Ignorance which is still the main bulk and
condition of our consciousness in its difficult evolution towards a supreme
consciousness and an integral awareness. As long as there is this soil
with the unfound roots in it and this nourishing air and climate of Igno-
rance, the tree will grow and flourish and put forth its dual blossoms and
its fruit of mixed nature. It would follow that there can be no final solu-
tion until we have turned our inconscience into the greater consciousness,
made the truth of self and spirit our life-basis and transformed our ig-
norance into a higher knowledge. All other expedients will only be make-
shifts or blind issues; a complete and radical transformation of our na-
ture is the only true solution. It is because the Inconscience imposes its
original obscurity on our awareness of self and things and because the
Ignorance bases it on an imperfect and divided consciousness and because
we live in that obscurity and division that wrong knowledge and wrong
will are possible: without wrong knowledge there could be no error or
falsehood, without error or falsehood in our dynamic parts there could
be no wrong will in our members ; without wrong will there could be no
wrong-doing or evil: while these causes endure, the effects also will per-
sist in our action and in our nature. A mental control can only be a con-
trol, not a cure; a mental teaching, rule, standard can only impose an
artificial groove in which our action revolves mechanically or with diffi-
culty and which imposes a curbed and limited formation on the course
of our nature. A total change of consciousness, a radical change of nature
is the one remedy and the sole issue.

But since the root of the difficulty is a split, limited and Separative
existence, this change must consist in an integration, a healing of the di-
vided consciousness of our being, and since that division is complex and
many-sided, no partial change on one side of the being can be passed off
as a sufficient substitute for the integral transformation. Our first divi-
sion is that created by our ego and mainly, most forcefully, most vividly
by our life-ego, which divides us from all other beings as not-self and
ties us to our ego-centricity and the law of an egoistic self-affirmation.
It is in the errors of this self-affirmation that wrong and evil first arise:
wrong consciousness engenders wrong will in the members, in the think-

ORIGIN OF FALSEHOOD AND EVIL 559

ing mind, in the heart, in the life-mind and the sensational being, in
the very body-consciousness; wrong will engenders wrong action of all
these instruments, a multiple error and many-branching crookedness of
thought and will and sense and feeling. Nor can we deal rightly with
others so long as they are to us others, beings who are strangers to our-
selves and of whose inner consciousness, soul-need, mind-need, heart-
need, life-need, body-need we know little or nothing. The modicum of im-
perfect sympathy, knowledge and good-will that the law, need and habit
of association engender, is a poor quantum of what is required for a true
action. A larger mind, a larger heart, a more ample and generous life-
force can do something to help us or help others and avoid the worst
offences, but this too is insufficient and will not prevent a mass of troubles
and harms and colHsions of our preferred good with the good of others.
By the very nature of our ego and ignorance we affirm ourselves egotisti-
cally even when we most pride ourselves on selflessness and ignorantly
even when we most pride ourselves on understanding and knowledge. Al-
truism taken as a rule of life does not deliver us; it is a potent instrument
for self-enlargement and for correction of the narrower ego, but it does not
abolish it nor transform it into the true self one with all ; the ego of the
altruist is as powerful and absorbing as the ego of the selfish and it is
often more powerful and insistent because it is a self-righteous and
magnified ego. It helps still less if we do wrong to our soul, to our mind,
life or body with the idea of subordinating our self to the self of others.
To affirm our being rightly so that it may become one with all is the
true principle, not to mutilate or immolate it. Self-immolation may be
necessary at times, exceptionally, for a cause, in answer to some demand
of the heart or for some right or high purpose but cannot be made the
rule or nature of life ; so exaggerated, it would only feed and exaggerate
the ego of others or magnify some collective ego, not lead us or man-
kind to the discovery and affirmation of our or its true being. Sacrifice and
self-giving are indeed a true principle and a spiritual necessity, for w^e can-
not affirm our being rightly without sacrifice or without self-giving to
something larger than our ego; but that too must be done with a right
consciousness and will founded on a true knowledge. To develop the
sattwic part of our nature, a nature of light, understanding, balance, har-
mony, sympathy, good-will, kindness, fellow-feehng, self-control, rightly
ordered and harmonised action, is the best we can do in the limits of the
mental formation, but it is a stage and not the goal of our growth of be-
ing. These are solutions by the way, palliatives, necessary means for a

560 THE LIFE DIVINE

partial dealing with this root difficulty, provisional standards and devices
given us as a temporary help and guidance because the true and total
solution is beyond our present capacity and can only come when we
have sufficiently evolved to see it and make it our main endeavour.

The true solution can intervene only when by our spiritual growth
we can become one self with all beings, know them as part of our self,
deal with them as if they were our other selves ; for then the division is
healed, the law of separate self-affirmation leading by itself to affirmation
against or at the expense of others is enlarged and liberated by adding to
it the law of our self-affirmation for others and our self-finding in their
self-finding and self-realisation. It has been made a rule of religious
ethics to act in a spirit of universal compassion, to love one's neighbour
as oneself, to do to others as one would have them do to us, to feel the joy
and grief of others as one's own; but no man living in his ego is able
truly and perfectly to do these things, he can only accept them as a de-
mand of his mind, an aspiration of his heart, an effort of his will to live
by a high standard and modify by a sincere endeavour his crude ego-
nature. It is when others are known and felt intimately as oneself that
this ideal can become a natural and spontaneous rule of our living and be
realised in practice as in principle. But even oneness with others is not
enough by itself, if it is a oneness with their ignorance; for then the law
of ignorance will work and error of action ^ind wrong action will sur-
vive even if diminished in degree and mellowed in incidence and char-
acter. Our oneness with others must be fundamental, not a oneness with
their minds, hearts, vital selves, egos, — even though these come to be in-
cluded in our universalised consciousness, — ^but a oneness in the soul and
spirit, and that can only come by our liberation into soul-awareness and
self-knowledge. To be ourselves liberated from ego and realise our true
selves is the first necessity; all else can be achieved as a luminous result,
a necessary consequence. That is one reason why a spiritual call must
be accepted as imperative and take precedence over all other claims, in-
tellectual, ethical, social, that belong to the domain of the Ignorance.
For the mental law of good abides in that domain and can only modify
and palliate ; nothing can be a sufficient substitute for the spiritual change
that can realise the true and integral good because through the spirit we
come to the root of action and existence.

In the spiritual knowledge of self there are three steps of its self-
achievement which are at the same time three parts of the one knowl-
edge. The first is the discovery of the soul, not the outer soul of thought

ORIGIN OF FALSEHOOD AND EVIL 56 1

and emotion arid desire, but the secret psychic entity, the divine element
within us. When that becomes dominant over the nature, when we are
consciously the soul and when mind, life and body take their true
place as its instruments, we are aware of a guide within that knows
the truth, the good, the true delight and beauty of existence, controls
heart and intellect by its luminous law and leads our life and being to-
wards spiritual completeness. Even within the obscure workings of the
Ignorance we have then a witness who discerns, a living light that illu-
mines, a will that refuses to be misled and separates the mind's truth
from its error, the heart's intimate response from its vibrations to a
wrong call and wrong demand upon it, the life's true ardour and pleni-
tude of movement from vital passion and the turbid falsehoods of our
vital nature and its dark self-seekings. This is the first step of self-reali-
sation, to enthrone the soul, the divine psychic individual in the place
of the ego. The next step is to become aware of the eternal self in us un-
born and one with the self of all beings. This self-realisation liberates and
universalises ; even if our action still proceeds in the dynamics of the ig-
norance, it no longer binds or misleads because our inner being is seated
in the light of self-knowledge. The third step is to know the Divine Be-
ing who is at once our supreme transcendent Self, the Cosmic Being,
foundation of our universality, and the Divinity within of which our psy-
chic being, the true evolving individual in our nature, is a portion, a
spark, a flame growing into the eternal Fire from which it was lit and of
which it is the witness ever living within us and the conscious instrument •
of its light and power and joy and beauty. Aware of the Divine as the
Master of our being and action, we can learn to become channels of his
Shakti, the Divine Puissance, and act according to her dictates or her rule
of light and power within us. Our action will not then be mastered by our
vital impulse or governed by a mental standard, for she acts according to
the permanent yet plastic truth of things, — not that which the mind
constructs, but the higher, deeper and subtler truth of each movement
and circumstance as it is known to the supreme knowledge and demanded
by the supreme will in the universe. The liberation of the will follows
upon the liberation in knowledge and is its dynamic consequence; it is
knowledge that purifies, it is truth that liberates: evil is the fruit of a
spiritual ignorance and it will disappear only by the growth of a spiritual
consciousness and the light of spiritual knowledge. The division of our
being from the being of others can only be healed by removing the divorce
of our nature from the inner soul-reality, by abolishing the veil between

562 THE LIFE DIVINE

our becoming and our self-being, by bridging the remoteness of our in-
dividuality in Nature from the Divine Being who is the omnipresent
Reality in Nature and above Nature.

But the last division to be removed is the scission between this
Nature and the Super-Nature which is the Self-Power of the Divine
Existence. Even before the dynamic Knowledge-Ignorance is removed,
while it still remains as an inadequate instrumentation of the spirit, the
supreme Shakti or Supernature can work through us and we can be
aware of her workings; but it is then by a modification of her light and
power so that it can be received and assimilated by the inferior nature
of the mind, life and body. But this is not enough; there is needed an
entire remoulding of what we are into a way and power of the divine
Supernature. The integration of our being cannot be complete unless
there is this transformation of the dynamic action; there must be an up-
lifting and change of the whole mode of Nature itself and not only some
illumination and transmutation of the inner ways of the being. An eternal
Truth-Consciousness must possess us and sublimate all our natural
modes into its own modes of being, knowledge and action; a spontaneous
truth-awareness, truth-will, truth-feeling, truth-movement, truth-action
can then become the integral law of our nature.

PART II

THE KNOWLEDGE

AND

THE SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION

CHAPTER XV

REALITY AND THE INTEGRAL KNOWLEDGE

This Self is to be won by the Truth and by an integral
knowledge.

Mundaka Upanishad}

Here how thou shalt know Me in My totality . , . for
even of the seekers who have achieved, hardly one knows
Me in all the truth of My being.

GUa!"

THIS then is the origin, this the nature, these the boundaries of the
Ignorance. Its origin is a limitation of knowledge, its distinctive
character a separation of the being from its own integrality and entire
reality; its boundaries are determined by this separative development
of the consciousness, for it shuts us to our true self and to the true self
and whole nature of things and obliges us to live in an apparent surface
existence. A return or a progress to integrality, a disappearance of the
limitation, a breaking down of separativeness, an overpassing of bound-
aries, a recovery of our essential and whole reality must be the sign and
opposite character of the inner turn towards Knowledge. There must be
a replacement of a limited and separative by an essential and integral
consciousness identified with the original truth and the whole truth of
self and existence. The integral Knowledge is something that is already
there in the integral Reality: it is not a new or still non-existent thing
that has to be created, acquired, learned, invented or built up by the
mind; it must rather be discovered or uncovered, it is a Truth that is
self -revealed to a spiritual endeavour: for it is there veiled in our deeper
and greater self; it is the very stuff of our own spiritual consciousness,
and it is by awaking to it even in our surface self that we have to possess
it. There is an integral self-knowledge that we have to recover and, be-
cause the world-self also is our self, an integral world-knowledge. A
knowledge that can be learned or constructed by the mind exists and

^III. I. s. 'VII. I, 3.

S6S

566 THE LIFE DIVINE

has its value, but that is not what is meant when we speak of the Knowl-
edge and the Ignorance.

An integral spiritual consciousness carries in it a knowledge of all
the terms of being; it links the highest to the lowest through all the
mediating terms and achieves an indivisible whole. At the highest sum-
mit of things it opens to the reality, ineffable because superconscient to
all but its own self-awareness, of the Absolute. At the lowest end of our
being it perceives the Inconscience from which our evolution begins ; but
at the same time it is aware of the One and the All self-involved in those
depths, it unveils the secret Consciousness in the Inconscience. Inter-
pretative, revelatory, moving between these two extremes, its vision
discovers the manifestation of the One in the Many, the identity of the
Infinite in the disparity of things finite, the presence of the timeless
Eternal in eternal Time; it is this seeing that illumines for it the mean-
ing of the universe. This consciousness does not abolish the universe ; it
takes it up and transforms it by giving to it its hidden significance. It
does not abolish the individual existence; it transforms the individual
being and nature by revealing to them their true significance and ena-
bling them to overcome their separateness from the Divine Reality and
the Divine Nature.

An integral knowledge presupposes an integral Reality; for it is the
power of a Truth-consciousness which is itself the consciousness of the
Reality. But our idea and sense of Reality vary with our status and
movement of consciousness, its sight, its stress, its intake of things; that
sight or stress can be intensive and exclusive or extensive, inclusive and
comprehensive. It is quite possible — ^and it is in its own field a valid
movement for our thought and for a very high line of spiritual achieve-
ment— to affirm the existence of the ineffable Absolute, to emphasise its
sole Reality and to negate and abolish for our self, to expunge from our
idea and sense of reality, the individual being and the cosmic creation.
The reality of the individual is Brahman the Absolute ; the reality of the
cosmos is Brahman the Absolute: the individual is a phenomenon, a
temporal appearance in the cosmos; the cosmos itself is a phenomenon,
a larger and more complex temporal appearance. The two terms. Knowl-
edge and Ignorance, belong only to this appearance; in order to reach
an absolute superconsciousness both have to be transcended: ego-con-
sciousness and cosmic consciousness are extinguished in that supreme
transcendence and there remains only the Absolute. For the absolute
Brahman exists only in its own identity and is beyond all other-knowl-

REALITY AND THE INTEGRAL KNOWLEDGE 567

edge; there the very idea of the knower and the known and therefore of
the knowledge in which they meet and become one, disappears, is tran-
scended and loses its validity, so that to mind and speech the absolute
Brahman must remain always unattainable. In opposition to the view
we have put forward or in completion of it, — the view of the Ignorance
itself as only either a limited or an involved action of the divine Knowl-
edge, limited in the partly conscient, involved in the inconscient, — we
might say from this other end of the scale of things that Knowledge
itself is only a higher Ignorance, since it stops short of the absolute
Reality which is self-evident to Itself but to mind unknowable. This
absolutism corresponds to a truth of thought and to a truth of supreme
experience in the spiritual consciousness ; but by itself it is not the whole
of spiritual thought complete and comprehensive and it does not exhaust
the possibilities of the supreme spiritual experience.

The absolutist view of reality, consciousness and knowledge is
founded on one side of the earliest Vedantic thought, but it is not the
whole of that thinking. In the Upanishads, in the inspired scripture of
the most ancient Vedanta, we find the affirmation of the Absolute, the
experience-concept of the utter and ineffable Transcendence; but we
find also, not in contradiction to it but as its corollary, an affirmation of
the cosmic Divinity, an experience-concept of the cosmic Self and the
becoming of Brahman in the universe. Equally, we find the affirmation
of the Divine Reality in the individual: this too is an experience-concept;
it is seized upon not as an appearance, but as an actual becoming. In
place of a sole supreme exclusive affirmation negating all else than the
transcendent Absolute we find a comprehensive affirmation carried to its
farthest conclusion: this concept of Reality and of Knowledge envelop-
ing in one view the cosmic and the Absolute coincides fundamentally
with our own; for it implies that the Ignorance too is a half-veiled part
of the Knowledge and world-knowledge a part of self-knowledge. The
Isha Upanishad insists on the unity and reality of all the manifestations
of the Absolute ; it refuses to confine truth to any one aspect. Brahman
is the stable and the mobile, the internal and the external, all that is
near and all that is far whether spiritually or in the extension of Time
and Space; it is the Being and all becomings, the Pure and Silent who
is without feature or action and the Seer and Thinker who organises the
world and its objects ; it is the One who becomes all that we are sensible
of in the universe, the Immanent and that in which he takes up his
dwelling. The Upanishad affirms the perfect and the liberating knowl-

568 THE LIFE DIVINE

edge to be that which excludes neither the Self nor its creations: the
liberated spirit sees all these as becomings of the Self-existent in an
internal vision and by a consciousness which perceives the universe
within itself instead of looking out on it, like the limited and egoistic
mind, as a thing other than itself. To live in the cosmic Ignorance is a
blindness, but to confine oneself in an exclusive absolutism of Knowl-
edge is also a blindness: to know Brahman as at once and together the
Knowledge and the Ignorance, to attain to the supreme status at once
by the Becoming and the Non-Becoming, to relate together realisation
of the transcendent and the cosmic self, to achieve foundation in the
supramundane and a self-aware manifestation in the mundane, is the
integral knowledge; that is the possession of Immortality. It is this
whole consciousness with its complete knowledge that builds the founda-
tion of the Life Divine and makes its attainment possible. It follows
that the absolute reality of the Absolute must be, not a rigid indeter-
minable oneness, not an infinity vacant of all that is not a pure self-
existence attainable only by the exclusion of the many and the finite, but
something which is beyond these definitions, beyond indeed any descrip-
tion either positive or negative. All affirmations and negations are ex-
pressive of its aspects, and it is through both a supreme affirmation and
a supreme negation that we can arrive at the Absolute.

On the one side, then, presented to us as the Reality, we have an
absolute Self-Existence, an eternal sole self-being, and through the ex-
perience of the silent and inactive Self or the detached immobile Purusha
we can move towards this featureless and relationless Absolute, negate
the actions of the creative Power, whether that be an illusory Maya or
a formative Prakriti, pass from all circling in cosmic error into the
eternal Peace and Silence, get rid of our personal existence and find or
lose ourselves in that sole true Existence. On the other side, we have a
Becoming which is a true movement of Being, and both the Being and
the Becoming are truths of one absolute Reality. The first view is
founded on the metaphysical conception which formulates an extreme
perception in our thought, an exclusive experience in our consciousness
of the Absolute as a reality void of all relations and determinations:
that imposes as its consequence a logical and practical necessity to deny
the world of relativities as a falsity of unreal being, a non-existent
(Asat), or at least a lower and evanescent, temporal and pragmatic self-
experience, and to cut it away from the consciousness in order to arrive
at liberation of the spirit from its false perceptions or its inferior crea-

REALITY AND THE INTEGRAL KNOWLEDGE 569

tions. The second view is based on the conception of the Absolute as
neither positively nor negatively limitable. It is beyond all relations in
the sense that it is not bound by any relativities or limitable by them in
its power of being: it cannot be tied down and circumscribed by our
relative conceptions, highest or lowest, positive or negative; it is bound
neither by our knowledge nor by our ignorance, neither by our concept
of existence nor by our concept of non-existence. But neither can it be
limited by any incapacity to contain, sustain, create or manifest rela-
tions: on the contrary, the power to manifest itself in infinity of unity
and infinity of multiplicity can be regarded as an inherent force, sign,
result of its very absoluteness, and this possibility is in itself a sufficient
explanation of cosmic existence. The Absolute cannot indeed be bound
in its nature to manifest a cosmos of relations, but neither can it be
bound not to manifest any cosmos. It is not itself a sheer emptiness;
for a vacant Absolute is no Absolute, — our conception of a Void or Zero
is only a conceptual sign of our mental inability to know or grasp it:
it bears in itself some ineffable essentiality of all that is and all that can
be; and since it holds in itself this essentiality and this possibility, it
must also hold in itself in some way of its absoluteness either the perma-
nent truth or the inherent, even if latent, realisable actuality of all that
is fundamental to our or the world's existence. It is this realisable actu-
ality actualised or this permanent truth deploying its possibilities that
we call manifestation and see as the universe.

There is, then, in the conception or the realisation of the truth of
the Absolute no inherent inevitable consequence of a rejection or a dis-
solution of the truth of the universe. The idea of an essentially unreal
universe manifested somehow by an inexplicable Power of illusion, the
Absolute Brahman regarding it not or aloof and not affecting it even
as it is unaffected by it, is at bottom a carrying over, an imposing or
imputation, adhydropa, of an incapacity of our mental consciousness to
That so as to limit it. Our mental consciousness, when it passes beyond
its limits, loses its own way and means of knowledge and tends towards
inactivity or cessation; it loses at the same time or tends to have no
further hold on its former contents, no continuing conception of the
reality of that which once was to it all that was real: we impute to abso-
lute Parabrahman, conceived as non-manifest for ever, a corresponding
inability or separation or aloofness from what has become or seems now
to us unreal ; it must, like our mind in its cessation or self-extinction, be
by its very nature of pure absoluteness void of all connection with this

570 THE LIFE DIVINE

world of apparent manifestation, incapable of any supporting cognition
or dynamic maintenance of it that gives it a reality — or, if there is such
a cognition, it must be of the nature of an Is that is not, a magical Maya.
But there is no binding reason to suppose that this chasm must exist;
what our relative human consciousness is or is not capable of, is no test
or standard of an absolute capacity; its conceptions cannot be applied
to an absolute self-awareness: what is necessary for our mental ignorance
in order to escape from itself cannot be the necessity of the Absolute
which has no need of self-escape and no reason for refusing to cognise
whatever is to it cognisable.

There is that unmanifest Unknowable; there is this manifest know-
able, partly manifest to our ignorance, manifest entirely to the divine
Knowledge which holds it in its own infinity. If it is true that neither our
ignorance nor our utmost and widest mental knowledge can give us a
hold of the Unknowable, still it is also true that, whether through our
knowledge or through our ignorance. That variously manifests itself;
for it cannot be manifesting something other than itself, since nothing
else can exist: in this variety of manifestation there is that Oneness and
through the diversity we can touch the Oneness. But even so, even
accepting this co-existence, it is still possible to pass a final verdict and
sentence of condemnation on the Becoming and decide on the necessity
of a renunciation of it and a return into the absolute Being. This verdict
can be based on the distinction between the real reality of the Absolute
and the partial and misleading reality of the relative universe.

For we have in this unfolding of knowledge the two terms of the
One and the Many, as we have the two terms of the finite and the in-
finite, of that which becomes and of that which does not become but for
ever is, of that which takes form and of that which does not take form,
of Spirit and Matter, of the supreme Superconscient and the nethermost
Inconscience ; in this dualism, and to get away from it, it is open to us
to define Knowledge as the possession of one term and the possession of
the other as Ignorance. The ultimate of our life would then be a drawing
away from the lower reality of the Becoming to the greater reality of
the Being, a leap from the Ignorance to the Knowledge and a rejection
of the Ignorance, a departure from the many into the One, from the
finite into the infinite, from form into the formless, from the life of the
material universe into the Spirit, from the hold of the inconscient upon
us into the superconscient Existence. In this solution there is supposed
to be a fixed opposition, an ultimate irreconcilability in each case be-

REALITY AND THE INTEGRAL KNOWLEDGE 57I

tween the two terms of our being. Or else, if both are a means of the
manifestation of the Brahman, the lower is a false or imperfect clue, a
means that must fail, a system of values that cannot ultimately satisfy
us. Dissatisfied with the confusions of the multiplicity, disdainful of
even the highest light and power and joy that it can reveal, we must
drive beyond to the absolute one-pointedness and one-standingness in
which all self-variation ceases. Unable by the claim of the Infinite upon
us to dwell for ever in the bonds of the finite or to find there satisfaction
and largeness and peace, we have to break all the bonds of individual
and universal Nature, destroy all values, symbols, images, self-defini-
tions, limitations of the illimitable and lose all littleness and division in
the Self that is for ever satisfied with its own infinity. Disgusted with
forms, disillusioned of their false and transient attractions, wearied and
discouraged by their fleeting impermanence and vain round of recur-
rence, we must escape from the cycles of Nature into the formlessness
and featurelessness of permanent Being. Ashamed of Matter and its
grossness, impatient of the purposeless stir and trouble of Life, tired
out by the goalless running of Mind or convinced of the vanity of all its
aims and objects, we have to release ourselves into the eternal repose
and purity of the Spirit. The Inconscient is a sleep or a prison, the
conscient a round of strivings without ultimate issue or the wanderings
of a dream: we must wake into the superconscious where all darkness
of night and half-lights cease in the self-luminous bliss of the Eternal.
The Eternal is our refuge ; all the rest are false values, the Ignorance and
its mazes, a self-bewilderment of the soul in phenomenal Nature.

Our conception of the Knowledge and the Ignorance rejects this
negation and the oppositions on which it is founded: it points to a larger
if more difficult issue of reconciliation. For we see that these apparently
opposite terms of One and Many, Form and the Formless, Finite and
Infinite, are not so much opposites as complements of each other; not
alternating values of the Brahman which in its creation perpetually loses
oneness to find itself in multiplicity and, unable to discover itself in
multiplicity, loses it again to recover oneness, but double and concurrent
values which explain each other; not hopelessly incompatible alterna-
tives, but two faces of the one Reality which can lead us to it by our
realisation of both together and not only by testing each separately. —
even though such separate testing may be a legitimate or even an in-
evitable step or part of the process of knowledge. Knowledge is no doubt
the knowledge of the One, the realisation of the Being; Ignorance is a

572 THE LIFE DIVINE

self-oblivion of Being, the experience of separateness in the multiplicity
and a dwelling or circling in the ill-understood maze of becomings: but
this is cured by the soul in the Becoming growing into knowledge, into
awareness of the Being which becomes in the multiplicity all these exist-
ences and can so become because their truth is already there in its time-
less existence. The integral knowledge of Brahman is a consciousness in
possession of both together, and the exclusive pursuit of either closes the
vision to one side of the truth of the omnipresent Reality. The possession
of the Being who is beyond all becomings, brings to us freedom from
the bonds of attachment and ignorance in the cosmic existence and
brings by that freedom a free possession of the Becoming and of the
cosmic existence. The knowledge of the Becoming is a part of knowl-
edge; it acts as an Ignorance only because we dwell imprisoned in it,
avidydydm antare, without possessing the Oneness of the Being, which
is its base, its stuff, its spirit, its cause of manifestation and without
which it could not be possible.

In fact, the Brahman is one not only in a featureless oneness be-
yond all relation, but in the very multiplicity of the cosmic existence.
Aware of the works of the dividing mind but not itself limited by it. It
finds its oneness as easily in the many, in relations, in becoming as in
any withdrawal from the many, from relations, from becoming. Our-
selves also, to possess even its oneness fully, must possess it — since it is
there, since all is that — in the infinite self-variation of the cosmos. The
infinity of the multiplicity finds itself explained and justified only when
it is contained and possessed in the infinity of the One; but also the
infinity of the One pours itself out and possesses itself in the infinity
of the Many. To be capable of that outpouring of its energies as well
as not to lose itself in it, not to recoil defeated from its boundlessness
and endlessness of vicissitudes and differences as well as not to be self-
divided by its variations, is the divine strength of the free Purusha, the
conscious Soul in its possession of its own immortal self-knowledge. The
finite self-variations of the Self in which the mind losing self-knowledge
is caught and dispersed among the variations, are yet not the denials
but the endless expression of the Infinite and have no other meaning or
reason for existence: the Infinite too, while it possesses its delight of
limitless being, finds also the joy of that very limitlessness in its infinite
self-definition in the universe. The Divine Being is not incapable of
taking innumerable forms because He is beyond all form in His essence,
nor by assuming them does He lose His divinity, but pours out rather

REALITY AND THE INTEGRAL KNOWLEDGE 573

in them the delight of His being and the glories of His godhead; this
gold does not cease to be gold because it shapes itself into all kinds of
ornaments and coins itself into many currencies and values, nor does the
Earth-Power, principle of all this figured material existence, lose her
immutable divinity because she forms herself into habitable worlds,
throws herself out in the hills and hollows and allows herself to be
shaped into utensils of the hearth and household or as hard metal into
the weapon and the engine. Matter, — substance itself, subtle or dense,
mental or material, — is form and body of Spirit and would never have
been created if it could not be made a basis for the self-expression of the
Spirit. The apparent Inconscience of the material universe holds in itself
darkly all that is eternally self-revealed in the luminous Superconscient ;
to reveal it in Time is the slow and deliberate delight of Nature and the
aim of her cycles.

But there are other conceptions of reality, other conceptions of the
nature of knowledge which demand consideration. There is the view that
all that exists is a subjective creation of Mind, a structure of Conscious-
ness, and that the idea of an objective reality self-existent, independent
of Consciousness, is an illusion, since we have and can have no evidence
of any such independent self-existence of things. This way of seeing may
lead to the affirmation of the creative Consciousness as the sole Reality
or to the denial of all existence and the affirmation of Non-Existence or
a nescient Zero as the sole Reality. For, in one view, the objects con-
structed by consciousness have no intrinsic reality, they are merely
structures; even the consciousness that constructs them is itself only a
flux of perceptions that assume an appearance of connection and con-
tinuity and create a sense of continuous time, but in reality these things
have no stable basis as they are only an appearance of reality. This
would mean that the reality is an eternal absence at once of all self-
conscious existence and of all that constitutes movement of existence:
Knowledge would mean a return to that from the appearance of the
constructed universe. There would be a double and complete self-extinc-
tion, the disappearance of Purusha, the cessation or extinction of Prak-
riti; for the conscious Soul and Nature are the two terms of our being
and comprehend all that we mean by existence, and the negation of both
is the absolute Nirvana. What is real, then, must be either an Incon-
science, in which this flux and these structures appear, or a Supercon-
science beyond all idea of self or existence. But this view of the universe
is only true of the appearance of things when we regard our surface

574 THE LIFE DIVINE

mind as the whole of consciousness; as a description of the working of
that Mind it is valid: there, undoubtedly, all looks like a flux and a con-
struction by an impermanent Consciousness. But this cannot prevail as
a whole account of existence if there is a greater and deeper self-knowl-
edge and world-knowledge, a knowledge by identity, a consciousness to
which that knowledge is normal and a Being of which that consciousness
is the eternal sel f -awareness ; for then the subjective and the objective
can be real and intimate to that consciousness and being, both can be
something of itself, sides of its identity, authentic to its existence.

On the other hand, if the constructing Mind or Consciousness is
real and the sole reality, then the universe of material beings and objects
may have an existence, but it is purely subjective-structural, made by
Consciousness out of itself, maintained by it, dissolving into it in their
disappearance. For if there is nothing else, no essential Existence or
Being supporting the creative Power, and there is not, either, a sustain-
ing Void or Nihil, then this Consciousness which creates everything must
itself have or be an existence or a substance; if it can make structures,
they must be constructions out of its own substance or forms of its own
existence. A consciousness which is not that of an Existence or is not
itself an existence, must be an unreality, a perceptive Force of a Void or
in a Void raising there unreal structures made of nothing, — a proposi-
tion which is not easily acceptable unless all others prove to be invalid.
It then becomes apparent that what we see as consciousness must be a
Being or an Existence out of whose substance of consciousness all is
created.

But if we thus get back to the biune or the dual reality of Being
and Consciousness, we can either suppose with Vedanta one original
Being or with Sankhya a plurality of beings to whom Consciousness or
some Energy to which we attribute consciousness presents its structures.
If a plurality of separate original beings alone is real, then, since each
would be or create its own world in its own consciousness, the difficulty
is to account for their relations in a single identical universe ; there must
be a one Consciousness or one Energy, — corresponding to the Sankhya
idea of a single Prakriti which is the field of experience of many like
Purushas, — in which they meet in an identical mind-constructed uni-
verse. This theory of things has the advantage of accounting for the mul-
titude of souls and multitude of things and the oneness in diversity of
their experience, while at the same time it gives a reality to the separate
spiritual growth and destiny of the individual being. But if we can sup-

REALITY AND THE INTEGRAL KNOWLEDGE 575

pose a One Consciousness, or a One Energy, creating a multitude of fig-
ures of itself and accommodating in its world a plurality of beings, there
is no difficulty in supposing a one original Being who supports or ex-
presses himself in a plurality of beings, — souls or spiritual powers of his
one-existence; it would follow alsO that all objects, all the figures of
consciousness would be figures of the Being. It must then be asked
whether this plurality and these figures are realities of the one Real
Existence, or representative personalities and images only, or symbols
or values created by Mind to represent It. This would depend largely
on whether it is only Mind as we know it that is in action or a deeper
and greater Consciousness, of which Mind is a surface instrument,
executrix of its initiations, medium of its manifestations. If it is the
former, the universe constructed and seen by Mind can only have a sub-
jective or symbolic or representative reality: if the latter, then the uni-
verse and its natural beings and objects can be true realities of the One
Existence, forms or powers of its being manifested by its force of being.
Mind would be only an interpreter between the universal Reality and
the manifestations of its creative Consciousness-Force, Shakti, Prakriti,
Maya.

It is clear that a Mind of the nature of our surface intelligence can
be only a secondary power of existence. For it bears the stamp of in-
capacity and ignorance as a sign that it is derivative and not the original
creatrix; we see that it does not know or understand the objects it per-
ceives, it has no automatic control of them; it has to acquire a labori-
ously built knowledge and controlling power. This initial incapacity
could not be there if these objects were the Mind's own structures, crea-
tions of its self-Power. It may be that this is so because individual mind
has only a frontal and derivative power and knowledge and there is a
universal Mind that is whole, endowed with omniscience, capable of
omnipotence. But the nature of Mind as we know it is an Ignorance
seeking for knowledge; it is a knower of fractions and worker of divi-
sions striving to arrive at a sum, to piece together a whole, — it is not
possessed of the essence of things or their totality: a universal iMind of
the same character might know the sum of its divisions by force of its
universality, but it would still lack the essential knowledge, and without
the essential knowledge there could be no true integral knowledge. A
consciousness possessing the essential and integral knowledge, proceed-
ing from the essence to the whole and from the whole to the parts, would
be no longer Mind, but a perfect Truth-Consciousness automatically

576 THE LIFE DIVINE

possessed of inherent self-knowledge and world-knowledge. It is from
this basis that we have to look at the subjective view of reality. It is true
that there is no such thing as an objective reality independent of con-
sciousness ; but at the same time there is a truth in objectivity and it is
this, that the reality of things resides in something that is within them
and is independent of the interpretation our mind gives to them and
of the structures it builds upon its observation. These structures con-
stitute the mind's subjective image or figure of the universe, but the
universe and its objects are not a mere image or figure. They are in
essence creations of consciousness, but of a consciousness that is one
with being, whose substance is the substance of Being and whose crea-
tions too are of that substance, therefore real. In this view the world
cannot be a purely subjective creation of Consciousness; the subjective
and the objective truth of things are both real, they are two sides of the
same Reality.

In a certain sense, to use the relative and suggestive phrasing of
our human language, all things are the symbols through which we have
to approach and draw nearer to That by which we and they exist. The
infinity of unity is one symbol, the infinity of the multiplicity is another
symbol: again, since each thing in the multiplicity points back to the
unity, since each thing that we call finite is a representative figure, a
form-front, a silhouette shadowing out something of the infinite, all that
defines itself in the universe — all its objects, happenings, idea-forma-
tions, life-formations — are in their turn each a clue and a symbol. To
our subjective mind the infinity of existence is one symbol, the infinity
of non-existence is another symbol. The infinity of the Inconscient and
the infinity of the Superconscient are two poles of the manifestation of
the absolute Parabrahman, and our existence between these two poles
and our passage from one to the other are a progressive seizing, a con-
stant interpretation, a subjective building up in ourselves of this mani-
festation of the unmanifest. Through such an unfolding of our self-exist-
ence we have to arrive at the consciousness of its ineffable Presence and
of ourselves and the world and all that is and all that is not as the un-
veiling of that which never entirely unveils itself to anything other than
its own self -light eternal and absolute.

But this way of seeing things belongs to the action of the mind
interpreting the relation between the Being and the external Becoming;
it is valid as a dynamic mental representation corresponding to a certain
truth of the manifestation, but subject to the proviso that these symbolic

REALITY AND THE INTEGRAL KNOWLEDGE 577

values of things do not make the things themselves mere significant
counters, abstract symbols like mathematical formulae or other signs
used by the mind for knowledge: for forms and happenings in the uni-
verse are realities significant of Reality; they are self-expressions of
That, movements and powers of the Being. Each form is there because
it is an expression of some power of That which inhabits it; each hap-
pening is a movement in the working out of some Truth of the Being in
its dynamic process of manifestation. It is this significance that gives
validity to the mind's interpretative knowledge, its subjective construc-
tion of the universe; our mind is primarily a percipient and interpreter,
secondarily and derivatively a creator. This indeed is the value of all
mental subjectivity that it reflects in it some truth of the Being which
exists independently of the reflection, — ^whether that independence pre-
sents itself as a physical objectivity or a supraphysical reality perceived
by the mind but not perceptible by the physical senses. ^lind, then, is
not the original constructor of the universe: it is an intermediate power
valid for certain actualities of being; an agent, an intermediary, it
actualises possibilities and has its share in the creation, but the real
creatrix is a Consciousness, an Energy inherent in the transcendent and
cosmic Spirit.

There is a precisely opposite view of reality and knowledge which
affirms an objective Reality as the only entire truth and an objective
knowledge as the sole entirely reliable knowledge. This view starts from
the idea of physical existence as the one fundamental existence and the
relegation of consciousness, mind, soul or spirit to the position of a tem-
porary outcome of the physical Energy in its cosmic action, — if indeed
soul or spirit has any existence. All that is not physical and objective
has a lesser reality dependent on the physical and objective; it has to
justify itself to the physical mind by objective evidence or a recognisable
and verifiable relation to the truth of physical and external things before
it can be given a passport of reality. But it is evident that this solution
cannot be accepted in its rigour, as it has no integrality in it but looks
at only one side of existence, even only one province or district of exist-
ence, and leaves all the rest unexplained, without inherent reality, with-
out significance. If pushed to its extreme, it would give to a stone or a
plum-pudding a greater reality and to thought, love, courage, genius,
greatness, the human soul and mind facing an obscure and dangerous
world and getting mastery over it an inferior dependent reality or even
an unsubstantial and evanescent reality. For in this view these things

578 THE LIFE DIVINE

SO great to our subjective vision are valid only as the reactions of an
objective material being to an objective material existence; they are
valid only in so far as they deal with objective realities and make them-
selves effective upon them: the soul, if it exists, is only a circumstance of
an objectively real world-Nature. But it could be held, on the contrary,
that the objective assumes value only as it has a relation to the soul;
it is a field, an occasion, a means for the soul's progression in Time: the
objective is created as a ground of manifestation for the subjective. The
objective world is only an outward form of becoming of the Spirit; it is
here a first form, a basis, but it is not the essential thing, the main truth
of being. The subjective and objective are two necessary sides of the
manifested Reality and of equal value, and in the range of the objective
itself the supraphysical object of consciousness has as much right to
acceptance as the physical objectivity; it cannot be a priori set aside
as a subjective delusion or hallucination.

In fact, subjectivity and objectivity are not independent realities,
they depend upon each other ; they are the Being, through consciousness,
looking at itself as subject on the object and the same Being offering
itself to its own consciousness as object to the subject. The more partial
view concedes no substantive reality to anything which exists only in
the consciousness, or, to put it more accurately, to anything to which
the inner consciousness or sense bears testimony but which the outer
physical senses do not provide with a ground or do not substantiate.
But the outer senses can bear a reliable evidence only when they refer
their version of the object to the consciousness and that consciousness
gives a significance to their report, adds to its externality its own in-
ternal intuitive interpretation and justifies it by a reasoned adherence;
for the evidence of the senses is always by itself imperfect, not altogether
reliable and certainly not final, because it is incomplete and constantly
subject to error. Indeed, we have no means of knowing the objective
universe except by our subjective consciousness of which the physical
senses themselves are instruments ; as the world appears not only to that
but in that, so it is to us. If we deny reality to the evidence of this uni-
versal witness for subjective or for supraphysical objectivities, there is
no sufficient reason to concede reality to its evidence for physical ob-
jectivities; if the inner or the supraphysical objects of consciousness
are unreal, the objective physical universe has also every chance of be-
ing unreal. In each case understanding, discrimination, verification are
necessary; but the subjective and the supraphysical must have another

REALITY AND THE INTEGRAL KNOWLEDGE 579

method of verification than that which we apply successfully to the
physical and external objective. Subjective experience cannot be referred
to the evidence of the external senses ; it has its own standards of seeing
and its inner method of verification: so also supraphysical realities by
their very nature cannot be referred to the judgment of the physical or
sense mind except when they project themselves into the physical, and
even then that judgment is often incompetent or subject to caution ; they
can only be verified by other senses and by a method of scrutiny and
affirmation which is applicable to their own reality, their own nature.

There are different orders of reality; the objective and physical is
only one order. It is convincing to the physical or externalising mind
because it is directly obvious to the senses, while of the subjective and
the supraphysical that mind has no means of knowledge except from
fragmentary signs and data and inferences which are at every step liable
to error. Our subjective movements and inner experiences are a domain
of happenings as real as any outward physical happenings; but if the
individual mind can know something of its own phenomena by direct
experience, it is ignorant of what happens in the consciousness of others
except by analogy with its own or such signs, data, inferences as its out-
ward observation can give it. I am therefore inwardly real to myself,
but the invisible life of others has only an indirect reality to me except
in so far as it impinges on my own mind, life and senses. This is the
limitation of the physical mind of man, and it creates in him a habit
of believing entirely only in the physical and of doubting or challenging
all that does not come into accord with his own experience or his own
scope of understanding or square with his own standard or sum of
established knowledge.

This ego-centric attitude has in recent times been elevated into a
valid standard of knowledge; it has been implicitly or explicitly held as
an axiom that all truth must be referred to the judgment of the personal
mind, reason and experience of every man or else it must be verified or
at any rate verifiable by a common or universal experience in order to
be valid. But obviously this is a false standard of reality and of knowl-
edge, since this means the sovereignty of the normal or average mind
and its limited capacity and experience, the exclusion of what is super-
normal or beyond the average intelligence. In its extreme, this claim of
the individual to be the judge of everything is an egoistic illusion, a
superstition of the physical mind, in the mass a gross and vulgar error.
The truth behind it is that each man has to think for himself, know for

580 THE LIFE DIVINE

himself according to his capacity, but his judgment can be valid only on
condition that he is ready to learn and open always to a larger knowl-
edge. It is reasoned that to depart from the physical standard and the
principle of personal or universal verification will lead to gross delusions
and the admission of unverified truth and subjective phantasy into the
realm of knowledge. But error and delusion and the introduction of per-
sonality and one's own subjectivity into the pursuit of knowledge are
always present, and the physical or objective standards and methods do
not exclude them. The probability of error is no reason for refusing to
attempt discovery, and subjective discovery must be pursued by a sub-
jective method of enquiry, observation and verification; research into
the supraphysical must evolve, accept and test an appropriate means and
methods other than those by which one examines the constituents of
physical objects and the processes of Energy in material Nature.

To refuse to enquire upon any general ground preconceived and
a priori is an obscurantism as prejudicial to the extension of knowledge
as the religious obscurantism which opposed in Europe the extension
of scientific discovery. The greatest inner discoveries, the experience
of self-being, the cosmic consciousness, the inner calm of the liberated
spirit, the direct effect of mind upon mind, the knowledge of things by
consciousness in direct contact with other consciousness or with its
objects, most spiritual experiences of any value, cannot be brought be-
fore the tribunal of the common mentality which has no experience of
these things and takes its own absence or incapacity of experience as a
proof of their invalidity or their non-existence. Physical truth or formu-
las, generalisations, discoveries founded upon physical observation can
be so referred, but even there a training of capacity is needed before one
can truly understand and judge; it is not every untrained mind that
can follow the mathematics of relativity or other difficult scientific truths
or judge of the validity either of their results or their process. All reality,
all experience must indeed, to be held as true, be capable of verification
by a same or similar experience; so, in fact, all men can have a spiritual
experience and can follow it out and verify it in themselves, but only
when they have acquired the capacity or can follow the inner methods by
which that experience and verification are made possible. It is necessary
to dwell for a moment on these obvious and elementary truths because
the opposite ideas have been sovereign in a recent period of human
mentality, — they are now only receding, — and have stood in the way of
the development of a vast domain of possible knowledge. It is of su-

REALITY AND THE INTEGRAL KNOWLEDGE $8 1

preme importance for the human spirit to be free to sound the depths of
inner or subliminal reality, of spiritual and of what is still superconscient
reality, and not to immure itself in the physical mind and its narrow
domain of objective external solidities; for in that way alone can there
come liberation from the Ignorance in which our mentality dwells and
a release into a complete consciousness, a true and integral self-realisation
and self-knowledge.

An integral knowledge demands an exploration, an unveiling of all
the possible domains of consciousness and experience. For there are
subjective domains of our being which lie behind the obvious surface;
these have to be fathomed and whatever is ascertained must be admitted
within the scope of the total reality. An inner range of spiritual experi-
ence is one very great domain of human consciousness; it has to be
entered into up to its deepest depths and its vastest reaches. The supra-
physical is as real as the physical; to know it is part of a complete
knowledge. The knowledge of the supraphysical has been associated with
mysticism and occultism, and occultism has been banned as a supersti-
tion and a fantastic error. But the occult is a part of existence; a true
occultism means no more than a research into supraphysical realities
and an unveiling of the hidden laws of being and Nature, of all that is
not obvious on the surface. It attempts the discovery of the secret laws
of mind and mental energy, the secret laws of life and life-energy, the
secret laws of the subtle-physical and its energies, — all that Nature has
not put into visible operation on the surface ; it pursues also the applica-
tion of these hidden truths and powers of Nature so as to extend the
mastery of the human spirit beyond the ordinary operations of mind,
the ordinary operations of life, the ordinary operations of our physical
existence. In the spiritual domain, which is occult to the surface mind
in so far as it passes beyond normal and enters into supernormal experi-
ence, there is possible not only the discovery of the self and spirit, but
the discovery of the uplifting, informing and guiding light of spiritual
consciousness and the power of the spirit, the spiritual way of knowl-
edge, the spiritual way of action. To know these things and to bring
their truths and forces into the life of humanity is a necessary part of
its evolution. Science itself is in its own way an occultism ; for it brings
to light the formulas which Nature has hidden and it uses its knowledge
to set free operations of her energies which she has not included in her
ordinary operations and to organise and place at the service of man
her occult powers and processes, a vast system of physical magic, — for

582 THE LIFE DIVINE

there is and can be no other magic than the utilisation of secret truths
of being, secret powers and processes of Nature. It may even be found
that a supraphysical knowledge is necessary for the completion of physi-
cal knowledge, because the processes of physical Nature have behind
them a supraphysical factor, a power and action mental, vital or spiritual
which is not tangible to any outer means of knowledge.

All insistence on the sole or the fundamental validity of the objec-
tive real takes its stand on the sense of the basic reality of Matter. But
it is now evident that Matter is by no means fundamentally real ; it is a
structure of Energy: it is becoming even a little doubtful whether the
acts and creations of this Energy itself are explicable except as the mo-
tions of power of a secret Mind or Consciousness of which its processes
and steps of structure are the formulas. It is therefore no longer possible
to take Matter as the sole reality. The material interpretation of exist-
ence was the result of an exclusive concentration, a preoccupation with
one movement of Existence, and such an exclusive concentration has its
utility and is therefore permissible ; in recent times it has justified itself
by the many immense and the innumerable minute discoveries of physi-
cal Science. But a solution of the whole problem of existence cannot be
based on an exclusive one-sided knowledge; we must know not only
what Matter is and what are its processes, but what mind and life are
and what are their processes, and one must know also spirit and soul and
all that is behind the material surface: only then can we have a knowl-
edge sufficiently integral for a solution of the problem. For the same
reason those views of existence which arise from an exclusive or pre-
dominant preoccupation with Mind or with Life and regard Mind or
Life as the sole fundamental reality, have not a sufficiently wide basis
for acceptance. Such a preoccupation of exclusive concentration may
lead to a fruitful scrutiny which sheds much light on Mind and Life, but
cannot result in a total solution of the problem. It may very well be that
an exclusive or predominant concentration on the subliminal being, re-
garding the surface existence as a mere system of symbols for an expres-
sion of its sole reality, might throw a strong light on the subliminal and
its processes and extend vastly the powers of the human being, but it
would not be by itself an integral solution or lead us successfully to the
integral knowledge of Reality. In our view the Spirit, the Self is the
fundamental reality of existence; but an exclusive concentration on this
fundamental reality to the exclusion of all reality of Mind, Life or Mat-
ter except as an imposition on the Self or unsubstantial shadows cast by

REALITY AND THE INTEGRAL KNOWLEDGE 583

the Spirit might help to an independent and radical spiritual realisation
but not to an integral and valid solution of the truth of cosmic and indi-
vidual existence.

An integral knowledge then must be a knowledge of the truth of all
sides of existence both separately and in the relation of each to all and
the relation of all to the truth of the Spirit. Our present state is an Igno-
rance and a many-sided seeking; it seeks for the truth of all things but, —
as is evident from the insistence and the variety of the human mind's
speculations as to the fundamental Truth which explains all others, the
Reality at the basis of all things, — the fundamental truth of things,
their basic reality must be found in some at once fundamental and uni-
versal Real; it is that which, once discovered, must embrace and explain
all, — for "That being known all will be known": the fundamental Real
must necessarily be and contain the truth of all existence, the truth of
the individual, the truth of the universe, the truth of all that is beyond
the universe. The Mind, in seeking for such a Reality and testing
each thing from Matter upwards to see if that might not be It, has not
proceeded on a wrong intuition. All that is necessary is to carry the
inquiry to its end and test the highest and ultimate levels of experience.

But since it is from the Ignorance that we proceed to the Knowl-
edge, we have had first to discover the secret nature and full extent of
the Ignorance. If we look at this Ignorance in which ordinarily we live
by the very circumstance of our separative existence in a material, in a
spatial and temporal universe, we see that on its obscurer side it reduces
itself, from whatever direction we look at or approach it, into the fact
of a many-sided self-ignorance. We are ignorant of the Absolute which is
the source of all being and becoming; we take partial facts of being,
temporal relations of the becoming for the whole truth of existence, —
that is the first, the original ignorance. We are ignorant of the spaceless,
timeless, immobile and immutable Self; we take the constant mobility
and mutation of the cosmic becoming in Time and Space for the whole
truth of existence, — that is the second, the cosmic ignorance. We are
ignorant of our universal self, the cosmic existence, the cosmic conscious-
ness, our infinite unity with all being and becoming; we take our limited
egoistic mentality, vitality, corporeality for our true self and regard
everything other than that as not-self, — that is the third, the egoistic
ignorance. We are ignorant of our eternal becoming in Time; we take
this little life in a small span of Time, in a petty field of Space, for our
beginning, our middle and our end, — that is the fourth, the temporal

584 THE LIFE DIVINE

ignorance. Even within this brief temporal becoming we are ignorant
of our large and complex being, of that in us which is superconscient,
subconscient, intraconscient, circumconscient to our surface becoming;
we take that surface becoming with its small selection of overtly men-
talised experiences for our whole existence, — that is the fifth, the psycho-
logical ignorance. We are ignorant of the true constitution of our becom-
ing ; we take the mind or life or body or any two of these or all three for
our true principle or the whole account of what we are, losing sight of
that which constitutes them and determines by its occult presence and
is meant to determine sovereignly by its emergence their operations, —
that is the sixth, the constitutional ignorance. As a result of all these
ignorances, we miss the true knowledge, government and enjoyment of
our life in the world; we are ignorant in our thought, will, sensations,
actions, return wrong or imperfect responses at every point to the ques-
tionings of the world, wander in a maze of errors and desires, strivings
and failures, pain and pleasure, sin and stumbling, follow a crooked
road, grope blindly for a changing goal, — that is the seventh, the practi-
cal ignorance.

Our conception of the Ignorance will necessarily determine our con-
ception of the Knowledge and determine, therefore, since our life is the
Ignorance at once denying and seeking after the Knowledge, the goal
of human effort and the aim of the cosmic endeavour. Integral knowl-
edge will then mean the cancelling of the sevenfold Ignorance by the
discovery of what it misses and ignores, a sevenfold self-revelation
within our consciousness: — it will mean the knowledge of the Absolute
as the origin of all things; the knowledge of the Self, the Spirit, the
Being and of the cosmos as the Self's becoming, the becoming of the
Being, a manifestation of the Spirit; the knowledge of the world as one
with us in the consciousness of our true self, thus cancelling our division
from it by the separative idea and life of ego; the knowledge of our
psychic entity and its immortal persistence in Time beyond death and
earth-existence; the knowledge of our greater and inner existence be-
hind the surface; the knowledge of our mind, life and body in its true
relation to the self within and the superconscient spiritual and supra-
mental being above them; the knowledge, finally, of the true harmony
and true use of our thought, will and action and a change of all our
nature into a conscious expression of the truth of the Spirit, the Self, the
Divinity, the integral spiritual Reality.

But this is not an intellectual knowledge which can be learned and

REALITY AND THE INTEGRAL KNOWLEDGE $8$

completed in our present mould of consciousness; it must be an experi-
ence, a becoming, a change of consciousness, a change of being. This
brings in the evolutionary character of the Becoming and the fact that
our mental ignorance is only a stage in our evolution. The integral knowl-
edge, then, can only come by an evolution of our being and our nature,
and that would seem to signify a slow process in Time such as has
accompanied the other evolutionary transformations. But as against
that inference there is the fact that the evolution has now become con-
scious and its method and steps need not be altogether of the same char-
acter as when it was subconscious in its process. The integral knowledge,
since it must result from a change of consciousness, can be gained by a
process in which our will and endeavour have a part, in which they can
discover and apply their own steps and method: its growth in us can
proceed by a conscious self- transformation. It is necessary then to see
what is likely to be the principle of this new process of evolution and
what are the movements of the integral knowledge that must necessarily
emerge in it, — or, in other words, what is the nature of the conscious-
ness that must be the base of the life divine and how that life may be
expected to be formed or to form itself, to materialise or, as one might
say, to "realise."

CHAPTER XVI

THE INTEGRAL KNOWLEDGE AND THE AIM OF LIFE;
FOUR THEORIES OF EXISTENCE

When all the desires that cling to the heart are loosed
away from it, then the mortal becomes immortal, even here
he possesses the Eternal. Brihadaranyaka Upanishad}

He becomes the Eternal and departs into the Eternal.

Brihadaranyaka Upanishad.^

This bodiless and immortal Life and Light is the Brah-

^^^- Brihadaranyaka Upanishad.^

Long and narrow is the ancient Path, — I have touched
it, I have found it, — the Path by which the wise, knowers
of the Eternal, attaining to salvation, depart hence to the
high world of Paradise. Brihadaranyaka Upanishad.''

I am a son of Earth, the soil is my mother. . . .
May she lavish on me her manifold treasure, her secret
riches. . . . May we speak the beauty of thee, O Earth, that
is in thy villages and forests and assemblies and war and
battles. Atharva Veda^

May Earth, sovereign over the past and the future,
make for us a wide world. . . . Earth that was the water
on the Ocean and whose course the thinkers follow by the
magic of their knowledge, she who has her heart of immor-
tality covered up by the Truth in the supreme ether, may
she stablish for us light and power in that most high king-
dom. Atharva Veda!"

O Flame, thou foundest the mortal in a supreme im-
mortality for increase of inspired Knowledge day by day;
for the seer who has thirst for the dual birth, thou createst
divine bliss and human joy. jUg Veda!!

O Godhead, guard for us the Infinite and lavish the
finite. Rig veda.^

BUT before we examine the principles and process of the evolu-
tionary ascent of Consciousness, it is necessary to restate what our
theory of integral knowledge affirms as fundamental truths of the Re-

'IV. 4. 7. nY.4.6.

'XIL I. 12, 44, 56. 'XII. I. I, 8.

^iv. 4. 7.

'I. 31. 7.

*IV. 4. 8.

nv. 2. II,

586

AIM OF LIFE AND THEORIES OF EXISTENCE 587

ality and its manifestation and what it admits as effectual sides and dy-
namic aspects but is unable to accept as sufficient for a total explanation
of existence and the universe. For truth of knowledge must base truth
of life and determine the aim of life; the evolutionary process itself is
the development of a Truth of existence concealed here in an original
Inconscience and brought out from it by an emerging Consciousness which
rises from gradation to gradation of its self-unfolding until it can manifest
in itself the integral reality of things and a total self-knowledge. On the
nature of that Truth from which it starts and which it has to manifest
must depend the course of the evolutionary development, — the steps of
its process and their significance.

First, we affirm an Absolute as the origin and support and secret
Reality of all things. The Absolute Reality is indefinable and ineffable
by mental thought and mental language; it is self-existent and self-evi-
dent to itself, as all absolutes are self-evident, but our mental affirmatives
and negatives, whether taken separatively or together, cannot limit or
define it. But at the same time there is a spiritual consciousness, a spir-
itual knowledge, a knowledge by identity which can seize the Reality in
its fundamental aspects and its manifested powers and figures. All that
is comes within this description and, if seen by this knowledge in its
own truth or its occult meaning, can be regarded as an expression of the
Reality and itself a reality. This manifested reality is self-existent in
these fundamental aspects; for all the basic realities are a bringing out
of something that is eternal and inherently true in the Absolute ; but all
that is not fundamental, all that is temporary is phenomenal, is form and
power dependent on the reality it expresses and is real by that and by
its own truth of significance, the truth of what it carries in it, because
it is that and not something fortuitous, not baseless, illusory, a vain
constructed figure. Even what deforms and disguises, as falsehood de-
forms and disguises truth, evil deforms and disguises good, has a tem-
poral reality as true consequences of the Inconscience; but these contrary
figures, though real in their own field, are not essential but only contribu-
tory to the manifestation and serve it as a temporal form or power of its
movement. The universal then is real by virtue of the Absolute of which
it is a self manifestation, and all that it contains is real by virtue of the
universal to which it gives a form and figure.

The Absolute manifests itself in two terms, a Being and a Becoming.
The Being is the fundamental reality; the Becoming is an effectual real-
ity: it is a dynamic power and result, a creative energy and working out

588 THE LIFE DIVINE

of the Being, a constantly persistent yet mutable form, process, outcome
of its immutable formless essence. All theories that make the Becoming
sufficient to itself are therefore half-truths, valid for some knowledge of
the manifestation acquired by an exclusive concentration upon what they
affirm and envisage, but otherwise valid only because the Being is not
separate from the Becoming but present in it, constitutive of it, inherent
in its every infinitesimal atom and in its boundless expansion and exten-
sion. Becoming can only know itself wholly when it knows itself as
Being; the soul in the Becoming arrives at self-knowledge and immortal-
ity when it knows the Supreme and Absolute and possesses the nature
of the Infinite and Eternal. To do that is the supreme aim of our exist-
ence; for that is the truth of our being and must therefore be the inherent
aim, the necessary outcome of our becoming: this truth of our being
becomes in the soul a necessity of manifestation, in matter a secret en-
ergy, in life an urge and tendency, a desire and a seeking, in mind a will,
aim, endeavour, purpose; to manifest what is from the first occult within
it is the whole hidden trend of evolutionary Nature.

Therefore we accept the truth on which the philosophies of the
supracosmic Absolute take their stand ; Illusionism itself, even if we con-
test its ultimate conclusions, can still be accepted as the way in which
the soul in mind, the mental being, has to see things in a spiritual-prag-
matic experience when it cuts itself off from the Becoming in order to
approach and enter into the Absolute. But also, since the Becoming is
real and is inevitable in the very self-power of the Infinite and Eternal,
this too is not a complete philosophy of existence. It is possible for the
soul in the Becoming to know itself as the Being and possess the Be-
coming, to know itself as Infinite in essence but also as the Infinite self-
expressed in the finite, the timeless Eternal regarding itself and its works
in the founding status and the developing motion of Time-eternity. This
realisation is the culmination of the Becoming; it is the fulfilment of
the Being in its dynamic reality. This too then must be part of the total
truth of things, for it alone gives a full spiritual significance to the
universe and justifies the soul in manifestation ; an explanation of things
that deprives cosmic and individual existence of all significance cannot
be the whole explanation or the solution it proposes the sole true issue.

The next affirmation which we put forward is that the fundamental
reality of the Absolute is to our spiritual perception a Divine Existence,
Consciousness and Delight of Being which is a supracosmic Reality, self-
existent, but also the secret truth underlying the whole manifestation;

AIM OF LIFE AND THEORIES OF EXISTENCE 589

for the fundamental truth of Being must necessarily be the fundamental
truth of Becoming. All is a manifestation of That; for it dwells even in
all that seem to be its opposites and its hidden compulsion on them to
disclose it is the cause of evolution, on Inconscience to develop from
itself its secret consciousness, on the apparent Non-Being to reveal in
itself the occult spiritual existence, on the insensible neutrality of Matter
to develop a various delight of being which must grow, setting itself free
from its minor terms, its contrary dualities of pain and pleasure, into
the essential delight of existence, the spiritual Ananda.

The Being is one, but this oneness is infinite and contains in itself
an infinite plurality or multiplicity of itself: the One is the All; it is not
only an essential Existence, but an All-Existence. The infinite multiplic-
ity of the One and the eternal unity of the Many are the two realities or
aspects of one reality on which the manifestation is founded. By reason
of this fundamental verity of the manifestation the Being presents itself
to our cosmic experience in three poises, — the supracosmic Existence,
the cosmic Spirit and the individual Self in the Many. But the multiplic-
ity permits of a phenomenal division of consciousness, an effectual Igno-
rance in which the Many, the individuals, cease to become aware of the
eternal self-existent Oneness and are oblivious of the oneness of the
cosmic Self in which and by which they live, move and have their being.
But, by force of the secret Unity, the soul in becoming is urged by its
own unseen reality and by the occult pressure of evolutionary Nature to
come out of this state of Ignorance and recover eventually the knowledge
of the one Divine Being and its oneness with it and at the same time to
recover its spiritual unity with all individual beings and the whole uni-
verse. It has to become aware not only of itself in the universe but of the
universe in itself and of the Being of cosmos as its greater self; the indi-
vidual has to universalise himself and in the same movement to become
aware of his supracosmic transcendence. This triple aspect of the reality
must be included in the total truth of the soul and of the cosmic manifes-
tation, and this necessity must determine the ultimate trend of the process
of evolutionary Nature.

All views of existence that stop short of the Transcendence and ig-
nore it must be incomplete accounts of the truth of being. The pantheistic
view of the identity of the Divine and the Universe is a truth, for all this
that is is the Brahman: but it stops short of the whole truth when it
misses and omits the supracosmic Reality. On the other side, every \'iew
that affirms the cosmos only and dismisses the individual as a by-product

590 THE LIFE DIVINE

of the cosmic Energy, errs by laying too much emphasis on one apparent
factual aspect of the world-action ; it is true only of the natural individual
and is not even the whole truth of that: for the natural individual, the
nature-being, is indeed a product of the universal Energy, but is at the
same time a nature-personality of the soul, an expressive formation of
the inner being and person, and this soul is not a perishable cell or a dis-
soluble portion of the cosmic Spirit, but has its original immortal reality
in the Transcendence. It is a fact that the cosmic Being expresses itself
through the individual being, but also it is a truth that the Transcenden-
tal Reality expresses itself through both the individual existence and the
Cosmos ; the soul is an eternal portion of the Supreme and not a fraction of
Nature. But equally any view that sees the universe as existent only in
the individual consciousness must very evidently be a fragmentary truth:
it is justified by a perception of the universality of the spiritual individual
and his power of embracing the whole universe in his consciousness ; but
neither the cosmos nor the indivdual consciousness is the fundamental
truth of existence ; for both depend upon and exist by the transcendental
Divine Being.

This Divine Being, Sachchidananda, is at once impersonal and per-
sonal: it is an Existence and the origin and foundation of all truths,
forces, powers, existences, but it is also the one transcendent Conscious
Being and the All-Person of whom all conscious beings are the selves and
personalities; for He is their highest Self and the universal indwelling
Presence. It is a necessity for the soul in the universe — and therefore the
inner trend of the evolutionary Energy and its ultimate intention — to
know and to grow into this truth of itself, to become one with the Divine
Being, to raise its nature to the Divine Nature, its existence into the
Divine Existence, its consciousness into the Divine Consciousness, its
delight of being into the divine Delight of Being, and to receive all this
into its becoming, to make the becoming an expression of that highest
Truth, to be possessed inwardly of the Divine Self and Master of its
existence and to be at the same time wholly possessed by Him and moved
by His Divine Energy and live and act in a complete self-giving and sur-
render. On this side the dualistic and theistic views of existence which
affirm the eternal real existence of God and the Soul and the eternal real
existence and cosmic action of the Divine Energy, express also a truth of
the integral existence; but their formulation falls short of the whole
truth if it denies the essential unity of God and Soul or their capacity
for utter oneness or ignores what underlies the supreme experience of

AIM OF LIFE AND THEORIES OF EXISTENCE 59 1

the merger of the soul in the Divine Unity through love, through union
of consciousness, through fusion of existence in existence.

The manifestation of the Being in our universe takes the shape of
an involution which is the starting-point of an evolution, — Matter the
nethermost stage. Spirit the summit. In the descent into involution there
can be distinguished seven principles of manifested being, seven grada-
tions of the manifesting Consciousness of which we can get a perception
or a concrete realisation of their presence and immanence here or a re-
flected experience. The first three are the original and fundamental princi-
ples and they form universal states of consciousness to which we can
rise ; when we do so, we can become aware of supreme planes or levels of
fundamental manifestation or self-formulation of the spiritual reality in
which is put in front the unity of the Divine Existence, the power of the
Divine Consciousness, the bliss of the Divine Delight of existence, — not
concealed or disguised as here, for we can possess them in their full inde-
pendent reality. A fourth principle of supramental truth-consciousness is
associated with them; manifesting unity in infinite multiplicity, it is the
characteristic power of self-determination of the Infinite. This quadruple
power of the supreme existence, consciousness and delight constitutes an
upper hemisphere of manifestation based on the Spirit's eternal self-
knowledge. If we enter into these principles or into any plane of being in
which there is the pure presence of the Reality, we find in them a com-
plete freedom and knowledge. The other three powers and planes of being,
of which we are even at present aware, form a lower hemisphere of the
manifestation, a hemisphere of Mind, Life and Matter. These are in
themselves powers of the superior principles; but wherever they manifest
in a separation from their spiritual sources, they undergo as a result a
phenomenal lapse into a divided in place of the true undivided existence:
this lapse, this separation creates a state of limited knowledge exclusively
concentrated on its own limited world-order and oblivious of all that is
behind it and of the underlying unity, a state therefore of cosmic and
individual Ignorance.

In the descent into the material plane of which our natural life is
a product, the lapse culminates in a total Inconscience out of which an
involved Being and Consciousness have to emerge by a gradual evolu-
tion. This inevitable evolution first develops, as it is bound to develop.
Matter and a material universe; in Matter, Life appears and living phys-
ical beings; in Life, Mind manifests and embodied thinking and living
beings; in Mind, ever increasing its powers and activities in forms of

592 THE LIFE DIVINE

Matter, the Supermind or Truth-Consciousness must appear, inevitably,
by the very force of what is contained in the Inconscience and the neces-
sity in Nature to bring it into manifestation. Supermind appearing mani-
fests the Spirit's self-knowledge and whole knowledge in a supramental
living being and must bring about by the same law, by an inherent neces-
sity and inevitability, the dynamic manifestation here of the divine Exist-
ence, Consciousness and Delight of existence. It is this that is the sig-
nificance of the plan and order of the terrestrial evolution; it is this
necessity that must determine all its steps and degrees, its principle and
its process. Mind, Life and Matter are the realised powers of the evolu-
tion and well-known to us; Supermind and the triune aspects of Sachchi-
dananda are the secret principles which are not yet put in front and have
still to be realised in the forms of the manifestation and we know them
only by hints and a partial and fragmentary action still not disengaged
from the lower movement and therefore not easily recognisable. But
their evolution too is part of the destiny of the soul in the Becoming, —
there must be a realisation and dynamisation in earth-life and in Matter
not only of Mind but of all that is above it, all that has descended indeed
but is still concealed in earth-life and Matter.

Our theory of the integral knowledge admits Mind as a creative
principle, a power of the Being, and assigns it its place in the manifesta-
tion; it similarly accepts Life and Matter as powers of the Spirit and in
them also is a creative Energy. But the view of things that makes Mind
the sole or the supreme creative principle and the philosophies that as-
sign to Life £>r Matter the same sole reality or predominance, are expres-
sions of a half-truth and not the integral knowledge. It is true that when
Matter first emerges it becomes the dominant principle; it seems to be
and is within its own field the basis of all things, the constituent of all
things, the end of all things: but Matter itself is found to be a result of
something that is not Matter, of Energy, and this Energy cannot be
something self-existent and acting in the Void, but can turn out and,
when deeply scrutinised, seems likely to turn out to be the action of a
secret Consciousness and Being: when the spiritual knowledge and ex-
perience emerge, this becomes a certitude, — it is seen that the creative
Energy in Matter is a movement of the power of the Spirit. Matter itself
cannot be the original and ultimate reality. At the same time the view
that divorces Matter and Spirit and puts them as opposites is unaccept-
able ; Matter is a form of Spirit, a habitation of Spirit, and here in Matter
itself there can be a realisation of Spirit.

AIM OF LIFE AND THEORIES OF EXISTENCE 593

It is true again that Life when it emerges becomes dominant, turns
Matter into an instrument for its manifestation, and begins to look as if
it were itself the secret original principle which breaks out into creation
and veils itself in the forms of Matter; there is a truth in this appearance
and this truth must be admitted as a part of the integral knowledge. Life,
though not the original Reality, is yet a form, a power of it which is mis-
sioned here as a creative urge in Matter. Life, therefore, has to be ac-
cepted as the means of our activity and the dynamic mould into which
we have here to pour the Divine Existence; but it can so be accepted only
because it is a form of a Divine Energy which is itself greater than the
Life-force. The Life-principle is not the whole foundation and origin of
things ; its creative working cannot be perfected and sovereignly fulfilled
or even find its true movement until it knows itself as an energy of the
Divine Being and elevates and subtilises its action into a free channel for
the outpourings of the superior Nature.

Mind in its turn, when it emerges, becomes dominant; it uses Life
and Matter as means of its expression, a field for its own growth and
sovereignty, and it begins to work as if it were the true reality and the
creator even as it is the witness of existence. But Mind also is a limited
and derivative power ; it is an outcome of Overmind or it is here a lumi-
nous shadow thrown by the divine Supermind: it can only arrive at its
own perfection by admitting the light of a larger knowledge; it must
transform its own more ignorant, imperfect and conflicting powers and
values into the divinely effective potencies and harmonious values of the
supramental truth-consciousness. All the powers of the lower hemisphere
with their structures of the Ignorance can find their true selves only by
a transformation in the light that descends to us from the higher hemi-
sphere of an eternal self-knowledge.

All these three lower powers of being build upon the Inconscient and
seem to be originated and supported by it: the black dragon of the In-
conscience sustains with its vast wings and its back of darkness the whole
structure of the material universe; its energies unroll the flux of things,
its obscure intimations seem to be the starting-point of consciousness
itself and the source of all life-impulse. The Inconscient, in consequence of
this origination and predominance, is taken now by a certain line of en-
quiry as the real origin and creator. It has indeed to be accepted that
an inconscient force, an inconscient substance are the starting-point of
the evolution, but it is a conscious Spirit and not an inconscient Being
that is emerging in the evolution. The Inconscient and its primary works

594 THE LIFE DIVINE

are penetrated by a succession of higher and higher powers of being and
are made subject to Consciousness so that its obstructions to the evolu-
tion, its circles of restriction, are slowly broken, the Python coils of its
obscurity shot through by the arrows of the Sun-God; so are the limita-
tions of our material substance diminished until they can be transcended
and mind, life and body can be transformed through a possession of them
by the greater law of divine Consciousness, Energy and Spirit. The in-
tegral knowledge admits the valid truths of all views of existence, valid
in their own field, but it seeks to get rid of their limitations and negations
and to harmonise and reconcile these partial truths in a larger truth
which fulfils all the many sides of our being in the one omnipresent
Existence.

At this point we must take a step farther and begin to regard the
metaphysical truth we have so stated as a determinant not only of our
thought and inner movements but of our life direction, a guide to a dy-
namic solution of our self-experience and world-experience. Our meta-
physical knowledge, our view of the fundamental truth of the universe
and the meaning of existence, should naturally be the determinant of our
whole conception of life and attitude to it; the aim of life, as we conceive
it, must be structured on that basis. Metaphysical philosophy is an at-
tempt to fix the fundamental realities and principles of being as distinct
from its processes and the phenomena which result from those processes.
But it is on the fundamental realities that the processes depend: our own
process of life, its aim and method, should be in accordance with the truth
of being that^Hresee; otherwise our metaphysical truth can be only a play
of the intellect without any dynamic importance. It is true that the in-
tellect must seek after truth for its own sake without any illegitimate
interference of a preconceived idea of life-utility. But still the truth, once
discovered, must be realisable in our inner being and our outer activities:
if it is not, it may have an intellectual but not an integral importance ; a
truth for the intellect, for our life it would be no more than the solution
of a thought puzzle or an abstract unreality or a dead letter. Truth of
being must govern truth of life ; it cannot be that the two have no rela-
tion or interdependence. The highest significance of life to us, the funda-
mental truth of existence, must be also the accepted meaning of our own
living, our aim, our ideal.

There are, roughly, from this view-point, four main theories, or
categories of theory, with their corresponding mental attitudes and ideals
in accordance with four different conceptions of truth of existence. These

AIM OF LIFE AND THEORIES OF EXISTENCE 595

we may call the supracosmic, the cosmic and terrestrial, the supraterres-
trial or other-worldly, and the integral or synthetic or composite, the
theories that try to reconcile the three factors — or any two of them —
which the other views tend to isolate. In this last category would fall our
view of our existence here as a Becoming with the Divine Being for its
origin and its object, a progressive manifestation, a spiritual evolution
with the supracosmic for its source and support, the other-worldly for a
condition and connecting link and the cosmic and terrestrial for its field,
and with human mind and life for its nodus and turning-point of release
towards a higher and a highest perfection. Our regard then must be on
the three first to see where they depart from the integralising view of
life and how far the truths they stand on fit into its structure.

In the supracosmic view of things the supreme Reality is alone
entirely real. A certain illusoriness, a sense of the vanity of cosmic exist-
ence and individual being is a characteristic turn of this seeing of things,
but it is not essential, not an indispensable adjunct to its main thought-
principle. In the extreme forms of its world-vision human existence has
no real meaning; it is a mistake of the soul or a delirium of the will to
live, an error or ignorance which somehow overcasts the absolute Reality.
The only true truth in the supracosmic ; or, in any case, the Absolute, the
Parabrahman is the origin and goal of all existence, all else is an interlude
without any abiding significance. If so, it would follow that the one thing
to be done, the one wise and needful way of our being is to get away from
all living, whether terrestrial or celestial, as soon as our inner evolution
or some hidden law of the spirit makes that possible. True, the illusion
is real to itself, the vanity pretends to be full of purpose; its laws and
facts — they are only facts and not truths, empirical and not real realities
— are binding on us so long as we rest in the error. But from any stand-
point of real knowledge, in any view of the true truth of things, all this
self-delusion would seem to be little better than the laws of a cosmic
madhouse; so long as we are mad and have to remain in the madhouse,
we are perforce subject to its rules and we must make, according to our
temperament, the best or the worst of them, but always our proper aim
is to get cured of our insanity and depart into light and truth and free-
dom. Whatever mitigations may be made in the severity of this logic,
whatever concessions validating life and personality for the time being,
yet from this view-point the true law of living must be whatever rule can
help us soonest to get back to self-knowledge and lead by the most direct
road to Nirvana; the true ideal must be an extinction of the individual

596 THE LIFE DIVINE

and the universal, a self-annulment in the Absolute. This ideal of self-
extinction which is boldly and clearly proclaimed by the Buddhists, is
in Vedantic thought a self-finding: but the self-finding of the individual
by his growth into his true being in the Absolute would only be possible
if both are interrelated realities; it could not apply to the final world-
abolishing self-affirmation of the Absolute in an unreal or temporary
individual by the annulment of the false personal being and by the de-
struction of all individual and cosmic existence for that individual con-
sciousness,— however much these errors may go on, helplessly inevitable,
in the world of Ignorance permitted by the Absolute, in a universal,
eternal and indestructible Avidya.

But this idea of the total vanity of life is not altogether an inevitable
consequence of the supracosmic theory of existence. In the Vedanta of
the Upanishads, the Becoming of Brahman is accepted as a reality; there
is room therefore for a truth of the Becoming: there is in that truth a
right law of life, a permissible satisfaction of the hedonistic element in
our being, its delight of temporal existence, an effective utilisation of its
practical energy, of the executive force of consciousness in it; but, the
truth and law of its temporal becoming once fulfilled, the soul has to
turn back to its final self-realisation, for its natural highest fulfilment
is a release, a liberation into its original being, its eternal self, its timeless
reality. There is a circle of becoming starting from eternal Being and end-
ing in it; or, from the point of view of the Supreme as a personal or
superpersonal Reality, there is a temporary play, a game of becoming and
living in the universe. Here, evidently, there is no other significance of
life than the will of the Being to become, the will of consciousness and
the urge of its force towards becoming, its delight of becoming; for the
individual, when that is withdrawn from him or fulfilled in him and no
longer active, the becoming ceases: but otherwise the universe persists or
always comes back into manifestation, because the will to become is eter-
nal and must be so since it is the inherent will of an eternal Existence. It
may be said that one defect in this view of things is the absence of any
fundamental reality of the individual, of any abiding value and signifi-
cance of his natural or his spiritual activity: but it can be replied that
this demand for a permanent personal significance, for a personal eter-
nity, is an error of our ignorant surface consciousness; the individual is
a temporary becoming of the Being, and that is a quite sufficient value
and significance. It may be added that in a pure or an absolute Exist-
ence there can be no values and significances: in the universe values exist

AIM OF LIFE AND THEORIES OF EXISTENCE 597

and are indispensable, but only as relative and temporary buildings;
there can be no absolute values, no eternal and self-existent significances
in a Time-structure. This sounds conclusive enough and it seems that
nothing more can be said about the matter. And yet the question remains
over; for the stress on our individual being, the demand on it, the value
put on individual perfection and salvation is too great to be dismissed as
a device for a minor operation, the coiling and uncoiling of an insignifi-
cant spiral amid the vast circlings of the Eternal's becoming in the
universe.

The cosmic-terrestrial view which we may take next as the exact
opposite of the supracosmic, considers cosmic existence as real; it goes
farther and accepts it as the only reality, and its view is confined, ordi-
narily, to life in the material universe. God, if God exists, is an eternal
Becoming; or if God does not exist, then Nature, — whatever view w^e
may take of Nature, whether we regard it as a play of Force with ^Matter
or a great cosmic Life or even admit a universal impersonal Mind in Life
and Matter, — is a perennial becoming. Earth is the field or it is one of
the temporary fields, man is the highest possible form or only one of the
temporary forms of the Becoming. Man individually may be altogether
mortal ; mankind also may survive only for a certain short period of the
earth's existence; earth itself may bear life only for a rather longer
period of its duration in the solar system ; that system may itself one day
come to an end or at least cease to be an active or productive factor in
the Becoming; the universe we live in may itself dissolve or contract
again into the seed-state of its Energy: but the principle of Becoming
is eternal — or at least as eternal as anything can be in the obscure am-
biguity of existence. It is indeed possible to suppose a persistence of man
the individual as a psychic entity in Time, a continuous terrestrial or cos-
mic ensouling or reincarnation without any after-life or other-life else-
where: in that case one may either suppose an ideal of constantly
increasing perfection or approach to perfection or a growth towards an
enduring felicity somewhere in the universe as the aim of this endless
Becoming. But in an extreme terrestrial view this is with difficulty ten-
able. Certain speculations of human thought have tended in this direc-
tion, but they have not taken a substantial body. A perpetual persist-
ence in the Becoming is usually associated with the acceptance of a
greater supraterrestrial existence.

In the ordinary view of a sole terrestrial life or a restricted tran-
sient passage in the material universe, — for possibly there may be thinking

598 THE LIFE DIVINE

living beings in other planets, — an acceptance of man's mortality and a
passive endurance of it or an active dealing with a limited personal or
collective life and life-aims are the only choice possible. The one high
and reasonable course for the individual human being, — unless indeed
he is satisfied with pursuing his personal purposes or somehow living his
life until it passes out of him, — is to study the laws of the Becoming and
take the best advantage of them to realise, rationally or intuitionally,
inwardly or in the dynamism of life, its potentialities in himself or for
himself or in or for the race of which he is a member ; his business is to
make the most of such actualities as exist and to seize on or to advance
towards the highest possibilities that can be developed here or are in
the making. Only mankind as a whole can do this with entire effect, by
the mass of individual and collective action, in the process of time, in the
evolution of the race experience: but the individual man can help towards
it in his own limits, can do all these things for himself to a certain ex-
tent in the brief space of life allotted to him; but, especially, his thought
and action can be a contribution towards the present intellectual, moral
and vital welfare and the future progress of the race. He is capable of a
certain nobility of being; an acceptance of his inevitable and early indi-
vidual annihilation does not preclude him from making a high use of the
will and thought which have been developed in him or from directing
them to great ends which shall or may be worked out by humanity. Even
the temporary character of the collective being of humanity does not
so very much matter, — except in the most materialist view of existence;
for so long as the universal Becoming takes the form of human body and
mind, the thought, the will it has developed in its human creature will
work itself out and to follow that intelligently is the natural law and best
rule of human life. Humanity and its welfare and progress during its
persistence on earth provide the largest field and the natural limits for
the terrestrial aim of our being ; the superior persistence of the race and
the greatness and importance of the collective life should determine the
nature and scope of our ideals. But if the progress or welfare of humanity
be excluded as not our business or as a delusion, the individual is there;
to achieve his greatest possible perfection or make the most of his life
in whatever way his nature demands will then be life's significance.

The supraterrestrial view admits the reality of the material cosmos
and it accepts the temporary duration of earth and human life as the
first fact we have to start from; but it adds to it a perception of other
worlds or planes of existence w^hich have an eternal or at least a more

AIM OF LIFE AND THEORIES OF EXISTENCE 599

permanent duration ; it perceives behind the mortality of the bodily life
of man the immortality of the soul within him. A belief in the immortal-
ity, the eternal persistence of the individual human spirit apart from the
body is the keyword of this conception of life. That of itself necessitates
its other belief in higher planes of existence than the material or terres-
trial, since for a disembodied spirit there can be no abiding place in a
world whose every operation depends upon some play of force, whether
spiritual, mental, vital or material, in and with the forms of Matter.
There arises from this view of things the idea that the true home of man
is beyond and that the earth life is in some way or other only an episode
of his immortality or a deviation from a celestial and spiritual into a
material existence.

But what then is the character, the origin and the end of this devia-
tion? There is first the idea of certain religions, long persistent but now
greatly shaken or discredited, that man is a being primarily created as a
material living body upon earth into which a newly born divine soul is
breathed or else with which it is associated by the fiat of an almighty
Creator. A solitary episode, this life is his one opportunity from which he
departs to a world of eternal bliss or to a world of eternal misery either
according as the general or preponderant balance of his acts is good or
evil or according as he accepts or rejects, knows or ignores a particular
creed, mode of worship, divine mediator, or else according to the arbitrary
predestining caprice of his Creator. But that is the supraterrestrial theory
of life in its least rational form of questionable creed or dogma. Taking
the idea of the creation of a soul by the physical birth as our starting-
point, we may still suppose that by a natural law, common to all, the
rest of its existence has to be pursued beyond in a supraterrestrial plane,
when the soul has shaken off from it its original matrix of matter like a
butterfly escaped from the chrysalis and disporting itself in the air on its
light and coloured wings. Or we may suppose preferably a preterrestrial
existence of the soul, a fall or descent into matter and a reascension into
celestial being. If we admit the soul's pre-existence, there is no reason to
exclude this last possibility as an occasional spiritual occurrence, — a
being belonging to another plane of existence may, conceivably, assume
for some purpose the human body and nature: but this is not likely to be
the universal principle of earth-existence or a sufficient rationale for the
creation of the material universe.

It is also sometimes supposed that the solitary life on earth is a stage
only and the development of the being nearer to its original glory occurs

600 THE LIFE DIVINE

in a succession of worlds which are so many other stages of its growth,
stadia of its journey. The material universe, or earth especially, will then
be a sumptuously appointed field created by a divine power, wisdom or
caprice for the enacting of this interlude. According to the view we choose
to take of the matter, we shall see in it a place of ordeal, a field of devel-
opment of a scene of spiritual fall and exile. There is too an Indian view
which regards the world as a garden of the divine Lila, a play of the
divine Being with the conditions of cosmic existence in this world of an
inferior Nature; the soul of man takes part in the Lila through a pro-
tracted series of births, but it is destined to reascend at last into the
proper plane of the Divine Being and there enjoy an eternal proximity
and communion: this gives a certain rationale to the creative process and
the spiritual adventure which is either absent or not clearly indicated in
the other accounts of this kind of soul movement or soul cycle. Always
there are three essential characteristics in all these varying statements
of the common principle: — first, the belief in the individual immortality
of the human spirit; secondly, as a necessary consequence, the idea of its
sojourn on earth as a temporary passage or a departure from its highest
eternal nature and of a heaven beyond as its proper habitation ; thirdly,
an emphasis on the development of the ethical and spiritual being as the
means of ascension and therefore the one proper business of life in this
world of MatXsr^^^

These are the three fundamental ways of seeing, each with its mental
attitude towards life, that can be adopted with regard to our existence;
the rest are usually midway stations or else variations or composites
which attempt to adapt themselves more freely to the complexity of the
problem. For, practically, it is impossible for man taken as a race, what-
ever a few individuals may succeed in doing, to guide his life permanently
or wholly by the leading motive of any of these three attitudes, uniquely,
to the exclusion of the others' claim upon his nature. A confused amalgam
of two or more of them, a conflict or division of his life-motives between
them or some attempt at synthesis is his way of dealing with the various
impulses of his complex being and the intuitions of his mind to which
they appeal for their sanction. Almost all men normally devote the major
part of their energy to the life on earth, to the terrestrial needs, interests,
desires, ideals of the individual and the race. It could not be otherwise ;
for the care of the body, the sufficient development and satisfaction of
the vital and the mental being of man, the pursuit of high individual and
large collective ideals which start from the idea of an attainable human

AIM OF LIFE AND THEORIES OF EXISTENCE 6oi

perfection or nearer approach to perfection through his normal develop-
ment, are imposed upon us by the very character of our terrestrial being;
they are part of its law, its natural impulse and rule, its condition of
growth, and without these things man could not attain to his full man-
hood. Any view of our being which neglects, unduly belittles or in-
tolerantly condemns them, is therefore by that very fact, whatever its
other truth or merit or utility, or whatever its suitability to individuals of
a certain temperament or in a certain stage of spiritual evolution, unfit
to be the general and complete rule of human living. Nature takes good
care that the race shall not neglect these aims which are a necessary part
of her evolution; for they fall within the method and stages of the divine
plan in us, and a vigilance for her first steps and for the maintenance of
their mental and material ground is a preoccupation which she cannot
allow to go into the background, since these things belong to the founda-
tion and body of her structure.

But also she has implanted in us a sense that there is something in
our composition which goes beyond this first terrestrial nature of hu-
manity. For this reason the race cannot accept or follow for a very long
time any view of being which ignores this higher and subtler sense and
labours to confine us entirely to a purely terrestrial way of living. The
intuition of a beyond, the idea and feeling of a soul and spirit in us which
is other than the mind, life and body or is greater, not limited by their
formula, returns upon us and ends by resuming possession. The ordinary
man satisfies this sense easily enough by devoting to it his exceptional
moments or the latter part of his life when age shall have blunted the zest
of his earthly nature, or by recognising it as something behind or above
his normal action to which he can more or less imperfectly direct his
natural being: the exception man turns to the supraterrestrial as the one
aim and law of living and diminishes or mortifies as much as possible
his earthly parts in the hope of developing his celestial nature. There
have been epochs in which the supraterrestrial view has gained a very
powerful hold and there has been a vacillation between an imperfect hu-
man living which cannot take its large natural expansion and a sick as-
cetic longing for the celestial life which also does not acquire in more
than a few its best pure and happy movement. This is a sign of the crea-
tion of some false war in the being by the setting up of a standard or a
device that ignores the law of evolutionary capacity or an overstress that
misses the reconciling equation which must exist somewhere in a divine
dispensation of our nature.

602 THE LIFE DIVINE

But, finally, there must open in us, as our mental life deepens and
subtler knowledge develops, the perception that the terrestrial and the
supraterrestrial are not the only terms of being; there is something which
is supracosmic and the highest remote origin of our existence. This
perception is easily associated by spiritual enthusiasm, by the height
and ardour of the soul's aspiration, by the philosophic aloofness or the
strict logical intolerance of our intellect, by the eagerness of our will
or by a sick disgust in our vital being discouraged by the difficulties or
disappointed by the results of life, — by any or all of these motive-forces,
— ^with a sense of the entire vanity and unreality of all else than this
remote Supreme, the vanity of human life, the unreality of cosmic exist-
ence, the bitter ugliness and cruelty of earth, the insufficiency of heaven,
the aimlessness of the repetition of births in the body. Here again the
ordinary man cannot really live with these ideas; they can only give at
most a greyness and restless dissatisfaction to the life in which he must
still continue: but the exceptional man abandons all to follow the truth
he has seen and for him they can be the needed food of his spiritual im-
pulse or a stimulus to the one achievement that is now for him the one
thing that matters. Periods and countries there have been, in which this
view of being has become very powerful; a considerable part of the race
has swerved aside to the life of the ascetic, — not always with a real call
to it, — the rest adhered to the normal life but with an underlying belief
in its unreality, a belief which can bring about by too much reiteration
and insistence an unnerving of the life-impulse and an increasing little-
ness of its motives, or even, by a subtle reaction, an absorption in an ordi-
nary narrow living through a missing of our natural response to the
Divine Being's larger joy in cosmic existence and a failure of the great
progressive human idealism by which we are spurred to a collective self-
development and a noble embrace of the battle and the labour. Here
again there is a sign of some insufficiency in the statement of the supra-
cosmic Reality, perhaps an overstatement or a mistaken opposition, a
missing of the divine equation, of the total sense of creation and the en-
tire will of the Creator.

That equation can only be found if we recognise the purport of our
whole complex human nature in its right place in the cosmic movement ;
what is needed is to give its full legitimate value to each part of our com-
posite being and many-sided aspiration and find out the key of their
unity as well as their difference. The finding must be by a synthesis or
an integration and, since development is clearly the law of the human

AIM OF LIFE AND THEORIES OF EXISTENCE 603

soul, it is most likely to be discovered by an evolutionary synthesis. A
S3mthesis of this kind was attempted in the ancient Indian culture. It
accepted four legitimate motives of human living, — man's vital interests
and needs, his desires, his ethical and religious aspiration, his ultimate
spiritual aim and destiny, — in other words, the claims of his vital, physi-
cal and emotional being, the claims of his ethical and religious being
governed by a knowledge of the law of God and Nature and man, and the
claims of his spiritual longing for the Beyond for which he seeks satis-
faction by an ultimate release from an ignorant mundane existence. It
provided for a period of education and preparation based on this idea of
life, a period of normal living to satisfy human desires and interests under
the moderating rule of the ethical and religious part in us, a period of
withdrawal and spiritual preparation, and a last period of renunciation of
life and release into the spirit. Evidently, if applied as a universal rule,
this prescribed norm, this delineation of the curve of our journey, would
miss the fact that it is impossible for all to trace out the whole circle of
development in a single short lifetime; but it was modified by the theory
of a complete evolution pursued through a long succession of rebirths
before one could be fit for a spiritual liberation. This synthesis with its
spiritual insight, largeness of view, symmetry, completeness did much to
raise the tone of human life; but eventually it collapsed: its place was
occupied by an exaggeration of the impulse of renunciation which de-
stroyed the symmetry of the system and cut it into two movements of
life in opposition to each other, the normal life of interests and desires
with an ethical and religious colouring and the abnormal or supernormal
inner life founded on renunciation. The old synthesis in fact contained
in itself the seed of this exaggeration and could not but lapse into it: for
if we regard the escape from life as our desirable end, if we omit to hold
up any high offer of life-fulfilment, if life has not a divine significance in
it, the impatience of the human intellect and will must end by driving
at a short cut and getting rid as much as possible of any more tedious
and dilatory processes ; if it cannot do that or if it is incapable of follow-
ing the short cut, it is left with the ego and its satisfactions but with
nothing greater to be achieved here. Life is split into the spiritual and
the mundane and there can only be an abrupt transition, not a harmony
or reconciliation of these parts of our nature.

A spiritual evolution, an unfolding here of the Being within from
birth to birth, of which man becomes the central instrument and human
life at its highest offers the critical turning-point, is the link needed for

604 THE LIFE DIVINE

the reconciliation of life and spirit; for it allows us to take into account
the total nature of man and to recognise the legitimate place of his triple
attraction, to earth, to heaven and to the supreme Reality. But a com-
plete solution of its oppositions can be arrived at only on this basis that
the lower consciousness of mind, life and body cannot arrive at its full
meaning until it is taken up, restated, transformed by the light and power
and joy of the higher spiritual consciousness, while the higher too does
not stand in its full right relation to the lower by mere rejection, but by
this assumption and domination, this taking up of its unfulfilled values,
this restatement and transformation, — a spiritualising and supramen-
talising of the mental, vital and physical nature. The terrestrial ideal,
which has been so powerful in the modern mind, restored man and his
life on earth and the collective hope of the race to a prominent position
and created an insistent demand for a solution; this is the good it has ac-
complished. But by overdoing and exclusiveness it unduly limited man's
scope, it ignored that which is the highest and in the end the largest thing
in him, and by this limitation it missed the full pursuit of its own object.
If mind were the highest thing in man and Nature, then indeed this
frustration might not result ; still, the limitation of scope would be there,
a narrow possibility, a circumscribed prospect. But if mind is only a
partial unfolding of CQnsciousness and there are powers beyond of which
Nature in our race is capable, then not only does our hope upon earth,
let alone what is beyond it, depend upon their development, but this be-
comes the one proper road of our evolution.

Mind and life themselves cannot grow into their fullness except by
the opening up of the larger and greater consciousness to which mind
only approaches. Such a larger and greater consciousness is the spiritual,
for the spiritual consciousness is not only higher than the rest but more
embracing. Universal as well as transcendent, it can take up mind and
life into its light and give them the true and utmost realisation of all for
which they are seeking: for it has a greater instrumentality of knowledge,
a fountain of deeper power and will, an unlimited reach and intensity of
love and joy and beauty. These are the things for which our mind, life
and body are seeking, knowledge, power and joy, and to reject that by
which all these arrive at their utmost plenitude is to shut them out from
their own highest consummation. An opposite exaggeration demanding
only some colourless purity of spiritual existence nullifies the creative
action of the spirit and excludes from us all that the Divine manifests in

AIM OF LIFE AND THEORIES OF EXISTENCE 605

its being: it leaves room only for an evolution without sense or fulfil-
ment,— for a cutting off of all that has been evolved is the sole culmina-
tion; it turns the process of our being into the meaningless curve of a
plunge into Ignorance and return out of it or erects a wheel of cosmic
Becoming with only an escape-issue. The intermediary, the supraterres-
trial aspiration cuts short the fulfilment of the being above by not pro-
ceeding to its highest realisation of oneness and diminishes it below by
not allowing a proper amplitude of sense to its presence in the material
universe and its acceptance of life in an earthly body. A large relation of
unity, an integration, restores the balance, illumines the whole truth of
being and links together the steps of Nature.

In this integration the supracosmic Reality stands as the supreme
Truth of being; to realise it is the highest reach of our consciousness. But
it is this highest Reality which is also the cosmic being, the cosmic con-
sciousness, the cosmic will and life: it has put these things forth, not
outside itself but in its own being, not as an opposite principle but as its
own self-unfolding and self-expression. Cosmic being is not a meaningless
freak or phantasy or a chance error; there is a divine significance and
truth in it: the manifold self-expression of the spirit is its high sense,
the Divine itself is the key of its enigma. A perfect self-expression of the
spirit is the object of our terrestrial existence. This cannot be achieved
if we have not grown conscious of the supreme Reality; for it is only
by the touch of the Absolute that we can arrive at our own absolute. But
neither can it be done to the exclusion of the cosmic Reality: we must be-
come universal, for without an opening into universality the individual
remains incomplete. The individual separating himself from the All to
reach the Highest, loses himself in the supreme heights; including in
himself the cosmic consciousness, he recovers his wholeness of self and
still keeps his supreme gain of transcendence ; he fulfils it and himself in
the cosmic completeness. A realised unity of the transcendent, the uni-
versal and the individual is an indispensable condition for the fullness of
the self-expressing spirit: for the universe is the field of its totality of
self-expression, while it is through the individual that its evolutionary
self-unfolding here comes to its acme. But this supposes not only a real
being of the individual, but the revelation of our secret eternal oneness
with the Supreme and with all cosmic existence. In his self-integration
the soul of the individual must awake to universality and to transcend-
ence.

6o6 THE LIFE DIVINE

The supraterrestrial existence is also a truth of being; for the ma-
terial is not the only plane of our existence ; other planes of consciousness
there are to which we can attain and which have already their hidden
links with us: not to reach up to whatever greater regions of the soul are
open to us, not to have the experience of them, not to know and manifest
their law in ourselves is to fall short of the height and fullness of our be-
ing. But worlds of a higher consciousness are not the only possible scene
and habitation of the perfected soul ; nor can we find in any unchanging
typal world the final or total sense of the Spirit's self-expression in the
cosmos: the material world, this earth, this human life are a part of the
Spirit's self-expression and have their divine possibility; that possibility
is evolutionary and it contains the possibilities of all the other worlds in
it, unrealised but realisable. Earth-life is not a lapse into the mire of
something undivine, vain and miserable, offered by some Power to itself
as a spectacle or to the 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 towards the revelation of a supreme spiritual light
and power and joy and oneness, but includes in it also the manifold di-
versity of the self-achieving spirit. There is an all-seeing purpose in the
terrestrial creation; a divine plan is working itself out through its con-
tradictions and perplexities which are a sign of the many-sided achieve-
ment towards which are being led the soul's growth and the endeavour
of Nature.

It is true that the soul can ascend into worlds of a greater conscious-
ness beyond the earth, but it is also true that the power of these worlds,
the power of a greater consciousness has to develop itself here; the em-
bodiment of the soul is the means for that embodiment. All the higher
powers of Consciousness exist because they are powers of the Supreme
Reality. Our terrestrial being has also the same truth; it is a becoming
of the One Reality which has to embody in itself these greater powers.
Its present appearance is a veiled and partial figure and to limit our-
selves to that first figure, to the present formula of an imperfect hu-
manity, is to exclude our divine potentialities; we have to bring a wider
meaning into our human life and manifest in it the much more that we
secretly are. Our mortality is only justified in the light of our immor-
tality; our earth can know and be all itself only by opening to the
heavens ; the individual can see himself aright and use his world divinely
only when he has entered into greater planes of being and seen the light

AIM OF LIFE AND THEORIES OF EXISTENCE 607

of the Supreme and lived in the being and power of the Divine and Eter-
nal.

An integration of this kind would not be possible if a spiritual evo-
lution were not the sense of our birth and terrestrial existence; the evo-
lution of mind, life and spirit in Matter is the sign that this integration,
this completed manifestation of a secret self contained in it is its signifi-
cance. A complete involution of all that the Spirit is and its evolutionary
self-unfolding are the double term of our material existence. There is a
possibility of self-expression by an always unveiled luminous development
of the being, a possibility also of various expression in perfect types fixed
and complete in their own nature: that is the principle of becoming in the
higher worlds; they are typal and not evolutionary in their life prin-
ciple ; they exist each in its own perfection, but within the limits of a sta-
tionary world-formula. But there is also a possibility of self-expression
by self-finding, a deployment which takes the form and goes through the
progression of a self- veiling and an adventure of self -recovery: that is
the principle of becoming in this universe of which an involution of
consciousness and concealment of the spirit in Matter is the first appear-
ance.

An involution of spirit in the Inconscience is the beginning ; an evo-
lution in the Ignorance with its play of the possibilities of a partial de-
veloping knowledge is the middle, and the cause of the anomalies of our
present nature, — our imperfection is the sign of a transitional state, a
growth not yet completed, an effort that is finding its way; a consum-
mation in a deployment of the spirit's self-knowledge and the self-power
of its divine being and consciousness is the culmination: these are the
three stages of this cycle of the spirit's progressive self-expression in life.
The two stages that have already their play seem at first sight to deny
the possibility of the later consummating stage of the cycle, but logically
they imply its emergence ; for if the inconscience has evolved conscious-
ness, the partial consciousness already reached must surely evolve into
complete consciousness. It is a perfected and divinised life for which the
earth-nature is seeking, and this seeking is a sign of the Divine Will in
Nature. Other seekings also there are and these too find their means of
self-fulfilment; a withdrawal into the supreme peace or ecstasy, a with-
drawal into the bliss of the Divine Presence are open to the soul in earth-
existence: for the Infinite in its manifestation has many possibilities and
is not confined by its formulations. But neither of these withdrawals can

6o8 THE LIFE DIVINE

be the fundamental intention in the Becoming itself here; for then an
evolutionary progression would not have been undertaken, — such a pro-
gression here can only have for its aim a self- fulfilment here: a progres-
sive manifestation of this kind can only have for its soul of significance
the revelation of Being in a perfect Becoming.

CHAPTER XVII

THE PROGRESS TO KNOWLEDGI^GOD,
MAN AND NATURE

Thou art That, O Swetaketu.

Chhandogya Upanishad}

The living being is none else than the Brahman, the
whole world is the Brahman.

Vivekachudamani^

My supreme Nature has become the living being and
this world is upheld by it . . . all beings have this for
their source of birth.

Gita^

Thou art man and woman, boy and girl; old and worn
thou walkest bent over a staff; thou art the blue bird and
the green and the scarlet-eyed. . . .

Swetaswatara Upanishad.*

This whole world is fiUed with beings who are His
members.

Swetaswatara Upanishad.^

AN INVOLUTION of the Divine Existence, the spiritual Reality, in
^£\^ the apparent inconscience of Matter is the starting-point of the
evolution. But that Reality is in its nature an eternal Existence, Con-
sciousness, Delight of Existence: the evolution must then be an emer-
gence of this Existence, Consciousness, Delight of Existence, not at first
in its essence or totality but in evolutionary forms that express or disguise
it. Out of the Inconscient, Existence appears in a first evolutionary form
as substance of Matter created by an inconscient Energy. Consciousness,
involved and non-apparent in Matter, first emerges in the disguise of
vital vibrations, animate but subconscient ; then, in imperfect formula-
tions of a conscient life, it strives towards self-finding through succes-
sive forms of that material substance, forms more and more adapted to
its own completer expression. Consciousness in life, throwing off the
primal insensibility of a material inanimation and nescience, labours to

*VI. 8. 7. 2 Verse 479- ^VII. 5, 6. "TV. 3, 4- ^IV. 10.

609

6lO THE LIFE DIVINE

find itself more and more entirely in the Ignorance which is its first in-
evitable formulation; but it achieves at first only a primary mental
perception and a vital awareness of self and things, a life perception
which in its first forms depends on an internal sensation responsive to
the contacts of other life and of Matter. Consciousness labours to mani-
fest as best it can through the inadequacy of sensation its own inherent
delight of being; but it can only formulate a partial pain and pleasure.
In man the energising Consciousness appears as Mind more clearly aware
of itself and things; this is still a partial and limited, not an integral
power of itself, but a first conceptive potentiality and promise of inte-
gral emergence is visible. That integral emergence is the goal of evolving
Nature.

Man is there to affirm himself in the universe, that is his first busi-
ness, but also to evolve and finally to exceed himself: he has to enlarge
his partial being into a complete being, his partial consciousness into an
integral consciousness; he has to achieve mastery of his environment
but also world-union and world-harmony; he has to realise his indi-
viduality but also to enlarge it into a cosmic self and a universal and
spiritual delight of existence. A transformation, a chastening and correc-
tion of all that is obscure, erroneous and ignorant in his mentality, an
ultimate arrival at a free and wide harmony and luminousness of knowl-
edge and will and feeling and action and character, is the evident inten-
tion of his nature ; it is the ideal which the creative Energy has imposed
on his intelligence, a need implanted by her in his mental and vital sub-
stance. But this can only be accomplished by his growing into a larger
being and a larger consciousness: self-enlargement, self-fulfilment, self-
evolution from what he partially and temporarily is in his actual and
apparent nature to what he completely is in his secret self and spirit
and therefore can become even in his manifest existence, is the object of
his creation. This hope is the justification of his life upon earth amidst
the phenomena of the cosmos. The outer apparent man, an ephemeral
being subject to the constraints of his material embodiment and im-
prisoned in a limited mentality, has to become the inner real Man, mas-
ter of himself and his environment and universal in his being. In a more
vivid and less metaphysical language, the natural man has to evolve him-
self into the divine Man ; the sons of Death have to know themselves as
the children of Immortality. It is on this account that the human birth
can be described as the turning-point in the evolution, the critical stage
in earth-nature.

GOD, MAN AND NATURE 6ll

It follows at once that the knowledge we have to arrive at is not
truth of the intellect; it is not right belief, right opinions, right infor-
mation about oneself and things, — that is only the surface mind's idea
of knowledge. To arrive at some mental conception about God and our-
selves and the world is an object good for the intellect but not large enough
for the Spirit; it will not make us the conscious sons of Infinity. Ancient
Indian thought meant by knowledge a consciousness which possesses the
highest Truth in a direct perception and in self-experience; to become,
to be the Highest that we know is the sign that we really have the knowl-
edge. For the same reason, to shape our practical life, our actions as far as
may be in consonance with our intellectual notions of truth and right
or with a successful pragmatic knowledge, — an ethical or a vital fulfil-
ment,— is not and cannot be the ultimate aim of our life ; our aim must
be to grow into our true being, our being of Spirit, the being of the su-
preme and universal Existence, Consciousness, Delight, Sachchidananda.

All our existence depends on that Existence, it is that which is evolv-
ing in us; we are a being of that Existence, a state of consciousness of
that Consciousness, an energy of that conscious Energy, a will-to-delight
of being, delight of consciousness, delight of energy born of that Delight:
this is the root principle of our existence. But our surface formulation of
these things is not that, it is a mistranslation into the terms of the Igno-
rance. Our I is not that spiritual being which can look on the Divine
Existence and say, "That am I"; our mentality is not that spiritual con-
sciousness; our will is not that force of consciousness; our pain and
pleasure, even our highest joys and ecstasies are not that delight of be-
ing. On the surface we are still an ego figuring self, an ignorance turn-
ing into knowledge, a will labouring towards true force, a desire seeking
for the delight of existence. To become ourselves by exceeding ourselves,
— so we may turn the inspired phrases of a half-blind seer who knew
not the self of which he spoke, — is the difficult and dangerous neces-
sity, the cross surmounted by an invisible crown which is imposed on
us, the riddle of the true nature of his being proposed to man by the
dark Sphinx of the Inconscience below and from within and above by
the luminous veiled Sphinx of the infinite Consciousness and eternal
Wisdom confronting him as an inscrutable divine ^laya. To exceed
ego and be our true self, to be aware of our real being, to possess it, to
possess a real delight of being, is therefore the ultimate meaning of our
life here ; it is the concealed sense of our individual and terrestrial exist-
ence.

6l2 THE LIFE DIVINE

Intellectual knowledge and practical action are devices of Nature
by which we are able to express so much of our being, consciousness,
energy, power of enjoyment as we have been able to actualise in our ap-
parent nature and by which we attempt to know more, express and ac-
tualise more, grow always more into the much that we have yet to actual-
ise. But our intellect and mental knowledge and will of action are not
our only means, not all the instruments of our consciousness and energy:
our nature, the name which we give to the Force of being in us in its
actual and potential play and power, is complex in its ordering of con-
sciousness, complex in its instrumentation of force. Every discovered
or discoverable term and circumstance of that complexity which we can
get into working order, we need to actualise in the highest and finest
values possible to us and to use in its widest and richest powers for the
one object. That object is to become, to be conscious, to increase con-
tinually in our realised being and awareness of self and things, in our
actualised force and joy of being, and to express that becoming dy-
namically in such an action on the world and ourselves that we and it
shall grow more and always yet more towards the highest possible reach,
largest possible breadth of universality and infinity. All man's age-long
effort, his action, society, art, ethics, science, religion, all the manifold
activities by which he expresses and increases his mental, vital, physical,
spiritual existence, are episodes in the vast drama of this endeavour of
Nature and have behind their limited apparent aims no other true sense
or foundation. For the individual to arrive at the divine universality and
supreme infinity, live in it, possess it, to be, know, feel and express that
alone in all his being, consciousness, energy, delight of being is what
the ancient seers of the Veda meant by the Knowledge ; that was the Im-
mortality which they set before man as his divine culmination.

But by the nature of his mentality, by his inlook into himself and
his outlook on the world, by his original limitation in both through sense
and body to the relative, the obvious and the apparent, man is obliged
to move step by step and at first obscurely and ignorantly in this im-
mense evolutionary movement. It is not possible for him to envisage be-
ing at first in the completeness of its unity: it presents itself to him
through diversity, and his search for knowledge is preoccupied with three
principal categories which sum up for him all its diversity; himself, —
man or individual soul, — God, and Nature. The first is that of which
alone he is directly aware in his normal ignorant being ; he sees himself,
the individual, separate apparently in its existence, yet always insepara-

GOD, MAN AND NATURE 613

ble from the rest of being, striving to be sufficient, yet always insufficient
to itself, since never has it been known to come into existence or to exist
or to culminate in its existence apart from the rest, without their aid and
independently of universal being and universal nature. Secondly, there
is that which he knows only indirectly by his mind and bodily senses and
its effects upon them, yet must strive always to know more and more
completely: for he sees also this rest of being with which he is so closely
identified and yet from which he is so separate, — the cosmos, world,
Nature, other individual existences whom he perceives as always like
himself and yet always unlike; for they are the same in nature even to
the plant and the animal and yet different in nature. Each seems to go
its own way, to be a separate being, and yet each is impelled by the
same movement and follows in its own grade the same vast curve of evo-
lution as himself. Finally, he sees or rather divines something else which
he does not know at all except quite indirectly; for he knows it only
through himself and that at which his being aims, through the world and
that at which it seems to point and which it is either striving obscurely
to reach and express by its imperfect figures or, at least, founds them
without knowing it on their secret relation to that invisible Reality and
occult Infinite.

This third and unknown, this tertium quid, he names God; and by
the word he means somewhat or someone who is the Supreme, the Di-
vine, the Cause, the All, one of these things or all of them at once, the
perfection or the totality of all that here is partial or imperfect, the ab-
solute of all these myriad relativities, the Unknown by learning of w^hom
the real secret of the known can become to him more and more intelli-
gible. Man has tried to deny all these categories, — he has tried to deny
his own real existence, he has tried to deny the real existence of the cos-
mos, he has tried to deny the real existence of God. But behind all these
denials we see the same constant necessity of his attempt at knowledge ;
for he feels the need of arriving at a unity of these three terms, even if
it can only be done by suppressing two of them or merging them in the
other that is left. To do that he affirms only himself as cause and all the
rest as mere creations of his mind, or he affirms only Nature and ail
the rest as nothing but phenomena of Nature-Energy, or he affirms only
God, the Absolute, and all the rest as no more than illusions which That
thrusts upon itself or on us by an inexplicable ^laya. None of these
denials can wholly satisfy, none solves the entire problem or can be in-
disputable and definitive, — least of all the one to which his sense-gov-

6 14 THE LIFE DIVINE

erned intellect is most prone, but in which it can never persist for long;
the denial of God is a denial of his true quest and his own supreme Ul-
timate. The ages of naturalistic atheism have always been short-lived
because they can never satisfy the secret knowledge in man: that cannot
be the final Veda because it does not correspond with the Veda within
which all mental knowledge is labouring to bring out; from the moment
that this lack of correspondence is felt, a solution, however skilful it
may be and however logically complete, has been judged by the eternal
Witness in man and is doomed; it cannot be the last word of Knowledge.

Man as he is is not sufficient to himself, nor separate, nor is he the
Eternal and the All; therefore by himself he cannot be the explanation of
the cosmos of which his mind, life and body are so evidently an infinitesi-
mal detail. The visible cosmos too, he finds, is not sufficient to itself, nor
does it explain itself even by its unseen material forces; for there is too
much that he finds both in the world and in himself which is beyond
them and of which they seem only to be a face, an epidermis or even a
mask. Neither his intellect, nor his intuitions, nor his feeling can do with-
out a One or a Oneness to whom or to which these world-forces and him-
self may stand in some relation which supports them and gives them
their significance. He feels that there must be an Infinite which holds
these finites, is in, behind and about all this visible cosmos, bases the
harmony and interrelation and essential oneness of multitudinous things.
His thought needs an Absolute on which these innumerable and finite
relativities depend for their existence, an ultimate Truth of things, a
creating Power or Force or a Being who originates and upholds all these
innumerable beings in the universe. Let him call it what he will, he
must arrive at a Supreme, a Divine, a Cause, an Infinite and Eternal,
a Permanent, a Perfection to which all tends and aspires, or an All to
which everything perpetually and invisibly amounts and without which
they could not be.

Yet even this Absolute he cannot really affirm by itself and to the
exclusion of the two other categories ; for then he has only made a violent
leap away from the problem he is here to solve, and he himself and the
cosmos remain an inexplicable mystification or a purposeless mystery.
A certain part of his intellect and his longing for rest may be placated by
such a solution, just as his physical intelligence is easily satisfied by a
denial of the Beyond and a deification of material Nature ; but his heart,
his will, the strongest and intensest parts of his being remain without a
meaning, void of purpose or justification, or become merely a random

GOD, MAN AND NATURE 615

foolishness agitating itself like a vain and restless shadow against the
eternal repose of the pure Existence or amidst the eternal inconscience
of the universe. As for the cosmos, it remains there in the singular char-
acter of a carefully constructed lie of the Infinite, a monstrously aggres-
sive and yet really non-existent anomaly, a painful and miserable para-
dox with false shows of wonder and beauty and delight. Or else it is a
huge play of blind organised Energy without significance and his own
being a temporary minute anomaly incomprehensibly occurring in that
senseless vastness. That way no satisfying fulfilment lies for the con-
sciousness, the energy that has manifested itself in the world and in man:
the mind needs to find something that links all together, something by
which Nature is fulfilled in man and man in Nature and both find them-
selves in God, because the Divine is ultimately self-revealed in both
man and Nature.

An acceptance, a perception of the unity of these three categories
is essential to the Knowledge; it is towards their unity as well as their
integrality that the growing self-consciousness of the individual opens
out and at which it must arrive if it is to be satisfied of itself and com-
plete. For without the realisation of unity the Knowledge of none of
the three can be entire; their unity is for each the condition of its own
integrality. It is, again, by knowing each in its completeness that all
three meet in our consciousness and become one; it is in a total knowl-
edge that all knowing becomes one and indivisible. Otherwise it is only
by division and rejection of two of them from the third that we could
get at any kind of oneness. Man therefore has to enlarge his knowledge
of himself, his knowledge of the world and his knowledge of God until in
their totality he becomes aware of their mutual indwelling and oneness.
For so long as he knows them only in part, there will be an incom-
pleteness resulting in division, and so long as he has not realised them in
a reconciling unity, he will not have found their total truth or the funda-
mental significances of existence.

This is not to say that the Supreme is not self-existent and self-
sufficient; God exists in Himself and not by virtue of the cosmos or of
man, while man and cosmos exist by virtue of God and not in themselves
except in so far as their being is one with the being of God. But still they
are a manifestation of the power of God and even in His eternal existence
their spiritual reality must in some way be present or implied, since
otherwise there would be no possibility of their manifestation or, mani-
fested, they would have no significance. What appears here as man is an

6l6 THE LIFE DIVINE

individual being of the Divine ; the Divine extended in multiplicity is the
Self of all individual existences.^ Moreover, it is through the knowledge
of self and the world that man arrives at the knowledge of God and he
cannot attain to it otherwise. It is not by rejecting God's manifestation,
but by rejecting his own ignorance of it and the results of his ignorance,
that he can best lift up and offer the whole of his being and consciousness
and energy and joy of being into the Divine Existence. He may do this
through himself, one manifestation^ or he may do it through the universe,
another manifestation. Arriving through himself alone, it is possible for
him to plunge into an individual immergence or absorption in the Inde-
finable and to lose the universe. Arriving through the universe alone, he
can sink his individuality either in the impersonality of universal being
or in a dynamic self of universal Conscious-Force; he merges into the
universal self or he becomes an impersonal channel of the cosmic Energy,
Arriving through the equal integrality of both and seizing through
them and beyond them on all the aspects of the Divine, he exceeds both
and fulfils them in that exceeding: he possesses the Divine in his being,
even as he is enveloped, penetrated, pervaded, possessed by the Divine
Being, Consciousness, Light, Power, Delight, Knowledge; he possesses
God in himself and God in the universe. The All-Knowledge justifies
to him its creation of himself and justifies by him perfected its creation
of the world it has made. All this becomes entirely real and effective
by an ascension into a supramental and supreme supernature and the
descent of its powers into the manifestation; but even while that con-
summation is still difficult and distant, the true knowledge can be made
subjectively real by a spiritual reflection or reception in mind-life-body
Nature.

But this spiritual truth and true aim of his being is not allowed to
appear till late in his journey: for the early preparatory business of man
in the evolutionary steps of Nature is to affirm, to make distinct and
rich, to possess firmly, powerfully and completely his own individuality.
As a consequence, he has in the beginning principally to occupy himself
with his own ego. In this egoistic phase of his evolution the world and
others are less important to him than himself, are indeed only important
as aids and occasions for his self-affirmation. God too at this stage is less
important to him than he is to himself, and therefore in earlier forma-
tions, on the lower levels of religious development, God or the gods are
treated as if they existed for man, as supreme instruments for the satis-
°eko vail sarvabhutdntardtmd — Katha Upanishad, V. 12.

GOD, MAN AND NATURE 617

faction of his desires, his helpers in his task of getting the world in which
he lives to satisfy his needs and wants and ambitions. This primary-
egoistic development with all its sins and violences and crudities is by
no means to be regarded, in its proper place, as an evil or an error of
Nature; it is necessary for man's iirst work, the finding of his own indi-
viduality and its perfect disengagement from the lower subconscient in
which the individual is overpowered by the mass consciousness of the
world and entirely subject to the mechanical workings of Nature. Man
the individual has to affirm, to distinguish his personality against Na-
ture, to be powerfully himself, to evolve all his human capacities of
force and knowledge and enjoyment so that he may turn them upon her
and upon the world with more and more mastery and force; his self-
discriminating egoism is given him as a means for this primary purpose.
Until he has thus developed his individuality, his personality, his sepa-
rate capacity, he cannot be fit for the greater work before him or suc-
cessfully turn his faculties to higher, larger and more divine ends. He
has to affirm himself in the Ignorance before he can perfect himself in
the Knowledge.

For the initiation of the evolutionary emergence from the Incon-
scient works out by two forces, a secret cosmic consciousness and an
individual consciousness manifest on the surface. The secret cosmic
consciousness remains secret and subliminal to the surface individual;
it organizes itself on the surface by the creation of separate objects and
beings. But while it organises the separate object and the body and
mind of the individual being, it creates also collective powers of con-
sciousness which are large subjective formations of cosmic Nature; but
it does not provide for them an organised mind and body, it bases them
on the group of individuals, develops for them a group mind, a chang-
ing yet continuous group body. It follows that only as the individuals
become more and more conscious can the group-being also become more
and more conscious; the growth of the individual is the indispensable
means for the inner growth as distinguished from the outer force and
expansion of the collective being. This indeed is the dual importance
of the individual that it is through him that the cosmic spirit organises
its collective units and makes them self-expressive and progressive and
through him that it raises Nature from the Inconscience to the Super-
conscience and exalts it to meet the Transcendent. In the mass the col-
lective consciousness is near to the Inconscient; it has a subconscious,
an obscure and mute movement which needs the individual to express

6l8 THE LIFE DIVINE

it, to bring it to light, to organise it and make it effective. The mass
consciousness by itself moves by a vague, half-formed or unformed
subliminal and commonly subconscient impulse rising to the surface;
it is prone to a blind or half-seeing unanimity which suppresses the indi-
vidual in the common movement: if it thinks, it is by the motto, the
slogan, the watch-word, the common crude or formed idea, the tradi-
tional, the accepted customary notion; it acts, when not by instinct or
on impulse, then by the rule of the pack, the herd mentality, the type
law. This mass consciousness, life, action can be extraordinarily effec-
tive if it can find an individual or a few powerful individuals to embody,
express, lead, organise it; its sudden crowd-movements can also be irre-
sistible for the moment like the motion of an avalanche or the rush of a
tempest. The suppression or entire subordination of the individual in
the mass consciousness can give a great practical efficiency to a nation
or a community if the subliminal collective being can build a binding
tradition or find a group, a class, a head to embody its spirit and direc-
tion; the strength of powerful mihtary states, of communities with a
tense and austere culture rigidly imposed on its individuals, the success
of the great world-conquerors, had behind it this secret of Nature. But
this is an efficiency of the outer life, and that life is not the highest or
last term of our being. There is a mind in us, there is a soul and spirit,
and our life has no true value if it has not in it a growing consciousness,
a developing mind, and if life and mind are not an expression, an instru-
ment, a means of liberation and fulfilment for the soul, the indwelling
Spirit.

But the progress of the mind, the growth of the soul, even of the
mind and soul of the collectivity, depends on the individual, or his suffi-
cient freedom and independence, on his separate power to express and
bring into being what is still unexpressed in the mass, still undeveloped
from the subconscience or not yet brought out from within or brought
down from the Superconscience. The collectivity is a mass, a field of
formation; the individual is the diviner of truth, the form-maker, the
creator. In the crowd the individual loses his inner direction and be-
comes a cell of the mass body moved by the collective will or idea or the
mass impulse. He has to stand apart, affirm his separate reality in the
whole, his own mind emerging from the common mentality, his own life
distinguishing itself in the common life-uniformity, even as his body has
developed something unique and recognisable in the common physicality.
He has, even, in the end to retire into himself in order to find himself,

GOD, MAN AND NATURE 619

and it is only when he has found himself that he can become spiritually-
one with all ; if he tries to achieve that oneness in the mind, in the vital,
in the physical and has not yet a sufficiently strong individuality, he
may be overpowered by the mass consciousness and lose his soul fulfil-
ment, his mind fulfilment, his life fulfilment, become only a cell of the
mass body. The collective being may then become strong and dominant,
but it is likely to lose its plasticity, its evolutionary movement: the
great evolutionary periods of humanity have taken place in communities
where the individual became active, mentally, vitally or spiritually alive.
For this reason Nature invented the ego that the individual might dis-
engage himself from the inconscience or subconscience of the mass and
become an independent living mind, life-power, soul, spirit, co-ordinating
himself with the world around him but not drowned in it and separately
inexistent and ineffective. For the individual is indeed part of the cosmic
being, but he is also something more, he is a soul that has descended
from the Transcendence. This he cannot manifest at once, because he
is too near to the cosmic Inconscience, not near enough to the original
Superconscience ; he has to find himself as the mental and vital ego
before he can find himself as the soul or spirit.

Still, to find his egoistic individuality is not to know himself; the
true spiritual individual is not the mind ego, the life ego, the body ego:
predominantly, this first movement is a work of will, of power, of egoistic
self-effectuation and only secondarily of knowledge. Therefore a time
must come when man has to look below the obscure surface of his egoistic
being and attempt to know himself; he must set out to find the real
man: without that he would be stopping short at Nature's primary edu-
cation and never go on to her deeper and larger teachings; however
great his practical knowledge and efficiency, he would be only a little
higher than the animals. First, he has to turn his eyes upon his own
psychology and distinguish its natural elements, — ego, mind and its
instruments, life, body, — until he discovers that his whole existence
stands in need of an explanation other than the working of the natural
elements and of a goal for its activities other than an egoistic self-affirma-
tion and satisfaction. He may seek it in Nature and mankind and thus
start on his way to the discovery of his unity with the rest of his world:
he may seek it in supernature, in God, and thus start on his way to the
discovery of his unity with the Divine. Practically, he attempts both
paths and, continually wavering, continually seeks to fix himself in the
successive solutions that may be best in accordance with the various

620 THE LIFE DIVINE

partial discoveries he has made on his double line of search and finding.

But through it all what he is in this stage still insistently seeking
to discover, to know, to fulfil is himself; his knowledge of Nature, his
knowledge of God are only helps towards self-knowledge, towards the
perfection of his being, towards the attainment of the supreme object of
his individual self-existence. Directed towards Nature and the cosmos,
it may take upon itself the figure of self-knowledge, self-mastery — in the
mental and vital sense — and mastery of the world in which we find our-
selves: directed towards God, it may take also this figure but in a higher
spiritual sense of world and self, or it may assume that other, so familiar
and decisive to the religious mind, the seeking for an individual salva-
tion whether in heavens beyond or by a separate immergence in a su-
preme Self or a supreme Non-Self, — beatitude or Nirvana. Throughout,
however, it is the individual who is seeking individual self-knowledge
and the aim of his separate existence, with all the rest, ^en altruism
and the love and service of mankind, self-effacement or self-annihilation,
thrown in — ^with whatever subtle disguises — as helps and means to-
wards that one great preoccupation of his realised individuality. This
may seem to be only an expanded egoism, and the separative ego would
then be the truth of man's being persistent in him to the end or till at
last he is liberated from it by his self-extinction in the featureless eter-
nity of the Infinite. But there is a deeper secret behind which justifies
his individuality and its demand, the secret of the spiritual and eternal
individual, the Purusha.

It is because of the spiritual Person, the Divinity in the individual,
that perfection or liberation — salvation, as it is called in the West — ^has
to be individual and not collective; for whatever perfection of the col-
lectivity is to be sought after, can come only by the perfection of the
individuals who constitute it. It is because the individual is That, that
to find himself is his great necessity. In his complete surrender and self-
giving to the Supreme it is he who finds his perfect self-finding in a
perfect self-offering. In the abolition of the mental, vital, physical ego,
even of the spiritual ego, it is the formless and limitless Individual that
has the peace and joy of its escape into its own infinity. In the experi-
ence that he is nothing and no one, or everything and everyone, or the
One which is beyond all things and absolute, it is the Brahman in the
individual that effectuates this stupendous merger or this marvellous
joining. Yoga, of its eternal unit of being with its vast all-comprehending

GOD, MAN AND NATURE 621

or supreme all-transcending unity of eternal existence. To get beyond
the ego is imperative, but one cannot get beyond the self — except by find-
ing it supremely, universally. For the self is not the ego; it is one with
the All and the One and in finding it it is the All and the One that we
discover in our self: the contradiction, the separation disappears, but the
self, the spiritual reality remains, united with the One and the All by
that delivering disappearance.

The higher self-knowledge begins therefore as soon as man has got
beyond his preoccupation with the relation of Nature and God to his
superficial being, his most apparent self. One step is to know that this
life is not all, to get at the conception of his own temporal eternity, to
realise, to become concretely aware of that subjective persistence which
is called the immortality of the soul. When he knows that there are states
beyond the material and lives behind and before him, at any rate a pre-
existence and a subsequent existence, he is on the way to get rid of his
temporal ignorance by enlarging himself beyond the immediate moments
of Time into the possession of his own eternity. Another step forward is
to learn that his surface waking state is only a small part of his being,
to begin to fathom the abyss of the Inconscient and depths of the sub-
conscient and subliminal and scale the heights of the superconscient ; so
he commences the removal of his psychological self-ignorance. A third
step is to find out that there is something in him other than his instru-
mental mind, life and body, not only an immortal ever-developing indi-
vidual soul that supports his nature but an eternal immutable self and
spirit, and to learn what are the categories of his spiritual being, until
he discovers that all in him is an expression of the spirit and distinguishes
the link between his lower and his higher existence; thus he sets out to
remove his constitutional self-ignorance. Discovering self and spirit he
discovers God; he finds out that there is a Self beyond the temporal:
he comes to the vision of that Self in the cosmic consciousness as the
divine Reality behind Nature and this world of beings; his mind opens
to the thought or the sense of the Absolute of whom self and the indi-
vidual and the cosmos are so many faces; the cosmic, the egoistic, the
original ignorance begin to lose the rigidness of their hold upon him. In
his attempt to cast his existence into the mould of this enlarging self-
knowledge his whole view and motive of life, thought and action are
progressively modified and transformed ; his practical ignorance of him-
self, his nature and his object of existence diminishes: he has set his

62 2 THE LIFE DIVINE

Step on the path which leads out of the falsehood and suffering of a lim-
ited and partial into the perfect possession and enjoyment of a true and
complete existence.

In the course of this progress he discovers step by step the unity
of the three categories with which he started. For, first he finds that in
his manifest being he is one with cosmos and Nature; mind, life and
body, the soul in the succession of Time, the conscient, subconscient
and superconscient, — these in their various relations and the result of
their relations are cosmos and are Nature. But he finds too that in all
which stands behind them or on which they are based, he is one with
God; for the Absolute, the Spirit, the Self spaceless and timeless, the
Self manifest in the cosmos and Lord of Nature, — all this is what we
mean by God, and in all this his own being goes back to God and derives
from it; he is the Absolute, the Self, the Spirit self -projected in a mul-
tiplicity of itself into cosmos and veiled in Nature. In both of these
realisations he finds his unity with all other souls and beings, — relatively
in Nature, since he is one with them in mind, vitality, matter, soul, every
cosmic principle and result, however various in energy and act of energy,
disposition of principle and disposition of result, but absolutely in God,
because the one Absolute, the one Self, the one Spirit is ever the Self
of all and the origin, possessor and enjoyer of their multitudinous di-
versities. The Unity of God and Nature cannot fail to manifest itself
to him: for he finds in the end that it is the Absolute who is all these
relativities ; he sees that it is the Spirit of whom every other principle is
a manifestation; he discovers that it is the Self who has become all
these becomings; he feels that it is the Shakti or Power of being and
consciousness of the Lord of all beings which is Nature and is acting in
the cosmos. Thus in the progress of our self-knowledge we arrive at that
by the discovery of which all is known as one with our self and by the
possession of which all is possessed and enjoyed in our own self-exist-
ence.

Equally, by virtue of this unity, the knowledge of the universe must
lead the mind of man to the same large revelation. For he cannot know
Nature as Matter and Force and Life without being driven to scrutinise
the relation of mental consciousness with these principles, and once he
knows the real nature of mind, he must go inevitably beyond every sur-
face appearance. He must discover the will and intelligence secret in
the works of Force, operative in material and vital phenomena ; he must
perceive it as one in the waking consciousness, the subconscient and the

GOD, MAN AND NATURE 623

superconscient: he must find the soul in the body of the material uni-
verse. Pursuing Nature through these categories in which he recognises
his unity with the rest of the cosmos, he finds a Supernature behind all
that is apparent, a supreme power of the Spirit in Time and beyond
Time, in Space and beyond Space, a conscious Power of the Self who
by her becomes all becomings, of the Absolute who by her manifests all
relativities. He knows her, in other words, not only as material Energy,
Life-Force, Mind-Energy, the many faces of Nature, but as the power
of Knowledge-Will of the Divine Lord of being, the Consciousness- Force
of the self-existent Eternal and Infinite.

The quest of man for God, which becomes in the end the most
ardent and enthralling of all his quests, begins with his first vague ques-
tionings of Nature and a sense of something unseen both in himself and
her. Even if, as modern Science insists, religion started from animism,
spirit-worship, demon-worship and the deification of natural forces, these
first forms only embody in primitive figures a veiled intuition in the
subconscient, an obscure and ignorant feeling of hidden influences and
incalculable forces, or a vague sense of being, will, intelligence in what
seems to us inconscient, of the invisible behind the visible, of the secretly
conscious spirit in things distributing itself in every working of energy.
The 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 the Truth which at first
comes to us masked, draped, veiled by the mists of the Ignorance. An-
thropomorphism is an imaged recognition of the truth that man is what
he is because God is what He is and that there is one soul and body of
things, humanity even in its incompleteness the most complete manifes-
tation yet achieved here and divinity the perfection of what in man is
imperfect. That he sees himself everywhere and worships that as God
is also true; but here too he has laid confusedly the groping hand of
Ignorance on a truth^that his being and the Being are one, that this is
a partial reflection of That, and that to find his greater Self everywhere
is to find God and to come near to the Reality in things, the Reality of
all existence.

A unity behind diversity and discord is the secret of the variety
of human religions and philosophies; for they all get at some image or
some side clue^ touch some portion of the one Truth or envisage some

624 THE LIFE DIVINE

one of its myriad aspects. Whether they see dimly the material world
as the body of the Divine, or life as a great pulsation of the breath
of Divine Existence, or all things as thoughts of the cosmic Mind, or
realise that there is a Spirit which is greater than these things, their
subtler and yet more wonderful source and creator, — ^whether they find
God only in the Inconscient or as the one Conscious in inconscient things
or as an ineffable superconscious Existence to reach whom we must leave
behind our terrestrial being and annul the mind, life and body, or,
overcoming division, see that He is all these at once and accept fear-
lessly the large consequences of that vision, — ^whether they worship
Him with universality as the cosmic Being or limit Him and themselves,
like the Positivist, in humanity only or, on the contrary, carried away
by the vision of the timeless and spaceless Immutable, reject Him in
Nature and Cosmos, — whether they adore Him in various strange or
beautiful or magnified forms of the human ego or for His perfect pos-
session of the qualities to which man aspires, his Divinity revealed to
them as a supreme Power, Love, Beauty, Truth, Righteousness, Wis-
dom,— ^whether they perceive Him as the Lord of Nature, Father and
Creator, or as Nature herself and the universal Mother, pursue Him
as the Lover and attracter of souls or serve Him as the hidden Master
of all works, bow down before the one God or the manifold Deity, the
one divine Man or the one Divine in all men or, more largely, discover
the One whose presence enables us to become unified in consciousness
or in works or in life with all beings, unified with all things in Time and
Space, unified with Nature and her influences and even her inanimate
forces, — the truth behind must ever be the same because all is the one
Divine Infinite whom all are seeking. Because everything is that One,
there must be this endless variety in the human approach to its pos-
session; it was necessary that man should find God thus variously in
order that he might come to know Him entirely. But it is when knowl-
edge reaches its highest aspects that it is possible to arrive at its greatest
unity. The highest and widest seeing is the wisest; for then all knowl-
edge is unified in its one comprehensive meaning. All religions are seen
as approaches to a single Truth, all philosophies as divergent view-points
looking at different sides of a single Reality, all Sciences meet together
in a supreme Science. For that which all our mind-knowledge and sense-
knowledge and suprasensuous vision is seeking, is found most integrally
in the unity of God and man and Nature and all that is in Nature.

The Brahman, the Absolute is the Spirit, the timeless Self, the Self

GOD, MAN AND NATURE 625

possessing Time, Lord of Nature, creator and continent of the cosmos
and immanent in all existences, the Soul from whom all souls derive and
to whom they are drawn, — that is the truth of Being as man's highest
God-conception sees it. The same Absolute revealed in all relativities,
the Spirit who embodies Himself in cosmic Mind and Life and Matter
and of whom Nature is the self of energy so that all she seems to create
is the Self and Spirit variously manifested in His own being to His own
conscious force for the delight of His various existence, — this is the truth
of being to which man's knowledge of Nature and cosmos is leading him
and which he will reach when his Nature-knowledge unites itself with
his God-knowledge. This truth of the Absolute is the justification of
the cycles of the world; it is not their denial. It is the Self-Being that has
become all these becomings; the Self is the eternal unity of all these
existences, — I am He. Cosmic energy is not other than the conscious
force of that Self-existent: by that energy It takes through universal
nature innumerable forms of itself; through its divine nature It can,
embracing the universal but transcendent of it, arrive in them at the
individual possession of its complete existence, when its presence and
power are felt in one, in all and in the relations of one with all; — this
is the truth of being to which man's entire knowledge of himself in God
and in Nature rises and widens. A triune knowledge, the complete knowl-
edge of God, the complete knowledge of himself, the complete knowledge
of Nature, gives him his high goal; it assigns a vast and full sense to
the labour and effort of humanity. The conscious unity of the three,
God, soul and Nature, in his own consciousness is the sure foundation of
his perfection and his realisation of all harmonies: this will be his highest
and widest state, his status of a divine consciousness and a divine life
and its initiation the starting-point for his entire evolution of his self-
knowledge, world-knowledge, God-knowledge.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS— ASCENT
AND INTEGRATION

As he mounts from peak to peak, . . . Indra makes
him conscious of that goal of his movement.

Rig Veda?-

A son of the two Mothers, he attains to kingship in his
discoveries of knowledge, he moves on the summit, he dwells
in his high foundation.

Rig Veda?

I have arisen from earth to the mid-world, I have arisen
from the mid-world to heaven, from the level of the firma-
ment of heaven I have gone to the Sun-world, the Light.^

Yajur Veda.*'

IT IS now possible and necessary, since we have formed a sufficiently
clear idea of the significance of the evolutionary manifestation in
earth-nature and the final turn it is taking or destined to take, to direct
a more understanding regard on the principles of the process by which
it has arrived at its present level and by which, presumably, with what-
ever modifications, its final development, its passage from our still dom-
inant mental ignorance to a supramental consciousness and an integral
knowledge, will be governed and made effective. For we find that cos-
mic Nature is constant in its general law of action, since that depends
on a Truth of things which is invariable in principle although in detail
of application abundantly variable. At the outset, we can easily see that,
since this is an evolution out of a material Inconscience into spiritual
consciousness, an evolutionary self-building of Spirit on a base of Mat-
ter, there must be in the process a development of a triple character.
An evolution of forms of Matter more and more subtly and intricately
organised so as to admit the action of a growing, a more and more com-
plex and subtle and capable organisation of consciousness is the indis-

^I. 10. 2. ^III. 55.7.

^The four planes of Matter, Life, pure Mind and Supermind.

*i7. 67.

626

ASCENT AND INTEGRATION 627

pensable physical foundation. An upward evolutionary progress of the
consciousness itself from grade to higher grade, an ascent, is the evident
spiral line or emerging curve that, on this foundation, the evolution
must describe. A taking up of what has already been evolved into each
higher grade as it is reached and a transformation more or less com-
plete so as to admit of a total changed working of the whole being and
nature, an integration, must be also part of the process, if the evolution
is to be effective.

The end of this triple process must be a radical change of the ac-
tion of the Ignorance into an action of Knowledge, of our basis of incon-
science into a basis of complete consciousness, — a completeness which
exists at present only in what is to us the superconscience. Each ascent will
bring with it a partial change and modification of the old nature taken
up and subjected to a new fundamental principle; the inconscience will
be turned into a partial consciousness, an ignorance seeking for more and
more knowledge and mastery: but at some point there must be an ascent
which substitutes the principle of knowledge, of a fundamental true
consciousness, the consciousness of the Spirit, for the inconscience and
ignorance. An evolution in the Inconscience is the beginning, an evolu-
tion in the Ignorance is the middle, but the end is the liberation of the
spirit into its true consciousness and an evolution in the Knowledge.
This is actually what we find to be the law and method of the process
which has hitherto been followed and by all signs is likely to be followed
in her future working by evolutionary Nature. A first involutionary
foundation in which originates all that has to evolve, an emergence and
action of the involved powers in or upon that foundation in an ascending
series, and a culminating emergence of the highest power of all as the
agent of a supreme manifestation are the necessary stages of the journey
of evolutionary Nature.

An evolutionary process must be by the very terms of the problem
to be solved a development, in some first established basic principle of
being or substance, of something that that basic principle holds involved
in itself or else admits from outside itself and modifies by the admis-
sion; for it must necessarily modify by its own law of nature all that
enters into it and is not already part of its own nature. This must be
so even if it is a creative evolution in the sense of manifesting always
new powers of existence that are not native to the first foundation but
introduced into it, accepted into an original substance. If, on the con-
trary, there is already there in involution, — present in the first founda-

628 THE LIFE DIVINE

tion, but not yet manifested or not yet organised, — the new principle or
power of existence that has to be evolved, then, when it appears, it will
still have to accept modification by the nature and law of the basic sub-
stance: but also it will modify that substance by its own power, its own
law of nature. If, further, it is aided by a descent of its own principle
already established in its own full force above the field of evolution and
pressing down into that field to possess it, then the new power may even
establish itself as a dominant element and considerably or radically
change the consciousness and action of the world in which it emerges
or into which it enters. But its force to modify or change or to revolu-
tionise the law and working of the original substance chosen as the evo-
lutionary matrix will depend upon its own essential potency. It is not
likely that it will be able to bring about an entire transformation if it
is not itself the original Principle of Existence, if it is only derivative, an
instrumental power and not the first puissance.

Here the evolution takes place in a material universe; the founda-
tion, the original substance, the first established all-conditioning status
of things is Matter. Mind and Life are evolved in Matter, but they are
limited and modified in their action by the obligation to use its substance
for their instrumentation and by their subjection to the law of material
Nature even while they modify what they undergo and use. For they do
transform its substance, first into living substance and then into con-
scious substance; they succeed in changing its inertia, immobility and
inconscience into a movement of consciousness, feeling and life. But they
do not succeed in transforming it altogether; they cannot make it alto-
gether alive or altogether conscious: life-nature evolving is bound to
death; mind evolving is materialised as well as vitalised; it finds itself
rooted in inconscience, limited by ignorance ; it is moved by uncontrolled
life-forces which drive and use it, it is mechanised by the physical forces
on which it has to depend for its own self-expression. This is a sign that
neither Mind nor Life is the original creative Power; they, like Matter,
are intermediaries, successive and seried instruments of the evolutionary
process. If a material energy is not that original Power, then we must
seek for it in something above Mind or Life; there must be a deeper
occult Reality which has yet to disclose itself in Nature.

An original creative or evolutionary Power there must be: but,
although Matter is the first substance, the original and ultimate Power
is not an inconscient material Energy; for then life and consciousness
would be absent, since Inconscience cannot evolve consciousness nor an

ASCENT AND INTEGRATION 629

inanimate Force evolve life. There must be, therefore, since Mind and
Life also are not that, a secret Consciousness greater than Life Conscious-
ness or Mind Consciousness, an Energy more essential than the material
Energy. Since it is greater than Mind, it must be a supramental Con-
sciousness-Force; since it is a power of essential substance other than
Matter, it must be the power of that which is the supreme essence and
substance of all things, a power of the Spirit. There is a creative energy
of Mind and a creative Life-Force, but they are instrumental and partial,
not original and decisive: Mind and Life do indeed modify the material
substance they inhabit and its energies and are not merely determined
by them, but the extent and way of this material modification and de-
termination are fixed by the inhabitant and all-containing Spirit through
a secret indwelling light and force of supermind, an occult gnosis, — an
invisible self-knowledge and all-knowledge. If there is to be an entire
transformation, it can only be by the full emergence of the law of the
spirit; its power of supermind or gnosis must have entered into Matter
and it must evolve in Matter. It must change the mental into the supra-
mental being, make the inconscient in us conscious, spiritualise our ma-
terial substance, erect its law of gnostic consciousness in our whole
evolutionary being and nature. This must be the culminating emergence
or, at least, that stage in the emergence which first decisively changes
the nature of the evolution by transforming its action of Ignorance and
its basis of Inconscience.

This movement of evolution, of a progressive self-manifestation of
the Spirit in a material universe, has to make its account at every step
with the fact of the involution of consciousness and force in the form and
activity of material substance. For it proceeds by an awakening of the
involved consciousness and force and its ascent from principle to princi-
ple, from grade to grade, from power to power of the secret Spirit, but
this is not a free transference to a higher status. The law of action, the
force of action of each grade or power in its emergence is determined, not
by its own free, full and pure law of nature or vim of energy, but partly
by the material organisation provided for it and partly by its own status,
achieved degree, accomplished fact of consciousness which it has been
able to impose upon Matter. Its effectivity is in some sort made up of a
balance between the actual extent of this evolutionary emergence and the
countervailing extent to which the emergent power is still enveloped, pene-
trated, diminished by the domination and continuing grip of the Incon-
science. Mind as we see it is not mind pure and free, but mind clouded

630 THE LIFE DIVINE

and diminished by an enveloping nescience, mind labouring and struggling
to deliver knowledge out of that nescience. All depends upon the more or
less involved or more or less evolved condition of consciousness, — quite
involved in inconscient matter, hesitating on the verge between invo-
lution and conscious evolution in the first or non-animal forms of life
in matter, consciously evolving but greatly limited and hampered in
mind housed in a living body, destined to be fully evolved by the awaken-
ing of the supermind in the embodied mental being and nature.

To each grade in this series achieved by the evolving Consciousness
belongs its appropriate class of existences, — one by one there appear
material forms and forces, vegetable life, animals and half-animal man,
developed human beings, imperfectly evolved or more evolved spiritual
beings: but because of the continuity of the evolutionary process there
is no rigid separation between them; each new advance or formation
takes up what was before. The animal takes up into himself living and
inanimate Matter; man takes up both along with the animal existence.
There are furrows left by the transitional process or separating demarca-
tions settled by the fixed habit of nature: but these distinguish one series
from another, serve perhaps to prevent a fall back of what has been
evolved, they do not cancel or cut the continuity of the evolution. The
evolving Consciousness passes from one grade to another or from one
series of steps to another either by an imperceptible process or by some
bound or crisis or, perhaps, by an intervention from above, — some descent
or ensouling or influence from higher planes of Nature. But, by whatever
means, the Consciousness secretly indwelling in matter, the occult In-
habitant, is able thus to make its way upward from the lower to the
higher gradations, taking up what it was into what it is and preparing
to take up both into what it will be. Thus, having first laid down a basis
of material being, material forms, forces, existences in which it seems to
be lying inconscient, though in reality, as we know now, always subcon-
sciently at work, it is able to manifest life and living beings, to manifest
mind and mental beings in a material world, and must therefore be able
to manifest there supermind also and supramental beings. Thus has
come about the present status of the evolution of which man is the now
apparent culmination but not the real ultimate summit ; for he is himself
a transitional being and stands at the turning-point of the whole move-
ment. Evolution, being thus continuous, must have at any given moment
a past with its fundamental results still in evidence, a present in which
the results it is labouring over are in process of becoming, a future in

ASCENT AND INTEGRATION 63 1

which Still unevolved, powers and forms of being must appear till there
is the full and perfectimanifestation. The past has been the history of a
slow and difficult subconscious working with effects on the surface, — it
has been an unconscious evolution; the present is a middle stage, an
uncertain spiral in which the human intelligence is used by the secret
evolutionary Force of being and participates in its action without being
fully taken into confidence, — it is an evolution slowly becoming conscious
of itself; the future must be a more and more conscious evolution of the
spiritual being until it is fully delivered into a self-aware action by the
emergent gnostic principle.

The first foundation in this emergence, the creation of forms of
Matter, first of inconscient and inanimate, then of living and thinking
Matter, the appearance of more and more organised bodies adapted to
express a greater power of consciousness, has been studied from the
physical side, the side of form-building, by Science ; but very little light
has been shed on the inner side, the side of consciousness, and what
little has been observed is rather of its physical basis and instrumentation
than of the progressive operations of Consciousness in its own nature.
In the evolution, as it has been observed so far, although a continuity
is there, — for Life takes up Matter and Mind takes up submental Life,
the Mind of intelligence takes up the mind of life and sensation, — the
leap from one grade of consciousness in the series to another grade seems
to our eyes immense, the crossing of the gulf whether by bridge or by
leap impossible; we fail to discover any concrete and satisfactory evi-
dence of its accomplishment in the past or of the manner in which it was
accomplished. Even in the outward evolution, even in the development
of physical forms where the data are clearly in evidence, there are miss-
ing links that remain always missing ; but in the evolution of conscious-
ness the passage is still more difficult to account for, for it seems more
like a transformation than a passage. It may be, however, that, by our
incapacity to penetrate the subconscious, to sound the submental or to
understand sufficiently a lower mentality different from ours, we are
unable to observe the minute gradations, not only in each degree of the
series, but on the borders between grade and grade: the scientist who
does observe minutely the physical data, has been driven to believe in the
continuity of evolution in spite of the gaps and missing links ; if we could
observe similarly the inner evolution, we could, no doubt, discover the
possibility and the mode of these formidable transitions. But still there
is a real, a radical difference between grade and grade, so much so that

632 THE LIFE DIVINE

the passage from one to another seems a new creation, a miracle of meta-
morphosis rather than a natural predictable development or quiet passing
from one state of being to another with its well-marked steps arranged
in an easy sequence.

These gulfs appear deeper, but less wide, as we rise higher in the
scale of Nature. If there are rudiments of life-reaction in the metal, as
has been recently contended, it may be identical with life-reaction in the
plant in its essence, but what might be called the vital-physical difference
is so considerable that one seems to us inanimate, the other, though not
apparently conscious, might be called a living creature. Between the
highest plant life and lowest animal the gulf is visibly deeper, for it is
the difference between mind and the entire absence of any apparent or
even rudimentary movement of mind: in the one the stuff of mental con-
sciousness is unawakened though there is a life of vital reactions, a sup-
pressed or subconscious or perhaps only submental sense vibration which
seems to be intensely active ; in the other, though the life is at first less au-
tomatic and secure in the subconscious way of living and in its own new
way of overt consciousness imperfectly determined, still mind is awak-
ened,— there is a conscious life, a profound transition has been made.
But the community of the phenomenon of life between plant and animal,
however different their organisation, narrows the gulf, even though it
does not fill in its profundity. Between the highest animal and the lowest
man there is a still deeper though narrower gulf to be crossed, the gulf
between sense-mind and the intellect: for however we may insist on the
primitive nature of the savage, we cannot alter the fact that the most
primitive human being has above and beyond the sense-mind, emotional
vitality and primary practical intelligence which we share with the ani-
mals, a human intellect and is capable — in whatever limits — of reflection,
ideas, conscious invention, religious and ethical thought and feeling,
everything fundamental of which man as a race is capable; he has the
same kind of intelligence, it differs only in its past instruction and forma-
tive training and the degree of its developed capacity, intensity and activ-
ity. Still, in spite of these dividing furrows, we can no longer suppose that
God or some Demiurge has manufactured each genus and species ready-
made in body and in consciousness and left the matter there, having
looked upon his work and seen that it was good. It has become evident
that a secretly conscious or an inconscient Energy of creation has effected
the transition by swift or slow degrees, by whatever means, devices, bio-

ASCENT AND INTEGRATION 633

logical, physical or psychological machinery, — perhaps, having made it,
did not care to preserve as distinct forms what were only stepping-stones
and had no longer any function nor served any purpose in evolutionary
Nature. But this explanation of the gaps is little more than a hypothesis
which as yet we cannot sufficiently substantiate. It is probable at any
rate that the reason for these radical differences is to be found in the
working of the inner Force and not in the outer process of the evolu-
tionary transition; if we look at it more deeply from that inner side, the
difficulty of understanding ceases and these transitions become intelligi-
ble and indeed inevitable by the very nature of the evolutionary process
and its principle.

For if we look, not at the scientific or physical aspects, but at the
psychological side of the question and enquire in what precisely the
difference lies, we shall see that it consists in the rise of consciousness
to another principle of being. The metal is fixed in the inconscient and
inanimate principle of matter; even if we can suppose that it has some
reactions suggestive of life in it or at least of rudimentary vibrations that
in the plant developed into life, still it is not at all characteristically a
form of life ; it is characteristically a form of matter. The plant is fixed
in a subconscient action of the principle of life, — not that it is not sub-
ject to matter or devoid of reactions that find their full meaning only
in mind, for it seems to have submental reactions that in us are the
foundation of pleasure and pain or of attraction and repulsion; but still
it is a form of life, not of mere matter, nor is it, so far as we know, at all
a mind-conscious being. Man and the animal are both mentally conscious
beings: but the animal is fixed in vital mind and mind-sense and cannot
exceed its limitations, while man has received into his sense-mind the
light of another principle, the intellect, which is really at once a reflection
and a degradation of the supermind, a ray of gnosis seized by the sense
mentality and transformed by it into something other than its source:
for it is agnostic like the sense-mind in which and for which it works,
not gnostic; it seeks to lay hold on knowledge, because it does not pos-
sess it, it does not like supermind hold knowledge in itself as its natural
prerogative. In other words, in each of these forms of existence the uni-
versal being has fixed its action of consciousness in a different principle
or, as between man and animal, in the modification of a lower by a
higher though still not a highest-grade principle. It is this stride from
one principle of being to another quite different principle of being that

634 THE LIFE DIVINE

creates the transitions, the furrows, the sharp lines of distance, and
makes, not all the difference, but still a radical characteristic difference
between being and being in their nature.

But it must be observed that this ascent, this successive fixing in
higher and higher principles, does not carry with it the abandonment of
the lower grades, any more than a status of existence in the lower grades
means the entire absence of the higher principles. This heals the objec-
tion against the evolutionary theory created by these sharp lines of
difference; for if the rudiments of the higher are present in the lower
creation and the lower characters are taken up into the higher evolved
being, that of itself constitutes an indubitable evolutionary process. What
is necessary is a working that brings the lower gradation of being to a
point at which the higher can manifest in it; at that point a pressure from
some superior plane where the new power is dominant may assist towards
a more or less rapid and decisive transition by a bound or a series of
bounds, — a slow creeping, imperceptible or even occult action is followed
by a run and an evolutionary saltus across the border. It is in some such
way that the transition from the lower to higher grades of consciousness
seems to have been made in Nature.

In fact, life, mind, supermind are present in the atom, are at work
there, but invisible, occult, latent in a subconscious or apparently uncon-
scious action of the Energy; there is an informing Spirit, but the outer
force and figure of being, what we might call the formal or form existence
as distinguished from the immanent or secretly governing consciousness,
is lost in the physical action, is so absorbed into it as to be fixed in a
stereotyped self-oblivion unaware of what it is and what it is doing. The
electron and atom are in this view eternal somnambulists ; each material
object contains an outer or form consciousness involved, absorbed in the
form, asleep, seeming to be an unconsciousness driven by an unknown
and unfelt inner Existence, — he who is awake in the sleeper, the uni-
versal Inhabitant of the Upanishads, — an outer absorbed form-con-
sciousness which, unlike that of the human somnambulist, has never been
awake and is not always or ever on the point of waking. In the plant
this outer form-consciousness is still in the state of sleep, but a sleep full
of nervous dreams, always on the point of waking, but never waking.
Life has appeared ; in other words, force of concealed conscious being has
been so much intensified, has raised itself to such a height of power as
to develop or become capable of a new principle of action, that which
we see as vitality, life-force. It has become vitally responsive to existence,

ASCENT AND INTEGRATION 635

though not mentally aware, and has put forth a new grade of activities of
a higher and subtler value than any purely physical action. At the same
time, it is capable of receiving and turning into these new life-values,
into motions and phenomena of a vibration of vitality, life-contacts and
physical contacts from other forms than its own and from universal
Nature. This is a thing which forms of mere matter cannot do; they
cannot turn contacts into life-values or any kind of value, partly because
their power of reception, — although it exists, if occult evidence is to be
trusted, — is not sufficiently awake to do anything but dumbly receive and
imperceptibly react, partly because the energies transmitted by the con-
tacts are too subtle to be utilised by the crude inorganic density of
formed Matter. Life in the tree is determined by its physical body, but
it takes up the physical existence and gives it a new value or system of
values, — the life-value.

The transition to the mind and sense that appear in the animal
being, that which we call conscious life, is operated in the same manner.
The force of being is so much intensified, rises to such a height as to
admit or develop a new principle of existence, — apparently new at least
in the world of Matter, — mentality. Animal being is mentally aware of
existence, its own and others, puts forth a higher and subtler grade of
activities, receives a wider range of contacts, mental, vital, physical, from
forms other than its own, takes up the physical and vital existence and
turns all it can get from them into sense values and vital-mind values.
It senses body, it senses life, but it senses also mind ; for it has not only
blind nervous reactions, but conscious sensations, memories, impulses,
volitions, emotions, mental associations, the stuff of feeling and thought
and will. It has even a practical intelligence, founded on memory, associa-
tion, stimulating need, observation, a power of device; it is capable of
cunning, strategy, planning; it can invent, adapt to some extent its in-
ventions, meet in this or that detail the demand of new circumstance.
All is not in it a half-conscious instinct; the animal prepares human
intelligence.

But when we come to man, we see the whole thing becoming con-
scious; the world, which he epitomises, begins in him to reveal to itself
its owm nature. The higher animal is not the somnambulist, — as the very
lowest animal forms still mainly or almost are, — but it has only a limited
waking mind, capable of just what is necessary for its vital existence: in
man the conscious mentality enlarges its wakefulness and, though not at
first fully self-conscious, though still conscious only on the surface, can

636 THE LIFE DIVINE

open more and more to his inner and integral being. As in the two lower
ascents, there is a heightening of the force of conscious existence to a
new power and a new range of subtle activities; there is a transition
from vital mind to reflecting and thinking mind, there is developed a
higher power of observation and invention, taking up and connecting
data, conscious of process and result, a force of imagination and aesthetic
creation, a higher more plastic sensibility, the co-ordinating and inter-
preting reason, the values no longer of a reflex or reactive but of a mas-
tering, understanding, self-detaching intelligence. As in the lower as-
cents, so here there is also a widening of the range of consciousness; man
is able to take in more of the world and of himself as well as to give to
this knowledge higher and completer figures of conscious experience.
So, too, there is here also the third constant element of the ascension;
mind takes up the lower grades and gives to their action and reaction
intelligent values. Man has not only like the animal the sense of his
body and life, but an intelligent sense and idea of life and a conscious
and observant perception of body. He takes up too the mental life of
the animal, as well as the material and bodily; although he loses some-
thing in the process, he gives to what he retains a higher value; he has
the intelligent sense and the idea of his sensations, emotions, volitions,
impulses, mental associations; what was crude stuff of thought and feel-
ing and will, capable only of gross determinations, he turns into the
finished work and artistry of these things. For the animal too thinks,
but in an automatic way based mainly on a mechanical series of memories
and mental associations, accepting quickly or slowly the suggestions of
Nature and only awakened to a more conscious personal action when
there is need of close observation and device; it has some first crude
stuff of practical reason, but not the formed ideative and reflective fac-
ulty. The awaking consciousness in the animal is the unskilled primitive
artisan of mind, in man it is the skilled craftsman and can become, —
but this he does not attempt sufficiently, — not only the artist, but mas-
ter and adept.

But here we have to observe two particularities of this human and
at present highest development, which bring us to the heart of the mat-
ter. First, this taking up of the lower parts of life reveals itself as a
turning downward of the master eye of the secret evolving spirit or of
the universal Being in the individual from the height to which he has
reached on all that now lies below him, a gazing down with the double
or twin power of the being's consciousness- force, — the power of will, the

ASCENT AND INTEGRATION 637

power of knowledge, — so as to understand from this new, different and
wider range of consciousness and perception and nature the lower life
and its possibilities and to raise it up, it also, to a higher level, to give
it higher values, to bring out of it higher potentialities. And this he does
because evidently he does not intend to kill or destroy it, but, delight of
existence being his eternal business and a harmony of various strains,
not a sweet but monotonous melody the method of his music, he wishes
to include the lower notes also and, by surcharging them with a deeper
and finer significance, get more delight out of them than was possible
in the cruder formulation. Still in the end he lays on them as a condition
for his continued acceptance their consent to admit the higher values and,
until they do consent, he can deal harshly enough with them even to
trampling them under foot when he is bent on perfection and they are
rebellious. And that indeed is the true inmost aim and meaning of ethics,
discipline and askesis, to lesson and tame, purify and prepare to be fit
instruments the vital and physical and lower mental life so that they
may be transformed into notes of the higher mental and eventually the
supramental harmony, but not to mutilate and destroy them. Ascent
is the first necessity, but an integration is an accompanying intention of
the spirit in Nature.

This downward eye of knowledge and will with a view to an all-
round heightening, deepening and subtler, finer and richer intensification
is the secret Spirit's way from the beginning. The plant soul takes, as
we may say, a nervous-material view of its whole physical existence so
as to get out of it all the vital-physical intensity possible ; for it seems to
have some intense excitations of a mute life-vibration in it, — ^perhaps,
though that is difficult for us to imagine, more intense relatively to its
lower rudimentary scale than the animal mind and body in its higher
and more powerful scale could tolerate. The animal being takes a men-
talised sense-view of its vital and physical existence so as to get out
of it all the sense value possible, much acuter in many respects than
man's as mere sensation or sense-emotion or satisfaction of vital desire
and pleasure. Man, looking downward from the plane of will and intelli-
gence, abandons these lower intensities, but in order to get out of mind
and life and sense a higher intensity in other values, intellectual, aesthetic,
moral, spiritual, mentally dynamic or practical — as he terms it; by
these higher elements he enlarges, subtilises and elevates his use of life-
values. He does not abandon the animal reactions and enjoyments, but
more lucidly, finely and sensitively mentalises them. This he does even

638 THE LIFE DIVINE

on his normal and his lower levels, but, as he develops, he puts his
lower being to a severer test, begins to demand from it on pain of rejec-
tion something like a transformation: that is the mind's way of preparing
for a spiritual life still beyond it.

But man not only turns his gaze downward and around him, when
he has reached his higher level, but upward towards what is above him
and inward towards what is occult within him. In him not only the
downward gaze of the universal Being in the evolution has become
conscious, but its conscious upward and inward gaze also develops.
The animal lives as if satisfied with what Nature has done for it; if there
is any upward gaze of the secret spirit within its animal being, it has
nothing consciously to do with it, that is still Nature's business: it is man
who first makes this upward gaze consciously his own business. For al-
ready by his possession of intelligent will, deformed ray of the gnosis
though it be, he begins to put on the double nature of Sachchidananda;
he is no longer, like the animal, an undeveloped conscious being entirely
driven by Prakriti, a slave of the executive Force, played with by the
mechanical energies of Nature, but has begun to be a developing con-
scious soul or Purusha interfering with what was her sole affair, wish-
ing to have a say in it and eventually to be the master. He cannot do it
yet, he is too much in her meshes, too much involved in her established
mechanism: but he feels, — though as yet too vaguely and uncertainly, —
that the spirit within him wishes to rise to yet higher heights, to widen its
bounds; something within, something occult, knows that it is not the in-
tention of the deeper conscious Soul-Nature, the Purusha-Prakriti, to be
satisfied with his present lowness and limitations. To climb to higher
altitudes, to get a greater scope, to transform his lower nature, this is
always a natural impulse of man as soon as he has made his place for
himself in the physical and vital world of earth and has a little leisure
to consider his farther possibilities. It must be so not because of any
false and pitiful imaginative illusion in him, but, first, because he is
the imperfect, still developing mental being and must strive for more
development, for perfection, and still more because he is capable, unlike
other terrestrial creatures, of becoming aware of what is deeper than
mind, of the soul within him, and of what is above the mind, of super-
mind, of spirit, capable of opening to it, admitting it, rising towards it,
taking hold of it. It is in his human nature, in all human nature, to ex-
ceed itself by conscious evolution, to climb beyond what he is. Not indi-
viduals only, but in time the race also, in a general rule of being and liv-

ASCENT AND INTEGRATION 639

ing if not in all its members, can have the hope, if it develops a sufficient
will, to rise beyond the imperfections of our present very undivine nature
and to ascend at least to a superior humanity, to rise nearer, even if it
cannot absolutely reach, to a divine manhood or supermanhood. At any
rate, it is the compulsion of evolutionary Nature in him to strive to de-
velop upward, to erect the ideal, to make the endeavour.

But where is the limit of effectuation in the evolutionary being's
self-becoming by self-exceeding? In mind itself there are grades of the
series and each grade again is a series in itself; there are successive
elevations which we may conveniently call planes and sub-planes of the
mental consciousness and the mental being. The development of our
mental self is largely an ascent of this stair; we can take our stand on
any one of them, while yet maintaining a dependence on the lower stages
and a power of occasional ascension to higher levels or of a response to
influences from our being's superior strata. At present we still normally
take our first secure stand on the lowest, sub-plane of the intelligence,
which we may call the physical-mental, because it depends for its evi-
dence of fact and sense of reality on the physical brain, the physical
sense-mind, the physical sense organs; there we are the physical man
who attaches most importance to objective things and to his outer life,
has little intensity of the subjective or inner existence and subordinates
whatever he has of it to the greater claims of exterior reality. The physical
man has a vital part, but it is mainly made up of the smaller instinctive
and impulsive formations of life-consciousness emerging from the sub-
conscient, along with a customary crowd or round of sensations, desires,
hopes, feelings, satisfactions which are dependent on external things and
external contacts and concerned with the practical, the immediately
realisable and possible, the habitual, the common and average. He has a
mental part, but this too is customary, traditional, practical, objective,
and respects what belongs to the domain of mind mostly for its utility
for the support, comfort, use, satisfaction and entertainment of his phys-
ical and sensational existence. For the physical mind takes its stand on
matter and the material world, on the body and the bodily life, on sense-
experience and on a normal practical mentality and its experience. All
that is not of this order, the physical mind builds up as a restricted su-
per structure dependent upon the external sense-mentality. Even so, it
regards these higher contents of life as either helpful adjuncts or a super-
fluous but pleasant luxury of imaginations, feelings and thought-abstrac-
tions, not as inner realities; or, even if it receives them as realities, it

640 THE LIFE DIVINE

does not feel them concretely and substantially in their own proper sub-
stance, subtler than the physical substance and its grosser concreteness,
— it treats them as a subjective, less substantial extension from physical
realities. It is inevitable that the human being should thus take his first
stand on Matter and give the external fact and external existence its due
importance; for this is Nature's first provision for our existence, on
which she insists greatly: the physical man is emphasized in us and is
multiplied abundantly in the world by her as her force for conservation
of the secure, if somewhat inert, material basis on which she can main-
tain herself while she attempts her higher human developments; but in
this mental formation there is no power for progress or only for a ma-
terial progress. It is our first mental status, but the mental being can-
not remain always at this lowest rung of the human evolutionary ladder.
Above physical mind and deeper within than physical sensation,
there is what we may call an intelligence of the life-mind, dynamic, vital,
nervous, more open, though still obscurely, to the psychic, capable of a
first soul-formation, though only of an obscurer life-soul, — not the psy-
chic being, but a frontal formation of the vital Purusha. This life-soul
concretely senses and contacts the things of the life-world, and tries to
realise them here; it attaches immense importance to the satisfaction and
fulfilment of the life-being, the life- force, the vital nature: it looks on
physical existence as a field for the life-impulses' self-fulfilment, for the
play of ambition, power, strong character, love, passion, adventure, for
the individual, the collective, the general human seeking and hazard
and venture, for all kinds of life-experiment and new life-experience,
and but for this saving element, this greater power, interest, significance,
the physical existence would have for it no value. This life mentality is
supported by our secret subliminal vital being and is in veiled contact
with a life-world to which it can easily open and so feel the unseen
dynamic forces and realities behind the material universe. There is an
inner life-mind which does not need for its perceptions the evidence of
the physical senses, is not limited by them; for on this level our inner
life and the inner life of the world become real to us independent of the
body and of the symbols of the physical world which alone we call natu-
ral phenomena, as if Nature had no greater phenomena and no greater
realities than those of gross Matter. The vital man, moulded consciously
or unconsciously by these influences, is the man of desire and sensation,
the man of force and action, the man of passion and emotion, the kinetic
individual: he may and does lay great stress on the material existence,

ASCENT AND INTEGRATION 64 1

but he gives it, even when most preoccupied with its present actualities, a
push for life-experience, for force of realisation, for life-extension, for
life-power, for life-affirmation and life-expansion which is Nature's first
impetus towards enlargement of the being; at a highest intensity of this
life impetus, he becomes the breaker of bonds, the seeker of new horizons,
the disturber of the past and present in the interest of the future. He has
a mental life which is often enslaved to the vital force and its desires
and passions, and it is these he seeks to satisfy through the mind: but
when he interests himself strongly in mental things, he can become the
mental adventurer, the opener of the way to new mind-formations or the
fighter for an idea, the sensitive type of artist, the dynamic poet of life
or the prophet or champion of a cause. The vital mind is kinetic and
therefore a great force in the working of evolutionary Nature.

Above this level of vital mentality and yet more inly extended, is
a mind-plane of pure thought and intelligence to which the things of the
mental world are the most important realities; those who are under its
influence, the philosopher, thinker, scientist, intellectual creator, the
man of the idea, the man of the written or spoken word, the idealist and
dreamer are the present mental being at his highest attained summit.
This mental man has his life-part, his life of passions and desires and
ambitions and life-hopes of all kinds and his lower sensational and phys-
ical existence, and this lower part can often equibalance or weigh down
his nobler mental element so that, although it is the highest portion of
him, it does not become dominant and formative in his whole nature : but
this is not typical of him in his greatest development, for there the vital
and physical are controlled and subjected by the thinking will and in-
telligence. The mental man cannot transform his nature, but he can
control and harmonise it and lay on it the law of a mental ideal, impose
a balance or a sublimating and refining influence, and give a high con-
sistency to the multipersonal confusion and conflict or the summary
patchwork of our divided and half-constructed being. He can be the
observer and governor of his own mind and life, can consciously develop
them and become to that extent a self-creator.

This mind of pure intelligence has behind it our inner or subliminal
mind which senses directly all the things of the mind-plane, is open to the
action of a world of mental forces, and can feel the ideative and other
imponderable influences which act upon the material world and the life-
plane but which at present we can only infer and cannot directly experi-
ence: these intangibles and imponderables are to the mental man real and

642 THE LIFE DIVINE

patent and he regards them as truths demanding to be realised in our
or the earth's nature. On the inner plane mind and mind-soul independent
of the body can become to us an entire reality, and we can consciously
live in them as much as in the body. Thus to live in mind and the things
of the mind, to be an intelligence rather than a life and a body, is our
highest position, short of spirituality, in the degrees of Nature. The
mental man, the man of a self-dominating and self-formative mind and
will conscious of an ideal and turned towards its realisation, the high
intellect, the thinker, the sage, less kinetic and immediately effective than
the vital man, who is the man of action and outer swift life-fulfilment,
but as powerful and eventually even more powerful to open new vistas
to the race, is the normal summit of Nature's evolutionary formation on
the human plane. These three degrees of mentality, clear in themselves,
but most often mixed in our composition, are to our ordinary intelligence
only psychological types that happen to have developed, and we do not
discover any other significance in them; but in fact they are full of
significance, for they are the steps of Nature's evolution of mental be-
ing towards its self-exceeding, and, as thinking mind is the highest step
she can now attain, the perfected mental man is the rarest and highest
of her normal human creatures. To go farther she has to bring into the
mind and make active in mind, life and body the spiritual principles.

For these are her evolutionary figures built out of the surface men-
tality; to do more she has to use more amply the unseen material hidden
below our surface, to dive inwards and bring out the secret soul, the
psyche, or to ascend above our normal mental level into planes of intui-
tive consciousness dense with light derived from the spiritual gnosis, as-
cending planes of pure spiritual mind in which we are in direct contact
with the infinite, in touch with the self and highest reality of things, Sach-
chidananda. In ourselves, behind our surface natural being, there is a
soul, an inner mind, an inner life-part which can open to these heights
as well as to the occult spirit within us, and this double opening is the
secret of a new evolution ; by that breaking of lids and walls and bound-
aries the consciousness rises to a greater ascent and a larger integra-
tion which, as the evolution of mind has mentalised, so will by this new
evolution spiritualise all the powers of our nature. For the mental man
has not been Nature's last effort or highest reach, — though he has been,
in general, more fully evolved in his own nature than those who have
achieved themselves below or aspired above him; she has pointed man
to a yet higher and more difficult level, inspired him with the ideal of a

ASCENT AND INTEGRATION 643

spiritual living, begun the evolution in him of a spiritual being. The
spiritual man is her supreme supernormal effort of human creation; for,
having evolved the mental creator, thinker, sage, prophet of an ideal, the
self-controlled, self-disciplined, harmonised mental being, she has tried
to go higher and deeper within and call out into the front the soul and
inner mind and heart, call down from above the forces of the spiritual
mind and higher mind and overmind and create under their light and by
their influence the spiritual sage, seer, prophet, God-lover, Yogin, gnos-
tic, Sufi, mystic.

This is man's only way of true self-exceeding: for so long as we live
in the surface being or found ourselves wholly on Matter, it is impos
sible to go higher and vain to expect that there can be any new transi-
tion of a radical character in our evolutionary being. The vital man,
the mental man have had an immense effect upon the earth-life, they have
carried humanity forward from the mere human animal to what it is now.
But it is only within the bounds of the already established evolutionary
formula of the human being that they can act; they can enlarge the
human circle but not change or transform the principle of consciousness
or its characteristic operation. Any attempt to heighten inordinately the
mental or exaggerate inordinately the vital man, — a Nietzschean super-
manhood, for example, — can only colossalise the human creature, it
cannot transform or divinise him. A different possibility opens if we can
live within in the inner being and make it the direct ruler of life or sta-
tion ourselves on the spiritual and intuitive planes of being and from
there and by their power transmute our nature.

The spiritual man is the sign of this new evolution, this new and
higher endeavour of Nature. But this evolution differs from the past
process of the evolutionary Energy in two respects: it is conducted by a
conscious effort of the human mind, and it is not confined to a conscious
progression of the surface nature, but is accompanied by an attempt to
break the walls of the Ignorance and extend ourselves inward into the
secret principle of our present being and outward into cosmic being as
well as upward towards a higher principle. Up till now what Nature
had achieved was an enlarging of the bounds of our surface Knowledge-
Ignorance ; what it attempted in the spiritual endeavour is to abolish the
Ignorance, to go inwards and discover the soul and to become united in
consciousness with God and with all existence. This is the final aim of
the mental stage of evolutionary Nature in man; it is the initial step
towards a radical transmutation of the Ignorance into the Knowledge.

644 THE LIFE DIVINE

The spiritual change begins by an influence of the inner being and the
higher spiritual mind, an action felt and accepted on the surface; but
this by itself can lead only to an illumined mental idealism or to the
growth of a religious mind, a religious temperament and some devotion
in the heart and piety in the conduct; it is a first approach of mind to
spirit, but it cannot make a radical change: more has to be done, we have
to live deeper within, we have to exceed our present consciousness and
surpass our present status of Nature.

It is evident that if we can live thus deeper within and put out
steadily the inner forces into the outer instrumentation or raise ourselves
to dwell on higher and wider levels and bring their powers to bear on
physical existence, not merely receive influences descending from them,
which is all we can now do, there could begin a heightening of our force
of conscious being so as to create a new principle of consciousness,
a new range of activities, new values for all things, a widening of
our consciousness and life, a taking up and transformation of the
lower grades of our existence, — in brief, the whole evolutionary
process by which the Spirit in Nature creates a higher type of being.
Each step could mean a pace, however distant from the goal, or a close
approach leading to a larger and more divine being, a larger and more
divine force and consciousness, knowledge and will, sense of existence
and delight in existence; there could be an initial unfolding towards the
divine life. All religion, all occult knowledge, all supernormal (as op-
posed to abnormal) psychological experience, all Yoga, all psychic ex-
perience and discipline are sign-posts and directions pointing us upon
that road of progress of the occult self-unfolding spirit.

But the human race is still weighted by a certain gravitation to-
wards the physical, it obeys still the pull of our yet unconquered earth-
matter; it is dominated by the brain-mind, the physical intelligence: thus
held back by many ties, it hesitates before the indication or falls back
before the too tense demand of the spiritual effort. It has, too, still a
great capacity for sceptical folly, an immense indolence, an enormous
intellectual and spiritual timidity and conservatism when called out of
the grooves of habit: even the constant evidence of life itself that where
it chooses to conquer it can conquer, — witness the miracles of that quite
inferior power, physical Science, — does not prevent it from doubting; it
repels the new call and leaves the response to a few individuals. But that
is not enough if the step forward is to be for humanity; for it is only if
the race advances that, for it, the victories of the Spirit can be secure.

ASCENT AND INTEGRATION 645

For then, even if there is a lapse of Nature, a fall in her effort, the Spirit
within, employing a secret memory, — sometimes represented on the
lower side, that of downward gravitation, as an atavistic force in the race,
but really the force of a persistent memory in Nature which can pull us
either upward or downward, — will call it upward again and the next as-
cent will be both easier and more lasting, because of the past endeavour ;
for that endeavour and its impulse and its result cannot but remain
stored in the subconscious mind of humanity. Who can say what vic-
tories of the kind may have been achieved in our past cycles and how
near may be the next ascension? It is not indeed necessary or possible
that the whole race should transform itself from mental into spiritual be-
ings, but a general admission of the ideal, a widespread endeavour, a
conscious concentration are needed to carry the stream of tendency to its
definitive achievement. Otherwise what will be ultimately accomplished
is an achievement by the few initiating a new order of beings, while
humanity will have passed sentence of unfitness on itself and may fall
back into an evolutionary decline or a stationary immobility; for it is
the constant upward effort that has kept humanity alive and maintained
for it its place in the front of creation.

The principle of the process of evolution is a foundation, from that
foundation an ascent, in that ascent a reversal of consciousness and,
from the greater height and wideness gained, an action of change and
new integration of the whole nature. The first foundation is Matter ; the
ascent is that of Nature; the integration is an at first unconscious or half-
conscious automatic change of Nature by Nature. But as soon as a more
completely conscious participation of the being has begun in these work-
ings of Nature, a change in the functioning of the process is inevitable.
The physical foundation of Matter remains, but Matter can no longer
be the foundation of the consciousness; consciousness itself will be no
longer in its origin a welling up from the Inconscient or a concealed flow
from an occult inner subliminal force under the pressure of contacts from
the universe. The foundation of the developing existence will be the new
spiritual status above or the unveiled soul status within us; it is a flow
of light and knowledge and will from above and a reception from within
that will determine the reactions of the being to cosmic experience.
The whole concentration of the being will be shifted from below up-
wards and from without inwards; our higher and inner being now un-
known to us will become ourselves, and the outer or surface being which
we now take for ourselves will be only an open front or an annexe

646 THE LIFE DIVINE

through which the true being meets the universe. The outer world itself
will become inward to the spiritual awareness, a part of itself, intimately
embraced in a knowledge and feeling of unity and identity, penetrated
by an intuitive regard of the mind, responded to by the direct contact
of consciousness with consciousness, taken into an achieved integrality.
The old inconscient foundation itself will be made conscious in us by
the inflow of light and awareness from above and its depths annexed
to the heights of the spirit. An integral consciousness will become the
basis of an entire harmonisation of life through the total transformation,
unification, integration of the being and the nature.

CHAPTER XIX

OUT OF THE SEVENFOLD IGNORANCE TOWARDS
THE SEVENFOLD KNOWLEDGE

Seven steps has the ground of the Ignorance, seven
steps has the ground of the Knowledge.

Mahopanishad}

He found the vast Thought with seven heads that is
born of the Truth; he created some fourth world and be-
came universal. . . . The Sons of Heaven, the Heroes of
the Omnipotent, thinking the straight thought, giving voice
to the Truth, founded the plane of illumination and con-
ceived the first abode of the Sacrifice. . . , The Master of
Wisdom cast down the stone defences and called to the
Herds of Light, . . . the herds that stand in the secrecy
on the bridge over the Falsehood between two worlds be-
low and one above; desiring Light in the darkness, he
brought upward the Ray-Herds and uncovered from the veil
the three worlds; he shattered the city that lies hidden in
ambush, and cut the three out of the Ocean, and discovered
the Dawn and the Sun and the Light and the World of
Light.

Rig Veda!"

The Master of Wisdom in his first coming to birth in
the supreme ether of the great Light, — many his births,
seven his mouths of the Word, seven his Rays, — scatters the
darknesses with his cry.

Rig Veda.^

A LL evolution is in essence a heightening of the force of conscious-
jfj^ ness in the manifest being so that it may be raised into the
greater intensity of what is still unmanifest, from matter into life, from
life into mind, from the mind into the spirit. It is this that must be the
method of our growth from a mental into a spiritual and supramental
manifestation, out of a still half-animal humanity into a divine being
and a divine living. There must be achieved a new spiritual height, wide-
ness, depth, subtlety, intensity of our consciousness, of its substance, its
force, its sensibility, an elevation, expansion, plasticity, integral capacity

W.I. *X. 67. i-s. »IV. so. 4-

647

648 THE LIFE DIVINE

of our being, and an assumption of mind and all that is below mind into
that larger existence. In a future transformation the character of the evo-
lution, the principle of evolutionary process, although modified, will not
fundamentally change but, on a vaster scale and in a liberated move-
ment, royally continue. A change into a higher consciousness or state of
being is not only the whole aim and process of religion, of all higher aske-
sis, of Yoga, but it is also the very trend of our life itself, the secret pur-
pose found in the sum of its labour. The principle of life in us seeks
constantly to confirm and perfect itself on the planes of mind, vitality
and body which it already possesses; but it is self-driven also to go be-
yond and transform these gains into means for the conscious spirit to
unfold in Nature. 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 exist-
ence, 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, would not eventuate here. But this is not the integral trend
of our existence; there is a labour 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
that higher principle may be exclusively affirmed by the rejection and
extinction of Nature. To heighten the force of consciousness until it
passes from a mental, vital and physical instrumentation into the es-
sence and power of the spirit is the indispensable thing, but that is not
the sole object or all the thing to be done.

Our call must be to live on a new height in all our being: we have
not, in order to reach that height, to drop back our dynamic parts into
the indeterminate stuff of Nature and abide by this liberating loss in a
blissful quiescence of the Spirit; that can always be done and it brings
a great repose and freedom, but what Nature herself attends from us is
that the whole of what we are should rise into the spiritual conscious-
ness and become a manifest and manifold power of the spirit. An integral
transformation is the integral aim of the Being in Nature; this is the
inherent sense of her universal urge of self-transcendence. It is for this
reason that the process of Nature is not confined to a heightening of her-
self into a new principle; the new height is not a narrow intense pin-
nacle, it brings with it a widening and establishes a larger field of life
in which the power of the new principle may have sufficient play and
room for its emergence. This action of elevation and expansion is not

TOWARDS THE SEVENFOLD KNOWLEDGE 649

confined to an utmost possible largeness in the essential play of the new
principle itself; it includes a taking up of that which is lower into the
higher values: the divine or spiritual life will not only assume into itself
the mental, vital, physical life transformed and spiritualised, but it will
give them a much wider and fuller play than was open to them so long as
they were living on their own level. Our mental, physical, vital existence
need not be destroyed by our self-exceeding, nor are they lessened and
impaired by being spiritualised; they can and do become much richer,
greater, more powerful and more perfect: in their divine change they
break into possibilities which in their unspiritualised condition could
not be practicable or imaginable.

This evolution, this process of heightening and widening and inte-
gralisation, is in its nature a growth and an ascent out of the sevenfold
ignorance into the integral knowledge. The crux of that ignorance is the
constitutional; it resolves itself into a manifold ignorance of the true
character of our becoming, an unawareness of our total self, of which the
key is a limitation by the plane we inhabit and by the present predomi-
nant principle of our nature. The plan we inhabit is the plane of Matter;
the present predominant principle in our nature is the mental intelligence
with the sense-mind, which depends upon Matter, as its support and
pedestal. As a consequence, the preoccupation of the mental intelligence
and its powers with the material existence as it is shown to it through
the senses, and with life as it has been formulated in a compromise be-
tween life and matter, is a special stamp of the constitutional Ignorance.
This natural materialism or materialised vitalism, this clamping of our-
selves to our beginnings, is a form of self-restriction narrowing the scope
of our existence which is very insistent on the human being. It is a first
necessity of his physical existence, but is afterwards forged by a primal
ignorance into a chain that hampers his every step upwards: the attempt
to grow out of this limitation of the wholeness, power and truth of the
spirit by the materialised mental intelligence and out of his subjection of
the soul to material Nature is the first step towards a real progress of our
humanity. For our ignorance is not entire ; it is a limitation of conscious-
ness,— it is not the complete nescience which is the stamp of the same
Ignorance in purely material existences, those which have not only mat-
ter for their plane but matter for their dominant principle. It is a partial,
a limiting, a dividing and, very largely, a falsifying knowledge; out of
that limitation and falsification we have to grow into the truth of our
spiritual being.

650 THE LIFE DIVINE

This preoccupation with life and matter is at the beginning right
and necessary because the first step that man has to take is to know and
possess this physical existence as well as he can by applying his thought
and intelligence to such experience of it as his sense-mind can give to
him; but this is only a preliminary step and, if we stop there, we have
made no real progress: we are where we were and have gained only more
physical elbow-room to move about in and more power for our mind to
establish a relative knowledge and an insufficient and precarious mas-
tery and for our life-desire to push things about and jostle and hustle
around amid the throng of physical forces and existences. The utmost
widening of a physical objective knowledge, even if it embrace the most
distant solar systems and the deepest layers of the earth and sea and
the most subtle powers of material substance and energy, is not the es-
sential gain for us, not the one thing which it is most needful for us to
acquire. That is why the gospel of materialism, in spite of the dazzling
triumphs of physical Science, proves itself always in the end a vain and
helpless creed, and that too is why physical Science itself with all its
achievements, though it may accomplish comfort, can never achieve hap-
piness and fullness of being for the human race. Our true happiness lies
in the true growth of our whole being, in a victory throughout the total
range of our existence, in mastery of the inner as well as and more than
the outer, the hidden as well as the overt nature; our true completeness
comes not by describing wider circles on the plane where we began, but
by transcendence. It is for this reason that, after the first necessary foun-
dation in life and matter, we have to heighten our force of conscious-
ness, deepen, widen, subtilise it; we must first liberate our mental selves
and enter into a freer, finer and nobler play of our mental existence: for
the mental is much more than the physical our true existence, because we
are even in our instrumental or expressive nature predominantly mind
and not matter, mental much rather than physical beings. That growth
into the full mental being is the first transitional movement towards
human perfection and freedom; it does not actually perfect, it does not
liberate the soul, but it lifts us one step out of the material and vital
absorption and prepares the loosening of the hold of the Ignorance.

Our gain in becoming more perfect mental beings is that we get to
the possibility of a subtler, higher and wider existence, consciousness,
force, happiness and delight of being; in proportion as we rise in the
scale of mind, a greater power of these things comes to us: our men-
tal consciousness acquires for itself at the same time more vision and

TOWARDS THE SEVENFOLD KNOWLEDGE 651

power and more subtlety and plasticity, and we are able to embrace more
of the vital and physical existence itself, to know it better, to use it
better, to give it nobler values, a broader range, a more sublimated action,
— an extended scale, higher issues. Man is in his characteristic power of
nature a mental being, but in the first steps of his emergence he is more
of the mentalised animal, preoccupied like the animal with his bodily
existence; he employs his mind for the uses, interests, desires of the life
and the body, as their servant and minister, not yet as their sovereign
and master. It is as he grows in mind and in proportion as his mind
asserts its selfhood and independence against the tyranny of life and mat-
ter, that he grows in stature. On one side, mind by its emancipation con-
trols and illumines the life and physicality ; on the other, the purely men-
tal aims, occupations, pursuits of knowledge begin to get a value. The
mind liberated from a lower control and preoccupation introduces into
life a government, an uplifting, a refinement, a finer balance and har-
mony; the vital and physical movements are directed and put into
order, transformed even as far as they can be by a mental agency ; they
are taught to be the instruments of reason and obedient to an enlightened
will, an ethical perception and an aesthetic intelligence: the more this
can be accomplished, the more the race becomes truly human, a race of
mental beings.

It is this perception of life that was put in front by the Greek
thinkers, and it is a vivid flowering in the sunlight of this ideal that im-
parts so great a fascination to Hellenic life and culture. In later times
this perception was lost and, when it came back, it returned much dim-
inished, mixed with more turbid elements: the perturbation of a spiritual
ideal imperfectly grasped by the understanding and not at all realised
in the life's practice but present with its positive and negative mental
and moral influences, and over against it the pressure of a dominant,
an inordinate vital urge which could not get its free self-satisfied move-
ment, stood in the way of the sovereignty of the mind and the harmony
of life, its realised beauty and balance. An opening to higher ideals, a
greater range of life was gained, but the elements of a new idealism were
only cast into its action as an influence, could not dominate and trans-
form it and, finally, the spiritual endeavour, thus ill-understood and un-
realised, was thrown aside: its moral effects remained, but, deprived of
the sustaining spiritual element, dwindled towards ineffectivity : the vital
urge, assisted by an immense development of physical intelligence, be-
came the preoccupation of the race. An imposing increase of a certain

652 THE LIFE DIVINE

kind of knowledge and efficiency was the first result ; the most recent out-
come has been a perilous spiritual ill-health and a vast disorder.

For mind itself is not enough; even its largest play of intelligence
creates only a qualified half-light. A surface mental knowledge of the
physical universe is a still more imperfect guide ; for the thinking animal
it might be enough, but not for a race of mental beings in labour of a
spiritual evolution. Even the truth of physical things cannot be entirely
known, nor can the right use of our material existence be discovered by
physical Science and an outward knowledge alone or made possible by
the mastery of physical and mechanical processes alone: to know, to use
rightly we must go beyond the truth of physical phenomenon and process,
we must know what is within and behind it. For we are not merely em-
bodied minds ; there is a spiritual being, a spiritual principle, a spiritual
plane of Nature. Into that we have to heighten our force of conscious-
ness, to widen by that still more largely, even universally and infinitely,
our range of being and our field of action, to take up by that our lower
life and use it for greater ends and on a larger plan, in the light of the
spiritual truth of existence. Our labour of mind and struggle of life can-
not come to any solution until we have gone beyond the obsessing lead
of an inferior Nature, integralised our natural being in the being and
consciousness, learned to utilise our natural instruments by the force
and for the joy of the Spirit. Then only can the constitutional ignorance,
the ignorance of the real build of our existence from which we suffer,
change into a true and effective knowledge of our being and becoming.
For what we are is spirit, — at present using mind predominantly, life
and body subordinately, with matter for our original field but not our
only field of experience; but this is only at present. Our imperfect men-
tal instrumentation is not the last word of our possibilities; for there
are in us, dormant or invisibly and imperfectly active, other principles
beyond mind and closer to the spiritual nature, there are more direct
powers and luminous instruments, there is a higher status, there are
greater ranges of dynamic action than those that belong to our present
physical, vital and mental existence. These can become our own status,
part of our being, they can be principles, powers and instruments of our
own enlarged nature. But for that it is not enough to be satisfied with
a vague or an ecstatic ascent into spirit or a formless exaltation through
the touch of its infinities; their principle has to evolve, as life has
evolved, as mind has evolved, and organise its own instrumentation, its

TOWARDS THE SEVENFOLD KNOWLEDGE 653

own satisfaction. Then we shall possess the true constitution of our being
and we shall have conquered the Ignorance.

The conquest of our constitutional ignorance cannot be complete,
cannot become integrally dynamic, if we have not conquered our psy-
chological ignorance ; for the two are bound up together. Our psychologi-
cal ignorance consists in a limitation of our self-knowledge to that little
wave or superficial stream of our being which is the conscient waking
self. This part of our being is an original flux of formless or only half-
formulated movements carried on in an automatic continuity, supported
and held together by an active surface memory and a passive under-
lying consciousness in its flow from moment to moment of time, or-
ganised and interpreted by our reason and our witnessing and participat-
ing intelligence. Behind it is an occult existence and energy of our secret
being without which the superficial consciousness and activity could not
have existed or acted. In Matter only an activity is manifest, — incon-
scient in the outside of things which is all we know; for the indwelling
Consciousness in Matter is secret, subliminal, not manifested in the
inconscient form and the involved energy: but in us consciousness has
become partly manifest, partly awake. But this consciousness is hedged
and imperfect; it is bound by its habitual self-limitation and moves in
a restricted circle, — except when there are flashes, intimations or up-
surgings from the secrecy within us which break the limits of the forma-
tion or flow beyond them or widen the circle. But these occasional visita-
tions cannot enlarge us far beyond our present capacities, are not enough
to revolutionise our status. That can only be done if we can bring into
it the higher undeveloped lights and powers potential in our being and
get them consciously and normally into play; for this we must be able
to draw freely from those ranges of our being to which they are native
but which are at present subconscient or rather secretly intraconscient
and circumconscient or else superconscient to us. Or, — the yet more
that is also possible, — we must enter into these inner and higher parts
of ourselves by an inward plunge or disciplined penetration and bring
back with us to the surface their secrets. Or, achieving a still more radi-
cal change of our consciousness, we must learn to live within and no
longer on the surface and be and act from the inner depths and from a
soul that has become sovereign over the nature.

That part of us which we can strictly call subconscient because it is
below the level of mind and conscious life, inferior and obscure, covers

654 THE LIFE DIVINE

the purely physical and vital elements of our constitution of bodily
being, unmentalised, unobserved by the mind, uncontrolled by it in their
action. It can be held to include the dumb occult consciousness, dynamic
but not sensed by us, which operates in the cells and nerves and all the
corporeal stuff and adjusts their life process and automatic responses. It
covers also those lowest functionings of submerged sense-mind which
are more operative in the animal and in plant life ; in our evolution we
have overpassed the need of any large organised action of this element,
but it remains submerged and obscurely at work below our conscious
nature. This obscure activity extends to a hidden and hooded mental
substratum into which past impressions and all that is rejected from the
surface mind sink and remain there dormant and can surge up in sleep
or in any absence of the mind, taking dream forms, forms of mechanical
mind action or suggestion, forms of automatic vital reaction or impulse,
forms of physical abnormality or nervous perturbance, forms of mor-
bidity, disease, unbalance. Out of the subconscious we bring ordinarily
so much to the surface as our waking sense-mind and intelligence need
for their purpose ; in so bringing them up we are not aware of their na-
ture, origin, operation and do not apprehend them in their own values
but by a translation into the values of our waking human sense and intel-
ligence. But the risings of the subconscious, its effects upon the mind and
body, are mostly automatic, uncalled for and involuntary; for we have
no knowledge and therefore no control of the subconscient. It is only by
an experience abnormal to us, most commonly in illness or some dis-
turbance of balance, that we can become directly aware of something
in the dumb world, dumb but very active, of our bodily being and vital-
ity or grow conscious of the secret movements of the mechanical sub-
human physical and vital mind which underlies our surface, — a con-
sciousness which is ours but seems not ours because it is not part of our
known mentality. This and much more lives concealed in the subcon-
science.

A descent into the subconscient would not help us to explore this
region, for it would plunge us into incoherence or into sleep or a dull
trance or a comatose torpor. A mental scrutiny or insight can give us
some indirect and constructive idea of these hidden activities; but it is
only by drawing back into the subliminal or by ascending into the
superconscient and from there looking down or extending ourselves into
these obscure depths that we can become directly and totally aware and
in control of the secrets of our subconscient physical, vital and mental

TOWARDS THE SEVENFOLD KNOWLEDGE 655

nature. This awareness, this control are of the utmost importance. For
the subconscient is the Inconscient in the process of becoming conscious ;
it is a support and even a root of our inferior parts of being and their
movements. It sustains and reinforces all in us that clings most and
refuses to change, our mechanical recurrences of unintelligent thought,
our persistent obstinacies of feeling, sensation, impulse, propensity, our
uncontrolled fixities of character. The animal in us, — the infernal also, —
has its lair of retreat in the dense jungle of the subconscience. To pene-
trate there, to bring in light and establish a control, is indispensable for
the completeness of any higher life, for any integral transformation of
the nature.

The part of us that we have characterised as intraconscient and
circumconscient is a still more potent and much more valuable element
in the constitution of our being. It includes the large action of an inner
intelligence and inner sense-mind, of an inner vital, even of an inner
subtle-physical being which upholds and embraces our waking conscious-
ness, which is not brought to the front, which is subliminal, in the mod-
ern phrase. But when we can enter and explore this hidden self, we find
that our waking sense and intelligence are for the most part a selection
from what we secretly are or can be, an exteriorised and much mutilated
and vulgarised edition of our real, our hidden being or an upthrow from
its depths. Our surface being has been formed with this subliminal help
by an evolution out of the Inconscient for the utility of our present
mental and physical life on earth; this that is behind is a formation
mediating between the Inconscient and the larger planes of Life and
Mind which have been created by the involutionary descent and whose
pressure has helped to bring about the evolution of mind and life in
Matter. Our surface responses to physical existence have at their back
the support of an activity in these veiled parts, are often responses from
them modified by a surface mental rendering. But also that large part
of our mentality and vitality which is not a response to the outside
world but lives for itself or throws itself out on material existence to use
and possess it, our personality, is the outcome, the amalgamated formula-
tion of powers, influences, motives proceeding from this potent intra-
conscient secrecy.

Again, the subliminal extends itself into an enveloping conscious-
ness through which it receives the shock of the currents and wave-circuits
pouring upon us from the universal Mind, universal Life, universal
subtler Matter-forces. These, unperceived by us on the surface, are per-

656 THE LIFE DIVINE

ceived and admitted by our subliminal self and turned into formations
which can powerfully affect our existence without our knowledge. If
the wall that separates this inner existence from the outer self were
penetrated, we could know and deal with the sources of our present mind
energies and life action and could control instead of undergoing their
results. But though large parts of it can be thus known by a penetration
and looking within or a freer communication, it is only by going inward
behind the veil of superficial mind and living within, in an inner mind,
an inner life, an inmost soul gf our being that we can be fully self-aware,
— by this and by rising to a higher plane of mind than that which our
waking consciousness inhabits. An enlargement and completion of our
present evolutionary status, now still so hampered and truncated, would
be the result of such an inward living; but an evolution beyond it can
come only by our becoming conscious in what is now superconscient to
us, by an ascension to the native heights of the Spirit.

In the superconscience beyond our present level of awareness are
included the higher planes of mental being as well as the native heights
of supramental and pure spiritual being. The first indispensable step in
an upward evolution would be to elevate our force of consciousness into
those higher parts of Mind from which we already receive, but without
knowing the source, much of our larger mental movements, those, espe-
cially, that come with a greater power and light, the revelatory, the
inspirational, the intuitive. On these mental heights, in these largenesses,
if the consciousness could succeed in reaching them or maintain and
centre itself there, something of the direct presence and power of the
spirit, something even — however secondary or indirect — of the super-
mind could receive a first expression, could make itself initially manifest,
could intervene in the government of our lower being and help to re-
mould it. Afterwards, by the force of that remoulded consciousness, the
course of our evolution could rise by a sublimer ascent and get beyond
the mental into the supramental and the supreme spiritual nature. It is
possible without an actual ascent into these at present superconscient
mental planes or without a constant or permanent living in them, by
openness to them, by reception of their knowledge and influences, to get
rid to a certain extent of our constitutional and psychological ignorance ;
it is possible to be aware of ourselves as spiritual beings and to spiritual-
ise, though imperfectly, our normal human life and consciousness. There
could be a conscious communication and guidance from this greater
more luminous mentality and a reception of its enlightening and trans-
forming forces. That is within the reach of the highly developed or the

TOWARDS THE SEVENFOLD KNOWLEDGE 657

spiritually awakened human being; but it would not be more than a
preliminary stage. To reach an integral self-knowledge, an entire con-
sciousness and power of being, there is necessary an ascent beyond the
plane of our normal mind. Such an ascent is at present possible in an
absorbed superconscience ; but that could lead only to an entry into the
higher levels in a state of immobile or ecstatic trance. If the control of
that highest spiritual being is to be brought into our waking life, there
must be a conscious heightening and widening into immense ranges of
new being, new consciousness, new potentialities of action, a taking up —
as integral as possible — of our present being, consciousness, activities
and a transmutation of them into divine values which would effect a
transfiguration of our human existence. For wherever a radical transi-
tion has to be made, there is always this triple movement — ascent, wid-
ening of field and base, integration — in Nature's method of self-tran-
scendence.

Any such evolutionary change must necessarily be associated with
a rejection of our present narrowing temporal ignorance. For not only
do we now live from moment to moment of time, but our whole view is
limited to our life in the present body between a single birth and death.
As our regard does not go farther back in the past, so it does not extend
farther out into the future ; thus we are limited by our physical memory
and awareness of the present life in a transient corporeal formation.
But this limitation of our temporal consciousness is intimately depend-
ent upon the preoccupation of our mentality with the material plane and
life in which it is at present acting; the limitation is not a law of the
spirit but a temporary provision for an intended first working of our
manifested nature. If the preoccupation is relaxed or put aside, an ex-
tension of the mind effected, an opening into the subliminal and super-
conscient, into the inner and higher being created, it is possible to realise
our persistent existence in time as well as our eternal existence beyond
it. This is essential if we are to get our self-knowledge into the right
focus ; for at present our whole consciousness and action are vitiated by
an error of spiritual perspective which prevents us from seeing in right
proportion and relation the nature, purpose and conditions of our being.
A belief in immortality is made so vital a point in most religions because
it is a self-evident necessity if we are to rise above the identity with the
body and its preoccupation with the material level. But a belief is not
sufficient to alter radically this mistake of perspective: the true self-
knowledge of our being in time can come to us only when we live in the
consciousness of our immortality; we have to awaken to a concrete

658 THE LIFE DIVINE

sense of our perpetual being in Time and of our timeless existence.
For immortality in its fundamental sense does not mean merely
some kind of personal survival of the bodily death ; we are immortal by
the eternity of our self-existence without beginning or end, beyond the
whole succession of physical births and deaths through which we pass,
beyond the alternations of our existence in this and other worlds: the
spirit's timeless existence is the true immortality. There is, no doubt,
a secondary meaning of the word which has its truths ; for, corollary to
this true immortality, there exists a perpetual continuity of our temporal
existence and experience from life to life, from world to world after the
dissolution of the physical body: but this is a natural consequence of
our timelessness which expresses itself here as a perpetuity in eternal
Time. The realisation of timeless immortality comes by the knowledge of
self in the Non-birth and Non-becoming and of the changeless spirit
within us: the realisation of time-immortality comes by the knowledge
of self in the birth and Becoming and is translated into a sense of the
persistent identity of the soul through all changes of mind and life and
body; this too is not a mere survival, it is timelessness translated into
the Time manifestation. By the first realisation we become free from
obscuring subjection to the chain of birth and death, that supreme object
of so many Indian disciplines; by the second realisation added to the
first we are able to possess freely, with right knowledge, without igno-
rance, without bondage by the chain of our actions, the experiences of
the spirit in its successions of time-eternity. A realisation of timeless
existence by itself might not include the truth of that experience of
persistent self in eternal Time ; a realisation of survival of death by itself
might still give room for a beginning or end to our existence. But, in
either realisation truly envisaged as side and other side of one truth,
to exist consciously in eternity and not in the bondage of the hour and
the succession of the moments is the substance of the change: so to exist
is a first condition of the divine consciousness and the divine life. To
possess and govern from that inner eternity of being the course and
process of the becoming is the second, the dynamic condition with, as
its practical outcome, a spiritual self-possession and self-mastery. These
changes are possible only by a withdrawal from our absorbing material
preoccupation, — that does not necessitate a rejection or neglect of the
life in the body, — and a constant living on the inner and higher planes
of the mind and the spirit. For the heightening of our consciousness into
its spiritual principle is effectuated by an ascent and a stepping back
inward — both these movements are essential — out of our transient life

TOWARDS THE SEVENFOLD KNOWLEDGE 659

from moment to moment into the eternal life of our immortal conscious-
ness; but with it there comes also a widening of our range of conscious-
ness and field of action in time and a taking up and a higher use of our
mental, our vital, our corporeal existence. There arises a knowledge of
our being, no longer as a consciousness dependent on the body, but as
an eternal spirit which uses all the worlds and all lives for various self-
experience; we see it to be a spiritual entity possessed of a continuous
soul-life perpetually developing its activities through successive physical
existences, a being determining its own becoming. In that knowledge,
not ideative but felt in our very substance, it becomes possible to live,
not as slaves of a blind Karmic impulsion, but as masters — subject only
to the Divine within us — of our being and nature.

At the same time we get rid of the egoistic ignorance; for so long
as we are at any point bound by that, the divine life must either be
unattainable or imperfect in its self-expression. For the ego is a falsifica-
tion 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 individual experience and prevents us from
living as the universal individual : it is a separation from God, our high-
est Self, who is the one Self in all existences and the divine Inhabitant
within us. As our consciousness changes into the height and depth and
wideness of the spirit, the ego can no longer survive there: it is too small
and feeble to subsist in that vastness and dissolves into it; for it exists
by its limits and perishes by the loss of its limits. The being breaks out
of its imprisonment in a separated individuality, becomes universal,
assumes a cosmic consciousness in which it identifies itself with the self
and spirit, the life, the mind, the body of all beings. Or it breaks out
upward into a supreme pinnacle and infinity and eternity of self-exist-
ence independent of its cosmic or its individual existence. The ego col-
lapses, losing its wall of separation, into the cosmic immensity; or it falls
into nothingness, unable to breathe in the heights of the spiritual ether.
If something of its movements remains by habit of Nature, yet these
also fall away and are replaced by a new impersonal-personal seeing,
feeling, action. This disappearance of the ego does not bring with it the
destruction of our true individuality, our spiritual existence, for that was
always universal and one with the Transcendence; but there is a trans-
formation which replaces the separative ego by the Purusha, a conscious
face and figure of the universal being and a self and power of the tran-
scendent Divine in cosmic Nature.

In the same movement, by the very awakening into the spirit, there

660 THE LIFE DIVINE

is a dissolution of the cosmic ignorance; for we have the knowledge of
ourselves as our timeless immutable self possessing itself in cosmos and
beyond cosmos: this knowledge becomes the basis of the Divine Play in
time, reconciles the one and the many, the eternal unity and the eternal
multiplicity, reunites the soul with God and discovers the Divine in the
universe. It is by this realisation that we can approach the Absolute as
the source of all circumstances and relations, possess the world in our-
selves in an utmost wideness and in a conscient dependence on its source,
and by so taking it up raise it and realise through it the absolute values
that converge into the Absolute. If our self-knowledge is thus made
complete in all its essentials, our practical ignorance which in its extreme
figures itself as wrong-doing, suffering, falsehood, error and is the cause
of all life's confusions and discords, will yield its place to the right will
of self-knowledge and its false or imperfect values recede before the
divine values of the true Consciousness-Force and Ananda. For right
consciousness, right action and right being, not in the imperfect human
sense of our petty moralities but in the large and luminous movement
of a divine living, the conditions are union with God, unity with all
beings, a life governed and formed from within outwards in which the
source of all thought, will and action shall be the Spirit working
through the truth and the divine law which are not built and constructed
by the mind of Ignorance but are self-existent and spontaneous in their
self-fulfilment, not so much a law as the truth acting in its own con-
sciousness and in a free luminous plastic automatic process of its knowl-
edge.

This would seem to be the method and the result of the conscious
spiritual evolution; a transformation of the life of the Ignorance into
the divine life of the truth-conscious spirit, a change from the mental
into a spiritual and supramental way of being, a self-expansion out of
the sevenfold ignorance into the sevenfold knowledge. This transforma-
tion would be the natural completion of the upward process of Nature
as it heightens the forces of consciousness from principle to higher prin-
ciple until the highest, the spiritual principle, becomes expressed and
dominant in her, takes up cosmic and individual existence on the lower
planes into its truth and transforms all into a conscious manifestation
of the Spirit. The true individual, the spiritual being, emerges, individual
yet universal, universal yet self-transcendent: life no longer appears as
a formation of things and an action of being created by the separative
Ignorance.

CHAPTER XX

THE PHILOSOPHY OF REBIRTH

An end have these bodies of an embodied soul that is
eternal; it is not born nor dies nor is it that having been it
will not be again. It is unborn, ancient, ever-lasting; it is
not slain with the slaying of the body. As a man casts from
him his worn-out garments and takes others that are new,
so the embodied being casts off its bodies and joins itself to
others that are new. Certain is the death of that which is
born and certain is the birth of that which dies.

Gita}

There is a birth and growth of the self. According to
his actions the embodied being assumes forms successively
in many places ; many forms gross and subtle he assumes by
force of his own quahties of nature.

Swetaswatara Upanishad?

BIRTH is the first spiritual mystery of the physical universe, death
is the second which gives its double point of perplexity to the mys-
tery of birth; for life, which would otherwise be a self-evident fact of
existence, becomes itself a mystery by virtue of these two which seem
to be its beginning and its end and yet in a thousand ways betray them-
selves as neither of these things, but rather intermediate stages in an
occult processus of life. At first sight birth might seem to be a constant
outburst of life in a general death, a persistent circumstance in the uni-
versal lifelessness of Matter. On a closer examination it begins to be
more probable that life is something involved in Matter or even an
inherent power of the Energy that creates Matter, but able to appear
only when it gets the necessary conditions for the affirmation of its
characteristic phenomena and for an appropriate self-organisation. But
in the birth of life there is something more that participates in the
emergence, — there is an element which is no longer material, a strong
upsurging of some flame of soul, a first evident vibration of the spirit.
All the known circumstances and results of birth presuppose an
unknown before, and there is a suggestion of universality, a will of per-

^11. l8, 20, 22, 27. *V. II, 12.

661

662 THE LIFE DIVINE

sistence of life, an inconclusiveness in death which seem to point to an
unknown hereafter. What were we before birth and what are we after
death, are the questions, the answer of the one depending upon that of
the other, which the intellect of man has put to itself from the begin-
ning without even now resting in any final solution. The intellect indeed
can hardly give the final answer: for that must in its very nature lie
beyond the data of the physical consciousness and memory, whether of
the race or the individual, yet these are the sole data which the intellect
is in the habit of consulting with something like confidence. In this
poverty of materials and this incertitude it wheels from one hypothesis
to another and calls each in turn a conclusion. Moreover, the solution
depends upon the nature, source and object of the cosmic movement, and
as we determine these, so we shall have to conclude about birth and life
and death, the before and the hereafter.

The first question is whether the before and the after are purely
physical and vital or in some way, and more predominantly, mental and
spiritual. If Matter were the principle of the universe, as the materialist
alleges, if the truth of things were to be found in the first formula ar-
rived at by Bhrigu, son of Varuna, when he meditated upon the eternal
Brahman, ''Matter is the Eternal, for from Matter all beings are born
and by Matter all beings exist and to Matter all beings depart and
return," then no farther questioning would be possible. The before of
our bodies would be a gathering of their constituents out of various
physical elements through the instrumentality of the seed and food and
under the influence perhaps of occult but always material energies, and
the before of our conscious being a preparation by heredity or by some
other physically vital or physically mental operation in universal Matter
specialising its action and building the individual through the bodies of
our parents, through seed and gene and chromosome. The after of the
body would be a dissolution into the material elements and the after of
the conscious being a relapse into Matter with some survival of the
effects of its activity in the general mind and life of humanity: this last
quite illusory survival would be our only chance of immortality. But
since the universality of Matter can no longer be held as giving any
sufficient explanation of the existence of Mind, — and indeed Matter
itself can no longer be explained by Matter alone, for it does not appear
to be self-existent, — we are thrown back from this easy and obvious solu-
tion to other hypotheses.

One of these is the old religious myth and dogmatic mystery of a

THE PHILOSOPHY OF REBIRTH 663

God who creates constantly immortal souls out of his own being or else
by his "breath" or life-power entering, it is to be presumed, into mate-
rial Nature or rather into the bodies he creates in it and vivifying them
internally with a spiritual principle. As a mystery of faith this can hold
and need not be examined, for the mysteries of faith are intended to be
beyond question and scrutiny; but for reason and philosophy it lacks
convincingness and does not fit into the known order of things. For it
involves two paradoxes which need more justification before they can
even be accorded any consideration; first, the hourly creation of beings
who have a beginning in time but no end in time, and are, moreover,
born by the birth of the body but do not end by the death of the body;
secondly, their assumption of a ready-made mass of combined qualities,
virtues, vices, capacities, defects, temperamental and other advantages
and handicaps, not made by them at all through growth, but made for
them by arbitrary fiat, — if not by law of heredity, — yet for which and
for the perfect use of which they are held responsible by their Creator.
We may maintain — ^provisionally, at least, — certain things as le-
gitimate presumptions of the philosophic reason and fairly throw the
burden of disproving them on their denier. Among these postulates is
the principle that that which has no end must necessarily have had no
beginning; all that begins or is created has an end by cessation of the
process that created and maintains it or the dissolution of the materials
of which it is compounded or the end of the function for which it came
into being. If there is an exception to this law, it must be by a descent
of spirit into matter animating matter with divinity or giving matter its
own immortality; but the spirit itself which so descends is immortal, not
made or created. If the soul was created to animate the body, if it de-
pended on the body for its coming into existence, it can have no reason
or basis for existence after the disappearance of the body. It is naturally
to be supposed that the breath or power given for the animation of the
body would return at its final dissolution to its Maker. If, on the con-
trary, it still persists as an immortal embodied being, there must be a
subtle or psychic body in which it continues, and it is fairly certain that
this psychic body and its inhabitant must be pre-existent to the material
vehicle: it is irrational to suppose that they were created originally to
inhabit that brief and perishable form ; an immortal being cannot be the
outcome of so ephemeral an incident in creation. If the soul remains but
in a disembodied condition, then it can have had no original dependence
on a body for its existence; it must have subsisted as an unembodied

664 THE LIFE DIVINE

spirit before birth even as it persists in its disembodied spiritual entity
after death.

Again, we can assume that where we see in Time a certain stage
of development, there must have been a past to that development.
Therefore, if the soul enters this life with a certain development of per-
sonality, it must have prepared it in other precedent lives here or else-
where. Or, if it only takes up a ready-made life and personality not
prepared by it, prepared perhaps by a physical, vital and mental hered-
ity, it must itself be something quite independent of that life and per-
sonality, something which is only fortuitously connected with the mind
and body and cannot therefore be really affected by what is done or
developed in this mental and bodily living. If the soul is real and im-
mortal, not a constructed being or figure of being, it must also be eternal,
beginningless in the past even as endless in the future; but, if eternal, it
must be either a changeless self unaffected by life and its terms or a
timeless Purusha, an eternal and spiritual Person manifesting or causing
in time a stream of changing personality. If it is such a Person, it can
only manifest this stream of personality in a world of birth and death
by the assumption of successive bodies, — in a word, by constant or by
repeated rebirth into the forms of Nature.

But the immortality or eternity of the soul does not at once impose
itself, even if we reject the explanation of all things by eternal Matter.
For we have also the hypothesis of the creation of a temporary or appar-
ent soul by some power of the original Unity from which all things
began, by which they live and into which they cease. On one side, we
can erect upon the foundation of certain modern ideas or discoveries the
theory of a cosmic Inconscient creating a temporary soul, a consciousness
which after a brief play is extinguished and goes back into the Incon-
scient. Or there may be an eternal Becoming, which manifests itself in a
cosmic Life-force with the appearance of Matter as one objective end of
its operations and the appearance of Mind as the other subjective end,
the interaction of these two phenomena of Life-force creating our human
existence. On the other side, we have the old theory of a sole-existing
Superconscient, an eternal unmodifiable Being which admits or creates
by Maya an illusion of individual soul-life in this world of phenomenal
Mind and Matter, both of them ultimately unreal, — even if they have
or assume a temporary and phenomenal reality, — since one unmodifiable
and eternal Self or Spirit is the only entity. Or we have the Buddhist
theory of a Nihil or Nirvana and, somehow imposed upon that, an

THE PHILOSOPHY OF REBIRTH 665

eternal action or energy of successive becoming, Karma, which creates
the illusion of a persistent self or soul by a constant continuity of asso-
ciations, ideas, memories, sensations, images. In their effect upon the
life problem all these three explanations are practically one; for even
the Superconscient is for the purposes of the universal action an equiva-
lent of the Inconscient; it can be aware only of its own unmodifiable self-
existence: the creation of a world of individual beings by Maya is an
imposition on this self-existence; it takes place, perhaps, in a sort of
self-absorbed sleep of consciousness, susupti,^ out of which yet all active
consciousness and modification of phenomenal becoming emerge, just as
in the modern theory our consciousness is an impermanent development
out of the Inconscient. In all three theories the apparent soul or spiritual
individuality of the creature is not immortal in the sense of eternity, but
has a beginning and an end in Time, is a creation by Maya or by Nature-
Force or cosmic Action out of the Inconscient or Superconscient, and is
therefore impermanent in its existence. In all three rebirth is either un-
necessary or else illusory; it is either the prolongation by repetition of an
illusion, or it is an additional revolving wheel among the many w^heels
of the complex machinery of the Becoming, or it is excluded since a single
birth is all that can be asked for by a conscious being fortuitously engen-
dered as part of an inconscient creation.

In these views, whether we suppose the one Eternal Existence to be
a vital Becoming or an immutable and unmodifiable spiritual Being or a
nameless and formless Non-being, that which we call the soul can be
only a changing mass or stream of phenomena of consciousness w^hich
has come into existence in the sea of real or illusory becoming and will
cease to exist there, — or, it may be, it is a temporary spiritual sub-
stratum, a conscious reflection of the Superconscient Eternal w^hich by
its presence supports the mass of phenomena. It is not eternal, and its
only immortality is a greater or less continuity in the Becoming. It is not
a real and always existent Person who maintains and experiences the
stream or mass of phenomena. That which supports them, that which
really and always exists, is either the one eternal Becoming or the one
eternal and impersonal Being or the continual stream of Energy in its
workings. For a theory of this kind it is not indispensable that a psychic
entity always the same should persist and assume body after body, form
after form, until it is dissolved at last by some process annulling alto-

^Prajna of the Mandukya Upanishad, the Self situated in deep sleep, is the
lord and creator of things.

666 THE LIFE DIVINE

gether the original impetus which created this cycle. It is quite possible
that as each form is developed, a consciousness develops corresponding
to the form, and as the form dissolves, the corresponding consciousness
dissolves with it; the One which forms all, alone endures for ever. Or,
as the body is gathered out of the general elements of Matter and begins
its life with birth and ends with death, so the consciousness may be
developed out of the general elements of mind and equally begin with
birth and end with death. Here too, the One who supplies by Maya or
otherwise the force which creates the elements, is the sole reality that
endures. In none of these theories of existence is rebirth an absolute
necessity or an inevitable result of the theory.*

As a matter of fact, however, we find a great difference; for the
old theories affirm, the modern denies rebirth as a part of the universal
process. Modern thought starts from the physical body as the basis of
our existence and recognises the reality of no other world except this
material universe. What it sees here is a mental consciousness associated
with the life of the body, giving in its birth no sign of previous individual
existence and leaving in its end no sign of subsequent individual exist-
ence. What was before birth is the material energy with its seed of life,
or at best an energy of life-force, which persists in the seed transmitted
by the parents and gives, by its mysterious infusion of past develop-
ments into that trifling vehicle, a particular mental and physical stamp
to the new individual mind and body thus strangely created. What re-
mains after death is the same material energy or life-force persisting in
the seed transmitted to the children and active for the farther develop-
ment of the mental and physical life carried with it. Nothing is left of
us except what we so transmit to others or what the Energy which
shaped the individual by its pre-existent and its surrounding action, by
birth and by environment, may take as the result of his life and works
into its subsequent action ; whatever may help by chance or by physical
law to build the mental and vital constituents and environment of other
individuals, that alone can have any survival. Behind both the mental
and the physical phenomena there is perhaps a universal Life of which
we are individualised, evolutionary and phenomenal becomings. This
universal Life creates a real world and real beings, but the conscious

* In the Buddhist theory rebirth is imperative because Karma compels it ; not
a soul, but Karma is the link of an apparently continuing consciousness, — for the
consciousness changes from moment to moment: there is this apparent continuity
of consciousness, but there is no real immortal soul taking birth and passing through
the death of the body to be reborn in another body.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF REBIRTH 667

personality in these beings is not, or at least it need not be, the sign or
the shape of consciousness of an eternal nor even of a persistent soul or
supraphysical Person: there is nothing in this formula of existence com-
pelling us to believe in a psychic entity that outlasts the death of the
body. There is here no reason and little room for the admission of re-
birth as a part of the scheme of things.

But what if it were found with the increase of our knowledge, as
certain researches and discoveries seem to presage, that the dependence
of the mental being or the psychic entity in us on the body is not so
complete as we at first naturally conclude it to be from the study of the
data of physical existence and the physical universe alone? What if it
were found that the human personality survives the death of the body
and moves between other planes and this material universe? The preva-
lent modern idea of a temporary conscious existence would then have
to broaden itself and admit a Life that has a wider range than the physi-
cal universe and admit too a personal individuality not dependent on
the material body. It might have practically to readopt the ancient idea
of a subtle form or body inhabitated by a psychic entity. A psychic or
soul entity, carrying with it the mental consciousness, or, if there be
no such original soul, then the evolved and persistent mental individual
would continue after death in this subtle persistent form, which must
have been either created for it before this birth or by the birth itself or
during the life. For either a psychic entity pre-exists in other worlds in
a subtle form and comes from there with it to its brief earthly sojourn,
or the soul develops here in the material world itself, and with it a
psychic body is developed in the course of Nature and persists after
death in other worlds or by reincarnation here. These would be the two
possible alternatives.

An evolving universal Life may have developed on earth the grow-
ing personality that has now become ourselves, before it entered a hu-
man body at all; the soul in us may have evolved in lower life-shapes
before man was created. In that case, our personality has previously
inhabited animal forms, and the subtle body would be a plastic forma-
tion carried from birth to birth but adapting itself to whatever physical
shape the soul inhabits. Or the evolving Life may be able to build a
personality capable of survival, but only in the human form when that
is created. This would happen by the force of a sudden growth of mental
consciousness, and at the same time a sheath of subtle mind-substance
might develop and help to individualise this mental consciousness and

668 THE LIFE DIVINE

would then function as an inner body, just as the gross physical form by
its organisation at once individualises and houses the animal mind and
life. On the former supposition, we must admit that the animal too sur-
vives the dissolution of the physical body and has some kind of soul
formation which after death occupies other animal forms on earth and
finally a human body. For there is little likelihood that the animal soul
passes beyond earth and enters other planes of life than the physical
and constantly returns here until it is ready for the human incarnation ;
the animal's conscious individualisation does not seem sufficient to bear
such a transfer or to adapt itself to an other-worldly existence. On the
second supposition, the power thus to survive the death of the physical
body in other states of existence would only arrive with the human stage
of the evolution. If, indeed, the soul is not such a constructed personality
evolved by Life, but a persistent unevolving reality with a terrestrial life
and body as its necessary field, the theory of rebirth in the sense of
Pythagorean transmigration would have to be admitted. But if it is a
persistent evolving entity capable of passing beyond the terrestrial stage,
then the Indian idea of a passage to other worlds and a return to ter-
restrial birth would become possible and highly probable. But it would
not be inevitable; for it might be supposed that the human personality,
once capable of attaining to other planes, need not return from them:
it would naturally, in the absence of some greater compelling reason,
pursue its existence upon the higher plane to which it had arisen; it
would have finished with the terrestrial life-evolution. Only if faced
with actual evidence of a return to earth, would a larger supposition be
compulsory and the admission of a repeated rebirth in human forms
become inevitable.

But even then the developing vitalistic theory need not spiritualise
itself, need not admit the real existence of a soul or its immortality or
eternity. It might regard the personality still as a phenomenal creation
of the universal Life by the interaction of life consciousness and physical
form and force, but with a wider, more variable and subtler action of
both upon each other and another history than it had at first seen to be
possible. It might even arrive at a sort of vitalistic Buddhism, admitting
Karma, but admitting it only as the action of a universal Life- force; it
would admit as one of its results the continuity of the stream of person-
ality in rebirth by mental association, but might deny any real self for
the individual or any eternal being other than this ever-active vital Be-
coming. On the other hand, it might, obeying a turn of thought which

THE PHILOSOPHY OF REBIRTH 669

is now beginning to gain a little in strength, admit a universal Self or
cosmic Spirit as the primal reality and Life as its power or agent and
so arrive at a form of spiritualised vital Monism. In this theory too a
law of rebirth would be possible but not inevitable; it might be a phe-
nomenal fact, an actual law of life, but it would not be a logical result
of the theory of being and its inevitable consequence.

Adwaita of the Mayavada, like Buddhism, started with the already
accepted belief — part of the received stock of an antique knowledge — of
supraphysical planes and worlds and a commerce between them and
ours which determined a passage from earth and, though this seems to
have been a less primitive discovery, a return to earth of the human per-
sonality. At any rate their thought had behind it an ancient perception
and even experience, or at least an age-long tradition, of a before and
after for the personality which was not confined to the experience of the
physical universe ; for they based themselves on a view of self and world
which already regarded a supraphysical consciousness as the primary
phenomenon and physical being as only a secondary and dependent phe-
nomenon. It was around these data that they had to determine the
nature of the eternal Reality and the origin of the phenomenal becom-
ing. Therefore they admitted the passage of the personality from this
to other worlds and its return into form of life upon earth; but the
rebirth thus admitted was not in the Buddhistic view a real rebirth of
a real spiritual Person into the forms of material existence. In the later
Adwaita view the spiritual reality was there, but its apparent individual-
ity and therefore its birth and rebirth were part of a cosmic illusion, a
deceptive but effective construction of universal Maya.

In Buddhistic thought the existence of the Self was denied, and
rebirth could only mean a continuity of the ideas, sensations and actions
which constituted a fictitious individual moving between different worlds,
— let us say, between differently organised planes of idea and sensation ;
for, in fact, it is only the conscious continuity of the flux that creates a
phenomenon of self and a phenomenon of personality. In the Adwaitic
Mayavada there was the admission of a Jivatman, an individual self,
and even of a real self of the individual;^ but this concession to our
normal language and ideas ends by being only apparent. For it turns out
that there is no real and eternal individual, no "I" or "you," and there-

^ The Self in this view is one, it cannot be many or multiply itself ; there can-
not therefore be any true individual, only at most a one Self omnipresent and
animating each mind and body with the idea of an "I."

670 THE LIFE DIVINE

fore there can be no real self of the individual, even no true universal
self, but only a Self apart from the universe, ever unborn, ever unmodi-
fied, ever unaffected by the mutations of phenomena. Birth, life, death,
the whole mass of individual and cosmic experience, become in the
last resort no more than aii illusion or a temporary phenomenon; even
bondage and release can be only such an illusion, a part of temporal
phenomena : they amount only to the conscious continuity of the illusory
experiences of the ego, itself a creation of the great Illusion, and the
cessation of the continuity and the consciousness into the superconscious-
ness of That which alone was, is and ever will be, or rather which has
nothing to do with Time, is for ever unborn, timeless and ineffable.

Thus while in the vitalistic view of things there is a real universe
and a real though brief temporary becoming of individual life which,
even though there is no ever-enduring Purusha, yet gives a considerable
importance to our individual experience and actions, — for these are truly
effective in a real becoming, — in the Mayavada theory these things have
no real importance or true effect, but only something like a dream-con-
sequence. For even release takes place only in the cosmic dream or hal-
lucination by the recognition of the illusion and the cessation of the
individualised mind and body; in reality, there is no one bound and no
one released, for the sole-existent Self is untouched by these illusions of
the ego. To escape from the all-destroying sterility which would be the
logical result, we have to lend a practical reality, however false it may
be eventually, to this dream-consequence and an immense importance
to our bondage and individual release, even though the life of the indi-
vidual is phenomenal only and to the one real Self both the bondage and
the release are and cannot but be non-existent. In this compulsory con-
cession to the tyrannous falsehood of Maya the sole true importance of
life and experience must lie in the measure in which they prepare for
the negation of life, for the self-elimination of the individual, for the
end of the cosmic illusion.

This, however, is an extreme view and consequence of the monistic
thesis, and the older Adwaita Vedantism starting from the Upanishads
does not go so far. It admits an actual and temporal becoming of the
Eternal and therefore a real universe; the individual too assumes a
sufficient reality, for each individual is in himself the Eternal who has
assumed name and form and supports through him the experiences of
life turning on an ever-circling wheel of birth in the manifestation. The
wheel is kept in motion by the desire of the individual, which becomes

THE PHILOSOPHY OF REBIRTH 67I

the effective cause of rebirth and by the mind's turning away from the
knowledge of the eternal self to the preoccupations of the temporal be-
coming. With the cessation of this desire and of this ignorance, the
Eternal in the individual draws away from the mutations of individual
personality and experience into his timeless, impersonal and immutable
being.

But this reality of the individual is quite temporal; it has no endur-
ing foundation, not even a perpetual recurrence in Time. Rebirth, though
a very important actuality in this account of the universe, is not an in-
evitable consequence of the relation between individuality and the pur-
pose of the manifestation. For the manifestation seems to have no
purpose except the will of the Eternal towards world-creation and it
can end only by that will's withdrawal: this cosmic will could work
itself out without any machinery of rebirth and the individual's desire
maintaining it; for his desire can be only a spring of the machinery, it
could not be the cause or the necessary condition of cosmic existence,
since he is himself in this view a result of the creation and not in exist-
ence prior to the Becoming. The will to creation could then accomplish
itself through a temporary assumption of individuality in each name
and form, a single life of many impermanent individuals. There would
be a self-shaping of the one consciousness in correspondence with the
type of each created being, but it could very well begin in each individual
body with the appearance of the physical form and end with its cessa-
tion. Individual would follow individual as wave follows wave, the sea
remaining always the same;^ each formation of conscious being would
surge up from the universal, roll for its allotted time and then sink back
into the Silence. The necessity for this purpose of an individualised con-
sciousness persistently continuous, assuming name after name and form
after form and moving between different planes backward and forward,
is not apparent and, even as a possibility, does not strongly impose
itself; still less is there any room for an evolutionary progress inevitably

®Dr. Schweitzer in his book on Indian thought asserts that this was the real
sense of the Upanishadic teachings and rebirth was a later invention. But there
are numerous important passages in almost all the Upanishads positively affirming
rebirth and, in any case, the Upanishads admit the survival of the personahty
after death and its passage into other worlds which is incompatible with this in-
terpretation. If there is survival in other worlds and also a final destiny of lib-
eration into the Brahman for souls embodied here, rebirth imposes itself, and there
is no reason to suppose that it was a later theory. The writer has e\-idently been
moved by the associations of Western philosophy to read a merely pantheistic sense
into the more subtle and complex thought of the ancient Vedanta.

672 THE LIFE DIVINE

pursued from form to higher form such as must be supposed by a theory
of rebirth that affirms the involution and evolution of the Spirit in Mat-
ter as the significant formula of our terrestrial existence.

It is conceivable that so the Eternal may have actually chosen to
manifest or rather to conceal himself in the body; he may have willed
to become or to appear as an individual passing from birth to death and
from death to new life in a cycle of persistent and recurrent human and
animal existence. The One Being personalised would pass through vari-
ous forms of becoming at fancy or according to some law of the conse-
quences of action, till the close came by an enlightenment, a return to
Oneness, a withdrawal of the Sole and Identical from that particular
individualisation. But such a cycle would have no original or final deter-
mining Truth which would give it any significance. There is nothing for
which it would be necessary; it would be purely a play, a Lila. But if it
is once admitted that the Spirit has involved itself in the Inconscience
and is manifesting itself in the individual being by an evolutionary
gradation, then the whole process assumes meaning and consistence ; the
progressive ascent of the individual becomes a key-note of this cosmic
significance, and the rebirth of the soul in the body becomes a natural
and unavoidable consequence of the truth of the Becoming and its in-
herent law. Rebirth is an indispensable machinery for the working out
of a spiritual evolution; it is the only possible effective condition, the
obvious dynamic process of such a manifestation in the material universe.

Our explanation of the evolution in Matter is that the universe is
a self-creative process of a supreme Reality whose presence makes spirit
the substance of things, — all things are there as the spirit's powers and
means and forms of manifestation. An infinite existence, an infinite con-
sciousness, an infinite force and will, an infinite delight of being is the
Reality secret behind the appearances of the universe; its divine Super-
mind or Gnosis has arranged the cosmic order, but arranged it indirectly
through the three subordinate and limiting terms of which we are con-
scious here. Mind, Life and Matter. The material universe is the lowest
stage of a downward plunge of the manifestation, an involution of the
manifested being of this triune Reality into an apparent nescience of
itself, that which we now call the Inconscient; but out of this nescience
the evolution of that manifested being into a recovered self-awareness
was from the very first inevitable. It was inevitable because that which
is involved, must evolve ; for it is not only there as an existence, a force
hidden in its apparent opposite and every such force must in its inmost

THE PHILOSOPHY OF REBIRTH 673

nature be moved to find itself, to realise itself, to release itself into play,
but it is the reality of that which conceals it, it is the self which the
Nescience has lost and which therefore it must be the whole secret
meaning, the constant drift of its action to seek for and recover. It is
through the conscious individual being that this recovery is possible;
it is in him that the evolving consciousness becomes organised and
capable of awaking to its own Reality. The immense importance of the
individual being, which increases as he rises in the scale is the most
remarkable and significant fact of a universe which started without con-
sciousness and without individuality in an undifferentiated Nescience.
This importance can only be justified if the Self as individual is no less
real than the Self as cosmic Being or Spirit and both are powers of the
Eternal. It is only so that can be explained the necessity for the growth
of the individual and his discovery of himself as a condition for the
discovery of the cosmic Self and Consciousness and of the supreme
Reality. If we adopt this solution, this is the first result, the reality of
the persistent individual; but from that first consequence the other
result follows, that rebirth of some kind is no longer a possible machinery
which may or may not be accepted, it becomes a necessity, an inevitable
outcome of the root nature of our existence.

For it is no longer sufficient to suppose an illusory or temporary
individual, created in each form by the play of consciousness; individu-
ality can no longer be conceived as an accompaniment of play of con-
sciousness in figure of body which may or may not survive the form,
may or may not prolong its false continuity of self from form to form,
from life to life, but which certainly need not do it. In this world what
we seem at first to see is individual replacing individual without any
continuity, the form dissolving, the false or transient individuality dis-
solving with it, while the universal Energy or some universal Being
alone remains for ever; that might very well be the whole principle of
cosmic manifestation. But if the individual is a persistent reality, an
eternal portion or power of the Eternal, if his growth of consciousness is
the means by which the Spirit in things discloses its being, the cosmos
reveals itself as a conditioned manifestation of the play of the eternal
One in the being of Sachchidananda with the eternal ISIany. Then,
secure behind all the changings of our personality, upholding the stream
of its mutations, there must be a true Person, a real spiritual Individual,
a true Purusha. The One extended in universality exists in each being
and affirms himself in this individuality of himself. In the individual he

674 THE LIFE DIVINE

discloses his total existence by oneness with all in the universality. In
the individual he discloses too his transcendence as the Eternal in whom
all the universal unity is founded. This trinity of self-manifestation, this
prodigious Lila of the manifold Identity, this magic of Maya or protean
miracle of the conscious truth of being of the Infinite, is the luminous
revelation which emerges by a slow evolution from the original Incon-
science.

If there were no need of self-finding but only an eternal enjoyment
of this play of the being of Sachchidananda, — and such an eternal enjoy-
ment is the nature of certain supreme states of conscious existence, —
then evolution and rebirth need not have come into operation. But there
has been an involution of this unity into the dividing Mind, a plunge into
self-oblivion by which the ever-present sense of the complete oneness
is lost, and the play of separative difference — ^phenomenal, because the
real unity in difference remains unabridged behind, — comes into the
forefront as a dominant reality. This play of difference has found its
utmost term of the sense of division by the precipitation of the dividing
Mind into a form of body in which it becomes conscious of itself as a
separate ego. A dense and solid basis has been laid for this play of divi-
sion in a world of separative forms of Matter by an involution of the
active self-conscience of Sachchidananda into a phenomenal Nescience.
It is this foundation in Nescience that makes the division secure be-
cause it imperatively opposes a return to the consciousness of unity; but
still, though effectively obstructive, it is phenomenal and terminable
because within it, above it, supporting it is the all-conscient Spirit and
the apparent Nescience turns out to be only a concentration, an ex-
clusive action of consciousness tranced into self-forgetfulness by an
abysmal plunge into the absorption of the formative and creative mate-
rial process. In a phenomenal universe so created, the separative form
becomes the foundation and the starting-point of all its life action;
therefore the individual Purusha in working out its cosmic relations with
the One has in this physical world to base himself upon the form, to
assume a body; it is the body that he must make his own foundation
and the starting-point fot his development of the life and mind and
spirit in the physical existence. That assumption of body we call birth,
and in it only can take place here the development of self and the play
of relations between the individual and the universal and all other indi-
viduals ; in it only can there be the growth by a progressive development
of our conscious being towards a supreme recovery of unity with God

THE PHILOSOPHY OF REBIRTH 67$

and with all in God: all the sum of what we call Life in the physical
world is a progress of the soul and proceeds by birth into the body and
has that for its fulcrum, its condition of action and its condition of evo-
lutionary persistence.

Birth then is a necessity of the manifestation of the Purusha on
the physical plane; but his birth, whether the human or any other, can-
not be in this world-order an isolated accident or a sudden excursion of a
soul into physicality without any preparing past to it or any fulfilling
hereafter. In a world of involution and evolution, not of physical form
only, but of conscious being through life and mind to spirit, such an iso-
lated assumption of life in the human body could not be the rule of the
individual soul's existence ; it would be a quite meaningless and inconse-
quential arrangement, a freak for which the nature and system of things
here have no place, a contrary violence which would break the rhythm
of the Spirit's self-manifestation. The intrusion of such a rule of indi-
vidual soul-life into an evolutionary spiritual progression would make it
an effect without cause and a cause without effect; it would be a frag-
mentary present without a past or a future. The life of the individual
must have the same rhythm of significance, the same law of progression
as the cosmic life ; its place in that rhythm cannot be a stray purposeless
intervention, it must be an abiding instrumentation of the cosmic pur-
pose. Neither in such an order can we explain an isolated advent, a one
birth of the soul in the human body which would be its first and last
experience of the kind, by a previous existence in other worlds with a
future before it in yet other fields of experience. For here life upon earth,
life in the physical universe is not and cannot be a casual perch for the
wanderings of the soul from world to world; it is a great and slow devel-
opment needing, as we now know, incalculable spaces of Time for its
evolution. Human life is itself only a term in a graded series, through
which the secret Spirit in the universe develops gradually his purpose and
works it out finally through the enlarging and ascending individual
soul-consciousness in the body. This ascent can only take place by re-
birth within the ascending order; an individual visit coming across it
and progressing on some other line elsewhere could not fit into the system
of this evolutionary existence.

Nor is the human soul, the human individual, a free wanderer
capriciously or lightly hastening from field to field according to its un-
fettered choice or according to its free and spontaneously variable action
and result of action. That is a radiant thought of pure spiritual liberty

676 THE LIFE DIVINE

which may have its truth in planes beyond or in an eventual release, but
is not true at first of the earth-life, of life in the physical universe. The
human birth in this world is on its spiritual side a complex of two ele-
ments, a spiritual Person and a soul of personality; the former is man's
eternal being, the latter is his cosmic and mutable being. As the spiritual
impersonal person he is one in his nature and being with the freedom of
Sachchidananda who has here consented to or willed his involution in the
Nescience for a certain round of soul-experience, impossible otherwise,
and presides secretly over its evolution. As the soul of personality he is
himself part of that long development of the soul-experience in the forms
of Nature; his own evolution must follow the laws and the lines of the
universal evolution. As a spirit he is one with the Transcendence which
is immanent in the world and comprehensive of it; as a soul he is at once
one with and part of the universality of Sachchidananda self-expressed
in the world: his self-expression must go through the stages of the cosmic
expression, his soul-experience follow the revolutions of the wheel of
Brahman in the universe.

The universal Spirit in things involved in the Nescience of the
physical universe evolves its nature self in a succession of physical forms
up the graded series of Matter, Life, Mind and Spirit. It emerges first as
a secret soul in material forms quite subject on the surface to the
nescience; it develops as a soul still secret but about to emerge in vital
forms that stand on the borders between nescience and the partial light
of consciousness which is our ignorance; it develops still farther as the
initially conscient soul in the animal mind and, finally, as the more out-
wardly conscious, but not yet fully conscient soul in man: the conscious-
ness is there throughout in our occult parts of being, the development
is in the manifesting Nature. This evolutionary development has a uni-
versal as well as an individual aspect: the Universal develops the grades
of its being and the ordered variation of the universality of itself in the
series of its evolved forms of being; the individual soul follows the line
of this cosmic series and manifests what is prepared in the universality
of the Spirit. The universal Man, the cosmic Purusha in humanity, is
developing in the human race the power that has grown into humanity
from below it and shall yet grow to supermind and spirit and become
the Godhead in man who is aware of his true and integral self and the
divine universality of his nature. The individual must have followed this
line of development; he must have presided over a soul-experience in
the lower forms of life before he took up the human evolution: as the

THE PHILOSOPHY OF REBIRTH 677

One was capable of assuming in its universality these lower forms of
the plant and animal, so must the individual, now human, have been
capable of assuming them in his previous stages of existence. He now
appears as a human soul, the Spirit accepting the inner and outer form
of humanity, but he is not limited by this form any more than he was
limited by the plant or animal forms previously assumed by him; he
can pass on from it to a greater self-expression in a higher scale of
Nature.

To suppose otherwise would be to suppose that the spirit which
now presides over the human soul-experience was originally formed by
a human mentality and the human body, exists by that and cannot exist
apart from it, cannot ever go below or above it. In fact, it would then
be reasonable to suppose that it is not immortal but has come into
existence by the appearance of the human mind and body in the evolu-
tion and would disappear by their disappearance. But body and mind
are not the creators of the spirit, the spirit is the creator of the mind
and body; it develops these principles out of its being, it is not devel-
oped into being out of them, it is not a compound of their elements or a
resultant of their meeting. If it appears to evolve out of mind and body,
that is because it gradually manifests itself in them and not because it is
created by them or exists by them; as it manifests, they are revealed
as subordinate terms of its being and are to be finally taken up out of
their present imperfection and transformed into visible forms and instru-
ments of the spirit. Our conception of the spirit is of something which
is not constituted by name and form, but assumes various forms of body
and mind according to the various manifestations of its soul-being. This
it does here by a successive evolution; it evolves successive forms and
successive strata of consciousness: for it is not bound always to assume
one form and no other or to possess one kind of mentality which is its
sole possible subjective manifestation. The soul is not bound by the
formula of mental humanity: it did not begin with that and will not end
with it ; it had a prehuman past, it has a superhuman future.

What we see of Nature and of human nature justifies this view
of a birth of the individual soul from form to form until it reaches the
human level of manifested consciousness which is its instrument for
rising to yet higher levels. We see that Nature develops from stage to
stage and in each stage takes up its past and transforms it into stuff
of its new development. We see too that human nature is of the same
make; all the earth-past is there in it. It has an element of matter taken

678 THE LIFE DIVINE

up by life, an element of life taken up by mind, an element of mind which
is being taken up by spirit: the animal is still present in its humanity; the
very nature of the human being presupposes a material and a vital stage
which prepared his emergence into mind and an animal past which
moulded a first element of his complex humanity. And let us not say that
this is because material Nature developed by evolution his life and his
body and his animal mind, and only afterwards did a soul descend into
the form so created: there is a certain truth behind this idea, but not the
truth which that formula would suggest. For that supposes a gulf be-
tween soul and body, between soul and life, between soul and mind,
which does not exist; there is no body without soul, no body that is not
itself a form of soul: Matter itself is substance and power of spirit and
could not exist if it were anything else, for nothing can exist which is
not substance and power of Brahman; and if Matter, then still more
clearly and certainly Life and Mind must be that and ensouled by the
presence of the Spirit. If Matter and Life had not already been ensouled,
man could not have appeared or only as an intervention or an accident,
not as a part of the evolutionary order.

We arrive then necessarily at this conclusion that human birth is a
term at which the soul must arrive in a long succession of rebirths and
that it has had for its previous and preparatory terms in the succession
the lower forms of life upon earth; it has passed through the whole chain
that life has strung in the physical universe on the basis of the body,
the physical principle. Then the farther question arises whether, hu-
manity once attained, this succession of rebirths still continues and, if
so, how, by what series or by what alternations. And, first, we have to
ask whether the soul, having once arrived at humanity, can go back to
the animal life and body, a retrogression which the old popular theories
of transmigration have supposed to be an ordinary movement. It seems
impossible that it should so go back with any entirety, and for this
reason that the transit from animal to human life means a decisive con-
version of consciousness, quite as decisive as the conversion of the
vital consciousness of the plant into the mental consciousness of
the animal. It is surely impossible that a conversion so decisive
made by Nature should be reversed by the soul and the decision of
the spirit within her come, as it were, to naught. It could only be
possible for human souls, supposing such to exist, in whom the conversion
was not decisive, souls that had developed far enough to make, occupy
or assume a human body, but not enough to ensure the safety of this

THE PHILOSOPHY OF REBIRTH 679

assumption, not enough to remain secure in its achievement and faithful
to the human type of consciousness. Or at most there might be, suppos-
ing certain animal propensities to be vehement enough to demand a
separate satisfaction quite of their own kind, a sort of partial rebirth,
a loose holding of an animal form by a human soul, with an immediate
subsequent reversion to its normal progression. The movement of Nature
is always sufficiently complex for us not to deny dogmatically such a pos-
sibility, and, if it be a fact, then there may exist this modicum of truth
behind the exaggerated popular belief which assumes an animal rebirth
of the soul once lodged in man to be quite as normal and possible as a
human reincarnation. But whether the animal reversion is possible or
not, the normal law must be the recurrence of birth in new human forms
for a soul that has once become capable of humanity.

But why a succession of human births and not one alone? For the
same reason that has made the human birth itself a culminating point
of the past succession, the previous upward series, — it must be so by the
very necessity of the spiritual evolution. For the soul has not finished
what it has to do by merely developing into humanity; it has still to de-
velop that humanity into its higher possibilities. Obviously, the soul
that lodges in a Caribbee or an untaught primitive or an Apache of Paris
or an American gangster, has not yet exhausted the necessity of human
birth, has not developed all its possibilities or the whole meaning of hu-
manity, has not worked out all the sense of Sachchidananda in the uni-
versal Man; neither has the soul lodged in a vitalistic European occu-
pied with dynamic production and vital pleasure or in an Asiatic peasant
engrossed in the ignorant round of the domestic and economic life. We
may reasonably doubt whether even a Plato or a Shankara marks the
crown and therefore the end of the outflowering of the spirit in man. We
are apt to suppose that these may be the limit, because these and others
like them seem to us the highest point which the mind and soul of man
can reach, but that may be the illusion of our present possibility. There
may be a higher or at least a larger possibility which the Divine intends
yet to realise in man, and, if so, it is the steps built by these highest souls
which were needed to compose the way up to it and to open the gates. At
any rate this present highest point at least must be reached before we
can write finis on the recurrence of the human birth for the individual.
Man is there to move from the ignorance and from the little life which
he is in his mind and body to the knowledge and the large divine life
which he can compass by the unfolding of the spirit. At least the opening

680 THE LIFE DIVINE

out of the spirit in him, the knowledge of his real self and the leading
of the spiritual life must be attained before he can go definitively and
for ever otherwhere. There may too be beyond this initial culmination
a greater flowering of the spirit in the human life of which we have as yet
only the first intimations; the imperfection of Man is not the last word
of Nature, but his perfection too is not the last peak of the Spirit.

This possibility becomes a certitude if the present leading principle
of the mind as man has developed it, the intellect, is not its highest prin-
ciple. If mind itself has other powers as yet only imperfectly possessed
by the highest types of the human individual, then a prolongation of the
line of evolution and consequently of the ascending line of rebirth to
embody them is inevitable. If supermind also is a power of conscious-
ness concealed here in the evolution, the line of rebirth cannot stop even
there; it cannot cease in its ascent before the mental has been replaced
by the supramental nature and an embodied supramental being becomes
the leader of terrestrial existence.

This then is the rational and philosophical foundation for a belief
in rebirth; it is an inevitable logical conclusion if there exists at the
same time an evolutionary principle in the Earth-Nature and a reality
of the individual soul born into evolutionary Nature. If there is no soul,
then there can be a mechanical evolution without necessity or signifi-
cance and birth is only part of this curious but senseless machinery. If
the individual is only a temporary formation beginning and ending with
the body, then evolution can be a play of the All-Soul or Cosmic Exist-
ence mounting through a progression of higher and higher species to-
wards its own utmost possibility in this Becoming or to its highest con-
scious principle ; rebirth does not exist and is not needed as a mechanism
of that evolution. Or, if the All-Existence expresses itself in a persistent
but illusory individuality, rebirth becomes a possibility or an illusory
fact, but it has no evolutionary necessity and is not a spiritual necessity ;
it is only a means of accentuating and prolonging the illusion up to its
utmost time-limit. If there is an individual soul or Purusha not de-
pendent on the body but inhabiting and using it for its purpose, then
rebirth begins to be possible, but it is not a necessity if there is no evo-
lution of the soul in Nature: the presence of the individual soul in an
individual body may be a passing phenomenon, a single experience
without a past here or a future; its past and its future may be elsewhere.
But if there is an evolution of consciousness in an evolutionary body
and a soul inhabiting the body, a real and conscious individual, then

THE PHILOSOPHY OF REBIRTH 68 1

it is evident that it is the progressive experience of that soul in Nature
which takes the form of this evolution of consciousness: rebirth is self-
evidently a necessary part, the sole possible machinery of such an evolu-
tion. It is as necessary as birth itself; for without it birth would be an
initial step without a sequel, the starting of a journey without its farther
steps and arrival. It is rebirth that gives to the birth of an incomplete
being in a body its promise of completeness and its spiritual significance.

CHAPTER XXI

THE ORDER OF THE WORLDS

Seven are these worlds in which move the life-forces that
are hidden within the secret heart as their dwelling-place
seven by seven.

Mundaka Upanishad.^

May the Peoples of the five Births accept my sacrifice,
those who are born of the Light and worthy of worship;
may Earth protect us from earthly evil and the Mid-Region
from calamity from the gods. Follow the shining thread
spun out across the mid-world, protect the luminous paths
built by the thought; weave an inviolate work, become the
human being, create the divine race. . . . Seers of truth are
you, sharpen the shining spears with which you cut the way
to that which is Immortal; knowers of the secret planes,
form them, the steps by which the gods attained to im-
mortality.

Rig Veda.''

This is the eternal Tree with its root above and its
branches downward; this is Brahman, this is the Immortal;
in it are lodged all the worlds and none goes beyond it.
This and That are one.

Katha Upanishad.^

IF A SPIRITUAL evolution of consciousness in the material world and
a constant or repeated rebirth of the individual into an earthly body-
are admitted, the next question that arises is whether this evolutionary
movement is something separate and complete in itself or part of a larger
universal totality of which the material world is only one province. This
question has already its answer implied in the gradations of the involu-
tion which precede the evolution and make it possible; for, if that pre-
cedence is a fact, there must be worlds or at least planes of higher being
and they must have some connection with the evolution which has been
made possible by their existence. It may be that all they do for us is by
their effective presence or pressure on the earth-consciousness to liberate
the involved principles of life and mind and spirit and enable them to

'II. I. 8. ^'X. 53. 5, 6, 10. =VI. I.

682

THE ORDER OF THE WORLDS 683

manifest and assert their reign in material Nature. But it would be in
the highest degree improbable that the connection and intervention
should cease there ; there is likely to be a sustained, if veiled, commerce
between material life and the life of the other planes of existence. It is
necessary now to look more closely into this problem, regard it in itself
and determine the nature and limits of this connection and intercom-
munication, in so far as it affects the theory of evolution and rebirth in
material Nature.

The descent of the Soul into the Ignorance can be thought of as an
abrupt precipitation or immediate lapse of a pure spiritual being out of
the superconscient spiritual Reality into the first inconscience and the
subsequent evolving phenomenal life of material Nature. If that were
so, there might be the Absolute above and the Inconscient below, with
the material world created out of it, and the issue, the return back would
then be a similar abrupt or precipitous transit from a material embodied
world-being into the transcendent Silence. There would be no interme-
diate powers or realities other than Matter and Spirit, no other planes
than the material, no other worlds than the world of Matter. But this
idea is too trenchant and simple a construction and caimot outlive a
wider view of the complex nature of existence.

There are, no doubt, several possible originations of cosmic exist-
ence by which such an extreme and rigid world-balancement could have
conceivably come into being. There could have been a conception of this
kind and a fiat in an All-Will, or an idea, a movement of the soul towards
an egoistic material life of the Ignorance. The eternal individual soul
urged by some inexplicable desire arising within it can be supposed to
have sought the adventure of the darkness and taken a plunge from its
native Light into the depths of a Nescience out of which arose this world
of Ignorance; or a collectivity of souls may have been so moved, the
Many: for an individual being cannot constitute a cosmos; a cosmos
must be either impersonal or multi-personal or the creation or self-ex-
pression of a universal or infinite Being. This desire may have drawn
down an All-Soul with it to build a world based upon the power of the
Inconscient. If not that, then the eternally omniscient All-Soul itself
may have abruptly plunged its self-knowledge into this darkness of the
Inconscience, carrying the individual souls within it to begin their up-
ward evolution through an ascending scale of life and consciousness.
Or, if the individual is not pre-existent, if we are only a creation of the
All-consciousness or a fiction of the phenomenal Ignorance, either crea-

684 THE LIFE DIVINE

trix may have conceived all these myriads of individual beings by the
evolution of names and forms out of an original indiscriminate Prakriti ;
the soul would be a temporary product of the indiscriminate stuff of
inconscient force-substance which is the first appearance of things in the
material universe.

On that supposition, or on any of them, there could be only two
planes of existence: on one side there is the material universe created
out of the Inconscient by the blind nescience of Force or Nature obedient
perhaps to some inner unfelt Self which governs its somnambulist activi-
ties; on the other side there is the superconscient One to which we re-
turn out of the Inconscience and Ignorance. Or else we may imagine that
there is one plane only, the material existence; there is no supercon-
scient apart from the Soul of the material universe. If we find that there
are other planes of conscious being and that there already exist other
worlds than the material universe, these ideas might become difficult to
substantiate ; but we can escape from that annulment if we suppose that
these worlds have been subsequently created by or for the evolving Soul
in the course of its ascent out of the Inconscience. In any of these views
the whole cosmos would be an evolution out of the Inconscient, either
with the material universe as its sole and sufficient stage and scene or else
with an ascending scale of worlds, one evolving out of the other, helping
to grade our return to the original Reality. Our own view has been that
the cosmos is a self-graded devolution out of the superconscient Sach-
chidananda; but in this idea it would be nothing but an evolution of
the Inconscience towards some kind of knowledge sufficient to allow, by
the annihilation of some primal ignorance or some originating desire, the
extinction of a misbegotten soul or an escape out of a mistaken world-
adventure.

But such theories either imply a premier importance and originating
power of mind or a premier importance of the individual being; both
have indeed a great place, but the one eternal Spirit is the original power
and the original existence. Idea, conceptively creative, — not the Real-
Idea which is Being aware of what is in itself and automatically self-
creative by the force of that Truth-awareness, — is a movement of the
mind; desire is a movement of life in mind; life and mind then must be
pre-existent powers and must have been the determinants of the creation
of the material world, and in that case they can equally create worlds of
their own supraphysical nature. Or else we must suppose that what
acted was not desire in an individual or a universal Mind or Life, but

THE ORDER OF THE WORLDS 685

a will in the Spirit, — a will of Being deploying something of itself or of
its Consciousness, realising a creative idea or a self-knowledge or an urge
of its self-active Force or a turn to a certain formulation of its delight of
existence. But if the world has been created, not by the universal De-
light of existence, but for the desire of the individual soul, its caprice of
an ignorant egoistic enjoyment, then the mental Individual and not the
Cosmic Being or a Transcendent Divinity should be the creator and
witness of the universe. In the past trend of human thought the indi-
vidual being has always loomed enormously large in the front plan of
things and in the premier dimensions of importance; if these proportions
could still be maintained, this origination might conceivably be ad-
mitted: for a will towards the life of the Ignorance or an assent to it in
the individual Purusha must indeed be part of the operative movement
of Consciousness in the involutionary descent of the Spirit into material
Nature. But the world cannot be a creation of the individual mind or a
theatre erected by it for its own play of consciousness; nor can it have
been created solely for the play and the satisfaction or frustration of the
ego. As we awake to a sense of the premier importance of the universal
and the dependence of the individual upon it, a theory of this kind be-
comes an impossibility to our intelligence. The world is too vast in its
movement for such an account of its working to be credible; only a
cosmic Power or a cosmic Being can be the creator and the upholder of
the cosmos and it must have too a cosmic and not only an individual
reality, significance or purpose.

Accordingly, this world-creating or participating Individual and
its desire or assent to the Ignorance must have been awake before the
world at all existed; it must have been there as an element in some
supracosmic Superconscient from which it comes and to w^hich it returns
out of the life of the ego: we must suppose an original immanence of the
Many in the One. It becomes then conceivable that a will or an impetus
or a spiritual necessity may have stirred, in some transmundane Infinite,
in some of the Many which precipitated them downward and compelled
the creation of this world of the Ignorance. But since the One is the
premier fact of existence, since the Many depend upon the One, are
souls of the One, beings of the Being, this truth must determine also the
fundamental principle of the cosmic existence. There we see that the
universal precedes the individual, gives it its field, is that in which it
exists cosmically even though its origin is in the Transcendence. The
individual soul lives here by the All-Soul and depends upon it; the All-

686 THE LIFE DIVINE

Soul very evidently does not exist by the individual or depend upon it:
it is not a sum of individual beings, a pluralistic totality created by the
conscious life of individuals; if an All-Soul exists, it must be the one
Cosmic Spirit supporting the one cosmic Force in its works, and it re-
peats here, modified in the terms of cosmic existence, the primary rela-
tion of the dependence of the Many on the One. It is inconceivable that
the Many should have independently or by a departure from the One
Will desired cosmic existence and forced by their desire the supreme
Sachchidananda to descend unwillingly or tolerantly into the Nescience;
that would be to reverse altogether the true dependence of things. If the
world was directly originated by the will or the spiritual impetus of the
Many, which is possible and even probable in a certain sense, there must
still have been first a Will in Sachchidananda to that end ; otherwise the
impetus — translating here the All-Will into desire, for what becomes
desire in the ego is Will in the Spirit, — could not have arisen anywhere.
The One, the All-Soul, by whom alone the consciousness of the Indi-
vidual is determined, must first accept the veil of inconscient Nature
before the Individual too can put on the veil of the Ignorance in the
material universe.

But once we admit this Will of the supreme and cosmic Being as
the indispensable condition of the existence of the material universe, it
is no longer possible to accept Desire as the creative principle ; for desire
has no place in the Supreme or in the All-being. It can have nothing to
desire; desire is the result of incompleteness, of insufficiency, of some-
thing that is not possessed or enjoyed and which the being seeks for pos-
session or enjoyment. A supreme and universal Being can have the
delight of its all-existence, but to that delight desire must be foreign, —
it can only be the appanage of the incomplete evolutionary ego which is
a product of the cosmic action. Moreover, if the All-consciousness of the
Spirit has willed to plunge into the inconscience of Matter, it must be
because that was a possibility of its self-creation or manifestation. But
a sole material universe and an evolution there out of inconscience
into spiritual consciousness cannot be the one solitary and limited
possibility of manifestation of the All-being. That could only be if
Matter were the original power and form of manifested being and the
spirit had no other choice, could not manifest except through Incon-
science into Matter as a basis. This would bring us to a materialistic
evolutionary Pantheism; we would have to regard the beings who people
the universe as souls of the One, souls born here in It and evolving up-

THE ORDER OF THE WORLDS 687

ward through inanimate, animate and mentally developed forms till
the recovery of their complete and undivided life in the superconscient
Pantheos and its cosmic Oneness would intervene as the end and goal
of their evolution. In that case, everything has evolved here; life, mind,
soul have arisen out of the One in the material universe by the force
of its hidden being, and everything will fulfil itself here in the material
universe. There is then no separate plane of the Superconscience, for
the Superconscient is here only, not elsewhere ; there are no supraphysical
worlds; there is no action of supraphysical principles exterior to Matter,
no pressure of an already existent Mind and Life upon the material
plane.

It has then to be asked what are mind and life, and it may be
answered that they are products of Matter or of the Energy in Matter.
Or else they are forms of consciousness that arise as results of an evo-
lution from Inconscience to Superconscience: consciousness itself is only
a bridge of transition; it is spirit becoming partially aware of itself
before plunging into its normal trance of luminous superconscience.
Even if there proved to be planes of larger life and mind, they would
only be subjective constructions of this intermediary consciousness
erected on the way to that spiritual culmination. But the difficulty here
is that mind and life are too different from Matter to be products of
Matter; Matter itself is a product of Energy, and mind and life must
be regarded as superior products of the same Energy. If we admit the
existence of a cosmic Spirit, the Energy must be spiritual ; life and mind
must be independent products of a spiritual energy and themselves
powers of manifestation of the Spirit. It then becomes irrational to
suppose that Spirit and Matter alone exist, that they are the two con-
fronting realities and that Matter is the sole possible basis of the mani-
festation of spirit ; the idea of a sole material world becomes immediately
untenable. Spirit must be capable of basing its manifestation on the
Mind principle or on the Life principle and not only on the principle
of Matter; there can then be and logically there should be worlds of
Mind and worlds of Life; there may even be worlds founded on a sub-
tler and more plastic, more conscious principle of Matter.

Three questions then arise, interrelated or interdependent: —
whether there is any evidence or any true intimation of the existence
of such other worlds; whether, if they exist, they are of the nature we
have indicated, arising or descending in the order and within the ra-
tionale of a hierarchical series between Matter and Spirit ; if that is their

688 THE LIFE DIVINE

scale of being, are they otherwise quite independent and unconnected,
or is there a relation and interaction of the higher worlds on the world of
Matter? It is a fact that mankind almost from the beginning of its
existence or so far back as history or tradition can go, has believed in
the existence of other worlds and in the possibility of communication
between their powers and beings and the human race. In the last ration-
alistic period of human thought from which we are emerging, this belief
has been swept aside as an age-long superstition ; all evidence or intima-
tions of its truth have been rejected a priori as fundamentally false and
undeserving of inquiry because incompatible with the axiomatic truth
that only Matter and the material world and its experiences are real;
all other experience purporting to be real must be either a hallucination
or an imposture or a subjective result of superstitious credulity and
imagination or else, if a fact, then other than what it purported to be
and explicable by a physical cause: no evidence could be accepted of
such a fact unless it is objective and physical in its character; even if
the fact be very apparently supraphysical, it cannot be accepted as such
unless it is totally unexplainable by any other imaginable hypothesis
or conceivable conjecture.

It should be evident that this demand for physical valid proof of
a supraphysical fact is irrational and illogical; it is an irrelevant atti-
tude of the physical mind which assumes that only the objective and
physical is fundamentally real and puts aside all else as merely sub-
jective. A supraphysical fact may impinge on the physical world and
produce physical results ; it may even produce an effect on our physical
senses and become manifest to them, but that cannot be its invariable
action and most normal character or process. Ordinarily, it must pro-
duce a direct effect or a tangible impression on our mind and our life-
being, which are the parts of us that are of the same order as itself, and
can only indirectly and through them, if at all, influence the physical
world and physical life. If it objectivises itself, it must be to a subtler
sense in us and only derivatively to the outward physical sense. This
derivative objectivisation is certainly possible ; if there is an association
of the action of the subtle body and its sense-organisation with the action
of the material body and its physical organs, then the supraphysical can
become outwardly sensible to us. This is what happens, for example,
with the faculty called second sight ; it is the process of all those psychic
phenomena which seem to be seen and heard by the outer senses and
are not sensed inwardly through representative or interpretative or sym-

THE ORDER OF THE WORLDS 689

bolic images which bear the stamp of an inner experience or have an
evident character of formations in a subtle substance. There can, then,
be various kinds of evidence of the existence of other planes of being and
communication with them; objectivisation to the outer sense, subtle-
sense contacts, mind contacts, life contacts, contacts through the sub-
liminal in special states of consciousness exceeding our ordinary range.
Our physical mind is not the whole of us nor, even though it dominates
almost the whole of our surface consciousness, the best or greatest part
of us; reality cannot be restricted to a sole field of this narrowness or
to ttie dimensions known within its rigid circle.

If it be said that subjective experience or subtle-sense images can
easily be deceptive, since we have no recognised method or standard of
verification and a too great tendency to admit the extraordinary and
miraculous or supernatural at its face value, this may be admitted: but
error is not the prerogative of the inner subjective or subliminal parts
of us, it is also an appanage of the physical mind and its objective
methods and standards, and such liability to error cannot be a reason
for shutting out a large and important domain of experience; it is a
reason rather for scrutinising it and finding out in it its own true stand-
ards and its characteristic appropriate and valid means of verification.
Our subjective being is the basis of our objective experience, and it is
not probable that only its physical objectivisations are true and the
rest unreliable. The subliminal consciousness, when rightly interrogated,
is a witness to truth and its testimony is confirmed again and again even
in the physical and the objective field; that testimony cannot, then,
be disregarded when it calls our attention to things within us or to things
that belong to planes or worlds of a supraphysical experience. At the
same time belief by itself is not evidence of reality; it must base itself
on something more valid before one can accept it. It is evident that the
beliefs of the past are not a sufficient basis for knowledge, even though
they cannot be entirely neglected: for a belief is a mental construction
and may be a wrong building; it may often answer to some inner inti-
mation and then it has a value, but, as often as not, it disfigures the
intimation, usually by a translation into terms familiar to our physical
and objective experience, such as that which converted the hierarchy of
the planes into a physical hierarchy or geographical space-extension,
turned the rarer heights of subtle substance into material heights and
placed the abodes of the gods on the summits of physical mountains. All
truth supraphysical or physical must be founded not on mental belief

690 THE LIFE DIVINE^^

alone, but on experience, — but in each case experience must be of the
kind, physical, subliminal or spiritual, which is appropriate to the order
of the truths into which we are empowered to enter; their validity and
significance must be scrutinised, but according to their own law and by
a consciousness which can enter into them and not according to the law
of another domain or by a consciousness which is capable only of truths
of another order ; so alone can we be sure of our steps and enlarge firmly
our sphere of knowledge.

If we scrutinise the intimations of supraphysical world-realities
which we receive in our inner experience and compare with it the ac-
count of such intimations that has continued to come down to us from
the beginnings of human knowledge, and if we attempt an interpreta-
tion and a summarised order, we shall find that what this inner experience
most intimately conveys to us is the existence and action upon us of
larger planes of being and consciousness than the purely material plane,
with its restricted existence and action, of which we are aware in our
narrow terrestrial formula. These domains of larger being are not alto-
gether remote and separate from our own being and consciousness; for,
though they subsist in themselves and have their own play and process
and formulations of existence and experience, yet at the same time they
penetrate and envelop the physical plane with their invisible presence
and influences, and their powers seem to be here in the material world
itself behind its action and objects. There are two main orders of ex-
perience in our contact with them; one is purely subjective, though in
its subjectivity sufficiently vivid and palpable, the other is more objec-
tive. In the subjective order, we find that what shapes itself to us as
a life-intention, life-impulse, life-formulation here, already exists in a
larger, more subtle, more plastic range of possibilities, and these pre-
existent forces and formations are pressing upon us to realise themselves
in the physical world also ; but only a part succeeds in getting through
and even that emerges partially in a form and circumstance more proper
to the system of terrestrial law and sequence. This precipitation takes
place, normally, without our knowledge ; we are not aware of the action
of these Powers, Forces and Influences upon us, but take them as forma-
tions of our own life and mind, even when our reason or will repudiates
them and strives not to be mastered: but when we go inwards away
from the restricted surface consciousness and develop a subtler sense
and deeper awarenesss, we begin to get an intimation of the origin of
these movements and are able to watch their action and process, to

THE ORDER OF THE WORLDS 69 1

accept or reject or modify, to allow them passage and use of our mind
and will and our life and members or refuse it. In the same way we
become aware of larger domains of mind, a play, experience, formation
of a greater plasticity, a teeming profusion of all possible mental formu-
lations, and we feel their contacts with us and their powers and influ-
ences acting upon our parts of mind in the same occult manner as those
Others that act upon our parts of life. This kind of experience is, pri-
marily, of a purely subjective character, a pressure of ideas, suggestions,
emotional formations, impulsions to sensation, action, dynamic experi-
ence. However large a part of this pressure may be traced to our own
subliminal self or to the siege of universal Mind-forces or Life-forces
belonging to our own world, there is an element which bears the stamp
of another origin, an insistent supraterrestrial character.

But the contacts do not stop here: for there is also an opening of
our mind and life parts to a great range of subjective-objective experi-
ences in which these planes present themselves no longer as extensions
of subjective being and consciousness, but as worlds; for the experi-
ences there are organised as they are in our own world, but on a differ-
ent plan, with a different process and law of action and in a substance
which belongs to a supraphysical Nature. This organisation includes,
as on our earth, the existence of beings who have or take forms, mani-
fest themselves or are naturally manifested in an embodying substance,
but a substance other than ours, a subtle substance tangible only to
subtle sense, a supraphysical form-matter. These worlds and beings
may have nothing to do with ourselves and our life, they may exercise
no action upon us ; but often also they enter into secret communication
with earth-existence, obey or embody and are the intermediaries and
instruments of the cosmic powers and influences of which we have a
subjective experience, or themselves act by their own initiation upon
the terrestrial world's life and motives and happenings. It is possible
to receive help or guidance or harm or misguidance from these beings;
it is possible even to become subject to their influence, to be possessed
by their invasion or domination, to be instrumentalised by them for
their good or evil purpose. At times the progress of earthly life seems
to be a vast field of battle between supraphysical Forces of either char-
acter, those that strive to uplift, encourage and illumine and those that
strive to deflect, depress or prevent or even shatter our upward evo-
lution or the soul's self-expression in the material universe. Some of these
Beings, Powers or Forces are such that we think of them as divine;

692 THE LIFE DIVINE ~^^^^

they are luminous, benignant or powerfully helpful: there are others
that are Titanic, gigantic or demoniac, inordinate Influences, instigators
or creators often of vast and formidable inner upheavals or of actions
that overpass the normal human measure. There may also be an aware-
ness of influences, presences, beings that do not seem to belong to other
worlds beyond us but are here as a hidden element behind the veil in
terrestrial nature. As contact with the supraphysical is possible, a con-
tact can also take place subjective or objective — or at least objectivised
— between our own consciousness and the consciousness of other once
embodied beings who have passed into a supraphysical status in these
other regions of existence. It is possible also to pass beyond a subjec-
tive contact or a subtle-sense perception and, in certain subliminal states
of consciousness, to enter actually into other worlds and know some-
thing of their secrets. It is the more objective order of other-worldly
experience that seized most the imagination of mankind in the past, but
it was put by popular belief into a gross-objective statement which un-
duly assimilated these phenomena to those of the physical world with
which we are familiar; for it is the normal tendency of our mind to
turn everything into forms or symbols proper to its own kind and terms
of experience.

This has always been, put into its most generalised terms, the nor-
mal range and character of other-worldly belief and experience in all
periods of the past of the race; names and forms differ, but the gen-
eral features have been strikingly similar in all countries and ages.
What exact value are we to put upon these persistent beliefs or upon
this mass of supernormal experience? It is not possible for anyone who
has had these contacts with any intimacy and not only by scattered
abnormal accidents, to put them aside as mere superstition or hallu-
cination; for they are too insistent, real, effective, organic in their pres-
sure, too constantly confirmed by their action and results to be so flung
aside: an appreciation, an interpretation, a mental organisation of this
side of our capacity of experience is indispensable.

One explanation which can be put forward is that man himself
creates the supraphysical worlds which he inhabits or thinks he inhabits
after death, creates the gods, as ran the ancient phrase, — it is claimed
even that God himself was created by man, was a myth of his con-
sciousness, and has now been abolished by man! All these things then
may be a sort of myth of the developing consciousness in which it is
able to dwell, a captive in its own buildings, and by a kind of realising

THE ORDER OF THE WORLDS 693

dynamisation maintain itself in its own imaginations. But pure imag-
inations they are not, they can only be so treated by us so long as the
things they represent, however incorrectly, are not part of our own ex-
perience. Yet there may conceivably be myths and imaginations that
are used by the power of the creative Consciousness- Force to materi-
alise its own idea-forces; these potent images may take form and body,
endure in some subtly materialised world of thought and react on their
creator: if so, we might suppose that the other worlds are buildings of
this character. But if that were so, if a subjective consciousness can
thus create worlds and beings, it might well be that the objective world
also is a myth of Consciousness or even of our consciousness, or that
Consciousness itself is a myth of the original Nescience. Thus, on this
line of thinking, we swing back towards a view of the universe in which
all things assume a certain hue of unreality except the all-productive
Inconscience out of which they are created, the Ignorance which creates
them and, it may be, a superconscient or inconscient impersonal Being
into whose indifference all finally disappears or goes back and ceases
there.

But we have no proof and there is no likelihood that man's mind
can create in this way a world where none was before, create in vacuo
without a substance to build in or build on, though it may well be that
it can add something to a world already made. Mind is indeed a potent
agency, more potent than we readily imagine; it can make formations
which effectuate themselves in our own or others' consciousness and
lives and even have an effect on inconscient Matter; but an entirely
original creation in the void is beyond its possibilities. What we can
rather hazard is that as it grows, man's mind enters into relation with
new ranges of being and consciousness not at all created by him, new to
him, already pre-existent in the All-Existence. In his increasing inner
experience he opens up new planes of being in himself ; as the secret cen-
tres of his consciousness dissolve their knots, he becomes able through
them to conceive of those larger realms, to receive direct influences from
them, to enter into them, to image them in his terrestrial mind and
inner sense. He does create images, symbol-forms, reflective shapes of
them with which his mind can deal; in this sense only he creates the
Divine Image that he worships, creates the forms of the gods, creates
new planes and worlds within him, and through these images the real
worlds and powers that overtop our existence are able to take possession
of the consciousness in the physical world, to pour into it their poten-

694 THE LIFE DIVINE

cies, to transform it with the hght of their higher being. But all this is
not a creation of the higher worlds of being; it is a revelation ofWeni\
to the consciousness of the soul on the material plane as it develops
out of the Nescience. It is a creation of their forms here by a reception
of their powers; there is an enlargement of our subjective life on this
plane by the discovery of its true relation with higher planes of its own
being from which it was separated by the veil of the material Nes-
cience. This veil exists because the soul in the body has put behind it
these greater possibilities in order that it might concentrate exclusively
its consciousness and force upon its primary work in this physical world
of being; but that primary work can have a sequel only by the veil
being at least partially lifted or else made penetrable so that the higher
planes of mind, life and spirit may pour their significances into human
existence.

It is possible to suppose that these higher planes and worlds have
been created subsequently to the manifestation of the material cosmos,
to aid the evolution or in some sense as a result of it. This is a notion
which the physical mind, starting in all its ideas from the material
universe as the one thing which it knows, has analysed and can deal
with in a beginning of mastery, might easily tend to accept, if obliged
to admit a supraphysical existence ; it could then keep the material, the
Inconscience, as the starting-point and support of all being, as it is un-
doubtedly the starting-point for us of the evolutionary movement of
which the material world is the scene. Our mind could still keep matter
and material force as the first existence, — so accepted and cherished
by it because it is the first thing that it knows, the one thing that is
always securely present and knowable, — and maintain the spiritual and
the supraphysical in a dependence upon the assured foundation in Mat-
ter.^ But how then were these other worlds created, by what force, by
what instrumentality? It might be the Life and Mind developing out
of the Inconscient which have at the same time developed these other
worlds or planes in the subliminal consciousness of the living beings
who appear in it. To the subliminal being in life and after death, — for
it is the inner being that survives the death of the body, — these worlds
might be real because sensible to its wider range of consciousness; it
would move in them with that sense of reality, derivative perhaps but

* There are certain expressions in the Rig Veda which seem to embody this
view. Earth (the material principle) is spoken of as the foundation of all the
worlds or the seven worlds are described as the seven planes of Earth.

THE ORDER OF THE WORLDS 695

convincing, and it would send up its experience of them as belief and
imagination to the surface being. This is a possible account, if we accept
Consciousness as the real creative Power or agent and all things as for-
mations of consciousness; but it would not give to the supraphysical
planes of being the unsubstantiality or less palpable reality which the
physical mind would like to attach to them; they would have the same
reality in themselves as the physical world or plane of physical experi-
ence has in its own order.

If in this or some other way the higher worlds were developed
subsequently to the creation of the material world, the primary cre-
ation, by a larger secret evolution out of the Inconscient, it must have
been done by some All-Soul in its emergence, by a process of which we
can have no knowledge and for the purpose of the evolution here, as
adjuncts to it or as its larger consequences, so that life and mind and
spirit might be able to move in fields of a freer scope with a repercussion
of these greater powers and experiences on the material self-expression.
But against this hypothesis there stands the fact that we find these
higher worlds in our vision and experience of them to be in no way based
upon the material universe, in no way its results, but rather greater
terms of being, larger and freer ranges of consciousness, and all the
action of the material plane looks more like the result and not the origin
of these greater terms, derivatory from them, even partly dependent
on them in its evolutionary endeavour. Immense ranges of powers, in-
fluences, phenomena descend covertly upon us from the overmind and
the higher mental and vital ranges, but of these only a part, a selection,
as it were, or restricted number can stage and realise themselves in the
order of the physical world; the rest await their time and proper cir-
cumstance for revelation in physical term and form, for their part in
the terrestrial ^ evolution which is at the same time an evolution of all
the powers of the spirit.

This character of the other worlds defeats all our attempts to give
the premier importance to our own plane of being and to our own part
in the mundane manifestation. We do not create God as a myth of our
consciousness, but are instruments for a progressive manifestation of
the Divine in the material being. We do not create the gods, his powers,
but rather such divinity as we manifest is the partial reflection and the

^Necessarily, by terrestrial we do not mean this one earth and its period of
duration, but use earth in the wider root-sense of the \'edantic Prithivi, the earth-
principle creating habitations of physical form for the soul.

696 THE LIFE DIVINE

shaping here of eternal godheads. We do not create the higher planes,
but are intermediaries by which they reveal their light, power, beauty
in whatever form and scope can be given to them by Nature-force on
the material plane. It is the pressure of the life-world which enables
life to evolve and develop here in the forms we already know; it is that
increasing pressure which drives it to aspire in us to a greater revelation
of itself and will one day deliver the mortal from his subjection to the
narrow limitations of his present incompetent and restricting physi-
cality. It is the pressure of the mind-world which evolves and develops
mind here and helps us to find a leverage for our mental self-uplifting
and expansion, so that we may hope to enlarge continually our self of
intelligence and even to break the prison walls of our matter-bound
physical mentality. It is the pressure of the supramental and spiritual
worlds which is preparing to develop here the manifest power of the
spirit and by it open our being on the physical plane into the freedom
and infinity of the superconscient Divine; that contact, that pressure
can alone liberate from the apparent Inconscience, which was our start-
ing-point, the all-conscient Godhead concealed in us. In this order of
things our human consciousness is the instrument, the intermediary; it
is the point in the development of light and power out of the Incon-
science at which liberation becomes possible: a greater role than this
we cannot attribute to it, but this is great enough, for it makes our
humanity all-important for the supreme purpose of evolutionary Nature.
At the same time there are some elements in our subliminal ex-
perience which raise a point of question against any invariable prior-
ity of the other worlds to the material existence. One such indication
is that in the vision of after-death experience there is a persistent tra-
dition of residence in conditions which seem to be a supraphysical pro-
longation of earth-conditions, earth-nature, earth-experience. Another is
that, in the life-worlds especially, we find formulations which seem to re-
semble the inferior movements of earth-existence; here are already em-
bodied the principles of darkness, falsehood, incapacity and evil which
we have supposed to be consequent upon the evolution out of the ma-
terial Inconscience. It seems even to be the fact that the vital worlds
are the natural home of the Powers that most disturb human life; this
is indeed logical, for it is through our vital being that they sway us and
they must therefore be powers of a larger and more powerful life-ex-
istence. The descent of Mind and Life into evolution need not have
created any such untoward developments of the limitation of being and

THE ORDER OF THE WORLDS 697

consciousness: for this descent is in its nature a limitation of knowl-
edge; existence and cognition and delight of being confine themselves
in a lesser truth and good and beauty and its inferior harmony, and
move according to that law of a narrower light, but in such a move-
ment darkness and suffering and evil are not obligatory phenomena. If
we fmd them existing in these worlds of other mind and other life, even
though not pervading it but only occupying their separate province, we
must either conclude that they have come into existence by a projection
out of the inferior evolution, upward from below, by something in the
subliminal parts of Nature bursting there into a larger formation of
the evil created here, or that they were already created as part of a
parallel gradation to the involutionary descent, a gradation forming a
stair for evolutionary ascension towards Spirit just as the involutionary
was a stair of the descent of the Spirit. In the latter hypothesis the
ajscending gradation might have a double purpose. For it would contain
pre-formations of the good and evil that must evolve in the earth as part
of the struggle necessary for the evolutionary growth of the Soul in
Nature ; these would be formations existing for themselves, for their own
independent satisfaction, formations that would present the full t\^
of these things, each in its separate nature, and at the same time they
would exercise on evolutionary beings their characteristic influence.

These worlds of a larger life would then hold in themselves both
the more luminous and the darker formations of our world's life in a
medium in which they could arrive freely at their independent expres-
sion, their own type's full freedom and natural completeness and har-
mony for good or for evil, — if indeed that distinction applies in these
ranges, — a completeness and independence impossible here in our ex-
istence where all is mingled in the complex interaction necessary to the
field of a many-sided evolution leading towards a final integration. For
we find what we call false, dark or evil seems there to have a truth of
its own and to be entirely content with its own type because it pos-
sesses that in a full expression which creates in it a sense of a satisfied
power of its own being, an accord, a complete adaptation of all its cir-
cumstances to its principle of existence; it enjoys there its own con-
sciousness, its own self-power, its own delight of being, obnoxious to
our minds but to itself full of the joy of satisfied desire. Those life
impulses which are to earth-nature inordinate and out of measure and
appear here as perverse and abnormal, find in their own province of
being an independent fulfilment and an unrestricted play of their t\-pe

698 THE LIFE DIVINE

and principle. What is to us divine or titanic, Rakshasic, demoniac and
therefore supernatural, is, each in its own domain, normal to itself and
gives to the beings that embody these things the feeling of self-nature
and the harmony of their own principle. Discord itself, struggle, in-
capacity, suffering enter into a certain kind of life-satisfaction which
would feel itself baulked or deficient without them. When these powers
are seen in their isolated working, building their own life-edifices, as
they do in those secret worlds where they dominate, we perceive more
clearly their origin and reason of existence and the reason also for the
hold they have on human life and the attachment of man to his own
imperfections, to his life-drama of victory and failure, happiness and
suffering, laughter and tears, sin and virtue. Here on earth these things
exist in an unsatisfied and therefore unsatisfactory and obscure state
of struggle and mixture, but there reveal their secret and their motive
of being because they are there established in their native power and
full form of nature in their own world and their own exclusive atmos-
phere. Man's heavens and hells or worlds of light and worlds of dark-
ness, however imaginative in their building, proceed from a perception
of these powers existing in their own principle and throwing their in-
fluences on him in life from a beyond-life which provides the elements
of his evolutionary existence.

In the same way as the powers of Life are self-founded, perfect
and full in a greater Life beyond us, so too the powers of Mind, its
ideas and principles that influence our earth-being, are found to have
in the greater Mind-world their own field of fullness of self-nature,
while here in human existence they throw out only partial formations
which have much difficulty in establishing themselves because of their
meeting and mixture with other powers and principles; this meeting,
this mixture curbs their completeness, alloys their purity, disputes and
defeats their influence. These other worlds, then, are not evolutionary,
but typal; but it is one though not the sole reason of their existence
that they provide things that must arise in the involutionary mani-
festation as well as things thrown up in the evolution with a field of
satisfaction of their own significance where they can exist in their own
right; this established condition is a base from which their functions
and workings can be cast as elements into the complex process of evolu-
tionary Nature.

If we look from this point of view at man's traditional accounts
of other-worldly existence, we shall find that mostly they point to worlds

THE ORDER OF THE WORLDS 699

of a larger life liberated from the restrictions and imperfections or in-
completeness of life in earth-nature. These accounts are evidently built
largely by imagination, but there is an element also of intuition and
divination, a feeling of what life can be and surely is in some domain
of its. manifested or its realisable nature; there is also an element of
true subliminal contact and experience. But the mind of man translates
what he sees or receives or contacts from other-nature into figures
proper to his own consciousness ; they are his translations of supraphysi-
cal realities into his own significant forms and images and through these
forms and images he enters into communication with the realities and
can make them to a certain degree present and effective. The experi-
ence of an after-death continuance of a modified earth-life may be ex-
plained as due to this kind of translation; but it is also explainable
partly as the creation of a subjective post-mortal state in which he still
lives in figures of habitual experience before he enters into other-worldly
realities, partly as a passage through life-worlds where the type of things
expresses itself in formations originative of those to which he was at-
tached in his earthly body or akin to them and therefore exercises a
natural attraction on the vital being after its exit from the body. But,
apart from these subtler life-states, the traditional accounts of other-
worldly existence contain, though as a rarer more elevated element not
included in the popular notion of these things, a higher grade of states of
existence which are clearly of a mental and not a vital character and
others founded on some spiritual-mental principle; these higher prin-
ciples are formulated in states of being into which our inner experience
can rise or the soul enter. The principle of gradation we have accepted
is therefore justified provided we recognise that it is one way of organ-
ising our experience and that other ways proceeding from other view-
points are possible. For a classification can always be valid from the
principle and view-point adopted by it while from other principles and
view-points another classification of the same things can be equally
valid. But for our purpose the system we have chosen is of the greatest
value because it is fundamental and answers to a truth of the manifesta-
tion which is of the utmost practical importance; it helps us to under-
stand our own constituted existence and the course of the involution
and the evolutionary motion of Nature. At the same time we see that
the other worlds are not things quite apart from the material universe
and earth-nature, but penetrate and envelop it with their influences and
have on it a secret incidence of formative and directive force which is

700 THE LIFE DIVINE

not easily calculable. This organisation of our other-worldly knowledge
and experience supplies us with the clue to the nature and lines of action
of this incidence.

The existence and influence of other worlds are a fact of primary
importance for the possibilities and for the scope of our evolution in
terrestrial Nature. For if the physical universe were the only field of
manifestation of the infinite Reality and at the same time the field of
its whole manifestation, we should have to suppose that, since all the
principles of its being from Matter to Spirit are entirely involved in
the apparently inconscient Force which is the basis of the first work-
ings of this universe, they are being evolved by it here completely and
here solely, without any other aid or pressure except that of the secret
Superconscience within it. There would then be a system of things in
which the principle of Matter must always remain the first principle,
the essential and original determining condition of manifested existence.
Spirit might indeed in the end arrive to a limited extent at its natural
domination; it might make its basis of physical matter a more elastic
instrument not altogether prohibitive of the action of its own highest
law and nature or opposed to that action, as it now is in its inelastic re-
sistance. But Spirit would always be dependent upon Matter for its
field and its manifestation; it could have no other field: it could not
get outside it to another kind of manifestation ; and within it also it could
not very well liberate any other principle of its being into sovereignty
over the material foundation; Matter would remain the one persistent
determinant of its manifestation. Life could not become dominant and
determinative. Mind could not become the master and creator; their
boundaries of capacity would be fixed by the capacities of Matter, which
they might enlarge or modify but would not be able to transform radi-
cally or liberate. There would be no place for any free and full manifesta-
tion of any power of the being, all would be limited for ever by the con-
ditions of an obscuring material formation. Spirit, Mind, Life would
have no native field or complete scope of their own characteristic power
and principle. It is not easy to believe in the inevitability of this self-
limitation if Spirit is the creator and these principles have an inde-
pendent existence and are not products, results or phenomena of the en-
ergy of Matter.

But, given the fact that the infinite Reality is free in the play of its
consciousness, it is not bound to involve itself in the nescience of Matter
before it can at all manifest. It is possible for it to create just the con-.

THE ORDER OF THE WORLDS 7OI

trary order of things, a world in which the unity of spiritual being is the
matrix and first condition of any formation or action, the Energy at work
is a self-aware spiritual existence in movement, and all its names and
forms are a self-conscious play of the spiritual unity. Or it might be an
order in which the Spirit's innate power of conscious Force or Will would
realise freely and directly its own possibilities in itself and not, as here,
through the restricting medium of the Life-Force in matter; that realisa-
tion would be at once the first principle of the manifestation and the ob-
ject of all its free and blissful action. It might be an order, again, in
which the free play of an infinite mutual self-delight in a multiplicity of
beings conscious not only of their concealed or underlying eternal unity
but of their present joy of oneness would be the object; in such a system
the action of the principle of self-existent Bliss would be the first prin-
ciple and the universal condition. Again, it might be a world-order in
which the Supermind would be the dominant principle from the begin-
ning; the nature of the manifestation would then be a multiplicity of
being finding through the free and luminous play of their divine indi-
viduality all the manifold joy of their difference in oneness.

Nor need the series stop here: for we observe that with us Mind is
hampered by Life in Matter and finds all the difficulty possible in domi-
nating the resistance of these two different powers and that Life itself
is similarly restricted by the mortality, the inertia and the instability
of Matter; but evidently there can be a world-order in which neither
of these two disabilities forms part of the first conditions of existence.
There is the possibility of a world in which Mind would be from the
first dominant, free to work upon its own substance or matter as a quite
plastic material, or where Matter would be quite evidently the result of
the universal Mind-Force working itself out in life. It is that even here
in reality; but here the Mind-Force is involved from the beginning, for
a long time subconscient, and, even when it has emerged, never in free
possession of itself, but subject to its encasing material, while there it
would be in possession of itself and master of its material, which would
be much more subtle and elastic than in a predominantly physical uni-
verse. So too Life might have its own world-order where it would be
sovereign, able to deploy its own more elastic and freely variable desires
and tendencies, not menaced at every moment by disintegrating forces
and therefore occupied chiefly with the care of self-preservation and re-
stricted in its play by this state of precarious tension which limits its
instincts of free formation, free self-gratification and free adventure.

702 THE LIFE DIVINE

The separate dominance of each principle of being is an eternal possi-
bility in the manifestation of being, — given always that they are prin-
ciples distinct in their dynamic power and mode of working, even
though one in original substance.

That could make no difference if all this were only a philosophical
possibility or a potentiality in the being of Sachchidananda which it
never realises or has not yet realised, or, if realised, has not brought
within the scope of the consciousness of beings living in the physical
universe. But all our spiritual and psychic experience bears affirmative
witness, brings us always a constant and, in its main principles, an in-
variable evidence of the existence of higher worlds, freer planes of exist-
ence. Not having bound ourselves down, like so much of modern thought,
to the dogma that only physical experience or experience based upon
the physical sense is true, the analysis of physical experience by the
reason alone verifiable, and all else only result of physical experience and
physical existence and anything beyond this an error, self-delusion and
hallucination, we are free to accept this evidence and to admit the
reality of these planes. We see that they are, practically, different har-
monies from the harmony of the physical universe; they occupy, as the
word "plane" suggests, a different level in the scale of being and adopt
a different system and ordering of its principles. We need not inquire,
for our present purpose, whether they coincide in time and space with
our own world or move in a different field of space and in another stream
of time, — in either case it is in a more subtle substance and with other
movements. All that directly concerns us is to know whether they are
different universes, each complete in itself and in no way meeting, inter-
crossing or affecting the others, or are rather different scales of one
graded and interwoven system of being, parts therefore of one complex
universal system. The fact that they can enter into the field of our men-
tal consciousness would naturally suggest the validity of the second
alternative, but it would not by itself be altogether conclusive. But what
we find is that these higher planes are actually at every moment acting
upon and in communication with our own plane of being, although this
action is naturally not present to our ordinary waking or outer conscious-
ness, because that is for the most part limited to a reception and utiHsa-
tion of the contacts of the physical world: but the moment we either go
back into our subliminal being or enlarge our waking consciousness be-
yond the scope of the physical contacts, we become aware of something
of this higher action. We find even that the human being can project him-

THE ORDER OF THE WORLDS 703

self partially into these higher planes under certain conditions, even
while in the body; a fortiori must he be able to do it when out of the
body, and to do it then completely, since there is no longer the disabling
condition of the physical life bound down to the body. The consequences
of this relation and this power of transference are of immense impor-
tance. On the one side they immediately justify, at any rate as an actual
possibility, the ancient tradition of at least a temporary sojourn of the
human conscious being in other worlds than the physical after the disso-
lution of the physical body. On the other side they open to us the possi-
bility of an action of the higher planes on the material existence which
can liberate the powers they represent, the powers of life, mind and
spirit for the evolutionary intention inherent within Nature by the very
fact of their embodiment in Matter.

These worlds are not in their original creation subsequent in order
to the physical universe but prior to it, — prior if not in time, in their
consequential sequence. For even if there is an ascending as well as a
descending gradation, this ascending gradation must be in its first nature
a provision for the evolutionary emergence in Matter, a formative power
for its endeavour, contributing to it helpful and adverse elements, and
not a mere consequence of the terrestrial evolution; for that is neither
a rational probability nor has it a spiritual or dynamic and pragmatic
sense. In other words, the higher worlds have not come into being by a
pressure from the lower physical universe,— let us say, from Sachchida-
nanda in the physical Inconscience, or else by the urge of his being as it
emerges from the Inconscience into life and mind and spirit and experi-
ences the necessity of creating worlds or planes in which those principles
shall have a freer play and in which the human soul may strengthen its
vital, mental or spiritual tendencies. Still less are they the creations of
the human soul itself, whether its dreams or the result of the constant
self-projections of mankind in its dynamic and creative being beyond
the limits of the physical consciousness. The only thing that man clearly
creates in this direction is the reflex images of these planes in his own em-
bodied consciousness and the fitness of his own soul to respond to them,
to become aware of them, to participate consciously in the interweaving
of their influences with the action of the physical plane. He may indeed
contribute the results or projections of his own higher vital and mental
action to the action of these planes: but, if so, these projections are, after
all, only a return of the higher planes upon themselves, a return from the
earth of their powers which have come down from them to the earth-

704 THE LIFE DIVINE

mind, since this higher vital and mental action is itself the result of in-
fluences transmitted from above. It is possible also that he can create
a certain kind of subjective annexe to these supraphysical planes, or at
least to the lower of them, environments of a half-unreal character
which are rather self-created envelopes of his conscious mind and life
than true worlds ; they are the reflections of his own being, an artificial
environment corresponding to his attempt during life to image these
other worlds, — heavens and hells projected by the image-creating faculty
in his human power of conscious being. But neither of these two con-
tributions at all means a total creation of a real plane of being founded
and acting on its own separate principle.

These planes or systems are then at least coeval and co-existent with
that which presents itself to us as the physical universe. We have been
led to conclude that the development of life, mind and spirit in the phys-
ical being presupposes their existence; for these powers are developed
here by two co-operating forces, an upward-tending force from below, an
upward-drawing and downward-pressing force from above. For there is
the necessity in the Inconscient of bringing out what is latent within it,
and there is the pressure of the superior principles in the higher planes
which not only aids this general necessity to realise itself, but may very
largely determine the special ways in which it is eventually realised. It
is this upward-drawing action and this pressure, this insistence from
above, which explain the constant influence of the spiritual, mental and
vital worlds upon the physical plane. It is evident that, given a complex
universe and seven principles interwoven in every part of its system and
naturally therefore drawn to act upon and respond to each other wherever
they can at all get at one another, such an action, such a constant pres-
sure and influence, is an inevitable consequence, must be inherent in the
very nature of the manifested universe.

A secret continuous action of the higher powers and principles from
their own planes upon terrestrial being and nature through the subliminal
self, which is itself a projection from those planes into the world born
of the Inconscience, must have an effect and a significance. Its first effect
has been the liberation of life and mind out of Matter; its last effect has
been to assist the emergence of a spiritual consciousness, a spiritual will
and spiritual sense of existence in the terrestrial being so that he is no
longer solely preoccupied with his outermost life or with that and mental
pursuits and interests, but has learned to look within, to discover his
inner being, his spiritual self, to aspire to overpass earth and her limi-

THE ORDER OF THE WORLDS 705

tations. As he grows more and more inward, his boundaries mental, vital,
spiritual begin to broaden, the bonds that held life, mind, soul to their
first limitations loosen or snap, and man the mental being begins to have
a glimpse of a larger kingdom of self and world closed to the first earth-
life. No doubt, so long as he lives mainly on his surface, he can only build
a sort of superstructure ideal and imaginative and ideative upon the
ground of his normal narrow existence. But if he makes the inward move-
ment which his own highest vision has held up before him as his greatest
spiritual necessity, then he will find there in his inner being a larger
consciousness, a larger life. An action from within and an action from
above can overcome the predominance of the material formula, diminish
and finally put an end to the power of the Inconscience, reverse the order
of the consciousness, substitute the spirit for Matter as his conscious
foundation of being and liberate its higher powers to their complete and
characteristic expression in the life of the soul embodied in Nature.

CHAPTER XXII

1

REBIRTH AND OTHER WORLDS; KARMA,
THE SOUL AND IMMORTALITY

He passes in his departure from this world to the physi-
cal Self ; he passes to the Self of life ; he passes to the Self of
mind; he passes to the Self of knowledge; he passes to the
Self of bliss ; he moves through these worlds at will.

Taittiriya Upanishad}

They say indeed that the conscious being is made of
desire. But of whatsoever desire he comes to be, he comes
to be of that will, and of whatever will he comes to be, he
does that action, and whatever his action, to (the result of)
that he reaches. . . . Adhered to by his Karma,^ he goes
in his subtle body to wherever his mind cleaves, then, com-
ing to the end of his Karma, even of whatsoever action he
does here, he returns from that world to this world for
Karma.

Brihadaranyaka Upanishad.'

Equipped with qualities, a doer of works and creator
of their consequences, he reaps the result of his actions; he
is the ruler of the life and he moves in his journey accord-
ing to his own acts ; he has idea and ego and is to be known
by the qualities of his intelligence and his quality of self.
Smaller than the hundredth part of the tip of a hair, the
soul of the living being is capable of infinity. Male is he
not nor female nor neuter, but is joined to whatever body
he takes as his own.

Swetaswatara Upanishad.^

Mortals, they achieved immortality.

Rig Veda.^

OUR first conclusion on the subject of reincarnation has been that
the rebirth of the soul in successive terrestrial bodies is an inevi-
table consequence of the original significance and process of the manifes-

^III. ID. 5.

^Action, karma. In the view expressed in this verse of the Upanishad the
Karma or action of this life is exhausted by the life in the world beyond in which
its results are fulfilled and the soul returns to earth for fresh Karma. The cause of
birth in this world, of Karma, of the soul's passage to other-world existence and
its return here is, throughout, the soul's own consciousness, will and desire.

nv. 4. s, 6. *V. 7-10. ''L no. 4.

706

REBIRTH AND OTHER WORLDS 707

tation in earth-nature; but this conclusion leads to farther problems and
farther results which it is necessary to elucidate. There arises first the
question of the process of rebirth; if that process is not quickly suc-
cessive, birth immediately following death of the body so as to maintain
an uninterrupted series of lives of the same person, if there are intervals,
that in its turn raises the question of the principle and process of the
passage to other worlds, which must be the scene of these intervals, and
the return to earth-life. A third question is the process of the spiritual
evolution itself and the mutations which the soul undergoes in its passage
from birth to birth through the stages of its adventure.

If the physical universe were the sole manifested world, or if it were
a quite separate world, rebirth as a part of the evolutionary process would
be confined to a constant succession of direct transmigrations from one
body to another; death would be immediately followed by a new birth
without any possibility of an interval, — the passage of the soul would be
a spiritual circumstance in the uninterrupted series of a compulsory,
mechanical, material procedure. The soul would have no freedom from
Matter; it would be perpetually bound to its instrument, the body, and
dependent on it for the continuity of its manifested existence. But we
have found that there is a life on other planes after death and before the
subsequent rebirth, a life consequent on the old and preparatory of the
new stage of terrestrial existence. Other planes co-exist with ours, are
part of one complex system and act constantly upon the physical which
is their own final and lowest term, receive its reactions, admit a secret
communication and commerce. Man can become conscious of these
planes, can even in certain states project his conscious being into them,
partly in life, presumably therefore with a full completeness after the
dissolution of the body. Such a possibility of projection into other worlds
or planes of being becomes then sufficiently actual to necessitate practi-
cally its own realisation, immediately and perhaps invariably following on
human earth-life if man is from the beginning endowed with such a power
of self-transference, eventual if he only arrives at it by a gradual progres-
sion. For it is possible that at the beginning he would not be sufficiently
developed to carry on his life or his mind into larger life-worlds or mind-
worlds and would be compelled to accept an immediate transmigration
from one earthly body to another as his only present possibility of per-
sistence.

The necessity for an interregnum between birth and birth and a pas-
sage to other worlds arises from a double cause: there is an attraction of

708 THE LIFE DIVINE

the other planes for the mental and the vital being in man's composite
nature due to their affinity with these levels, and there is the utility or
even the need of an interval for assimilation of the completed life-ex-
perience, a working out of what has to be discarded, a preparation for
the new embodiment and the new terrestrial experience. But this need
of a period of assimilation and this attraction of other worlds for kin-
dred parts of our being may become effective only when the mental and
vital individuality has been sufficiently developed in the half-animal
physical man; until then they might not exist or might not be active:
the life experiences would be too simple and elementary to need assimila-'
tion and the natural being too crude to be capable of a complex assimila-
tive process ; the higher parts would not be sufficiently developed to lift
themselves to higher planes of existence. There can be, then, in the ab-
sence of such connections with other worlds, a theory of rebirth which
admits only of a constant transmigration; here the existence of other
worlds and the sojourn of the soul in other planes are not an actual or at
any stage a necessary part of the system. There can be another theory in
which this passage is the obligatory rule for all and there is no immediate
rebirth ; the soul needs an interval of preparation for the new incarnation
and new experience. A compromise between the two theories is also pos-
sible; the transmigration may be the first rule prevailing while the soul
is yet unripe for a higher world-existence; the passage to other planes
would be the subsequent law. There may even be a third stage, as is some-
times suggested, in which the soul is so powerfully developed, its natural
parts so spiritually alive that it needs no interval, but can immediately
resume birth for a more rapid evolution without the retardation of a
period of intermittence.

In the popular ideas which derive from the religions that admit re-
incarnation, there is an inconsistency which, after the manner of popular
beliefs, they have been at no pains to reconcile. On the one hand, there
is the belief, vague enough but fairly general, that death is followed
immediately or with something like immediateness by the assumption
of another body. On the other hand, there is the old religious dogma of
a life after death in hells and heavens or, it may be, in other worlds or
degrees of being, which the soul has acquired or incurred by its merits or
demerits in this physical existence; the return to earth intervenes only
when that merit and demerit are exhausted and the being is ready for
another terrestrial life. This inconsistency would disappear if we admit a
variable movement dependent on the stage of evolution which the soul

REBIRTH AND OTHER WORLDS 709

has reached in its manifestation in Nature; all would then turn on the
degree of its capacity for entering a higher status than the earthly life.
But in the ordinary notion of reincarnation the idea of a spiritual evolu-
tion is not explicit, it is only implied in the fact that the soul has to
reach the point at which it becomes capable of transcending the neces-
sity of rebirth and returning to its eternal source; but if there is no
gradual and graded evolution, this point can be as well reached by a
chaotic zigzag movement of which the law is not easily determinable.
The definitive solution of the question depends on psychic inquiry and
experience; here we can only consider whether there is in the nature of
things or in the logic of the evolutionary process any apparent or inher-
ent necessity for either movement, for the immediate transition from
body to body or for the retardation or interval before a new reincarna-
tion of the self-embodying psychic principle.

A sort of half necessity for the life in other worlds, a dynamic and
practical rather than an essential necessity, arises from the very fact that
the different world-principles are interwoven with each other and in a
way interdependent and the effect that this fact must have upon the
process of our spiritual evolution. But this might be counteracted for a
time by the greater pull or attraction of the earth or the preponderant
physicality of the evolving nature. Our belief in the birth of an ascending
soul into the human form and its repeated rebirth in that form, without
which it cannot complete its human evolution, rests, from the point of
view of the reasoning intelligence, on the basis that the progressive transit
of the soul into higher and higher grades of the earthly existence and,
once it has reached the human level, its repeated human birth compose
a sequence necessary for the growth of the nature; one brief human life
upon earth is evidently insufficient for the evolutionary purpose. In the
early stages of a series of human reincarnations, during a period of rudi-
mentary humanity, there is a certain possibility at first sight of an often
repeated immediate transmigration, — the repeated assumption of a new
human form in a fresh birth immediately the previous body has been dis-
solved by a cessation or expulsion of the organised life-energy and the
consequent physical disintegration which we call death. But what neces-
sity of the evolutionary process would compel such a series of immediate
rebirths? Evidently, it could only be imperative so long as the psychic
individuality — not the secret soul-entity itself but the soul-formation in
the natural being — is little evolved, insufficiently developed, so insuffi-
ciently formed that it could not abide except by dependence upon the

710 THE LIFE DIVINE

uninterrupted continuance of this life's mental, vital and physical indi-
viduality: unable as yet to persist in itself, discard its past mind-forma-
tion and life- formation and build after a useful interval new formations,
it would be obliged to transfer at once its rudimentary crude personality
for preservation to a new body. It is doubtful whether we should be
justified in attributing any such entirely insufficient development to a
being so strongly individualised that it has got as far as the human
consciousness. Even at his lowest normality the human individual is still
a soul acting through a distinct mental being, however ill-formed his
mind may be, however limited and dwarfed, however engrossed and en-
cased in the physical and vital consciousness and unable or unwilling
to detach itself from its lower formations. Yet we may suppose that there
is a downward attachment so strong as to compel the being to hasten at
once to a resumption of the physical life because his natural formation
is not really fit for anything else or at home on any higher plane. Or,
again, the life-experience might be so brief and incomplete as to compel
the soul to an immediate rebirth for its continuance. Other needs, influ-
ences or causes there may be in the complexity of Nature-process, such
as a strong will of earthly desire pressing for fulfilment, which would
enforce an immediate transmigration of the same persistent form of per-
sonality into a new body. But still the alternative process of a reincarna-
tion, a rebirth of the Person not only into a new body but into a new
formation of the personality, would be the normal line taken by the
psychic entity once it had reached the human stage of its evolutionary
cycle.

For the soul personality, as it develops, must get sufficient power
over its own nature-formation and a sufficient self-expressive mental and
vital individuality to persist without the support of the material body,
as well as to overcome any excessive detaining attachment to the physical
plane and the physical life: it would be sufficiently evolved to subsist in
the subtle body which we know to be the characteristic case or sheath
and the proper subtle-physical support of the inner being. It is the soul-
person, the psychic being, that survives and carries mind and life with
it on its journey, and it is in the subtle body that it passes out of its
material lodging ; both then must be sufficiently developed for the transit.
But a transference to planes of mind existence or life existence implies also
a mind and life sufficiently formed and developed to pass without disinte-
gration and exist for a time on these higher levels. If these conditions
were satisfied, a sufficiently developed psychic personality and subtle

REBIRTH AND OTHER WORLDS 71I

body and a sufficiently developed mental and vital personality, survival
of the soul-person without an immediate new-birth would be secured
and the pull of the other worlds would become operative. But this by
itself would mean a return to earth with the same mental and vital per-
sonality and there would be no free evolution in the new birth. There
must be an individuation of the psychic person itself sufficient for it not
to depend on its past mind and life formations any more than on its
past body, but to shed them too in time and proceed to a new formation
for new experience. For this discarding of the old and preparation of
new forms the soul must dwell for some time between two births some-
where else than on the entirely material plane in which we now move;
for here there would be no abiding place for a disembodied spirit. A brief
stay might indeed be possible if there are subtle envelopes of the earth-
existence which belong to earth but are of a vital or mental character:
but even then there would be no reason for the soul to linger there for
a long period, unless it is still burdened with an overpowering attach-
ment to the earth-life. A survival of the material body by the personality
implies a supraphysical existence, and this can only be in some plane of
being proper to the evolutionary stage of the consciousness or, if there
is no evolution, in a temporary second home of the spirit which would
be its natural place of sojourn between life and life, — ^unless indeed it is
its original world from which it does not return into material Nature.
Where then would the temporary dwelling in the supraphysical
take place? what would be the soul's other habitat? It might seem that
it ought to be on a mental plane, in mental worlds, both because on man
the mental being the attraction of that plane, already active in life, must
prevail when there is not the obstacle of the attachment to the body,
and because the mental plane should be, evidently, the native and proper
habitat of a mental being. But this does not automatically follow, be-
cause of the complexity of man's being; he has a vital as well as a mental
existence, — -his vital part often more powerful and prominent than the
mental, — and behind the mental being is a soul of which it is the repre-
sentative. There are, besides, many planes or levels of world-existence
and the soul has to pass through them to reach its natural home. In the
physical plane itself or close to it there are believed to be layers of
greater and greater subtlety which may be regarded as sub-planes of
the physical with a vital and a mental character ; these are at once sur-
rounding and penetrating strata through which the interchange between
the higher worlds and the physical world takes place. It might then be

712 THE LIFE DIVINE

possible for the mental being, so long as its mentality is not sufficiently
developed, so long as it is restricted mainly to the more physical forms
of mind and life activity, to be caught and delayed in these media. It
might even be obliged to rest there entirely between birth and birth ; but
this is not probable and could only happen if and in so far as its attach-
ment to the earth-forms of its activity was so great as to preclude or
hamper the completion of the natural upward movement. For the post-
mortal state of the soul must correspond in some way to the development
of the being on earth, since this after-life is not a free upward return
from a temporary downward deviation into mortality, but a normal
recurrent circumstance which intervenes to help out the process of a
difficult spiritual evolution in the physical existence. There is a relation
which the human being in his evolution on earth develops with higher
planes of existence, and that must have a predominant effect on his
internatal dwelling in these planes ; it must determine his direction after
death and determine too the place, period and character of his self-
experience there.

It may be also that he may linger for a time in one of those annexes
of the other worlds created by his habitual beliefs or by the t5^e of his
aspirations in the mortal body. We know that he creates images of these
superior planes, which are often mental translations of certain elements
in them, and erects his images into a system, a form of actual worlds;
he builds up also desire worlds of many kinds to which he attaches a
strong sense of inner reality: it is possible that these constructions may
be so strong as to create for him an artificial postmortal environment in
which he may linger. For the image-making power of the human mind,
its imagination, which is in his physical life only an indispensable aid
to his acquisition of knowledge and his life-creation, may in a higher
scale become a creative force which would enable the mental being to
live for a while amid its own images until they were dissolved by the
soul's pressure. All these buildings are of the nature of larger life con-
structions; in them his mind translates some of the real conditions of
the greater mental and vital worlds into terms of his physical experience
magnified, prolonged, extended to a condition beyond physicality: he
carries by this translation the vital joy and vital suffering of the physical
being into supraphysical conditions in which they have a greater scope,
fullness and endurance. These constructive environments must therefore
be considered, so far as they have any supraphysical habitat, as annexes
of the vital or of the lower mental planes of existence.

REBIRTH AND OTHER WORLDS 713

But there are also the true vital worlds, — original constructions,
organised developments, native habitats of the universal life-principle,
the cosmic vital Anima, acting in its own field and in its own nature. On
his internatal journey he may be held there for a period by force of the
predominantly vital character of the influences which have shaped his
earthly existence, — for these influences are native to the vital world and
their hold on him would detain him for a while in their proper province :
he may be kept in the grasp of that which held him in its grasp even in
the physical being. Any residence of the soul in annexes or in its own
constructions could be only a transitional stage of the consciousness in
its passage from the physical to the supraphysical state; it must pass
from these structures into the true worlds of supraphysical Nature. It
may enter at once into the worlds of other-life, or it may remain first,
as a transitional stage, in some region of subtle-physical experience whose
surroundings may seem to it a prolongation of the circumstances of phys-
ical life, but in freer conditions proper to a subtler medium and in some
kind of happy perfection of mind or life or a finer bodily existence. Be-
yond these subtle-physical planes of experience and the life-worlds there
are also mental or spiritual-mental planes to which the soul seems to
have an internatal access and into which it may pursue its internatal
journey; but it is not likely to live consciously there if there has not
been a sufficient mental or soul development in this life. For these levels
must normally be the highest the evolving being can internatally inhabit,
since one who has not gone beyond the mental rung in the ladder of
being would not be able to ascend to any supramental or overmental
state; or if he had so developed, as to overleap the mental level and
could attain so far, it might not be possible for him to return so long as
the physical evolution has not developed here an organisation of an
overmental or supramental life in Matter.

But, even so, the mental worlds are not likely to be the last nor-
mal stage of the after-death passage ; for man is not entirely mental ; it
is the soul, the psychic being, and not the mind, that is the traveller
between death and birth, and the mental being is only a predominant
element in the figure of its self-expression. There must then be a final
resort to a plane of pure psychic existence in which the soul would await
rebirth; there it could assimilate the energies of its past experience and
life and prepare its future. Ordinarily, the normally developed human
being, who has risen to a sufficient power of mentality, might be expected
to pass successively through all these planes, subtle-physical, vital and

714 THE LIFE DIVINE

mental, on his way to his psychic habitation. At each stage he would ex-
haust and get rid of the fractions of formed personality structure, tem-
porary and superficial, that belonged to the past life; he would cast off
his mind sheath and life sheath as he had already cast off his body
sheath: but the essence of the personality and its mental, vital and phys-
ical experiences would remain in latent memory or as a dynamic potency
for the future. But if the development of mind were insufficient, it is
possible that it would not be able to go consciously beyond the vital
level and the being would either fall back from there, returning from its
vital heavens or purgatories to earth, or, more consistently, would pass
at once into a kind of psychic assimilative sleep co-extensive with the
internatal period; to be awake in the highest planes a certain develop-
ment would be indispensable.

All this, however, is a matter of dynamic probability, and that,
though amounting in practice to a necessity, though justified by certain
facts of subliminal experience, is still for the reasoning mind not in itself
quite conclusive. We have to ask whether there is any more essential ne-
cessity for these internatal intervals, or at least any of so great a dy-
namic power as to lead to an irresistible conclusion. We shall find one
such necessity in the decisive part played by the higher planes in the
earth-evolution and the relation that it has created between them and the
evolving soul-consciousness. Our development takes place very largely
by their superior but hidden action upon the earth-plane. All is con-
tained in the inconscient or the subconscient, but in potentiality ; it is the
action from above that helps to compel an emergence. A continuance of
that action is necessary to shape and determine the progression of the
mental and vital forms which our evolution takes in material nature ; for
these progressive movements cannot find their full momentum or suffi-
ciently develop their implications against the resistance of an incon-
scient or inert and ignorant material Nature except by a constant though
occult resort to higher supraphysical forces of their own character. This
resort, the action of this veiled alliance, takes place principally in our
subliminal being and not on the surface: it is from there that the active
power of our consciousness emerges, and all that it realises it sends back
constantly into the subliminal being to be stored up, developed and re-
emerge in stronger forms hereafter. This interaction of our larger hidden
being and our surface personality is the main secret of the rapid develop-
ment that operates in man once he has passed beyond the lower stages of
mind immersed in Matter.

REBIRTH AND OTHER WORLDS 715

This resort must continue in the internatal stage; for a new birth,
a new life is not a taking up of the development exactly where it stopped
in the last, it does not merely repeat and continue our past surface person-
ality and formation of nature. There is, an assimilation, a discarding and
strengthening and rearrangement of the old characters and motives, a
new ordering of the developments of the past and a selection for the pur-
poses of the future without which the new start cannot be fruitful or
carry forward the evolution. For each birth is a new start; it develops
indeed from the past, but is not its mechanical continuation: rebirth is
not a constant reiteration but a progression, it is the machinery of an evo-
lutionary process. Part of this rearrangement, the discarding especially
of past strong vibrations of the personality, can only be effected by an
exhaustion of the push of previous mental, vital, physical motives after
death, and this internal liberation or lightening of impedimenta must be
put through on the planes proper to the motives that are to be discarded
or otherwise manipulated, those planes which are themselves of that na-
ture; for it is only there that the soul can still continue the activities
which have to be exhausted and rejected from the consciousness so that
it can pass on to a formation. It is probable also that the integrating pos-
itive preparation would be carried out and the character of the new life
would be decided by the soul itself in a resort to its native habitat, a plane
of psychic repose, where it would draw all back into itself and await its
new stage in the evolution. This would mean a passage of the soul pro-
gressively through subtle-physical, vital and mental worlds to the psychic
dwelling-place from which it would return to its terrestrial pilgrimage.
The terrestrial gathering up and development of the materials thus pre-
pared, their working out in the earth life would be the consequence of
this internatal resort, and the new birth would be a field of the resultant
activity, a new stadium or spiral curve in the individual evolution of the
embodied spirit.

For when we say that the soul on earth evolves successively the
physical, the vital, the mental, the spiritual being, we do not mean that
it creates them and that they had no previous existence. On the contrary,
what it does is to manifest these principles of its spiritual entity under
the conditions imposed by a world of physical Nature; this manifesta-
tion takes the form of a structure of frontal personality which is a trans-
lation of the inner self into the terms and possibilities of the physical
existence. In fact we must accept the ancient idea that man has within
him not only the physical soul or Purusha with its appropiate nature,

71 6 THE LIFE DIVINE

but a vital, a mental, a psychic, a supramental, a supreme spiritual
being ;^ and either the whole or the greater presence or force of them is
concealed in his subliminal or latent and unformulated in his supercon-
scient parts. He has to bring forward their powers in his active conscious-
ness and to awake to them in its knowledge. But each of these powers of
his being is in relation with its own proper plane of existence and all
have their roots there. It is through them that there takes place the sub-
liminal resort of the being to the shaping influences from above, a re-
sort which may become more and more conscious as we develop. It is
logical then that according to the development of their powers in our
conscious evolution should be the internatal resort which this nature of
our birth here and its evolutionary object and process necessitate. The
circumstances and the stages of that resort must be complex and not
of the crudely and trenchantly simple character which the popular re-
ligions imagine: but in itself it can be accepted as an inevitable con-
sequence of the very origin and nature of the soul-life in the body. All is
a closely woven web, an evolution and an interaction whose links have
been forged by a Conscious-Force following out the truth of its own mo-
tives according to a dynamic logic of these finite of the Infinite.

If this view of rebirth and the soul's temporary passage into other
planes of existence is correct, both rebirth and the after-life assume a
different significance from the colour put on them by the long-current
belief about reincarnation and the after-death sojourn in worlds beyond
us. Reincarnation is commonly supposed to have two aspects, meta-
physical and moral, an aspect of spiritual necessity, an aspect of cosmic
justice and ethical discipline. The soul — in this view or for this purpose
supposed to have a real individual existence — is on earth as a result of
desire and ignorance ; it has to remain on earth or return to it always so
long as it has not wearied of desire and awakened to the fact of its igno-
rance and to the true knowledge. This desire compels it to return always
to a new body; it must follow always the revolving wheel of birth till
it is enlightened and liberated. It does not, however, remain always on
earth, but alternates between earth and other worlds, celestial and infer-
nal, where it exhausts its accumulated store of merit or demerit due to
the enactment of sin or virtue and then returns to the earth and to some
kind of terrestrial body, sometimes human, sometimes animal, sometimes
even vegetable. The nature of this new incarnation and its fortunes are
determined automatically by the soul's past actions, Karma ; if the sum

" Taittiriya Upanishad.

REBIRTH AND OTHER WORLDS 717

of past action was good, the birth is in the higher form, the life happy
or successful or unaccountably fortunate; if bad, a lower form of Nature
may house us or the life, if human, will be unhappy, unsuccessful, full
of suffering and misfortune. If our past actions and character were mixed,
then Nature, like a good accountant, gives us, according to the pitch and
values of our former conduct, a well-assorted payment of mixed happi-
ness and suffering, success and failure, the rarest good luck and the se-
verest ill-fortune. At the same time a strong personal will or desire in the
past life may also determine our new avatar. A mathematical aspect is
often given to these payments of Nature, for we are supposed to incur
a precise penalty for our misdeeds, undergo or return the replica or equiv-
alent of what we have inflicted or enacted ; the inexorable rule of a tooth
for a tooth is a frequent principle of the Karmic Law: for this Law is an
arithmetician with his abacus as well as a judge with his code of penalties
for long-past crimes and misdemeanours. It is also to be noted that in this
system there is a double punishment and a double reward for sin and
virtue; for the sinner is first tortured in hell and afterwards afflicted for
the same sins in another life here and the righteous or the puritan is re-
warded with celestial joys and afterwards again pampered for the same
virtues and good deeds in a new terrestrial existence.

These are very summary popular notions and offer no foothold to
the philosophic reason and no answer to a search for the true significance
of life. A vast world-system which exists only as a convenience for turn-
ing endlessly on a wheel of Ignorance with no issue except a final chance
of stepping out of it, is not a world with any real reason for existence. A
world which serves only as a school of sin and virtue and consists of
a system of rewards and whippings, does not make any better appeal
to our intelligence. The soul or spirit within us, if it is divine, immortal
or celestial, cannot be sent here solely to be put to school for this kind
of crude and primitive moral education; if it enters into the Ignorance,
it must be because there is some larger principle or possibility of its
being that has to be worked out through the Ignorance. If, on the other
hand, it is a being from the Infinite plunged for some cosmic purpose
into the obscurity of Matter and growing to self-knowledge within it, its
life here and the significance of that life must be something more than
that of an infant coddled and whipped into virtuous ways ; it must be a
growth out of an assumed ignorance towards its own full spiritual stature
with a final passage into an immortal consciousness, knowledge, strength,
beauty, divine purity and power, and for such a spiritual growth this law

71 8 THE LIFE DIVINE

of Karma is all too puerile. Even if the soul is something created, an in-
fant being that has to learn from Nature and grow into immortality, it
must be by a larger law of growth and not by some divine code of primi-
tive and barbaric justice. This idea of Karma is a construction of the
smaller part of the human vital mind concerned with its petty rules of
life and its desires and joys and sorrows and erecting their puny stand-
ards into the law and aim of the cosmos. These notions cannot be accept-
able to the thinking mind ; they have too evidently the stamp of a con-
struction fashioned by our human ignorance.

But the same solution can be elevated to a higher level of reason
and given a greater plausibility and the colour of a cosmic principle. For,
first, it may be based on the unassailable ground that all energies in Na-
ture must have their natural consequence; if any are without visible re-
sult in the present life, it may well be that the outcome is only delayed,
not withheld for ever. Each being reaps the harvest of his works and
deeds, the returns of the action put forth by the energies of his nature,
and those which are not apparent in his present birth must be held over
for a subsequent existence. It is true that the result of the energies and
actions of the individual may accrue not to himself but to others when
he is gone; for that we see constantly happening, — it happens indeed
even during a man's lifetime that the fruits of his energies are reaped by
others; but this is because there is a solidarity and a continuity of life
in Nature and the individual cannot altogether, even if he so wills, live
for himself alone. But, if there is a continuity of his own life by rebirth
for the individual and not only a continuity of the mass life and the cos-
mic life, if he has an ever-developing self, nature and experience, then it
is inevitable that for him too the working of his energies should not be
cut off abruptly but must bear their consequence at some time in his
continuous and developing existence. Man's being, nature, circumstances
of life are the result of his own inner and outer activities, not something
fortuitous and inexplicable: he is what he has made himself; the past
man was the father of the man that now is, the present man is the father
of the man that will be. Each being reaps what he sows; from what he
does he profits, for what he does he suffers. This is the law and chain
of Karma, of Action, of the work of Nature-Energy, and it gives a mean-
ing to the total force of our existence, nature, character, action which
is absent from other theories of life. It is evident on this principle that
a man's past and present Karma must determine his future birth and its
happenings and circumstances; for these two must be the fruit of his

REBIRTH AND OTHER WORLDS 719

energies: all that he was and did in the past must be the creator of all
that he now is and experiences in his present, and all that he is and is
doing in the present must be the creator of what he will be and experi-
ence in the future. Man is the creator of himself ; he is the creator also of
his fate. All this is perfectly rational and unexceptionable so far as it
goes and the law of Karma may be accepted as a fact, as part of the cos-
mic machinery; for it is so evident — ^rebirth once admitted — as to be
practically indisputable.

There are, however, two riders to this first proposition which are
less general and authentic and bring in a doubtful note ; for though they
may be true in part, they are overstated and create a wrong perspective,
because they are put forward as the whole sense of Karma. The first is
that as is the nature of the energies so must be the nature of the results,
— the good must bring good results, the evil must bring evil results: the
second is that the master word of Karma is justice and therefore good
deeds must bear the fruit of happiness and good fortune and evil deeds
must bear the fruit of sorrow, misery and ill-fortune. Since there must
be a cosmic justice which is looking on and controlling in some way the
immediate and visible operations of Nature in life, but is not apparent
to us in the facts of life as seen by us, it must be present and evident
in the totality of her unseen dealings ; it must be the subtle and hardly
visible, but strong and firm secret thread that holds together the other-
wise incoherent details of her dealings with her creatures. If it be asked
why actions alone, good or bad deeds alone, should have a result, it
might be conceded that good or evil thoughts, feelings, actions have all
their corresponding results, but since action is the greater part of life
and the test and formulated power of a man's values of being, since also
he is not always responsible for his thoughts and feelings, as they are
often involuntary, but is or must be held responsible for what he does,
as that is subject to his choice, it is mainly his actions that construct his
fate; they are the chief or the most forceful determinants of his being
and his future. This is the whole law of Karma.

But we have first to observe that a law or chain of Karma is only
an outward machinery and cannot be elevated to a greater position as
the sole and absolute determinant of the life-workings of the cosmos, un-
less the cosmos is itself entirely mechanical in its character. It is indeed
held by many that all is Law and Process and there is no conscious Being
or Will in or behind the cosmos; if so, here is a Law and Process that
satisfies our human reason and our mental standards of right and justice

720 THE LIFE DIVINE

and it has the beauty and truth of a perfect symmetry and a mathemat-
ical accuracy of working. But all is not Law and Process, there is also
Being and Consciousness; there is not only a machinery but a Spirit in
things, not only Nature and law of cosmos but a cosmic Spirit, not only
a process of mind and life and body but a soul in the natural creature.
If it were not so, there could be no rebirth of a soul and no field for a
law of Karma. But if the fundamental truth of our being is spiritual and
not mechanical, it must be our self, our soul that fundamentally deter-
mines its own evolution, and the law of Karma can only be one of the
processes it uses for that purpose: our Spirit, our Self must be greater
than its Karma. There is Law, but there is also spiritual freedom; Law
and Process are one side of our existence and their reign is over our outer
mind, life and body, for these are mostly subject to the mechanism of
Nature. But ever here their mechanical power is absolute only over body
and matter; for Law becomes more complex and less rigid. Process more
plastic and less mechanical when there comes in the phenomenon of life,
and yet more is this so when mind intervenes with its subtlety; an inner
freedom already begins to intervene and, the more we go within, the soul's
power of choice is increasingly felt: for Prakriti is the field of law and
process, but the soul, the Purusha, is the giver of the sanction, anumantd,
and even if ordinarily it chooses to remain a witness and concede an
automatic sanction, it can be, if it wills, the master of its nature, Ishwara.
It is not conceivable that the spirit within is an automaton in the
hands of Karma, a slave in this life of its past actions ; the truth must be
less rigid and more plastic. If a certain amount of results of past Karma is
formulated in the present life, it must be with the consent of the psychic
being which presides over the new formation of its earth-experience and
assents not merely to an outward compulsory process, but to a secret
Will and Guidance. That secret Will is not mechanical, but spiritual ; the
guidance comes from an Intelligence which may use mechanical processes
but is not their subject. Self-expression and experience are what the soul
seeks by its birth into the body ; whatever is necessary for the self-expres-
sion and experience of this life, whether it intervenes as an automatic
outcome of past lives or as a free selection of results and a continuity or
as a new development, whatever is a means of creation of the future, that
will be formulated: for the principle is not the working out of a mecha-
nism of Law, but the development of the nature through cosmic experi-
ence so that eventually it may grow out of the Ignorance. There must
therefore be two elements. Karma as an instrument, but also the secret

REBIRTH AND OTHER WORLDS 721

Consciousness and Will within working through the mind, life and body-
as the user. Fate, whether purely mechanical or created by ourselves, a
chain of our own manufacture, is only one factor of existence; Being and
its consciousness and its will are a still more important factor. In Indian
astrology which considers all life circumstances to be Karma, mostly pre-
determined or indicated in the graph of the stars, there is still provision
made for the energy and force of the being which can change or cancel
part or much of what is so written or even all but the most imperative and
powerful bindings of Karma. This is a reasonable account of the bal-
ance: but there is also to be added to the computation the fact that des-
tiny is not simple but complex; the destiny which binds our physical
being, binds it so long or in so far as a greater law does not intervene. Ac-
tion belongs to the physical part of us, it is the physical outcome of our
being; but behind our surface is a freer life power, a freer mind power
which has another energy and can create another destiny and bring it
in to modify the primary plan, and when the soul and self emerges, when
we become consciously spiritual beings, that change can cancel or wholly
remodel the graph of our physical fate. Karma, then, — or at least any
mechanical law of Karma, — cannot be accepted as the sole determinant
of circumstances and the whole machinery of rebirth and of our future
evolution.

But this is not all; for the statement of the Law errs by an over-
simplification and the arbitrary selection of a limited principle. Action
is a resultant of the energy of the being, but this energy is not of one sole
kind; the consciousness-force of the spirit manifests itself in many kinds
of energies: there are inner activities of mind, activities of life, of desire,
passion, impulse, character, activities of the senses and the body, a pur-
suit of truth and knowledge, a pursuit of beauty, a pursuit of ethical
good or evil, a pursuit of power, love, joy, happiness, fortune, success,
pleasure, life satisfactions of all kinds, life enlargement, a pursuit of in-
dividual or collective objects, a pursuit of the health, strength, capacity,
satisfaction of the body. All this makes an exceedingly complex sum of the
manifold experience and many-sided action of the spirit in life, and its
variety cannot be set aside in favour of a single principle, neither can it
be hammered into so many sections of the single duality of ethical good
and evil; ethics, the maintenance of human standards of morality, can-
not, therefore, be the sole preoccupation of the cosmic Law or the sole
principle of determination of the working of Karma. If it is true that the
nature of the energy put forth must determine the nature of the result

722 THE LIFE DIVINE

or outcome, all these differences in the nature of the energy have to be
taken into account and each must have its appropriate consequence. An
energy of seeking for truth and knowledge must have as its natural out-
come— its reward or recompense, if you" will, — a growth into truth, an
increase in knowledge; an energy used for falsehood should result in an
increase of falsehood in the nature and a deeper immersion in the Igno-
rance. An energy of pursuit of beauty should have as its outcome an in-
crease in the sense of beauty, the enjoyment of beauty or, if so directed,
in the beauty and harmony of the life and the nature. A pursuit of phys-
ical health, strength and capacity should create the strong man or the
successful athlete. An energy put out in the pursuit of ethical good must
have as its outcome or reward or recompense an increase in virtue, the
happiness of ethical growth or the sunny felicity and poise and purity of a
simple and natural goodness, while the punishment of opposite energies
would be a deeper plunge into evil, a greater disharmony and perversion
of the nature and, in case of excess, a great spiritual perdition, mahatl
vinastih. An energy put forward for power or other vital ends must lead
to an increase of the capacity for commanding these results or to the de-
velopment of a vital strength and plenitude. This is the ordinary disposi-
tion of things in Nature and, if justice be demanded of her, this surely
is justice that the energy and capacity put forward should have in its
own kind its fitting response from her. The prize of the race is assigned
by her to the swift, the victory in battle to the brave and strong and skil-
ful, the rewards of knowledge to the capable intellect and the earnest
seeker: these things she will not give to the good man who is sluggish or
weak or skilless or stupid merely because he is righteous or respectable;
if he covets these other powers of life, he must qualify for them and put
forward the right kind of energy. If Nature did otherwise, she could well
be accused of injustice; there is no reason to accuse her of injustice for
this perfectly right and normal arrangement or to demand from her a
rectification of the balance in a future life so that the good man may be
given as a natural reward for his virtue a high post or a large bank bal-
ance or a happy, easy and well-appointed life. That cannot be the signif-
icance of rebirth or a sufficient basis for a cosmic law of Karma.

There is indeed in our life a very large element of what we call luck
or fortune, which baulks our effort of result or gives the prize without
effort or to an inferior energy: the secret cause of these caprices of Des-
tiny— or causes, for the roots of Fortune may be manifold, — must be no
doubt partly sought for in our hidden past; but it is difficult to accept

REBIRTH AND OTHER WORLDS 723

the simple solution that good luck is a return for a forgotten virtuous ac-
tion in a past life and bad luck a return for a sin or crime. If we see the
righteous man suffering here, it is difficult to believe that this paragon
of virtue was in the last life a scoundrel and is paying, even after his ex-
emplary conversion by a new birth, for sins he then committed; nor if the
wicked triumphs, can we easily suppose that he was in his last life a
saint who has suddenly taken a wrong turn but continues to receive a
cash return for his previous virtue. A total change of this kind between
life and life is possible though not likely to be frequent, but to saddle
the new opposite personality with the rewards or punishments of the old
looks like a purposeless and purely mechanical procedure. This and many
other difficulties arise, and the too simple logic of the correlation is not
so strong as it claims to be; the idea of retribution of Karma as a com-
pensation for the injustice of life and Nature is a feeble basis for the
theory, for it puts forward a shallow and superficial human feeling and
standard as the sense of the cosmic Law and is based on an unsound
reasoning; there must be some other and stronger foundation for the law
of Karma.

Here, as so often, the error comes by our forcing a standard which
is the creation of our human mind into the larger, freer and more com-
prehensive ways of the cosmic Intelligence. In the action attributed to
the law of Karma two values are selected out of the many created by
Nature, moral good and evil, sin and virtue, and vital-physical good and
evil, outward happiness and suffering, outward good fortune and ill-
fortune, and it is supposed that there must be an equation between them,
the one must be the reward or punishment of the other, the final sanction
which it receives in the secret justice of Nature. This collocation is evi-
dently made from the view-point of a common vital-physical desire in
our members: because happiness and good fortune are what the lower
part of our vital being most desires, misfortune and suffering what it most
hates and dreads, it proceeds, when it accepts the moral demand upon it
for the curbing of its propensities, for self-restraint from doing evil and
self-exertion towards doing what is good, to strike a bargain, to erect
a cosmic Law which will compensate it for this strenuous self-compulsion
and help it by the dread of punishment to adhere to its difficult path of
self-denial. But the truly ethical being does not need a system of rewards
and punishments to follow the path of good and shun the path of evil;
virtue to him is its own reward, sin brings with it its own punishment in
the suffering of a fall from his own law of nature: this is the true ethical

724 THE LIFE DIVINE

Standard. On the contrary, a system of rewards and punishments debases
at once the ethical values of good, turns virtue into selfishness, a com-
mercial bargain of self-interest, and replaces the right motive of absti-
nence form evil by a baser motive. Human beings have erected the rule
of reward and punishment as a social necessity in order to restrain the
doing of things harmful to the community and encourage what is helpful
to it ; but to erect this human device into a general law of cosmic Nature
or a law of the supreme Being or the supreme law of existence is a pro-
cedure of doubtful value. It is human, but also puerile, to impose the
insufficient and narrow standards of our own Ignorance on the larger
and more intricate operations of Cosmic Nature or on the action of the
supreme Wisdom and supreme Good which draws or raises us towards
itself by a spiritual power working slowly in ourselves through our inner
being and not by a law of temptation and compulsion upon our outer
vital nature. If the soul is passing through an evolution by a many-sided
and complex experience, any law of Karma or return to action and output
of Energy, if it is to fit itself into that experience, must also be complex
and cannot be of a simple and exiguous texture or rigid and one-sided in
its incidence.

At the same time, a partial truth of fact, not of fundamental or gen-
eral principle, may be admitted for this doctrine; for although the lines
of the action of energy -are distinct and independent, they can act to-
gether and upon each other, though not by any rigidly fixed law of corre-
spondence. It is possible that in the total method of the returns of Nature
there intervenes a strand of connection or rather of interaction between
vital-physical good and ill and ethical good and ill, a limited correspond-
ence and meeting-point between divergent dualities not amounting to an
inseparable coherence. Our own varying energies, desires, movements are
mixed together in their working and can bring about a mixed result: our
vital part does demand substantial and external rewards for virtue, for
knowledge, for every intellectual, aesthetic, moral or physical effort; it
believes firmly in punishment for sin and even for ignorance. This may
well either create or else reply to a corresponding cosmic action; for
Nature takes us as we are and to some extent suits her movements to
our need or our demands on her. If we accept the action of invisible
Forces upon us, there may be also invisible Forces in Life-Nature that
belong to the same plane of Consciousness-Force as this part of our
being. Forces that move according to the same plan or the same power-
motive as our lower vital nature. It can be often observed that when a self-

REBIRTH AND OTHER WORLDS 725

assertive vital egoism goes on trampling on its way without restraint
or scruple all that opposes its will or desire, it raises a mass of' reactions
against itself, reactions of hatred, antagonism, unease in men which may
have their result now or hereafter, and still more formidable adverse
reactions in universal Nature. It is as if the patience of Nature, her
willingness to be used were exhausted; the very forces that the ego
of the strong vital man seized and bent to its purpose rebel and turn
against him, those he had trampled on rise up and receive power for
his downfall: the insolent vital force of Man strikes against the throne
of Necessity and is dashed to pieces or the lame foot of Punishment
reaches at last the successful offender. This reaction to his energies may
come upon him in another life and not at once, it may be a burden of
consequence he takes up in his return to the field of these Forces ; it may
happen on a small as well as a large scale, to the small vital being and his
small errors as well as in these larger instances. For the principle will be
the same ; the mental being in us seeking for success by a misuse of force
which Nature admits but reacts in the end against it, receives the adverse
return in the guise of defeat and suffering and failure. But the promo-
tion of this minor line of causes and results to the status of an invariable
absolute Law or the whole cosmic rule of action of a supreme Being is
not valid ; they belong to a middle region between the inmost or supreme
Truth of things and the impartiality of material Nature.

In any case the reactions of Nature are not in essence meant as re-
ward or punishment ; that is not their fundamental value, which is rather
an inherent value of natural relations and, in so far as it affects the spir-
itual evolution, a value of the lessons of experience in the soul's cosmic
training. If we touch fire, it burns, but there is no principle of punish-
ment in this relation of cause and effect, it is a lesson of relation and a
lesson of experience; so in all Nature's dealings with us there is a relation
of things and there is a corresponding lesson of experience. The action
of the cosmic Energy is complex and the same Forces may act in differ-
ent ways according to circumstances, to the need of the being, to the in-
tention of the Cosmic Power in its action ; our life is affected not only by
its own energies but by the energies of others and by universal Forces,
and all this vast interplay cannot be determined in its results solely by
the one factor of an all-governing moral law and its exclusive attention
to the merits and demerits, the sins and virtues of individual human
beings. Nor can good fortune and evil fortune, pleasure and pain, happi-
ness and misery and suffering be taken as if they existed merely as incen-

726 THE LIFE DIVINE

tives and deterrents to the natural being in its choice of good and evil. It
is for experience, for growth of the individual being that the soul enters
into rebirth; joy and grief, pain and suffering, fortune and misfortune
are parts of that experience, means of that growth: even, the soul may
of itself accept or choose poverty, misfortune and suffering as helpful to
its growth, stimulants of a rapid development, and reject riches and pros-
perity and success as dangerous and conducive to a relaxation of its
spiritual effort. Happiness and success bringing happiness are, no doubt,
a legitimate demand of humanity; it is an attempt of life and matter
to catch a pale reflection or a gross image of felicity: but a superficial
happiness and material success, however desirable to our vital nature,
are not the main object of our existence; if that had been the intention,
life would have been otherwise arranged in the cosmic ordinance of things.
All the secret of the circumstances of rebirth centres around the one cap-
ital need of the soul, the need of growth, the need of experience ; that gov-
erns the line of its evolution and all the rest is accessory. Cosmic existence
is not a vast administrative system of universal justice with a cosmic Law
of recompense and retribution as its machinery or a divine Legislator and
Judge at its centre. It is seen by us first as a great automatic movement
of energy of Nature, and in it emerges a self-developing movement of
consciousness, a movement therefore of Spirit working out its own being
in the motion of energy of Nature. In this motion takes place the cycle
of rebirth, and in that cycle the soul, the psychic being, prepares for it-
self,— or the Divine Wisdom or the cosmic Consciousness- Force prepares
for it and through its action, — whatever is needed for the next step in its
evolution, the next formation of personality, the coming nexus of neces-
sary experiences constantly provided and organised out of the contin-
uous flux of past, present and future energies for each new birth, for each
new step of the spirit backward or forward or else still in a circle, but
always a step in the growth of the being towards its destined self -unfold-
ing in Nature.

This brings us to another element of the ordinary conception of re-
birth which is not acceptable, since it is an obvious error of the physical
mind, — the idea of the soul itself as a limited personality which survives
unchanged from one birth to another. This too simple and superficial
idea of the soul and personality is born of the physical mind's inability to
look beyond its own apparent self-formation in this single existence. In
its conception, what returns in the reincarnation must be not only the
same spiritual being, the same psychic entity, but the same formation of

REBIRTH AND OTHER WORLDS 727

nature that inhabited the body of the last birth; the body changes, the
circumstances are different, but the form of the being, the mind, the
character, the disposition, temperament, tendencies are the same: John
Smith in his new life is the same John Smith that he was in his last
avatar. But if that were so, there would be no spiritual utility or mean-
ing at all in rebirth ; for there would be the repetition of the same little
personality, the same small mental and vital formation to the end of
Time. For the growth of the embodied being towards the full stature
of its reality, not only a new experience, but a new personality is in-
dispensable; to repeat the same personality would only be helpful if
something had been incomplete in its formation of its experience which
needed to be worked out in the same cadre of itself, in the same
building of mind and with the same formed capacity of energy. But
normally this would be quite otiose: the soul that has been John
Smith cannot gain anything or fulfil itself by remaining John Smith for
ever; it cannot achieve growth or perfection by repeating the same charac-
ter, interests, occupations, types of inner and outer movements for ever.
Our life and rebirth would be always the same recurring decimal; it would
be not an evolution but the meaningless continuity of an eternal repeti-
tion. Our attachment to our present personality demands such a continu-
ity, such a repetition; John Smith wants to be John Smith for ever: but
the demand is obviously ignorant and, if it were satisfied, that would be a
frustration, not a fulfilment. It is only by a change of outer self, a con-
stant progression of the nature, a growth in the spirit that we can justify
our existence.

Personality is only a temporary mental, vital, physical formation
which the being, the real Person, the psychic entity, puts forward on the
surface, — it is not the self in its abiding reality. In each return to earth
the Person, the Purusha, makes a new formation, builds a new personal
quantum suitable for a new experience, for a new growth of its being.
When it passes from its body, it keeps still the same vital and mental
form for a time, but the forms or sheaths dissolve and what is kept is only
the essential elements of the past quantum, of which some will but some
may not be used in the next incarnation. The essential form of the past
personality may remain as one element among many, one personality
among many personalities of the same Person, but in the background,
in the subliminal behind the veil of the surface mind and life and body,
contributing from there whatever is needed of itself to the new forma-
tion ; but it will not itself be the whole formation or build anew the old

728 THE LIFE DIVINE

unchanged type of nature. It may even be that the new quantum or struc-
ture of being will exhibit a quite contrary character and temperament,
quite other capacities, other very different tendencies; for latent poten-
tials may be ready to emerge, or something already in action but in-
choate may have been held back in the last life which needed to be
worked out but was kept over for a later and more suitable combination
of the possibilities of the nature. All the past is indeed there, with its ac-
celerated impetus and potentialities for the formation of the future, but
all of it is not ostensibly present and active. The greater the variety of
formations that have existed in the past and can be utilised, the more
rich and multitudinous the accumulated buildings of experience, the
more their essential result of capacity for knowledge, power, action, char-
acter, manifold response to the universe can be brought forward and
harmonised in the new birth, the more numerous the veiled personalities
mental, vital, subtle-physical that combine to enrich the new personality
on the surface, the greater and more opulent will be that personality and
the nearer to the possible transition out of the completed mental stage
of evolution to something beyond it. Such a complexity and gathering up
of many personalities in one person can be a sign of a very advanced
stage of the individual's evolution when there is a strong central being
that holds all together and works towards harmonisation and integration
of the whole many-sided movement of the nature. But this opulent tak-
ing up of the past would not be a repetition of personality; it would be
a new formation and large consummation. It is not as a machinery for
the persistent renewal or prolongation of an unchanging personality that
rebirth exists, but as a means for the evolution of the spiritual being in
Nature.

It becomes at once evident that in this plan of rebirth the false im-
portance which our mind attaches to the memory of past lives disappears
altogether. If indeed rebirth were governed by a system of rewards and
punishments, if life's whole intention were to teach the embodied spirit
to be good and moral, — supposing that that is the intention in the dis-
pensation of Karma and it is not what it looks like in this presentation of
it, a mechanical law of recompense and retribution without any reforma-
tory meaning or purpose, — then there is evidently a great stupidity and
injustice in denying to the mind in its new incarnation all memory of its
past births and actions. For it deprives the reborn being of all chance
to realise why he is rewarded or punished or to get any advantage from
the lesson of the profitableness of virtue and the unprofitableness of sin

REBIRTH AND OTHER WORLDS 729

vouchsafed to him or inflicted on him. Even, since life seems often to
teach the opposite lesson, — for he sees the good suffer for their goodness
and the wicked prosper by their wickedness, — he is rather likely to con-
clude in this perverse sense, because he has not the memory of an assured
and constant result of experience which would show him that the suffer-
ing of the good man was due to his past wickedness and the prosperity
of the sinner due to the splendour of his past virtues, so that virtue is the
best policy in the long run for any reasonable and prudent soul entering
into this dispensation of Nature. It might be said that the psychic being
within remembers; but such a secret memory would seem to have little
effect or value on the surface. Or it may be said that it realises what has
happened and learns its lesson when it reviews and assimilates its ex-
periences after issuing from the body: but this intermittent memory does
not very apparently help in the next birth ; for most of us persist in sin
and error and show no tangible signs of having profited by the teaching
of our past experience.

But if a constant development of being by a developing cosmic ex-
perience is the meaning and the building of a new personality in a new
birth is the method, then any persistent or complete memory of the past
life or lives might be a chain and a serious obstacle: it would be a force
for prolonging the old temperament, character, preoccupations, and a
tremendous burden hampering the free development of the new person-
ality and its formulation of new experience. A clear and detailed memory
of past lives, hatreds, rancours, attachments, connections would be
equally a stupendous inconvenience; for it would bind the reborn being
to a useless repetition or a compulsory continuation of his surface past
and stand heavily in the way of his bringing out new possibilities from the
depths of the spirit. If, indeed, a mental learning of things were the heart
of the matter, if that were the process of our development, memory
would have a great importance: but what happens is a growth of the soul
personality and a growth of the nature by an assimilation into our sub-
stance of being, a creative and effective absorption of the essential results
of past energies; in this process conscious memory is of no importance.
As the tree grows by a subconscient or inconscient assimilation of action
of sun and rain and wind and absorption of earth-elements, so the being
grows by a subliminal or intraconscient assimilation and absorption of
its results of past becoming and an output of potentialities of future be-
coming. The law that deprives us of the memory of past lives is a law
of the cosmic Wisdom and serves, not disserves its evolutionary purpose.

730 THE LIFE DIVINE

The absence of any memory of past existences is wrongly and very
ignorantly taken as a disproof of the actuality of rebirth; for if even in
this life it is difficult to keep all the memories of our past, if they often
fade into the background or fade out altogether, if no recollection re-
mains of our infancy, and yet with all this hiatus of memory we can grow
and be, if the mind is even capable of total loss of memory of past events
and its own identity and yet it is the same being who is there and the lost
memory can one day be recovered, it is evident that so radical a change
as a transition to other worlds followed by new birth in a new body
ought normally to obliterate altogether the surface or mental memory,
and yet that would not annul the identity of the soul or the growth of
the nature. This obliteration of the surface mental memory is all the more
certain and quite inevitable if there is a new personality of the same be-
ing and a new instrumentation which takes the place of the old, a new
mind, a new life, a new body: the new brain cannot be expected to carry
in itself the images held by the old brain; the new life or mind cannot
be summoned to keep the deleted impressions of the old mind and life
that have been dissolved and exist no more. There is, no doubt, the
subliminal being which may remember, since it does not suffer from the
disabilities of the surface; but the surface mind is cut off from the sub-
liminal memory which alone might retain some clear recollection or dis-
tinct impression of past lives. This separation is necessary because the
new personality has to be built up on the surface without conscious refer-
ence to what is within ; as with all the rest of the superficial being, so our
surface personality too is indeed formed by an action from within, but
of that action it is not conscious, it seems to itself to be self-formed or
ready-made or formed by some ill-understood action of universal Nature.
And yet fragmentary recollections of past births do sometimes remain
in spite of these almost insuperable obstacles ; there are even a very few
cases of astonishingly exact and full memory in the child mind. Finally,
at a certain stage of development of the being when the inner begins to
predominate over the outer and come to the front, past-life memory does
sometimes begin to emerge as if from some submerged layer, but more
readily in the shape of a perception of the stuff and power of past person-
alities that are effective in the composition of the being in the present life
than in any precise and accurate detail of event and circumstance, al-
though this too can recur in parts or be recovered by concentration from
the subliminal vision, from some secret memory or from our inner con-
scious-substance. But this detailed memory is of minor importance to

REBIRTH AND OTHER WORLDS 73 1

Nature in her normal work and she makes small or no provision for it: it
is the shaping of the future evolution of the being with which she is con-
cerned; the past is put back, kept behind the veil and used only as an
occult source of materials for the present and the future.

This conception of the Person and Personality, if accepted, must
modify at the same time our current ideas about the immortality of the
soul ; for, normally, when we insist on the soul's undying existence, what
is meant is the survival after death of a definite unchanging personality
which was and will always remain the same throughout eternity. It is
the very imperfect superficial "I" of the moment, evidently regarded by
Nature as a temporary form and not worth preservation, for which we
demand this stupendous right to survival and immortality. But the de-
mand is extravagant and cannot be conceded; the "I" of the moment
can only merit survival if it consents to change, to be no longer itself
but something else, greater, better, more luminous in knowledge, more
moulded in the image of the eternal inner beauty, more and more progres-
sive towards the divinity of the secret Spirit. It is that secret spirit or
divinity of Self in us which is imperishable, because it is unborn and
eternal. The psychic entity within, its representative, the spiritual indi-
vidual in us, is the Person that we are; but the "I" of this moment, the
"I" of this life is only a formation, a temporary personality of this inner
Person: it is one step of the many steps of our evolutionary change, and
it serves its true purpose only when we pass beyond it to a farther step
leading nearer to a higher degree of consciousness and being. It is the
inner Person that survives death, even as it pre-exists before birth; for
this constant survival is a rendering of the eternity of our timeless spirit
into the terms of Time.

What our normal demand of survival asks for is a similar survival
for our mind, our life, even our body; the dogma of the resurrection of
the body attests to this last demand, — even as it has been the root of
the age-long effort of man to discover the elixir of immortality or any
means magical, alchemic or scientific to conquer physically the death of
the body. But this aspiration could only succeed if the mind, life or
body could put on something of the immortality and divinity of the in-
dwelling spirit. There are certain circumstances in which the survival of
the outer mental personality representative of the inner mental Purusha
could be possible. It could happen if our mental being came to be so
powerfully individualised on the surface and so much one with the inner
mind and inner mental Purusha and at the same time so open plastically

732 THE LIFE DIVINE

to the progressive action of the Infinite that the soul no longer needed to
dissolve the old form of mind and create a new one in order to progress.
A similar individualisation, integration and openness of the vital being
on the surface would alone make possible a similar survival of the life-
part in us, the outer vital personality representative of the inner life-
being, the vital Purusha. What would really happen then is that the
wall between the inner self and the outer man would have broken down
and the permanent mental and vital being from within, the mental and
vital representatives of the immortal psychic entity, would govern the
life. Our mind nature and our life nature could then be a continuous pro-
gressive expression of the soul and not a nexus of successive formations
preserved only in their essence. Our mental personality and life per-
sonality would then subsist without dissolution from birth to birth ; they
would be in this sense immortal, persistently surviving, continuous in
their sense of identity. This would be evidently an immense victory of
soul and mind and life over the Inconscience and the limitations of
material Nature.

• But such a survival could only persist in the subtle body; the being
would still have to discard its physical form, pass to other worlds and in
its return put on a new body. The awakened mental Purusha and vital
Purusha, preserving the mind sheath and the life sheath of the subtle
body which are usually discarded, would return with them into a new
birth and keep a vivid and sustained sense of a permanent being of mind
and life constituted by the past and continuing into the present and
future; but the basis of physical existence, the material body, could not
be preserved even by this change. The physical being could only endure,
if by some means its physical causes of decay and disruption could be
overcome^ and at the same time it could be made so plastic and progres-
sive in its structure and its functioning that it would answer to each
change demanded of it by the progress of the inner Person; it must be
able to keep pace with the soul in its formation of self-expressive person-
ality, its long unfolding of a secret spiritual divinity and the slow trans-
formation of the mental into the divine mental or spiritual existence.
This consummation of a triple immortality, — immortality of the nature

' Even if Science — ^physical Science or occult Science — were to discover the nec-
essary conditions or means for an indefinite survival of the body, still, if the body
could not adapt itself so as to become a fit instrument of expression for the inner
growth, the soul would find some way to abandon it and pass on to a new incarna-
tion. The material or physical causes of death are not its sole or its true cause; its
true inmost reason is the spiritual necessity for the evolution of a new being.

REBIRTH AND OTHER WORLDS 733

completing the essential immortality of the Spirit and the psychic sur-
vival of death, — might be the crown of rebirth and a momentous indica-
tion of the conquest of the material Inconscience and Ignorance even in
the very foundation of the reign of Matter. But the true immortality
would still be the eternity of the spirit; the physical survival could only
be relative, terminable at will, a temporal sign of the spirit's victory here
over Death and Matter.

CHAPTER XXIII

MAN AND THE EVOLUTION

The one Godhead secret in all beings, all-pervading, the
inner Self of all, presiding over all action, witness, conscious
knower and absolute . . . the One in control over the many
who are passive to Nature, fashions one seed in many ways.

Swetaswatara JJpanishad?-

The Godhead moves in this Field modifying each web
of things separately in many ways . . . One, he presides
over all wombs and natures; himself the womb of all, he is
that which brings to ripeness the nature of the being and he
gives to all who have to be matured their result of develop-
ment and appoints all qualities to their workings.

Swetaswatara JJpanishad?

He fashions one form of things in many ways.

Katha Upanishad.^

Who has perceived this truth occult, that the Child gives
being to the Mothers by the workings of his nature? An
offspring from the lap of many Waters, he comes forth from
them a seer possessed of his whole law of nature. Mani-
fested, he grows in the lap of their crookednesses and be-
comes high, beautiful and glorious.

Rig Veda.*

From the non-being to true being, from the darkness to
the Light, from death to Immortality.

Brihadaranyaka JJpanishad?

A SPIRITUAL evolution, an evolution of consciousness in Matter
in a constant developing self- formation till the form can reveal
the indwelling spirit, is then the key-note, the central significant motive
of the terrestrial existence. This significance is concealed at the outset
by the involution of the Spirit, the Divine Reality, in a dense material
Inconscience; a veil of Inconscience, a veil of insensibility of Matter

^VI. II, 12. ^V. 3-S. "V. 12. *I. 95. 4, 5. 'I. 3. 28.

734

MAN AND THE EVOLUTION 735

hides the universal Consciousness-Force which works within it, so that
the Energy, which is the first form the Force of creation assumes in the
physical universe, appears to be itself inconscient and yet does the
works of a vast occult Intelligence. The obscure mysterious creatrix ends
indeed by delivering the secret consciousness out of its thick and tene-
brous prison; but she delivers it slowly, little by little, in minute in-
finitesimal drops, in thin jets, in small vibrant concretions of energy and
substance, of life, of mind, as if that were all she could get out through
the crass obstacle, the dull reluctant medium of an inconscient stuff of
existence. At first she houses herself in forms of Matter which appear
to be altogether unconscious, then struggles towards mentality in the
guise of living Matter and attains to it imperfectly in the conscious ani-
mal. This consciousness is at first rudimentary, mostly a half subcon-
scious or just conscious instinct ; it develops slowly till in more organised
forms of living Matter it reaches its climax of intelligence and exceeds it-
self in Man, the thinking animal who develops into the reasoning men-
tal being but carries along with him even at his highest elevation the
mould of original animality, the dead weight of subconscience of body,
the downward pull of gravitation towards the original Inertia and Nes-
cience, the control of an inconscient material Nature over his conscious
evolution, its power for limitation, its law of difficult development, its
immense force for retardation and frustration. This control by the orig-
inal Inconscience over the consciousness emerging from it takes the
general shape of a mentality struggling towards knowledge but itself, in
what seems to be its fundamental nature, an Ignorance. Thus hampered
and burdened, mental man has still to evolve out of himself the fully
conscious being, a divine manhood or a spiritual and supramental super-
manhood which shall be the next product of the evolution. That transi-
tion will mark the passage from the evolution in the Ignorance to a
greater evolution in the Knowledge, founded and proceeding in the light
of the Superconscient and no longer in the darkness of the Ignorance and
Inconscience.

This terrestrial evolutionary working of Nature from IMatter to
Mind and beyond it has a double process: there is an outward visible
process of physical evolution with birth as its machinery, — for each
evolved form of body housing its own evolved power of consciousness
is maintained and kept in continuity by heredity; there is, at the same
time, an invisible process of soul evolution with rebirth into ascending
grades of form and consciousness as its machinery. The first by itself

736 THE LIFE DIVINE

would mean only a cosmic evolution; for the individual would be a
quickly perishing instrument, and the race, a more abiding collective
formulation, would be the real step in the progressive manifestation of
the cosmic Inhabitant, the universal Spirit: rebirth is an indispensable
condition for any long duration and evolution of the individual being in
the earth-existence. Each grade of cosmic manifestation, each type of
form that can house the indwelling spirit, is turned by rebirth into a
means for the individual soul, the psychic entity, to manifest more and
more of its concealed consciousness ; each life becomes a step in a victory
over Matter by a greater progression of consciousness in it which shall
make eventually Matter itself a means for the full manifestation of the
Spirit.

But this account of the process and meaning of the terrestrial crea-
tion is at every point exposed to challenge in the mind of man himself, be-
cause the evolution is still half-way on its journey, is still in the Igno-
rance, is still seeking in the mind of a half-evolved humanity for its own
purpose and significance. It is possible to challenge the theory of evolu-
tion on the ground that it is insufficiently founded and that it is super-
fluous as an explanation of the process of terrestrial existence. It is open
to doubt, even if evolution is granted, whether man has the capacity to
develop into a higher evolutionary being. It is open also to doubt whether
the evolution is likely to go any farther than it has gone already or
whether a supramental evolution, the appearance of a consummated
Truth-Consciousness, a being of Knowledge, is at all probable in the fun-
damental Ignorance of the earthly Nature. Another construction neither
teleological nor evolutionary can be put on the workings of the Spirit in
the manifestation here, and it may be as well before proceeding farther
to formulate succinctly the line of thinking which makes such a construc-
tion possible.

Admitting that the creation is a manifestation of the Timeless Eter-
nal in a Time Eternity, admitting that there are the seven grades of
Consciousness and that the material Inconscience has been laid down as
a basis for the reascent of the Spirit, admitting that rebirth is a fact, a
part of the terrestrial order, still a spiritual evolution of the individual
being is not an inevitable consequence of any of these admissions or even
of all of them together. It is possible to take another view of the spir-
itual significance and the inner process of terrestrial existence. If each
thing created is a form of the manifest Divine Existence, each is divine
in itself by the spiritual presence within it, whatever its appearance, its

MAN AND THE EVOLUTION 737

figure or character in Nature. In each form of manifestation the Divine
takes the delight of existence and there is no need of change or progress
within it. Whatever ordered display or hierarchy of actualised possi-
bilities is necessitated by the nature of the Infinite Being, is sufficiently
provided for by the numberless variation, the teeming multitude of forms,
types of consciousness, natures that we see everywhere around us. There
is no teleological purpose in creation and there cannot be, for all is there
in the Infinite: the Divine has nothing that he needs to gain or that he
has not; if there is creation and manifestation, it is for the delight of
creation, of manifestation, not for any purpose. There is then no reason
for an evolutionary movement with a culmination to be reached or an aim
to be worked out and effectuated or a drive towards ultimate perfection.
In fact we see that the principles of creation are permanent and un-
changing: each type of being remains itself and does not try nor has any
need to become other than itself; granting that some types of existence
disappear and others come into being, it is because the Consciousness-
Force in the universe withdraws its life-delight from those that perish
and turns to create others for its pleasure. But each type of life, while it
lasts, has its own pattern and remains faithful with whatever minor varia-
tions to that pattern: it is bound to its own consciousness and cannot
get away from it into other-consciousness ; limited by its own nature, it
cannot transgress these boundaries and pass into other-nature. If the
Consciousness-Force of the Infinite has manifested Life after manifest-
ing Matter and Mind after manifesting Life, it does not follow that it
will proceed to manifest Supermind as the next terrestrial creation. For
Mind and Supermind belong to quite different hemispheres, ^Mind to
the lower status of the Ignorance, Supermind to the higher status of the
Divine Knowledge. This world is a world of the Ignorance and intended
to be that only; there need be no intention to bring down the powers of
the higher hemisphere into the lower half of existence or to manifest their
concealed presence there; for, if they are at all existent here, it is in an
occult incommunicable immanence and only to maintain the creation,
not to perfect it. Man is the summit of this ignorant creation; he has
reached the utmost consciousness and knowledge of which it is capable:
if he tries to go farther, he will only revolve in larger cycles of his own
mentality. For that is the curve of his existence here, a finite circling
which carries the mind in its revolutions and returns always to the point
from which it started; mind cannot go outside its own cycle, — all idea
of a straight line of movement or of progress reaching infinitely upward

738 THE LIFE DIVINE

or sidewise into the Infinite is a delusion. If the soul of man is to go
beyond humanity, to reach either a supramental or a still higher status,
it must pass out of this cosmic existence, either to a plane or world of
bliss and knowledge or into the unmanifest Eternal and Infinite.

It is true that Science now affirms an evolutionary terrestrial exist-
ence: but if the facts with which Science deals are reliable, the general-
isations it hazards are short-lived; it holds them for some decades or
some centuries, then passes to another generalisation, another theory of
things. This happens even in physical Science where the facts are solidly
ascertainable and verifiable by experiment: in psychology, — ^which is
relevant here, for the evolution of consciousness comes into the picture,
— its instability is still greater; it passes there from one theory to another
before the first is well-founded; indeed, several conflicting theories hold
the field together. No firm metaphysical building can be erected upon
these shifting quicksands. Heredity upon which Science builds its con-
cept of life evolution, is certainly a power, a machinery for keeping
type or species in unchanged being: the demonstration that it is also an
instrument for persistent and progressive variation is very questionable;
its tendency is conservative rather than evolutionary, — it seems to ac-
cept with difficulty the new character that the Life-Force attempts to
force upon it. All the facts show that a type can vary within its own
specification of nature, but there is nothing to show that it can go be-
yond it. It has not yet been really established that ape-kind developed
into man; for it would rather seem that a type resembling the ape, but
always characteristic of itself and not of apehood, developed within its
own tendencies of nature and became what we know as man, the present
human being. It is not even established that inferior races of man de-
veloped out of themselves the superior races ; those of an inferior organi-
sation and capacity perished, but it has not been shown that they left
behind the human races of today as their descendants: but still such a
development within the type is imaginable. The progress of Nature from
Matter to Life, from Life to Mind, may be conceded: but there is no
proof yet that Matter developed into Life or Life-energy into Mind-
energy; all that can be conceded is that Life has manifested in Matter,
Mind in living Matter. For there is no sufficient proof that any vege-
table species developed into an animal existence or that any organisation
of inanimate matter developed into a living organism. Even if it be dis-
covered hereafter that under certain chemical or other conditions life
makes its appearance, all that will be established by this coincidence is

MAN AND THE EVOLUTION 739

that in certain physical circumstances life manifests, not that certain
chemical conditions are constituents of life, are its elements or are the
evolutionary cause of a transformation of inanimate into animate mat-
ter. Here as elsewhere each grade of being exists in itself and by itself,
is manifested according to its own character by its own proper energy, and
the gradations above or below it are not origins and resultant sequences
but only degrees in the continuous scale of earth-nature.

If it be asked, how then did all these various gradations and types of
being come into existence, it can be answered that, fundamentally, they
were manifested in Matter by the Consciousness-Force in it, by the
power of the Real-Idea building its own significant forms and types
for the indwelling Spirit's cosmic existence: the practical or physical
method might vary considerably in different grades or stages, although
a basic similarity of line may be visible; the creative Power might use
not one but many processes or set many forces to act together. In Mat-
ter the process is a creation of infinitesimals charged with an immense
energy, their association by design and number, the manifestation of
larger infinitesimals on that primary basis, the grouping and associa-
tion of these together to found the appearance of sensible objects, earth,
water, minerals, metals, the whole material kingdom. In life also the Con-
sciousness-Force begins with infinitesimal forms of vegetable life and
infinitesimal animalcules; it creates an original plasm and multiplies it,
creates the living cell as a unit, creates other kinds of minute biological
apparatus like the seed or the gene, uses always the same method of
grouping and association so as to build by a various operation various
living organisms. A constant creation of types is visible, but that is no
indubitable proof of evolution. The types are sometimes distant from
each other, sometimes closely similar, sometimes identical in basis
but different in detail; all are patterns, and such a variation in pat-
terns with an identical rudimentary basis for all is the sign of a con-
scious Force playing with its own Idea and developing by it all kinds
of possibilities of creation. Animal species in coming into birth may be-
gin with a like rudimentary embryonic or fundamental pattern for all, it
may follow out up to a stage certain similarities of development on some
or all of its lines; there may too be species that are twy-natured, am-
phibious, intermediate between one type and another: but all this need
not mean that the types developed one from another in an evolutionary
series. Other forces than hereditary variation have been at work in bring-
ing about the appearance of new characteristics ; there are physical forces

740 THE LIFE DIVINE

such as food, light-rays and others that we are only beginning to know,
there are surely others which we do not yet know; there are at work
invisible life forces and obscure psychological forces. For these subtler
powers have to be admitted even in the physical evolutionary theory to
account for natural selection; if the occult or subconscious energy in
some types answers to the need of the environment, in others remains un-
responsive and unable to survive, this is clearly the sign of a varying life-
energy and psychology, of a consciousness and a force other than the
physical at work making for variation in Nature. The problem of the
method of operation is still too full of obscure and unknown factors for
any at present possible structure of theory to be definitive.

Man is a type among many types so constructed, one pattern among
the multitude of patterns in the manifestation in Matter. He is the most
complex that has been created, the richest in content of consciousness
and the curious ingeniousness of his building; he is the head of the
earthly creation, but he does not exceed it. Even as others, so he too has
his own native law, limits, special kind of existence, svabhdva, svad-
harma; within those limits he can extend and develop, but he cannot go
outside them. If there is a perfection to which he has to arrive, it must
be a perfection in his own kind, within his own law of being, — the full
play of it, but by observation of its mode and measure, not by transcend-
ence. To exceed himself, to grow into the superman, to put on the nature
and capacities of a god would be a contradiction of his self-law, imprac-
ticable and impossible. Each form and way of being has its own appro-
priate way of the delight of being ; to seek through the mind the mastery
and use and enjoyment of the environment of which he is capable is
rightly man the mental being's objective: but to look beyond, to run
after an ulterior object or aim of existence, to aspire to surpass the men-
tal stature is to bring in a teleological element into existence which is not
visible in the cosmic structure. If a supramental being is to appear in the
terrestrial creation, it must be a new and independent manifestation;
just as life and mind have manifested in Matter, so supermind must
manifest there and the secret Conscious-Energy must create the neces-
sary patterns for this new grade of its potencies. But there is no sign of
any such intention in the operations of Nature.

But if a superior creation is intended, then, certainly, it is not out
of man that the new grade, type or pattern can develop ; for in that case
there would be some race or kind or make of human beings that has al-
ready the material of the superman in it, just as the peculiar animal being

MAN AND THE EVOLUTION 74 1

that developed into humanity had the essential elements of human nature
already potential or present in it: there is no such race, kind or type, at
most there are only spiritualised mental beings who are seeking to escape
out of the terrestrial creation. If by any occult law of Nature such a
human development of the supramental being is intended, it could only
be by a few in humanity detaching themselves from the race so as to
become a first foundation for this new pattern of being. There is no rea-
son to suppose that the whole race could develop this perfection ; it can-
not be a possibility generalised in the human creature.

If indeed man has evolved in Nature out of the animal, yet now we
see that no other animal type shows any signs of an evolution beyond it-
self; if then there was this evolutionary stress in the animal kingdom, it
must have sunk back into quiescence as soon as the object was fulfilled
by man's appearance: so too if there is any such stress for a new step in
evolution, for self-exceeding, it is likely to subside into quiescence as
soon as its object is fulfilled by the supramental being's appearance.
But there is no such stress in reality: the idea of human progress itself
is very probably an illusion, for there is no sign that man, once emerged
from the animal stage, has radically progressed during his race history ; at
most he has advanced in knowledge of the physical world, in Science, in
the handling of his surroundings, in his purely external and utilitarian use
of the secret laws of Nature. But otherwise he is what he always was in
the early beginnings of civilisation: he continues to manifest the same
capacities, the same qualities and defects, the same efforts, blunders,
achievements, frustrations. If progress there has been, it is in a circle, at
most perhaps in a widening circle. Man today is not wiser than the an-
cient seers and sages and thinkers, not more spiritual than the great
seekers of old, the first mighty mystics, not superior in arts and crafts
to the ancient artists and craftsmen ; the old races that have disappeared
showed as potent an intrinsic originality, invention, capacity of dealing
with life and, if modern man in this respect has gone a little farther, not
by any essential progress but in degree, scope, abundance, it is because
he has inherited the achievements of his forerunners. Nothing warrants
the idea that he will ever hew his way out of the half-knowledge half-ig-
norance which is the stamp of his kind, or, even if he develops a higher
knowledge, that he can break out of the utmost boundary of the mental
circle.

It is tempting and not illogical to regard rebirth as the potential
means of a spiritual evolution, the factor that makes it possible, but still

742 THE LIFE DIVINE

it is not certain, granting rebirth to be a fact, that this is its significance.
All the ancient theories about reincarnation supposed it to be a constant
transmigration of the soul from animal to human, but also from human
to animal bodies: the Indian idea added the explanation of Karma, of a
return for good or evil done, of a result of past will and effort; but there
was no suggestion of a progressive evolution from type to higher t5^e,
still less of birth into a kind of being that has never yet existed but has
still to evolve in the future. If evolution there is, then man is the last
stage, because through him there can be the rejection of terrestrial or
embodied life and an escape into some heaven or Nirvana. That was
the end envisaged by the ancient theories and, since this is fundamen-
tally and unchangeably a world of Ignorance, — even if all cosmic exist-
ence is not in its nature a state of Ignorance, — that escape is likely to be
the true end of the cycle.

This is a line of reasoning that has a considerable cogency and im-
portance, and it was necessary to state it, even if too briefly for its im-
portance, in order to meet it. For although some of its propositions are
valid, its view of things is not complete and its cogency is not conclusive.
And first we may without much difficulty get rid of the objection to the
teleological element which the idea of a pre-determined evolution from
inconscience to super-conscience, the development of a rising order of
beings with a culminating transition from the life of the Ignorance to
a life in the Knowledge, brings into the structure of the terrestrial exist-
ence. The objection to a teleological cosmos can be based on two very
different grounds, — a. scientific reasoning proceeding on the assumption
that all is the work of an inconscient Energy which acts automatically by
mechanical processes and can have no element of purpose in it, and a
metaphysical reasoning which proceeds on the perception that the In-
finite and Universal has everything in it already, that it cannot have
something unaccomplished to accomplish, something to add to itself,
to work out, to realise, and there can therefore be in it no element of
progress, no original or emergent purpose.

The scientific or materialist objection cannot maintain its validity if
there is a secret Consciousness in or behind the apparently inconscient
Energy in Matter. Even in the Inconscient there seems to be at least an
urge of inherent necessity producing the evolution of forms and in the
forms a developing Consciousness, and it may well be held that this urge
is the evolutionary will of a secret Conscious Being and its push of pro-
gressive manifestation the evidence of an innate intention in the evolu-

MAN AND THE EVOLUTION 743

tion. This is a teleological element and it is not irrational to admit it:
for the conscious or even the inconscient nisus arises from a truth of
conscious being that has become dynamic and set out to fulfil itself in
an automatic process of material Nature; the teleology, the element of
purpose in the nisus is the translation of self-operative Truth of Being
into terms of self-effective Will-Power of that Being, and, if conscious-
ness is there, such a Will-Power must also be there and the translation
is normal and inevitable. Truth of being inevitably fulfilling itself would
be the fundamental fact of the evolution, but Will and its purpose must
be there as part of the instrumentation, as an element in the operative
principle.

The metaphysical objection is more serious; for it seems self-evi-
dent that the Absolute can have no purpose in manifestation except
the delight of manifestation itself: an evolutionary movement in Matter
as part of the manifestation must fall within this universal statement;
it can be there only for the delight of the unfolding, the progressive exe-
cution, the objectless seried self-revelation. A universal totality may
also be considered as something complete in itself; as a totality, it has
nothing to gain or to add to its fullness of being. But here the material
world is not an integral totality, it is part of a whole, a grade in a grada-
tion ; it may admit in it, therefore, not only the presence of undeveloped
immaterial principles or powers belonging to the whole that are involved
within its matter, but also a descent into it of the same powers from the
higher gradations of the system to deliver their kindred movements here
from the strictness of a material limitation. A manifestation of the
greater powers of Existence till the whole being itself is manifest in the
material world in the terms of a higher, a spiritual creation, may be con-
sidered as the teleology of the evolution. This teleology does not bring
in any factor that does not belong to the totality; it proposes only the
realisation of the totality in the part. There can be no objection to the
admission of a teleological factor in a part movement of the universal
totality, if the purpose, — not a purpose in the human sense, but the urge
of an intrinsic Truth necessity conscious in the will of the indwelling
Spirit, — is the perfect manifestation there of all the possibilities inherent
in the total movement. All exists here, no doubt, for the delight of exist-
ence, all is a game or Lila ; but a game too carries within itself an object
to be accomplished and without the fulfilment of that object would have
no completeness of significance. A drama without denouement may be an
artistic possibility — existing only for the pleasure of watching the char-

744 THE LIFE DIVINE

acters and the pleasure in problems posed without a solution or with a
for ever suspended dubious balance of solution ; the drama of the earth
evolution might conceivably be of that character, but an intended or in-
herently predetermined denouement is also and more convincingly pos-
sible. Ananda is the secret principle of all being and the support of all
activity of being: but Ananda does not exclude a delight in the working
out of a Truth inherent in being, immanent in the Force or Will of be-
ing, upheld in the hidden self-awareness of its Consciousness- Force which
is the dynamic and executive agent of all its activities and the knower
of their significance.

A theory of spiritual evolution is not identical with a scientific
theory of form-evolution and physical life-evolution; it must stand on
its own inherent justification: it may accept the scientific account of
physical evolution as a support or an element, but the support is not in-
dispensable. The scientific theory is concerned only with the outward and
visible machinery and process, with the detail of Nature's execution, with
the physical development of things in Matter and the law of develop-
ment of life and mind in Matter ; its account of the process may have to
be considerably changed or may be dropped altogether in the light of new
discovery, but that will not affect the self-evident fact of a spiritual evo-
lution, an evolution of Consciousness, a progression of the soul's mani-
festation in material existence. In its outward aspects this is what the
theory of evolution comes to, — there is in the scale of terrestrial existence
a development of forms, of bodies, a progressively complex and competent
organisation of matter, of life in matter, of consciousness in living mat-
ter; in this scale, the better organised the form, the more it is capable
of housing a better organised, a more complex and capable, a more
developed or evolved life and consciousness. Once the evolutionary hy-
pothesis is put forward and the facts supporting it are marshalled, this
aspect of the terrestrial existence becomes so striking as to appear indis-
putable. The precise machinery by which this is done or the exact gene-
alogy or chronological succession of types of being is a secondary, though
in itself an interesting and important question; the development of one
form of life out of a precedent less evolved form, natural selection, the
struggle for life, the survival of acquired characteristics may or may not
be accepted, but the fact of a successive creation with a developing plan
in it is the one conclusion which is of primary consequence. Another self-
evident conclusion is that there is a graduated necessary succession in the
evolution, first the evolution of Matter, next the evolution of Life in

MAN AND THE EVOLUTION 745

Matter, then the evolution of Mind in living Matter, and in this last
stage an animal evolution followed by a human evolution. The first
three terms of the succession are too evident to be disputable. It may be
debated whether there was a succession of man to animal or a simul-
taneous initial development, man outstripping the animal in mind evo-
lution; a theory has even been put forward that man was not the last,
but the first and eldest of the animal species. This priority of man is an
ancient conception, but it was not universal; it is born of the sense of
the clear supremacy of man among earthly creatures, the dignity of this
supremacy seeming to demand a priority of birth: but in evolutionary
fact the superior is not prior but posterior in appearance, the less de-
veloped precedes the more developed and prepares it.

In fact, the idea of the priority of the lower forms of life is not
altogether absent in ancient thinking. Apart from mythical acounts of
creation, we find already in ancient and mediaeval thought in India utter-
ances that favour the priority of the animal over man in the time succes-
sion in a sense that agrees with the modern evolutionary conception. A
Upanishad declares that the Self or Spirit after deciding on life creation
first formed animal kinds like the cow and horse, but the gods, — who
are in the thought of the Upanishads powers of Consciousness and
powers of Nature, — found them to be insufficient vehicles, and the Spirit
finally created the form of man which the gods saw to be excellently
made and sufficient and they entered into it for their cosmic functions.
This is a clear parable of the creation of more and more developed forms
till one was found that was capable of housing a developed consciousness.
In the Puranas it is stated that the tamasic animal creation was the first
in time. Tamas is the Indian word for the principle of inertia of con-
sciousness and force: a consciousness dull and sluggish and incompetent
in its play is said to be tamasic; a force, a life-energy that is indolent
and limited in its capacity, bound to a narrow range of instinctive im-
pulses, not developing, not seeking farther, not urged to a greater kinetic
action or a more luminously conscious action, would be assigned to the
same category. The animal, in whom there is this less developed force of
consciousness, is prior in creation ; the more developed human conscious-
ness, in which there is a greater force of kinetic mind-energy and light of
perception, is a later creation. The Tantra speaks of a soul fallen from
its status passing through many lacs of births in plant and animal forms
before it can reach the human level and be ready for salvation. Here,
again, there is implied the conception of vegetable and animal life-forms

746 THE LIFE DIVINE

as the lower steps of a ladder, humanity as the last or culminating de-
velopment of the conscious being, the form which the soul has to inhabit
in order to be capable of the spiritual motive and a spiritual issue out of
mentality, life and physicality. This is indeed the normal conception,
and it recommends itself so strongly both to reason and intuition that it
hardly needs debate, — the conclusion is almost unescapable.

It is against this background of a developing evolutionary process
that we have to look at man, his origin and first appearance, his status in
the manifestation. There are here two possibilities; either there was the
sudden appearance of a human body and consciousness in the earth
nature, an abrupt creation or independent automatic manifestation of
reasoning mentality in the material world intervening upon a previous
similar manifestation of subconscious life-forms and of living conscious
bodies in Matter, or else there was an evolution of humanity out of
animal being, slow perhaps in its preparation and in its stages of de-
velopment, but with strong leaps of change at the decisive points of the
transition. The latter theory offers no difficulty: for it is certain that
changes of characteristics in the type, though not of the fundamental
type itself, can be brought about in species or genus, — indeed this has
already been done by man himself and its possibilities are being strik-
ingly worked out on a small scale by experimental Science, — and it may
fairly be assumed that the secretly conscious Energy in Nature could
effect large-scale operations of the kind and bring about considerable
and decisive developments by means of its own creative conventions.
The necessary condition for the change from the normal animal to the
human character of existence would be a development of the physical
organisation which would capacitate a rapid progression, a reversal or
turn over of the consciousness, a reaching to a new height and a looking
down from it at the lower stages, a heightening and widening of capacity
which would enable the being to take up the old animal faculties with a
larger and more plastic, a human intelligence, and at the same time or
later to develop greater and subtler powers proper to the new type of be-
ing, powers of reason, reflection, complex observation, organised inven-
tion, thought and discovery. If there is an emergent Consciousness-Force,
there would be no difficulty in the transition, the instrument being
provided, except the difficulty of the obstruction and resistance of the
material Inconscience. The animal has already some of the corresponding
qualities on a limited scale, for action only, in a rudimentary organisa-
tion crude and simple, with a very inferior scope and plasticity, a nar-

MAN AND THE EVOLUTION 747

rower and more casual command of the faculty; but especially the work-
ing of these faculties is more mechanical, less deliberate, marked with
the character of an automatism of Nature Energy driving an operation
of primitive consciousness and not, as in man, of a conscious Energy ob-
serving and to a great extent directing and governing and deliberately
changing or modifying its own operations. Other animal habits of con-
sciousness are not fundamentally different from man's; all he had to do
was to develop and enlarge them on a higher mental level and wherever
possible, to mentalise, refine, subtilise, — in brief, to bring to them the
enlightenment of his new understanding and intellectual capacity and a
power of reasoned control denied to the animal. This change or reversal
once effected, the power of the human mind to work upon itself and
things, create, know, speculate, would develop in the course of his evo-
lution, even if, as is conceivable, they were at the beginning small in
scope, nearer to the animal, still comparatively simple and crude in their
action. Such a reversal has been made in each radical transition of Na-
ture: life- force emerging turns upon Matter, imposes a vital content on
the operations of material Energy while it develops also its own new
movements and operations; life-mind emerges in life-force and Matter
and imposes its content of consciousness on their operations while it de-
velops also its own action and faculties; a new greater emergence and
reversal, the emergence of humanity, is in line with Nature's precedents ;
it would be a new application of the general principle.

This theory is therefore easy to accept: its working is intelligible.
But the other hypothesis presents considerable difficulties. On the side
of consciousness the new manifestation, the human, could be accounted
for by an upsurge of concealed Consciousness from the involution in
universal Nature. But in that case it must have had some material form
already existent for its vehicle of emergence, the vehicle being adapted
by the force of the emergence itself to the needs of a new inner creation ;
or else a rapid divergence from previous physical types or patterns
may have brought a new being into existence. But whichever the hy-
pothesis accepted, this means an evolutionary process, — there is only a
difference in the method and machinery of the divergence or transition.
Or there may have been, on the contrary, not an upsurgence but a descent
of mentality from a mind plane above us, perhaps the descent of a soul
or mental being into terrestrial Nature. The difficulty would then be
the appearance of the human body, too complex and difficult an organ
to have been suddenly created or manifested; for such a miraculous

748 THE LIFE DIVINE

speed of process, though quite possible on a supraphysical plane of being,
does not seem to figure among the normal possibles or potentials of the
material Energy. It could only happen there by an intervention of a
supraphysical force or law of Nature or by a creator Mind acting with
full power and directly on Matter. An action of a supraphysical Force
and a creator may be conceded in every new appearance in Matter ; each
such appearance is at bottom a miracle operated by a secret Conscious-
ness supported by a veiled Mind Energy or Life Energy: but the action
is nowhere seen to be direct, overt, self-sufficient; it is always superim-
posed on an already realised physical basis and acts by an extension of
some established process of Nature. It is more conceivable that there was
an opening of some existing body to a supraphysical influx so that it was
transformed into a new body; but no such event can lightly be assumed
to have taken place in the past history of material Nature: in order to
happen it would seem to need either the conscious intervention of an in-
visible mental being to form the body he intended to inhabit or else a
previous development of a mental being in Matter itself who would be
already able to receive a supraphysical power and impose it on the rigid
and narrow formulas of his physical existence. Otherwise we must sup-
pose that there was a pre-existent body already so much evolved as to
be fitted for the reception of a vast mental influx or capable of a pliable
response to the descent into it of a mental being. But this would sup-
pose a previous evolution of mind in body to the point at which such a
receptivity would be possible. It is quite conceivable that such an evo-
lution from below and such a descent from above co-operated in the
appearance of humanity in earth-nature. The secret psychical entity al-
ready there in the animal might have itself called down the mental be-
ing, the mind Purusha, into the realm of living Matter in order to take
up the vital-mental energy already at work and lift it into a higher men-
tality. But this would still be a process of evolution, the higher plane
only intervening to assist the appearance and enlargement of its own
principle in terrestrial Nature.

Next, it may be conceded that each type or pattern of consciousness
and being in the body, once established, has to be faithful to the law of
being of that type, to its own design and rule of nature. But it may also
very well be that part of the law of the human type is its impulse to-
wards self-exceeding, that the means for a conscious transition has been
provided for among the spiritual powers of man; the possession of such
a capacity may be a part of the plan on which the creative Energy has

MAN AND THE EVOLUTION 749

built him. It may be conceded that what man has up till now princi-
pally done is to act within the circle of his nature, on a spiral of nature
movement, sometimes descending, sometimes ascending, — there has been
no straight line of progress, no indisputable, fundamental or radical ex-
ceeding of his past nature: what he has done is to sharpen, subtilise, make
a more and more complex and plastic use of his capacities. It cannot truly
be said that there has been no such thing as human progress since man's
appearance or even in his recent ascertainable history; for however great
the ancients, however supreme some of their achievements and creations,
however impressive their powers of spirituality, of intellect or of char-
acter, there has been in later developments an increasing subtlety, com-
plexity, manifold development of knowledge and possibility in man's
achievements, in his politics, society, life, science, metaphysics, knowl-
edge of all kinds, art, literature; even in his spiritual endeavour, less
surprisingly lofty and less massive in power of spirituality than that of
the ancients, there has been this increasing subtlety, plasticity, sound-
ing of depths, extension of seeking. There have been falls from a high
type of culture, a sharp temporary descent into a certain obscurantism,
cessations of the spiritual urge, plunges into a barbaric natural ma-
terialism; but these are temporary phenomena, at worst a downw^ard
curve of the spiral of progress. This progress has not indeed carried the
race beyond itself, into a self-exceeding, a transformation of the mental
being. But that was not to be expected; for the action of evolutionary
Nature in a type of being and consciousness is first to develop the type
to its utmost capacity by just such a subtilisation and increasing com-
plexity till it is ready for her bursting of the shell, the ripened decisive
emergence, reversal, turning over of consciousness on itself that consti-
tutes a new stage in the evolution. If it be supposed that her next step
is the spiritual and supramental being, the stress of spirituality in the
race may be taken as a sign that that is Nature's intention, the sign too
of the capacity of man to operate in himself or aid her to operate the
transition. If the appearance in animal being of a type similar in some
respects to the ape-kind but already from the beginning endowed "v\ith
the elements of humanity was the method of the human evolution, the
appearance in the human being of a spiritual type resembling mental-
animal humanity but already with the stamp of the spiritual aspiration
on it would be the obvious method of Nature for the evolutionary produc-
tion of the spiritual and supramental being.

It is pertinently suggested that if such an evolutionary culmination

750 THE LIFE DIVINE

is intended and man is to be its medium, it will only be a few especially
evolved human beings who will form the new t3^e and move towards the
new life; that once done, the rest of humanity will sink back from
a spiritual aspiration no longer necessary for Nature's purpose and re-
main quiescent in its normal status. It can equally be reasoned that the
human gradation must be preserved if there is really an ascent of the
soul by reincarnation through the evolutionary degrees towards the spir-
itual summit; for otherwise the most necessary of all the intermediate
steps will be lacking. It must be conceded at once that there is not the
least probability or possibility of the whole human race rising in a block
to the supramental level; what is suggested is nothing so revolutionary
and astonishing, but only the capacity in the human mentality, when it
has reached a certain level or a certain point of stress of the evolutionary
impetus, to press towards a higher plane of consciousness and its em-
bodiment in the being. The being will necessarily undergo by this em-
bodiment a change from the normal constitution of its nature, a change
certainly of its mental and emotional and sensational constitution and
also to a great extent of the body-consciousness and the physical condi-
tioning of our life and energies ; but the change of consciousness will be
the chief factor, the initial movement, the physical modification will
be a subordinate factor, a consequence. This transmutation of the con-
sciousness will always remain possible to the human being when the flame
of the soul, the psychic kindling, becomes potent in heart and mind
and the nature is ready. The spiritual aspiration is innate in man; for
he is, unlike the animal, aware of imperfection and limitation and feels
that there is something to be attained beyond what he now is: this urge
towards self-exceeding is not likely ever to die out totally in the race.
The human mental status will be always there, but it will be there not
only as a degree in the scale of rebirth, but as an open step towards the
spiritual and supramental status.

It must be observed that the appearance of human mind and body
on the earth marks a crucial step, a decisive change in the course and
process of the evolution ; it is not merely a continuation of the old lines.
Up till this advent of a developed thinking mind in Matter evolution
had been effected, not by the self-aware aspiration, intention, will or
seeking of the living being, but subconsciously or subliminally by the
automatic operation of Nature. This was so because the evolution began
from the Inconscience and the secret Consciousness had not emerged
sufficiently from it to operate through the self-aware participating indi-

MAN AND THE EVOLUTION 75 1

vidual will of its living creature. But in man the necessary change has
been made, — the being has become awake and aware of himself; there
has been made manifest in Mind its will to develop, to grow in knowl-
edge, to deepen the inner and widen the outer existence, to increase the
capacities of the nature. Man has seen that there can be a higher status of
consciousness than his own ; the evolutionary oestrus is there in his parts
of mind and life, the aspiration to exceed himself is delivered and articu-
late within him: he has become conscious of a soul, discovered the self
and spirit. In him, then, the substitution of a conscious for a subconscious
evolution has become conceivable and practicable, and it may well be
concluded that the aspiration, the urge, the persistent endeavour in him
is a sure sign of Nature's will for a higher way to fulfilment, the emer-
gence of a greater status.

In the previous stages of the evolution Nature's first care and ef-
fort had to be directed towards a change in the physical organisation, for
only so could there be a change of consciousness; this was a necessity
imposed by the insufficiency of the force of consciousness already in for-
mation to effect a change in the body. But in man a reversal is possible,
indeed inevitable ; for it is through his consciousness, through its trans-
mutation and no longer through a new bodily organism as a first in-
strumentation that the evolution can and must be effected. In the inner
reality of things a change of consciousness was always the major fact,
the evolution has always had a spiritual significance and the physical
change was only instrumental; but this relation was concealed by the first
abnormal balance of the two factors, the body of the external Incon-
science outweighing and obscuring in importance the spiritual element,
the conscious being. But once the balance has been righted, it is no
longer the change of body that must precede the change of conscious-
ness ; the consciousness itself by its mutation will necessitate and operate
whatever mutation is needed for the body. It has to be noted that the
human mind has already shown a capacity to aid Nature in the evolution
of new types of plant and animal; it has created new forms of its en-
vironment, developed by knowledge and discipline considerable changes
in its own mentality. It is not an impossibility that man should aid
Nature consciously also in his own spiritual and physical evolution and
transformation. The urge to it is already there and partly effective,
though still incompletely understood and accepted by the surface men-
tality; but one day it may understand, go deeper within itself and dis-
cover the means, the secret energy, the intended operation of the Con-

752 THE LIFE DIVINE

sciousness-Force within which is the hidden reality of what we call
Nature.

All these are conclusions that can be arrived at even from the obser-
vation of the outward phenomena of Nature's progression, her surface
evolution of being and of consciousness in the physical birth and the
body. But there is the other, the invisible factor; there is rebirth, the
progress of the soul by ascent from grade to grade of the evolving exist-
ence, and in the grades to higher and higher types of bodily and mental
instrumentation. In this progression the psychic entity is still veiled,
even in man the conscious mental being, by its instruments, by mind
and life and body; it is unable to manifest fully, held back from- coming
to the front where it can stand out as the master of its nature, obliged
to submit to a certain determination by the instruments, to a domination
of Purusha by Prakriti. But in man the psychic part of the personality
is able to develop with a much greater rapidity than in the inferior crea-
tion, and a time can arrive when the soul entity is close to the point at
which it will emerge from behind the veil into the open and become
the master of its instrumentation in Nature. But this will mean that
the secret indwelling spirit, the Daemon, the Godhead within is on the
point of emergence; and, when it emerges, it can hardly be doubted
that its demand will be, as indeed it already is in the mind itself when
it undergoes the inner psychic influence, for a diviner,, a more spiritual
existence. In the nature of the earth life where the mind is an instru-
ment of the Ignorance, this can only be effected by a change of con-
sciousness, a transition from a foundation in Ignorance to a foundation
in Knowledge, from the mental to a supramental consciousness, a supra-
mental instrumentation of Nature.

There is no conclusive validity in the reasoning that because this is
a world of Ignorance, such a transformation can only be achieved by a
passage to a heaven beyond or cannot be achieved at all and the demand
of the psychic entity is itself ignorant and must be replaced by a merger
of the soul in the Absolute. This conclusion could only be solely valid if
Ignorance were the whole meaning, substance and power of the world-
manifestation or if there were no element in World-Nature itself through
which there could be an exceeding of the ignorant mentality that still
burdens our present status of being. But the Ignorance is only a portion
of this World-Nature; it is not the whole of it, not the original power or
creator: it is in its higher origin a self-limiting Knowledge and even in
its lower origin, its emergence out of the sheer material Inconscience, it is

MAN AND THE EVOLUTION 753

a suppressed Consciousness labouring to find, to recover itself, to mani-
fest Knowledge, which is its true character, as the foundation of exist-
ence. In universal Mind itself there are ranges above our mentality
which are instruments of the cosmic truth-cognition, and into these the
mental being can surely rise ; for already it rises towards them in super-
normal conditions or receives from them without yet knowing or pos-
sessing them intuitions, spiritual intimations, large influxes of illumina-
tion or spiritual capacity. All these ranges are conscious of what is
beyond them, and the highest of them is directly open to the Supermind,
aware of the Truth-consciousness which exceeds it. Moreover, in the
evolving being itself, those greater powers of consciousness are here,
supporting mind-truth, underlying its action which screens them; this
Supermind and those Truth-powers uphold Nature by their secret pres-
ence: even, truth of mind is their result, a diminished operation, a rep-
resentation in partial figures. It is, therefore, not only natural but seems
inevitable that these higher powers of Existence should manifest here in
Mind as Mind itself has manifested in Life and Matter.

Man's urge towards spirituality is the inner driving of the spirit
within him towards emergence, the insistence of the Consciousness-Force
of the being towards the next step of its manifestation. It is true that the
spiritual urge has been largely other-worldly or turned at its extreme
towards a spiritual negation and self-annihilation of the mental indi-
vidual; but this is only one side of its tendency maintained and made
dominant by the necessity of passing out of the kingdom of the funda-
mental Inconscience, overcoming the obstacle of the body, casting away
the obscure vital, getting rid of the ignorant mentality, the necessity
to attain first and foremost, by a rejection of all these impediments to
spiritual being, to a spiritual status. The other, the dynamic side of the
spiritual urge has not been absent, — the aspiration to a spiritual mastery
and mutation of Nature, to a spiritual perfection of the being, a divinisa-
tion of the mind, the heart and the very body: there has even been the
dream or a psychic prevision of a fulfilment exceeding the individual
transformation, a new earth and heaven, a city of God, a divine descent
upon earth, a reign of the spiritually perfect, a kingdom of God not
only within us but outside, in a collective human life. However obscure
may have been some of the forms taken by this aspiration, the indication
they contain of the urge of the occult spiritual being within to emergence
in earth-nature is unmistakable.

If a spiritual unfolding on earth is the hidden truth of our birth into

754 THE LIFE DIVINE

Matter, if it is fundamentally an evolution of consciousness that hlas
been taking place in Nature, then man as he is cannot be the last term
of that evolution: he is too imperfect an expression of the spirit, mind
itself a too limited form and instrumentation; mind is only a middle
term of consciousness, the mental being can only be a transitional being.
If, then, man is incapable of exceeding mentality, he must be surpassed
and supermind and superman must manifest and take the lead of the
creation. But if his mind is capable of opening to what exceeds it, then
there is no reason why man himself should not arrive at supermind and
supermanhood or at least lend his mentality, life and body to an evo-
lution of that greater term of the Spirit manifesting in Nature.

CHAPTER XXIV ,

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SPIRITUAL MAN

Even, as men come to Me, so I accept them. It is my
path that men follow from all sides . . . Whatever form
the worshipper chooses to worship with faith, I set in him
firm faith in it, and with that faith he puts his yearning into
his adoration and gets his desire dispensed by Me. But lim-
ited is that fruit. Those whose sacrifice is to the gods, to
elemental spirits, reach the gods, reach the elemental spirits,
but those whose sacrifice is to Me, to Me they come.

Gita}

In these there is not the Wonder and the Might; the
truths occult exist not for the mind of the ignorant.

Rig Veda.^

As a seer working out the occult truths and their dis-
coveries of knowledge, he brought into being the seven
Craftsmen of heaven and in the light of day they spoke and
wrought the things of their wisdom. jUg Veda.^

Seer-wisdoms, secret words that speak their meaning to
the seer. jUg Vedaf-

None knows the birth of these ; they know each other's
way of begetting: but the Wise perceives these hidden mys-
teries, even that which the great Goddess, the many-hued
Mother, bears as her teat of knowledge. j^g Veda^

Made certain of the meaning of the highest spiritual
knowledge, purified in their being.

Manduka Upanishad.^

He strives by these means and has the knowledge: in
him this spirit enters into its supreme status. . . . Satisfied
in knowledge, having built up their spiritual being, the Wise,
in union with the spiritual self, reach the Omnipresent ev-
erywhere and enter into the All.

Manduka U panishad?

IN THE earliest stages of evolutionary Nature we are met by the
dumb secrecy of her inconscience ; there is no revelation of any sig-
nificance or purpose in her works, no hint of any other principles of being

^IV. ii; VII. 21-23; IX. 25. 'VII. 61. s. 'IV. 16. 3. * IV. 3. 16.
^VII. 56. 2, 4. » III. 2. 6. '^111.2.4,5.

7SS

756 THE LIFE DIVINE

than that first formulation which is her immediate preoccupation and
seems to be for ever her only business: for in her primal works Matter
alone appears, the sole dumb and stark cosmic reality. A Witness of
creation, if there had been one conscious but uninstructed, would only
have seen appearing out of a vast abyss of an apparent non-existence
an Energy busy with the creation of Matter, a material world and
material objects, organising the infinity of the Inconscient into the
scheme of a boundless universe or a system of countless universes that
stretched around him into Space without any certain end or limit, a tire-
less creation of nebulae and star-clusters and suns and planets, existing
only for itself, without a sense in it, empty of cause or purpose. It might
have seemed to him a stupendous machinery without a use, a mighty
meaningless movement, an aeonic spectacle without a witness, a cosmic
edifice without an inhabitant; for he would have seen no sign of an in-
dwelling Spirit, no being for whose delight it was made. A creatiorn of this
kind could only be the outcome of an inconscient Energy or an illusion-
cinema, a shadow play or puppet play of forms reflected on a supercon-
scient indifferent Absolute. He would have seen no evidence of a soul and
no hint of mind or life in this immeasurable and interminable display of
Matter. It would not have seemed to him possible or imaginable that
there could at all be in this desert universe for ever inanimate and insen-
sible an outbreak of teeming life, a first vibration of something occult
and incalculable, alive and conscious, a secret spiritual entity feeling its
way towards the surface.

But after some seons, looking out once more on that vain panorama,
he might have detected in one small corner at least of the universe this
phenomenon, a corner where Matter had been prepared, its operations
sufficiently fixed, organised, made stable, adapted as a scene of a new
development, — the phenomenon of a living matter, a life in things that
had emerged and become visible: but still the Witness would have under-
stood nothing, for evolutionary Nature still veils her secret. He would
have seen a Nature concerned only with establishing this outburst of life,
this new creation, but life living for itself with no significance in it, —
a wanton and abundant creatrix busy scattering the seed of her new
power and establishing a multitude of its forms in a beautiful and luxu-
rious profusion or, later, multiplying endlessly genus and species for the
pure pleasure of creation: a small touch of lively colour and movement
would have been flung into the immense cosmic desert and nothing more.
The Witness could not have imagined that a thinking mind would appear

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SPIRITUAL MAN 757

in this minute island of life, that a consciousness could awake in the In-
conscient, a new and greater subtler vibration come to the surface and
betray more clearly the existence of the submerged Spirit. It would have
seemed to him at first that Life had somehow become aware of itself and
that was all ; for this scanty new-born mind seemed to be only a servant
of life, a contrivance to help life to live, a machinery for its maintenance,
for attack and defence, for certain needs and vital satisfactions, for the
liberation of life-instinct and life-impulse. It could not have seemed pos-
sible to him that in this little life, so inconspicuous amid the immensi-
ties, in one sole species out of this petty multitude, a mental being would
emerge, a mind serving life still but also making life and matter its serv-
ants, using them for the fulfilment of its own ideas, will, wishes, — a men-
tal being who would create all manner of utensils, tools, instruments out
of Matter for all kinds of utilities, erect out of it cities, houses, temples,
theatres, laboratories, factories, chisel from it statues and carve cave-
cathedrals, invent architecture, sculpture, painting, poetry and a hun-
dred crafts and arts, discover the mathematics and physics of the uni-
verse and the hidden secret of its structure, live for the sake of mind and
its interests, for thought and knowledge, develop into the thinker, the
philosopher and scientist and, as a supreme defiance to the reign of Mat-
ter, awake in himself to the hidden Godhead, become the hunter after the
invisible, the mystic and the spiritual seeker.

But if after several ages or cycles the Witness had looked again and
seen this miracle in full process, even then perhaps, obscured by his orig-
inal experience of the sole reality of Matter in the universe, he would
still not have understood ; it would still seem impossible to him that the
hidden Spirit could wholly emerge, complete in its consciousness, and
dwell upon the earth as the self-knower and world-knower. Nature's
ruler and possessor. "Impossible!" he might say, "all that has happened
is nothing much, a Httle bubbling of sensitive grey stuff of brain, a queer
freak in a bit of inanimate Matter moving about on a small dot in the
Universe." On the contrary, a new Witness intervening at the end of the
story, informed of the past developments but unobsessed by the decep-
tion of the beginning, might cry out, "Ah, then, this was the intended
miracle, the last of many, — the Spirit that was submerged in the Incon-
science has broken out from it and now inhabits, unveiled, the form of
things which, veiled, it had created as its dw^elling-place and the scene of
its emergence." But in fact a more conscious Witness might have dis-
covered the clue at an early period of the unfolding, even in each step of

758 THE LIFE DIVINE

its process; for at each stage Nature's mute secrecy, though still there,
diminishes; a hint is given of the next step, a more overtly significant
preparation is visible. Already, in what seems to be inconscient in Life,
the signs of sensation coming towards the surface are visible; in moving
and breathing life the emergence of sensitive mind is apparent and the
preparation of thinking mind is not entirely hidden, while in thinking
mind, when it develops, there appear at an early stage the rudimentary
strivings and afterwards the more developed seekings of a spiritual con-
sciousness. As plant life contains in itself the obscure possibility of the
conscious animal, as the animal mind is astir with the movements of
feeling and perception and the rudiments of conception that are the first
ground for man the thinker, so man the mental being is sublimated by
the endeavour of the evolutionary Energy to develop out of him the spir-
itual man, the fully conscious being, man exceeding his first material self
and discoverer of his true self and highest nature.

But if this is to be accepted as the intention in Nature, there are two
questions that put themselves at once and call for a definitive answer, —
first, the exact nature of the transition from mental to spiritual being
and, when that is given, the process and method of the evolution of the
spiritual out of the mental man. It would at first sight seem evident that
as each gradation emerges not only out of its precedent grade but in it,
as life emerges in matter and is largely limited and determined in its
self-expression by its material conditions, as mind emerges in life-in-
matter and is similarly limited and determined in its self-expression by
life conditions and material conditions, so spirit too must emerge in a
mind embodied in life-in-matter and must be largely limited and deter-
mined by the mental conditions in which it has its roots as well as the life
conditions, the material conditions of its existence here. It might even
be maintained that, if there has been any evolution of the spiritual in us,
it is only as a part of the mental evolution, a special operation of man's
mentality; the spiritual element is not a distinct or separate entity and
cannot have an independent emergence or a supramental future. The
mental being can develop a spiritual interest or preoccupation and may
evolve perhaps in consequence a spiritual as well as an intellectual men-
tality, a fine soul-flower of his mental life. The spiritual may become a
predominant trend in some men just as in others there is a predominant
artistic or pragmatic trend; but there can be no such thing as a spiritual
being taking up and transforming the mental into the spiritual nature.
There is no evolution of the spiritual man ; there is only an evolution of

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SPIRITUAL MAN 759

a new and possibly a finer and rarer element in a mental being. This then
is what has to be brought out, — the clear distinction between the spirit-
ual and the mental, the nature of this evolution and the factors which
make it possible and inevitable that there should be this emergence of
the spirit in its true distinct character, not remaining, as it now for the
most part is in its process or seems to be in its way of appearance, a
subordinate or a dominating feature of our mentality, but defining itself
as a new power which will finally overtop the mental part and replace
it as the leader of the life and nature.

It is quite true that to a surface view life seems only an operation
of Matter, mind an activity of life, and it might seem to follow that what
we call the soul or spirit is only a power of mentality, soul a fine form
of mind, spirituality a high activity of the embodied mental being. But
this is a superficial view of things due to the thought's concentrating on
the appearance and process and not looking at what lies behind the proc-
ess. One might as well on the same lines have concluded that electricity
is only a product or operation of water and cloud matter, because it is
in such a field that lightning emerges; but a deeper inquiry has shown
that both cloud and water have, on the contrary, the energy of electricity
as their foundation, their constituent power or energy-substance: that
which seems to be a result is — in its reality, though not in its form — the
origin ; the effect is in the essence pre-existent to the apparent cause, the
principle of the emergent activity precedent to its present field of action.
So it is throughout evolutionary Nature ; Matter could not have become
animate if the principle of life had not been there constituting Matter and
emerging as a phenomenon of lif e-in-matter ; life-in-matter could not
have begun to feel, perceive, think, reason, if the principle of mind had
not been there behind Hfe and substance, constituting it as its field of
operation and emergent in the phenomenon of a thinking life and body:
so too spirituality emerging in mind is the sign of a power which itself
has founded and constituted life, mind and body and is now emerging as
a spiritual being in a living and thinking body. How far this emergence
will go, whether it will become dominant and transform its instrument, is a
subsequent question; but what is necessary first to posit is the existence
of spirit as something else than mind and greater than mind, spirituality
as something other than mentality and the spiritual being therefore as
something distinct from the mental being: spirit is a final evolutionary
emergence because it is the original involutionary element and factor.
Evolution is an inverse action of the involution: what is an ultimate and

760 THE LIFE DIVINE

last derivation in the involution is the first to appear in the evolution;
what was original and primal in the involution is in the evolution the last
and supreme emergence.

It is true again that it is difficult for man's mind to distinguish en-
tirely the soul or self or any spiritual element in him from the mental
and vital formation in which it makes its appearance; but that is only
so long as the emergence is not complete. In the animal mind is not quite
distinct from its own life-matrix and life-matter; its movements are so
involved in the life movements that it cannot detach itself from them,
cannot stand separate and observe them; but in man mind has become
separate, he can become aware of his mental operations as distinct from
his life operations, his thought and will can disengage themselves from his
sensations and impulses, desires and emotional reactions, can become de-
tached from them, observe and control them, sanction or cancel their func-
tioning: he does not as yet know the secrets of his being well enough to be
aware of himself decisively and with certitude as a mental being in a life
and body, but he has that impression and can take inwardly that position.
So too at first soul in man does not appear as something quite distinct from
mind and from mentalised life; its movements are involved in the mind
movements, its operations seem to be mental and emotional activities;
the mental human being is not aware of a soul in him standing back from
the mind and life and body, detaching itself, seeing and controlling and
moulding their action and formation: but, as the inner evolution pro-
ceeds, this is precisely what can, must and does happen, — it is the long-
delayed but inevitable next step in our evolutionary destiny. There can
be a decisive emergence in which the being separates itself from thought
and sees itself in an inner silence as the spirit in mind, or separates itself
from the life movements, desires, sensations, kinetic impulses and is aware
of itself as the spirit supporting life, or separates itself from the body
sense and knows itself as a spirit ensouling Matter: this is the discovery
of ourselves as the Purusha, a mental being or a life-soul or a subtle self
supporting the body. This is taken by many as a sufficient discovery of
the true self and in a certain sense they are right; for it is the self or
spirit that so represents itself in regard to the activities of Nature, and
this revelation of its presence is enough to disengage the spiritual ele-
ment: but self-discovery can go farther, it can even put aside all relation
to form or action of Nature. For it is seen that these selves are represen-
tations of a divine Entity to which mind, life and body are only forms
and instruments: we are then the Soul looking at Nature, knowing all

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SPIRITUAL MAN 76 1

her dynamisms in us, not by mental perception and observation, but by
an intrinsic consciousness and its direct sense of things and its intimate
exact vision, able therefore by its emergence to put a close control on
our nature and change it. When there is a complete silence in the being,
either a stillness of the whole being or a stillness behind unaffected by
surface movements, then we can become aware of a Self, a spiritual sub-
stance of our being, an existence exceeding even the soul individuality,
spreading itself into universality, surpassing all dependence on any nat-
ural form or action, extending itself upward into a transcendence of which
the limits are not visible. It is these liberations of the spiritual part in
us which are the decisive steps of the spiritual evolution in Nature.

It is only through these decisive movements that the true character
of the evolution becomes evident ; for till then there are only preparatory
movements, a pressure of the psychic Entity on the mind, life and body
to develop a true soul action, a pressure of the spirit or self for liberation
from the ego, from the surface ignorance, a turning of the mind and life
towards some occult Reality, — preliminary experiences, partial formu-
lations of a spiritualised mind, a spiritualised life, but no complete
change, no probability of an entire unveiling of the soul or self or a rad-
ical transformation of the nature. When there is the decisive emergence,
one sign of it is the status or action in us of an inherent, intrinsic, self-
existent consciousness which knows itself by the mere fact of being,
knows all that is in itself in the same way, by identity with it, begins
even to see all that to our mind seems external in the same manner, by
a movement of identity or by an intrinsic direct consciousness which en-
velops, penetrates, enters into its object, discovers itself in the object, is
aware in it of something that is not mind or life or body. There is, then,
evidently a spiritual consciousness which is other than the mental, and
it testifies to the existence of a spiritual being in us which is other than
our surface mental personality. But at first this consciousness may con-
fine itself to a status of being separate from the action of our ignorant
surface nature, observing it, limiting itself to knowledge, to a seeing of
things with a spiritual sense and vision of existence. For action it may
still depend upon the mental, vital, bodily instruments, or it may allow
them to act according to their own nature and itself remain satisfied
with self-experience and self-knowledge, with an inner liberation, an even-
tual freedom: but it may also and usually does exercise a certain author-
ity, governance, influence on thought, life movement, physical action, a
purifying uplifting control compelling them to move in a higher and purer

762 THE LIFE DIVINE

truth of themselves, to obey or be an instrumentation of an influx of
some diviner Power or a luminous direction which is not mental but spir-
itual and can be recognised as having a certain divine character, — the
inspiration of a greater Self or the command of the Ruler of all being,
the Ishwara. Or the nature may obey the psychic entity's intimations,
move in an inner light, follow an inner guidance. This is already a con-
siderable evolution and amounts to a beginning at least of a psychic and
spiritual transformation. But it is possible to go farther; for the spiritual
being, once inwardly liberated, can develop in mind the higher states
of being that are its own natural atmosphere and bring down a supra-
mental energy and action which are proper to the Truth-consciousness;
the ordinary mental instrumentation, life-instrumentation, physical in-
strumentation even, could then be entirely transformed and become parts
no longer of an ignorance however much illumined, but of a supramen-
tal creation which would be the true action of a spiritual truth-conscious-
ness and knowledge.

At first this truth of the spirit and of spirituality is not self-evident
to the mind ; man becomes mentally aware of his soul as something other
than his body, superior to his normal mind and life, but he has no clear
sense of it, only a feeling of some of its effects on his nature. As these
effects take a mental form or a life form, the difference is not firmly and
trenchantly drawn, the soul perception does not acquire a distinct and
assured independence. Very commonly indeed, a complex of half-effects
of the psychic pressure on the mental and vital parts, a formation mixed
with mental aspiration and vital desires, is mistaken for the soul, just as
the separative ego is taken for the self, although the self in its true being
is universal as well as individual in its essence, — or just as a mixture of
mental aspiration and vital enthusiasm and ardour uplifted by some kind
of strong or high belief or self-dedication or altruistic eagerness is mis-
taken for spirituality. But this vagueness and these confusions are in-
evitable as a temporary stage of the evolution which, because ignorance
is its starting-point and the whole stamp of our first nature, must neces-
sarily begin with an imperfect intuitive perception and an instinctive
urge or seeking without any acquired experience or clear knowledge.
Even the formations which are the first effects of the perception or urge
or the first indices of a spiritual evolution, must inevitably be of this in-
complete and tentative nature. But the error so created comes very
much in the way of a true understanding, and it must therefore be
emphasised that spirituality is not a high intellectuality, not idealism,

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SPIRITUAL MAN 763

not an ethical turn of mind or moral purity and austerity, not religiosity
or an ardent and exalted emotional fervour, not even a compound of all
these excellent things; a mental belief, creed or faith, an emotional as-
piration, a regulation of conduct according to a religious or ethical for-
mula are not spiritual achievement and experience. These things are of
considerable value to mind and life; they are of value to the spiritual
evolution itself as preparatory movements disciplining, purifying or giv-
ing a suitable form to the nature ; but they still belong to the mental evolu-
tion,— the beginning of a spiritual realisation, experience, change is not
yet there. Spirituality is in its essence an awakening to the inner reality
of our being, to a spirit, self, soul which is other than our mind, life
and body, an inner aspiration to know, to feel, to be that, to enter into
contact with the greater Reality beyond and pervading the universe
which inhabits also our own being, to be in communion with It and union
with It, and a turning, a conversion, a transformation of our whole being
as a result of the aspiration, the contact, the union, a growth or waking
into a new becoming or new being, a new self, a new nature.

In fact, the creative Consciousness-Force in our earth existence has
to lead forward, in an almost simultaneous process but with a consider-
able priority and greater stress of the inferior element, a double evolu-
tion. There is an evolution of our outward nature, the nature of the mental
being in the life and body, and there is within it, pressing forward for self-
revelation because with the emergence of mind that revelation is becom-
ing possible, a preparation at least, even the beginning of an evolution
of our inner being, our occult subliminal and spiritual nature. But Na-
ture's major preoccupation must necessarily be still and for a long time
the evolution of mind to its greatest possible range, height, subtlety; for
only so can be prepared the unveiling of an entirely intuitive intelligence,
of overmind, of supermind, the difficult passage to a higher instrumenta-
tion of the Spirit. If the sole intention were the revelation of the essential
spiritual Reality and a cessation of our being into its pure existence, this
insistence on the mental evolution would have no purpose: for at every
point of the nature there can be a breaking out of the spirit and an absorp-
tion of our being into it; an intensity of the heart, a total silence of the
mind, a single absorbing passion of the will would be enough to bring
about that culminating movement. If Nature's final intention were other-
worldly, then too the same law would hold ; for everywhere, at any point
of the nature, there can be a sufficient power of the other-worldly urge
to break through and away from the terrestrial action and enter into a

764 THE LIFE DIVINE

spiritual elsewhere. But if her intention is a comprehensive change of
the being, this double evolution is intelligible and justifies itself; for it is
for that purpose indispensable.

This, however, imposes a difficult and slow spiritual advance: for,
first, the spiritual emergence has to wait at each step for the instruments
to be ready; next, as the spiritual formation emerges, it is mixed inex-
tricably with the powers, motives, impulses of an imperfect mind, life
and body, — there is a pull on it to accept and serve these powers, mo-
tives and impulses, a downward gravitation and perilous mixture, a con-
stant temptation to fall or deviation, at least a fettering, a weight, a re-
tardation; there is a necessity to return upon a step gained in order to
bring up something of the nature which hangs back and prevents a farther
step; finally, there is, by the very character of mind in which it has to
work, a limitation of the emerging spiritual light and power and a com-
pulsion on it to move by segments, to follow one line or another and
leave altogether or leave till later on the achievement of its own totality.
This hampering, this obstacle of the mind, life and body, — the heavy
inertia and persistence of the body, the turbid passions of the life-part,
the obscurity and doubting incertitudes, denials, other-formulations of
the mind, — is an impediment so great and intolerable that the spiritual
urge becomes impatient and tries rigorously to quell these opponents, to
reject the life, to mortify the body, to silence the mind and achieve its
own separate salvation, spirit departing into pure spirit and rejecting
from it altogether an undivine and obscure Nature. Apart from the su-
preme call, the natural push of the spiritual part in us to return to its
own highest element and status, this aspect of vital and physical Nature
as an impediment to pure spirituality is a compelling reason for asceti-
cism, for illusionism, for the tendency to other-worldliness, the urge to-
wards withdrawal from life, the passion for a pure and unmixed Abso-
lute. A pure spiritual absolutism is a movement of the self towards its
own supreme selfhood, but it is also indispensable for Nature's own pur-
pose ; for without it the mixture, the downward gravitation would make
the spiritual emergence impossible. The extremist of this absolutism, the
solitary, the ascetic, is the standard-bearer of the spirit, his ochre robe
is its flag, the sign of a refusal of all compromise, — as indeed the struggle
of emergence cannot end by a compromise, but only by an entire spiritual
victory and the complete surrender of the lower nature. If that is impos-
sible here, then indeed it must be achieved elsewhere ; if Nature refuses
submission to the emerging spirit, then the soul must withdraw from her.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SPIRITUAL MAN 765

There is thus a dual tendency in the spiritual emergence, on one side a
drive towards the establishment at all cost of the spiritual consciousness
in the being, even to the rejection of Nature, on the other side a push
towards the extension of spirituality to our parts of nature. But until the
first is fully achieved, the second can only be imperfect and halting. It is
the foundation of the pure spiritual consciousness that is the first object in
the evolution of the spiritual man, and it is this and the urge of that con-
sciousness towards contact with the Reality, the Self or the Divine Being
that must be the first and foremost or even, till it is perfectly accom-
plished, the sole preoccupation of the spiritual seeker. It is the one thing
needful that has to be done by each on whatever line is possible to him,
by each according to the spiritual capacity developed in his nature.

In considering the achieved course of the evolution of the spiritual
being, we have to regard it from two sides, — a consideration of the means,
the lines of development utilised by Nature and a view of the actual re-
sults achieved by it in the human individual. There are four main lines
which Nature has followed in her attempt to open up the inner being,
— religion, occultism, spiritual thought and an inner spiritual realisation
and experience: the three first are approaches, the last is the decisive
avenue of entry. All these four powers have worked by a simultaneous
action, more or less connected, sometimes in a variable collaboration,
sometimes in dispute with each other, sometimes in a separate independ-
ence. Religion has admitted an occult element in its ritual, ceremony,
sacraments ; it has leaned upon spiritual thinking, deriving from it some-
times a creed or theology, sometimes its supporting spiritual philosophy,
— the former, ordinarily, is the occidental method, the latter the oriental:
but spiritual experience is the final aim and achievement of religion, its
sky and summit. But also religion has sometimes banned occultism or re-
duced its own occult element to a minimum ; it has pushed away the phil-
osophic mind as a dry intellectual alien, leaned with all its weight on
creed and dogma, pietistic emotion and fervour and moral conduct; it
has reduced to a minimum or dispensed with spiritual realisation and
experience. Occultism has sometimes put forward a spiritual aim as its
goal, and followed occult knowledge and experience as an approach to
it, formulated some kind of mystic philosophy: but more often it has
confined itself to occult knowledge and practice without any spiritual
vistas; it has turned to thaumaturgy or mere magic or even deviated
into diabolism. Spiritual philosophy has very usually leaned on re-
ligion as its support or its way to experience; it has been the outcome

766 THE LIFE DIVINE

of realisation and experience or built its structures as an approach to it:
but it has also rejected all aid — or all impediment — of religion and pro-
ceeded in its own strength, either satisfied with mental knowledge or
confident to discover its own path of experience and effective discipline.
Spiritual experience has used all the three means as a starting-point, but it
has also dispensed with them all, relying on its own pure strength: discour-
aging occult knowledge and powers as dangerous lures and entangling
obstacles, it has sought only the pure truth of the spirit ; dispensing with
philosophy, it has arrived instead through the heart's fervour or a mystic
inward spiritualisation ; putting behind it all religious creed, worship
and practice and regarding them as an inferior stage or first approach,
it has passed on, leaving behind it all these supports, nude of all these
trappings, to the sheer contact of the spiritual Reality. All these varia-
tions were necessary; the evolutionary endeavour of Nature has experi-
mented on all lines in order to find her true way and her whole way to-
wards the supreme consciousness and the integral knowledge.

For each of these means or approaches corresponds to something in
our total being and therefore to something necessary to the total aim of
her evolution. There are four necessities of man's self -expansion if he is
not to remain this being of the surface ignorance seeking obscurely after
the truth of things and collecting and systematising fragments and sec-
tions of knowledge, the small limited and half-competent creature of the
cosmic Force which he now is in his phenomenal nature. He must know
himself and discover and utilise all his potentialities: but to know himself
and the world completely he must go behind his own and its exterior, he
must dive deep below his own mental surface and the physical surface of
Nature. This he can only do by knowing his inner mental, vital, physical
and psychic being and its powers and movements and the universal laws
and processes of the occult Mind and Life which stand behind the mate-
rial front of the universe: that is the field of occultism, if we take the
word in its widest significance. He must know also the hidden Power or
Powers that control the world: if there is a Cosmic Self or Spirit or a
Creator, he must be able to enter into relation with It or Him and be able
to remain in whatever contact or communion is possible, get into some
kind of tune with the master Beings of the universe or with the universal
Being and its universal will or a supreme Being and His supreme will,
follow the law It gives him and the assigned or revealed aim of his life
and conduct, raise himself towards the highest height that It demands of
him in his life now or in his existence hereafter; if there is no such univer-

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SPIRITUAL MAN 767

sal or supreme Spirit or Being, he must know what there is and how to lift
himself to it out of his present imperfection and impotence. This approach
is the aim of religion: its purpose is to link the human with the Divine
and in so doing sublimate the thought and life and flesh so that they may
admit the rule of the soul and spirit. But this knowledge must be some-
thing more than a creed or a mystic revelation ; his thinking mind must
be able to accept it, to correlate it with the principle of things and the
observed truth of the universe: this is the work of philosophy, and in the
field of the truth of the spirit it can only be done by a spiritual philoso-
phy, whether intellectual in its method or intuitive. But all knowledge
and endeavour can reach its fruition only if it is turned into experience
and has become a part of the consciousness and its established opera-
tions; in the spiritual field all this religious, occult or philosophical knowl-
edge and endeavour must, to bear fruition, end in an opening up of
the spiritual consciousness, in experiences that found and continually
heighten, expand and enrich that consciousness and in the building of
a life and action that is in conformity with the truth of the spirit: this
is the work of spiritual realization and experience.

In the very nature of things all evolution must proceed at first by
a slow unfolding; for each new principle that evolves its powers has to
make its way out of an involution in Inconscience and Ignorance. It has
a difficult task in pulling itself out of the involution, out of the hold of the
obscurity of the original medium, against the pull and strains, the in-
stinctive opposition and obstruction of the Inconscience and the ham-
pering mixture and blind obstinate retardations of the Ignorance. Nature
affirms at first a vague urge and tendency which is a sign of the push of
the occult, subliminal, submerged reality towards the surface ; there are
then small half-suppressed hints of the thing that is to be, imperfect be-
ginnings, crude elements, rudimentary appearances, small, insignificant,
hardly recognisable quanta. Afterwards there are small or large forma-
tions; a more characteristic and recognisable quality begins to show
itself, first partially, here and there or in a low intensity, then more
vivid, more formative; finally, there is the decisive emergence, a reversal
of the consciousness, the beginning of the possibility of its radical
change: but still much has to be done in every direction, a long and dif-
ficult growth towards perfection lies before the evolutionary endeavour.
The thing done has not only to be confirmed, secured against relapse
and the downward gravitation, against failure and extinction, but opened
out into all the fields of its possibilities, its totality of entire self-achieve-

768 THE LIFE DIVINE

ment, its utmost height, subtlety, riches, wideness; it has to become
dominant, all-embracing, comprehensive. This is everywhere the process
of Nature and to ignore it is to miss the intention in her works and get
lost in the maze of her procedure.

It is this process that has taken place in the evolution of religion
in the human mind and consciousness ; the work done by it for humanity
cannot be understood or properly appreciated if we ignore the conditions
of the process and their necessity. It is evident that the first beginnings
of religion must be crude and imperfect, its development hampered by
mixtures, errors, concessions to the human mind and vital part which
may often be of a very unspiritual character. Ignorant and injurious and
even disastrous elements may creep in and lead to error and evil; the
dogmatism of the human mind, its self-assertive narrowness, its intoler-
ant and challenging egoism, its attachment to its limited truths and still
greater attachment to its errors, or the violence, fanaticism, militant and
oppressive self-affirmation of the vital, its treacherous action on the mind
in order to get a sanction for its own desires and propensities, may very
easily invade the religious field and baulk religion of its higher spiritual
aim and character ; under the name of religion much ignorance may hide,
many errors and an extensive wrong-building be permitted, many crimes
even and offences against the spirit be committed. But this chequered
history belongs to all human effort and, if it were to count against the
truth and necessity of religion, would count also against the truth and
necessity of every other line of human endeavour, against all man's ac-
tion, his ideals, his thought, his art, his science.

Religion has opened itself to denial by its claim to determine the
truth by divine authority, by inspiration, by a sacrosanct and infallible
sovereignty given to it from on high; it has sought to impose itself on
human thought, feeling, conduct without discussion or question. This is
an excessive and premature claim, although imposed in a way on the re-
ligious idea by the imperative and absolute character of the inspirations
and illuminations which are its warrant and justification and by the ne-
cessity of faith as an occult light and power from the soul amidst the
mind's ignorance, doubts, weakness, incertitudes. Faith is indispensable
to man, for without it he could not proceed forward in his journey
through the Unknown; but it ought not to be imposed, it should come
as a free perception or an imperative direction from the inner spirit. A
claim to unquestioned acceptance could only be warranted if the spir-
itual effort had already achieved man's progression to the highest Truth-

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SPIRITUAL MAN 769

consciousness total and integral, free from all ignorant mental and vital
mixture. This is the ultimate object before us, but it has not yet been
accomplished, and the premature claim has obscured the true work of
the religious instinct in man, which is to lead him towards the Divine
Reality, to formulate all that he has yet achieved in that direction and
to give to each human being a mould of spiritual discipline, a way of
seeking, touching, nearing the Divine Truth, a way which is proper to
the potentialities of his nature.

The wide and supple method of evolutionary Nature providing the
amplest scope and preserving the true intention of the religious seeking
of the human being can be recognised in the development of religion in
India, where any number of religious formulations, cults and disciplines
have been allowed, even encouraged to subsist side by side and each man
was free to accept and follow that which was congenial to his thought,
feeling, temperament, build of the nature. It is right and reasonable that
there should be this plasticity, proper to an experimental evolution: for
religion's real business is to prepare man's mind, life and bodily exist-
ence for the spiritual consciousness to take it up; it has to lead him to
that point where the inner spiritual light begins fully to emerge. It
is at this point that religion must learn to subordinate itself, not to
insist on its outer characters, but give full scope to the inner spirit
itself to develop its own truth and reality. In the meanwhile it has to
take up as much of man's mentality, vitality, physicality as it can and give
all his activities a turn towards the spiritual direction, the revelation of
a spiritual meaning in them, the imprint of a spiritual refinement, the
beginning of a spiritual character. It is in this attempt that the errors of
religion come in, for they are caused by the very nature of the matter
with which it is dealing, — that inferior stuff invades the very forms that
are meant to serve as intermediaries between the spiritual and the mental,
vital or physical consciousness, and often it diminishes, degrades and cor-
rupts them: but it is in this attempt that lies religion's greatest utility
as an intercessor between spirit and nature. Truth and error live always
together in the human evolution and the truth is not to be rejected be-
cause of its accompanying errors, though these have to be eliminated, —
often a difficult business and, if crudely done, resulting in surgical harm
inflicted on the body or religion; for what we see as error is very fre-
quently the symbol or a disguise or a corruption or malformation of a
truth which is lost in the brutal radicality of the operation, — the truth
is cut out along with the error. Nature herself very commonly permits the

770 THE LITE DIVINE

good corn and the tares and weeds to grow together for a long time, be-
cause only so is her own growth, her free evolution possible.

Evolutionary Nature in her first awakening of man to a rudimentary
spiritual consciousness must begin with a vague sense of the Infinite and
the Invisible surrounding the physical being, a sense of the limitation
and impotence of human mind and will and of something greater than
himself concealed in the world, of Potencies beneficent or maleficent
which determine the results of his action, a Power that is behind the
physical world he lives in and has perhaps created it and him, or Powers
that inform and rule her movements while they themselves perhaps are
ruled by the greater Unknown that is beyond them. He had to determine
what they are and find means of conmiunication so that he might propi-
tiate them or call them to his aid; he sought also for means by which
he could find out and control the springs of the hidden movements of
Nature. This he could not do at once by his reason because his reason
could at first deal only with physical facts, but this was the domain of the
Invisible and needed a supraphysical vision and knowledge; he had to
do it by an extension of the faculty of intuition and instinct which was
already there in the animal. This faculty, prolonged in the thinking
being and mentalised, must have been more sensitive and active in early
man, though still mostly on a lower scale, for he had to rely on it largely
for all his first necessary discoveries: he had to rely also on the aid of
subliminal experience; for the subliminal too must have been more active,
more ready to upsurge in him, more capable of formulating its phenom-
ena on the surface, before he learned to depend completely on his in-
tellect and senses. The intuitions that he thus received by contact with
Nature, his mind systematised and so created the early forms of religion.
This active and ready power of intuition also gave him the sense of
supraphysical forces behind the physical, and his instinct and a certain
subliminal or supernormal experience of supraphysical beings with whom
he could somehow communicate turned him towards the discovery of ef-
fective and canalising means for a dynamic utilisation of this knowledge;
so were created magic and the other early forms of occultism. At some
time it must have dawned on him that he had something in him which
was not physical, a soul that survived the body; certain supernormal
experiences which became active because of the pressure to know the
invisible, must have helped to formulate his first crude ideas of this en-
tity within him. It would only be later that he began to realise that what
he perceived in the action of the universe was also there in some form

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SPIRITUAL MAN 77 1

within him and that in him also were elements that responded to invisible
powers and forces for good or for evil ; so would begin his religio-ethical
formations and his possibilities of spiritual experience. An amalgam of
primitive intuitions, occult ritual, religio-social ethics, mystical knowl-
edge or experiences symbolised in myth but with their sense preserved
by a secret initiation and discipline is the early, at first very superficial
and external stage of human religion. In the beginning these elements
were, no doubt, crude and poor and defective, but they acquired depth
and range and increased in some cultures to a great amplitude and sig-
nificance.

But as the mental and life development increased, — for that is
Nature's first preoccupation in man and she does not hesitate to push
it forward at the cost of other elements that will need to be taken up fully
hereafter, — there is a tendency towards intellectualisation, and the first
necessary intuitive, instinctive and subliminal formations are overlaid
with the structures erected by a growing force of reason and mental in-
telligence. As man discovers the secrets and processes of physical Nature,
he moves more and more away from his early recourse to occultism and
magic; the presence and felt influence of gods and invisible powers
recedes as more and more is explained by natural workings, the mechani-
cal procedure of Nature: but he still feels the need of a spiritual element
and spiritual factors in his life and therefore keeps for a time the two
activities running together. But the occult elements of religion, though
still held as beliefs or preserved but also buried in rites and myths, lose
their significance and diminish and the intellectual element increases;
finally, where and when the intellectualising tendency becomes too
strong, there is a movement to cut out everything but creed, institution,
formal practice and ethics. Even the element of spiritual experience
dwindles and it is considered sufficient to rely only on faith, emotional
fervour and moral conduct ; the first amalgam of religion, occultism and
mystic experience is disrupted, and there is a tendency, not by any means
universal or complete but still pronounced or visible, for each of these
powers to follow its own way to its own goal in its own separate and free
character. A complete denial of religion, occultism and all that is supra-
physical is the last outcome of this stage, a hard dry paroxysm of the
superficial intellect hacking away the sheltering structures that are
refuges for the deeper parts of our nature. But still evolutionary Nature
keeps alive her ulterior intentions in the minds of a few and uses man's
greater mental evolution to raise them to a higher plane and deeper

772 THE LIFE DIVINE

issues. In the present time itself, after an age of triumphant intellectuality
and materialism, we can see evidences of this natural process, — a. return
towards inner self-discovery, an inner seeking and thinking, a new at-
tempt at mystic experience, a groping after the inner self, a reawaken-
ing to some sense of the truth and power of the spirit begins to manifest
itself; man's search after his self and soul and a deeper truth of things
tends to revive and resume its lost force and to give a fresh life to the old
creeds, erect new faiths or develop independently of sectarian religions.
The intellect itself, having reached near to the natural limits of the capac-
ity of physical discovery, having touched its bedrock and found that it
explains nothing more than the outer process of Nature, has begun, still
tentatively and hesitatingly, to direct an eye of research on the deeper
secrets of the mind and the life force and on the domain of the occult
which it had rejected a priori, in order to know what there may be in it
that is true. Religion itself has shown its power of survival and is under-
going an evolution the final sense of which is still obscure. In this new
phase of the mind that we see beginning, however crudely and hesitat-
ingly, there can be detected the possibility of a pressure towards some
decisive turn and advance of the spiritual evolution in Nature. Religion,
rich but with a certain obscurity in her first infrarational stage, had
tended under the overweight of the intellect to pass into a clear but
bare rational interspace; but it must in the end follow the upward curve
of the human mind and rise more fully at its summits towards its true
or greatest field in the sphere of a suprarational consciousness and knowl-
edge.

If we look at the past, we can still see the evidences of this line of
natural evolution, although most of its earlier stages are hidden from us
in the unwritten pages of prehistory. It has been contended that religion
in its beginnings was nothing but a mass of animism, fetishism, magic,
totemism, taboo, myth, superstitious symbol, with the medicine-man as
priest, a mental fungus of primitive human ignorance, — later on at its
best a form of Nature-worship. It could well have been so in the primi-
tive mind, though we have to add the proviso that behind much of its
beliefs and practices there may have been a truth of an inferior but very
effective kind that we have lost with our superior development. Primitive
man lives much in a low and small province of his life-being, and this
corresponds on the occult plane to an invisible Nature which is of a like
character and whose occult powers can be called into activity by a knowl-
edge and methods to which the lower vital intuitions and instincts may

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SPIRITUAL MAN 773

open a door of access. This might be formulated in a first stage of re-
ligious belief and practice which would be occult after a crude inchoate
fashion in its character and interests, not yet spiritual ; its main element
would be a calling in of small life-powers and elemental beings to the aid
of small life-desires and a rude physical welfare.

But this primitive stage, — if it is indeed such and not, in what we
still see of it, a fall or a vestige, a relapse from a higher knowledge be-
longing to a previous cycle of civilisation or the debased remnants of a
dead or obsolete culture, — can have been only a beginning. It was fol-
lowed, after whatever stages, by the more advanced type of religion of
which we have a record in the literature or surviving documents of the
early civilised peoples. This type, composed of a polytheistic belief and
worship, a cosmology, a mythology, a complexus of ceremonies, practices,
ritual and ethical obligations interwoven sometimes deeply into the so-
cial system, was ordinarily a national or tribal religion intimately ex-
pressive of the stage of evolution of thought and life reached by the
community. In the outer structure we still miss the support of a deeper
spiritual significance, but this gap was filled in in the greater more de-
veloped cultures by a strong background of occult knowledge and prac-
tices or else by carefully guarded mysteries with a first element of spir-
itual wisdom and discipline. Occultism occurs more often as an addition
or superstructure, but is not always present; the worship of divine
powers, sacrifice, a surface piety and social ethics are the main factors.
A spiritual philosophy or idea of the meaning of life seems at first to be
absent, but its beginnings are often contained in the myths and mysteries
and in one or two instances fully emerge out of them so that it assumes a
strong separate existence.

It is possible indeed that it is the mystic or the incipient occultist
who was everywhere the creator of religion and imposed his secret dis-
coveries in the form of belief, myth and practice on the mass human
mind; for it is always the individual who receives the intuitions of Na-
ture and takes the step forward dragging or drawing the rest of hu-
manity behind him. But even if we give the credit of this new creation
to the subconscious mass mind, it is the occultist and mystic element in
that mind which created it and it must have found individuals through
whom it could emerge ; for a mass experience or discovery or expression
is not the first method of Nature ; it is at some one point or a few points
that the fire is lit and spreads from hearth to hearth, from altar to altar.
But the spiritual aspiration and experience of the mystics was usually

774 THE LIFE DIVINE

casketed in secret formulas and given only to a few initiates ; it was con-
veyed to the rest or rather preserved for them in a mass of religious or
traditional symbols. It is these symbols that were the heart's core of re-
ligion in the mind of an early humanity.

Out of this second stage there emerged a third which tried to liberate
the secret spiritual experience and knowledge and put it at the disposal
of all as a truth that could have a common appeal and must be made uni-
versally available. A tendency prevailed, not only to make the spiritual
element the very kernel of the religion, but to render it attainable to
all the worshippers by an exoteric teaching ; as each esoteric school had
had its system of knowledge and discipline, so now each religion was to
have its system of knowledge, its creed and its spiritual discipline. Here,
in these two forms of the spiritual evolution, the esoteric and the exoteric,
the way of the mystic and the way of the religious man, we see a double
principle of evolutionary Nature, the principle of intensive and con-
centrated evolution in a small space and the principle of expansion and
extension so that the new creation may be generalised in as large a field
as possible. The first is the concentrated dynamic and effective move-
ment; the second tends towards diffusion and status. As a result of this
new development, the spiritual aspiration at first carefully treasured by a
few became more generalised in mankind, but it lost in purity, height and
intensity. The mystics founded their endeavour on a power of supra-
rational knowledge, intuitive, inspired, revelatory and on the force of the
inner being to enter into occult truth and experience: but these powers
are not possessed by men in the mass or possessed only in a crude, unde-
veloped and fragmentary initial form on which nothing could be safely
founded; so for them in this new development the spiritual truth had
to be clothed in intellectual forms of creed and doctrine, in emotional
forms of worship and in a simple but significant ritual. At the same time
the strong spiritual nucleus became mixed, diluted, alloyed; it tended
to be invaded and aped by the lower elements of mind and life and
physical nature. It was this mixture and alloy and invasion of the spu-
rious, this profanation of the mysteries and the loss of their truth and
significance, as well as the misuse of the occult power that comes by
communication with invisible forces, that was most dreaded by the early
mystics and prevented by secrecy, by strict discipline, by restriction
to the few fit initiates. Another untoward result or peril of the diffusive
movement and the consequent invasion has been the intellectual formali-
sation of spiritual knowledge into dogma and the materialisation of liv-

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SPIRITUAL MAN 775

ing practice into a dead mass of cult and ceremony and ritual, a mecha-
nisation by which the spirit was bound to depart in course of time from
the body of the religion. But this risk had to be taken, for the expansive
movement was an inherent necessity of the spiritual urge in evolutionary
Nature.

Thus came into being the religions which rely mainly or in the mass
on creed and ritual for some spiritual result, but yet hold because of
their truth of experience, the fundamental inner reality that was initially
present in them and persists so long as there are men to continue
or renew it, a means for those who are touched by the spiritual impulse
to realise the Divine and liberate the spirit. This development has led
farther to a division into two tendencies, catholic and protestant, one
a tendency towards some conservation of the original plastic character
of religion, its many-sidedness and appeal to the whole nature of the
human being, the other disruptive of this catholicity and insistent on a
pure reliance on belief, worship and conduct simplified so as to make a
quick and ready appeal to the common reason, heart and ethical will.
This turn has tended to create an excessive rationalisation, a discrediting
and condemnation of most of the occult elements which seek to establish
a communication with what is invisible, a reliance on the surface mind
as the sufficient vehicle of the spiritual endeavour ; a certain dryness and
a narrowness and paucity of the spiritual life have been a frequent con-
sequence. Moreover, the intellect having denied so much, cast out so
much, has found ample room and opportunity to deny more until it denies
all, to negate spiritual experience and cast out spirituality and religion,
leaving only intellect itself as the sole surviving power. But intellect
void of the spirit can only pile up external knowledge and machinery and
efficiency and ends in a drying up of the secret springs of vitality and a
decadence without any inner power to save the life or create a new life
or any other way out than death and disintegration and a new beginning
out of the old Ignorance.

It would have been possible for the evolutionary principle to have
preserved its pristine wholeness of movement while pressing on, by an ex-
pansion and not a disruption of the wiser ancient harmony, to a greater
synthesis of the principle of concentration and the principle of diffusion.
In India, we have seen, there has been a persistence of the original intui-
tion and total movement of evolutionary Nature. For religion in India
limited itself by no one creed or dogma ; it not only admitted a vast num-
ber of different formulations, but contained successfully within itself all

776 THE LIFE DIVINE

the elements that have grown up in the course of the evolution of religion
and refused to ban or excise any: it developed occultism to its utmost
limits, accepted spiritual philosophies of all kinds, followed to its highest,
deepest or largest outcome every possible line of spiritual realisation,
spiritual experience, spiritual self-discipline. Its method has been the
method of evolutionary Nature herself, to allow all developments, all
means of communication and action of the spirit upon the members, all
ways of communion between man and the Supreme or Divine, to follow
every possible way of advance to the goal and test it even to its extreme.
All stages of spiritual evolution are there in man and each has to be al-
lowed or provided with its means of approach to the spirit, an approach
suited to its capacity, adhikdra. Even the primitive forms that survived
were not banned but were lifted to a deeper significance, while still there
was the pressure to the highest spiritual pinnacles in the rarest supreme
ether. Even the exclusive credal type of religion was not itself excluded;
provided its affinity to the general aim and principle was clear, it was
admitted into the infinite variety of the general order. But this plasticity
sought to support itself on a fixed religio-social system, which it per-
meated with the principle of a graded working out of the human nature
turned at its height towards a supreme spiritual endeavour; this social
fixity, which was perhaps necessary at one time for unity of life if not also
as a settled and secure basis for the spiritual freedom, has been on one
side a power for preservation but also the one obstacle to the native spirit
of entire catholicity, an element of excessive crystallisation and restric-
tion. A fixed basis may be indispensable, but if settled in essence, this
also must be in its forms capable of plasticity, evolutionary change; it
must be an order, but a growing order.

Nevertheless, the principle of this great and many-sided religious
and spiritual evolution was sound, and by taking up in itself the whole
of life and of human nature, by encouraging the growth of intellect and
never opposing it or putting bounds to its freedom, but rather calling
it in to the aid of the spiritual seeking, it prevented the conflict or the
undue predominance which in the Occident led to the restriction and dry-
ing up of the religious instinct and the plunge into pure materialism and
secularism. A method of this plastic and universal kind, admitting but
exceeding all creeds and forms and allowing every kind of element, may
have numerous consequences which might be objected to by the purist,
but its great justifying result has been an unexampled multitudinous
richness and a more than millennial persistence and impregnable dura-

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SPIRITUAL MAN 777

bility, generality, universality, height, subtlety and many-sided wideness
of spiritual attainment and seeking and endeavour. It is indeed only by
such a catholicity and plasticity that the wider aim of the evolution can
work itself out with any fullness. The individual demands from religion
a door of opening into spiritual experience or a means of turning towards
it, a communion with God or a definite light of guidance on the way, a
promise of the hereafter or a means of a happier supraterrestrial future;
these needs can be met on the narrower basis of credal belief and sec-
tarian cult. But there is also the wider purpose of Nature to prepare and
further the spiritual evolution in man and turn him into a spiritual being ;
religion serves her as a means for pointing his effort and his ideal in
that direction and providing each one who is ready with the possibility
of taking a step upon the way towards it. This end she serves by the
immense variety of the cults she has created, some final, standardised
and definitive, others more plastic, various and many-sided. A religion
which is itself a congeries of religions and which at the same time provides
each man with his own turn of inner experience, would be the most in
consonance with this purpose of Nature: it would be a rich nursery of
spiritual growth and flowering, a vast multiform school of the soul's dis-
cipline, endeavour, self-realisation. Whatever errors Religion has com-
mitted, this is her function and her great and indispensable utility and
service, — the holding up of this growing light of guidance on our way
through the mind's ignorance towards the Spirit's complete consciousness
and self-knowledge.

Occultism is in its essence man's effort to arrive at a knowledge of
secret truths and potentialities of Nature which will lift him out of
slavery to his physical limits of being, an attempt in particular to pos-
sess and organise the mysterious, occult, outwardly still undeveloped
direct power of Mind upon Life and of both Mind and Life over Mat-
ter. There is at the same time an endeavour to establish communication
with worlds and entities belonging to the supraphysical heights, depths
and intermediate levels of cosmic Being and to utilise this communion
for the mastery of a higher Truth and for a help to man in his will to
make himself sovereign over Nature's powers and forces. This human
aspiration takes its stand on the belief, intuition or intimation that we
are not mere creatures of the mud, but souls, minds, wills that can
know all the mysteries of this and every world and become not only
Nature's pupils but her adepts and masters. The occultist sought to
know the secret of physical things also and in this effort he furthered

778 THE LIFE DIVINE

astronomy, created chemistry, gave an impulse to other sciences, for he
utilised geometry also and the science of numbers; but still more he
sought to know the secrets of supernature. In this sense occultism might
be described as the science of the supernatural; but it is in fact only
the discovery of the supraphysical, the surpassing of the material limit,
— the heart of occultism is not the impossible chimera which hopes to
go beyond or outside all force of Nature and make pure phantasy and
arbitrary miracle omnipotently effective. What seems to us supernatural
is in fact either a spontaneous irruption of the phenomena of other-Na-
ture into physical Nature or, in the work of the occultist, a possession of
the knowledge and power of the higher orders or grades of cosmic Being
and Energy and the direction of their forces and processes towards the
production of effects in the physical world by seizing on possibilities of
interconnection and means for a material effectuality. There are powers
of the mind and the life-force which have not been included in Nature's
present systematisation of mind and hfe in matter, but are potential and
can be brought to bear upon material things and happenings or even
brought in and added to the present systematisation so as to enlarge the
control of mind over our own life and body or to act on the minds, lives,
bodies of others or on the movements of cosmic Forces. The modern ad-
mission of hypnotism is an example of such a discovery and systematised
application, — though still narrow and limited, limited by its method and
formula, — of occult powers which otherwise touch us only by a casual
or a hidden action whose process is unknown to us or imperfectly caught
by a few; for we are all the time undergoing a battery of suggestions,
thought suggestions, impulse suggestions, will suggestions, emotional and
sensational suggestions, thought waves, life waves that come on us or
into us from others or from the universal Energy, but act and produce
their effects without our knowledge. A systematised endeavour to know
these movements and their law and possibilities, to master and use the
power or Nature-force behind them or to protect ourselves from them
would fall within one province of occultism: but it would only be a
small part even of that province ; for wide and multiple are the possible
fields, uses, processes of this vast range of little explored Knowledge.

In modern times, as physical Science enlarged its discoveries and
released the secret material forces of Nature into an action governed
by human knowledge for human use, occultism receded and was finally
set aside on the ground that the physical alone is real and mind and life
are only departmental activities of Matter. On this basis, believing ma-

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SPIRITUAL MAN 779

terial Energy to be the key of all things, Science has attempted to move
towards a control of mind and life processes by a knowledge of the ma-
terial instrumentation and process of our normal and abnormal mind
and life functionings and activities; the spiritual is ignored as only one
form of mentality. It may be observed in passing that if this endeavour
succeeded, it might not be without danger for the existence of the human
race, even as now are certain other scientific discoveries misused or
clumsily used by a humanity mentally and morally unready for the
handling of powers so great and perilous; for it would be an artificial
control applied without any knowledge of the secret forces which under-
lie and sustain our existence. Occultism in the West could be thus
easily pushed aside because it never reached its majority, never acquired
ripeness and a philosophic or sound systematic foundation. It indulged
too freely in the romance of the supernatural or made the mistake of
concentrating its major effort on the discovery of formulas and effective
modes for using supernormal powers. It deviated into magic white and
black or into a romantic or thaumaturgic paraphernalia of occult mysti-
cism and the exaggeration of what was after all a limited and scanty
knowledge. These tendencies and this insecurity of mental foundation
made it difficult to defend and easy to discredit, a target facile and vul-
nerable. In Egypt and the East this line of knowledge arrived at a greater
and more comprehensive endeavour: this ampler maturity can be seen
still intact in the remarkable system of the Tantras; it was not only a
many-sided science of the supernormal but supplied the basis of all the
occult elements of religion and even developed a great and powerful sys-
tem of spiritual discipline and self-realisation. For the highest occultism
is that which discovers the secret movements and dynamic supernormal
possibilities of mind and life and spirit and uses them in their native
force or by an applied process for the greater effectivity of our mental,
vital and spiritual being.

Occultism is associated in popular idea with magic and magical
formulae and a supposed mechanism of the supernatural. But this is
only one side, nor is it altogether a superstition as is vainly imagined
by those who have not looked deeply or at all at this covert side
of secret Nature-Force or experimented with its possibilities. For-
mulas and their application, a mechanisation of latent forces, can be
astonishingly effective in the occult use of mind power and life power just
as it is in physical Science, but this is only a subordinate method and a
limited direction. For mind and life forces are plastic, subtle and vari-

780 THE LIFE DIVINE

able in their action and have not the material rigidity; they need a subtle
and plastic intuition in the knowledge of them, in the interpretation of
their action and process and in their application, — even in the inter-
pretation and action of their established formulas. An overstress on mech-
anisation and rigid formulation is likely to result in sterilisation or a
formalised limitation of knowledge and, on the pragmatic side, to much
error, ignorant convention, misuse and failure. Now that we are out-
growing the superstition of the sole truth of Matter, a swing backward
towards the old occultism and to new formulations, as well as to a scien-
tific investigation of the still hidden secrets and powers of mind and a
close study of psychic and abnormal or supernormal psychological phe-
nomena, is possible and, in parts, already visible. But if it is to fulfil
itself, the true foundation, the true aim and direction, the necessary
restrictions and precautions of this line of inquiry have to be redis-
covered; its most important aim must be the discovery of the hidden
truths and powers of the mind-force and the life-power and the greater
forces of the concealed spirit. Occult science is, essentially, the science
of the subliminal, the subliminal in ourselves and the subliminal in world-
nature, and of all that is in connection with the subliminal, including the
subconscient and the superconscient, and the use of it as part of self-
knowledge and world-knowledge and for the right dynamisation of that
knowledge.

An intellectual approach to the highest knowledge, the mind's pos-
session of it, is an indispensable aid to this movement of Nature in the
human being. Ordinarily, on our surface, man's chief instrument of
thought and action is the reason, the observing, understanding and ar-
ranging intellect. In any total advance or evolution of the spirit, not only
the intuition, insight, inner sense, the heart's devotion, a deep and di-
rect life-experience of the things of the spirit have to be developed, but
the intellect also must be enlightened and satisfied; our thinking and re-
flecting mind must be helped to understand, to form a reasoned and sys-
tematised idea of the goal, the method, the principles of this highest
development and activity of our nature and the truth of all that lies
behind it. Spiritual realisation and experience, an intuitive and direct
knowledge, a growth of inner consciousness, a growth of the soul and of
an intimate soul perception, soul vision and a soul sense, are indeed the
proper means of this evolution: but the support of the reflective and
critical reason is also of great importance; if many can dispense with
it, because they have a vivid and direct contact with inner realities and

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SPIRITUAL MAN 78 1

are satisfied with experience and insight, yet in the whole movement it is
indispensable. If the supreme truth is a spiritual Reality, then the intel-
lect of man needs to know what is the nature of that original Truth and
the principle of its relations to the rest of existence, to ourselves and
the universe. The intellect is not capable by itself of bringing us into
touch with the concrete spiritual reality, but it can help by a mental
formulation of the truth of the Spirit which explains it to the mind and
can be applied even in the more direct seeking: this help is of a capital
importance.

Our thinking mind is concerned mainly with the statement of gen-
eral spiritual truth, the logic of its absolute and the logic of its relativities,
how they stand to each other or lead to each other, and what are the
mental consequences of the spiritual theorem of existence. But besides
this understanding and intellectual statement which is its principal right
and share, the intellect seeks to exercise a critical control ; it may admit
the ecstatic or other concrete spiritual experiences, but its demand is to
know on what sure and well-ordered truths of being they are founded.
Indeed, without such a truth known and verifiable, our reason might
find these experiences insecure and unintelligible, might draw back
from them as possibly not founded on truth or else distrust them in their
form, if not in their foundation, as affected by an error, even an aberra-
tion of the imaginative vital mind, the emotions, the nerves or the
senses; for these might be misled, in their passage or transference from
the physical and sensible to the invisible, into a pursuit of deceiving
lights or at least to a misreception of things valid in themselves but
marred by a wrong or imperfect interpretation of what is experienced or
a confusion and disorder of the true spiritual values. If reason finds itself
obliged to admit the dynamics of occultism, there too it will be most
concerned with the truth and right system and real significance of the
forces that it sees brought into play; it must inquire whether the signifi-
cance is that which the occultist attaches to it or something other and
perhaps deeper which has been misinterpreted in its essential relations
and values or not given its true place in the whole of experience. For
the action of our intellect is primarily the function of understanding, but
secondarily critical and finally organising, controlling and formative.

The means by which this need can be satisfied and with which our
nature of mind has provided us is philosophy, and in this field it must be
a spiritual philosophy. Such systems have arisen in numbers in the East ;
for almost always, wherever there has been a considerable spiritual

782 THE LIFE DIVINE

development, there has arisen from it a philosophy justifying it to the
intellect. The method was at first an intuitive seeing and an intuitive
expression, as in the fathomless thought and profound language of the
Upanishads, but afterwards there was developed a critical method, a firm
system of dialectics, a logical organisation. The later philosophies were
an intellectual account^ or a logical justification of what had been found
by inner realisation; or they provided, themselves, a mental ground or
a systematised method for realisation and experience.^ In the West where
the syncretic tendency of the consciousness was replaced by the analytic
and separative, the spiritual urge and the intellectual reason parted com-
pany almost at the outset ; philosophy took from the first a turn towards
a purely intellectual and ratiocinative explanation of things. Neverthe-
less, there were systems like the Pythagorean, Stoic and Epicurean, which
were dynamic not only for thought but for conduct of life and developed
a discipline, an effort at inner perfection of the being; this reached a
higher spiritual plane of knowledge in later Christian or Neo-pagan
thought-structures where East and West met together. But later on the
intellectualisation became complete and the connection of philosophy
with life and its energies or spirit and its dynamism was either cut or
confined to the little that the metaphysical idea can impress on life and
action by an abstract and secondary influence. Religion has supported
itself in the West not by philosophy but by a credal theology; sometimes
a spiritual philosophy emerges by sheer force of individual genius, but
it has not been as in the East a necessary adjunct to every considerable
line of spiritual experience and endeavour. It is true that a philosophic
development of spiritual thought is not entirely indispensable; for the
truths of spirit can be reached more directly and completely by intuition
and by a concrete inner contact. It must also be said that the critical
control of the intellect over spiritual experience can be hampering and
unreliable, for it is an inferior light turned upon a field of higher illumi-
nation; the true controlling power is an inner discrimination, a psychic
sense and tact, a superior intervention of guidance from above or an
innate and luminous inner guidance. But still this line of development
too is necessary, because there must be a bridge between the spirit and
the intellectual reason: the light of a spiritual or at least a spiritualised
intelligence is necessary for the fullness of our total inner evolution,
and without it, if another deeper guidance is lacking, the inner move-
®£.g., the Gita. "E.g., the Yoga philosophy of Patanjali.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SPHIITUAL MAN 783

ment may be erratic and undisciplined, turbid and mixed with unspirit-
ual elements or one-sided or incomplete in its catholicity. For the trans-
formation of the Ignorance into the integral Knowledge the growth in us
of a spiritual intelligence ready to receive a higher light and canalise it
for all the parts of our nature is an intermediate necessity of great im-
portance.

But none of these three lines of approach can by themselves entirely
fulfil the greater and ulterior intention of Nature; they cannot create
in mental man the spiritual being, unless and until they open the door
to spiritual experience. It is only by an inner realisation of what these
approaches are seeking after, by an overwhelming experience or by many
experiences building up an inner change, by a transmutation of the con-
sciousness, by a liberation of the spirit from its present veil of mind, life
and body that there can emerge the spiritual being. That is the final
line of the soul's progress towards which the others are pointing and,
when it is ready to disengage itself from the preliminary approaches, then
the real work has begun and the turning-point of the change is no longer
distant. Till then all that the human mental being has reached is a fa-
miliarity with the idea of things beyond him, with the possibility of an
other-worldly movement, with the ideal of some ethical perfection; he
may have made too some contact with greater Powers or Realities which
help his mind or heart or life. A change there may be, but not the trans-
mutation of the mental into the spiritual being. Religion and its thought
and ethics and occult mysticism in ancient times produced the priest and
the mage, the man of piety, the just man, the man of wisdom, many
high points of mental manhood; but it is only after spiritual experience
through the heart and mind began that we see arise the saint, the prophet,
the Rishi, the Yogi, the seer, the spiritual sage and the mystic, and it is
the religions in which these types of spiritual manhood came into being
that have endured, covered the globe and given mankind all its spiritual
aspiration and culture.

When spirituality disengages itself in the consciousness and puts on
its distinctive character, it is only at first a small kernel, a growing tend-
ency, an exceptional light of experience amidst the great mass of nor-
mal unenlightened human mind, vitality, physicality which forms the
outer self and engrosses our natural preoccupation. There are tentative
beginnings and a slow evolution and hesitating emergence. An earlier first
preliminary form of it creates a certain kind of religiosity which is not the

784 THE LIFE DIVINE

pure spiritual temperament, but is of the nature of mind or life seeking
or finding in itself a spiritual support or factor; in this stage man is
mostly preoccupied with the utilisation of such contacts as he can get or
construct with what is beyond him to help or serve his mental ideas or
moral ideals or his vital and physical interests; the true turn to some
spiritual change has not come. The first true formations take the shape
of a spiritualisation of our natural activities, a permeating influence on
them or a direction: there is a preparatory influence or influx in some
part or tendency of the mind or life, — a, spiritualised turn of thought
with uplifting illuminations, or a spiritualised turn of the emotional or
the sesthetic being, a spiritualised ethical formation in the character, a
spiritualised urge in some life-action or other dynamic vital movement of
the nature. An awareness comes perhaps of an inner light, of a guidance
or a communion, of a greater Control than the mind and will to which
something in us obeys ; but all is not yet recast in the mould of that ex-
perience. But when these intuitions and illuminations grow in insistence
and canalise themselves, make a strong inner formation and claim to
govern the whole life and take over the nature, then there begins the
spiritual formation of the being; there emerges the saint, the devotee,
the spiritual sage, the seer, the prophet, the servant of God, the soldier
of the spirit. All these take their stand on one part of the natural being
lifted up by a spiritual light, power or ecstasy. The sage and seer live
in the spiritual mind, their thought or their vision is governed and
moulded by an inner or a greater divine light of knowledge ; the devotee
lives in the spiritual aspiration of the heart, its self-offering and its seek-
ing; the saint is moved by the awakened psychic being in the inner heart
grown powerful to govern the emotional and vital being; the others
stand in the vital kinetic nature driven by a higher spiritual energy and
turned by it towards an inspired action, a God-given work or mission,
the service of some divine Power, idea or ideal. The last or highest emer-
gence is the liberated man who has realised the Self and Spirit within
him, entered into the cosmic consciousness, passed into union with the
Eternal and, so far as he still accepts life and action, acts by the light and
energy of the Power within him working through his human instruments
of Nature. The largest formulation of this spiritual change and achieve-
ment is a total liberation of soul, mind, heart and action, a casting of
them all into the sense of the cosmic Self and the Divine Reality.^^ The

"This is the essence of the spiritual ideal and realisation held before us by
the Gita.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SPIRITUAL MAN 785

spiritual evolution of the individual has then found its way and thrown
up its range of Himalayan eminences and its peaks of highest nature.
Beyond this height and largeness there opens only the supramental ascent
or the incommunicable Transcendence.

This then has been up till now the course of Nature's evolution of
the spiritual man in the human mental being, and it may be questioned
what is the exact sum of this achievement and its actual significance. In
the recent reaction towards the life of the mind in Matter, this great
direction and this rare change have been stigmatised as no true evolution
of consciousness but rather a sublimated crudity of ignorance deviating
from the true human evolution, which should be solely an evolution of
life-power, the practical physical mind, the reason governing thought
and conduct and the discovering and organising intelligence. In this
epoch religion was pushed aside as an out of date superstition and spir-
itual realisation and experience discredited as a shadowy mysticism ; the
mystic in this view is the man who turns aside into the unreal, into oc-
cult regions of a self-constructed land of chimeras and loses his way
there. This judgment proceeds from a view of things which is itself bound
to pass into discredit, because it depends ultimately on the false percep-
tion of the material as alone real and the outward life as alone of im-
portance. But apart from this extreme materialistic view of things, it
can be and is still held by the intellect and the physical mind eager for
human life-fulfilment, — and that is the prevalent mentality, the dominant
modern trend, — that the spiritual tendency in humanity has come to
very little ; it has not solved the problem of life nor any of the problems
with which humanity is at grips. The mystic either detaches himself
from life as the other-worldly ascetic or the aloof visionary and therefore
cannot help life, or else he brings no better solution or result than the
practical man or the man of intellect and reason: by his intervention he
rather disturbs the human values, distorts them with his alien and
unverifiable light obscure to the human understanding and confuses
the plain practical and vital issues life puts before us.

But this is not the stand-point from which the true significance
of the spiritual evolution in man or the value of spirituality can be
judged or assessed; for its real work is not to solve human problems
on the past or present mental basis, but to create a new foundation of
our being and our life and knowledge. The ascetic or other-worldly tend-
ency of the mystic is an extreme affirmation of his refusal to accept the
limitations imposed by material Nature: for his very reason of being is

786 THE LIFE DIVINE

to go beyond her ; if he cannot transform her, he must leave her. At the
same time the spiritual man has not stood back altogether from the life
of humanity; for the sense of unity with all beings, the stress of a uni-
versal love and compassion, the will to spend the energies for the good
of all creatures,^^ are central to the dynamic outfiowering of the spirit:
he has turned therefore to help, he has guided as did the ancient Rishis
or the prophets, or stooped to create and, where he has done so with
something of the direct power of the Spirit, the results have been pro-
digious. But the solution of the problem which spirituality offers is not
a solution by external means, though these also have to be used, but by
an inner change, a transformation of the consciousness and nature.

If no decisive but only a contributory result, an accretion of some
new finer elements to the sum of the consciousness, has been the general
consequence and there has been no life-transformation, it is because man
in the mass has always deflected the spiritual impulsion, recanted from
the spiritual ideal or held it only as a form and rejected the inward
change. Spirituality cannot be called upon to deal with life by a non-
spiritual method or attempt to cure its ills by the panaceas, the political,
social or other mechanical remedies which the mind is constantly attempt-
ing and which have always failed and will continue to fail to solve any-
thing. The most drastic changes made by these means change nothing;
for the old ills exist in a new form: the aspect of the outward environ-
ment is altered, but man remains what he was; he is still an ignorant
mental being misusing or not effectively using his knowledge, moved by
ego and governed by vital desires and passions and the needs of the body,
unspiritual and superficial in his outlook, ignorant of his own self and
the forces that drive and use him. His life constructions have a value as
expressions of his individual and collective being in the stage to which
they have reached or as a machinery for the convenience and welfare
of his vital and physical parts and a field and medium for his mental
growth, but they cannot take him beyond his present self or serve as a
machinery to transform him; his and their perfection can only come by
his farther evolution. Only a spiritual change, an evolution of his being
from the superficial mental towards the deeper spiritual consciousness,

"Gzfa. The Buddhist elevation of universal compassion, karuna, and sym-
pathy (vasudhaiva kutumbakam, the whole earth is my family), to be the highest
principle of action, the Christian emphasis on love indicate this dynamic side of the
spiritual being.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SPIRITUAL MAN 787

can make a real and effective difference. To discover the spiritual being
in himself is the main business of the spiritual man and to help others
towards the same evolution is his real service to the race; till that is
done, an outward help can succour and alleviate, but nothing or very
little more is possible.

It is true that the spiritual tendency has been to look more beyond
life than towards life. It is true also that the spiritual change has been
individual and not collective; its result has been successful in the man,
but unsuccessful or only indirectly operative in the human mass. The
spiritual evolution of Nature is still in process and incomplete, — one
might almost say, still only beginning, — and its main preoccupation
has been to affirm and develop a basis of spiritual consciousness and
knowledge and to create more and more a foundation or formation for
the vision of that which is eternal in the truth of the spirit. It is only
when Nature has fully confirmed this intensive evolution and formation
through the individual that anything radical of an expanding or dynami-
cally diffusive character can be expected or any attempt at collective spir-
itual life, — such attempts have been made, but mostly as a field of protec-
tion for the growth of the individual's spirituality, — acquire a successful
permanence. For till then the individual must be preoccupied with his
own problem of entirely changing his mind and life into conformity with
the truth of the spirit which he is achieving or has achieved in his inner
being and knowledge. Any premature attempt at a large-scale collective
spiritual life is exposed to vitiation by some incompleteness of the spir-
itual knowledge on its dynamic side, by the imperfections of the indi-
vidual seekers and by the invasion of the ordinary mind and vital and
physical consciousness taking hold of the truth and mechanising, obscur-
ing or corrupting it. The mental intelligence and its main power of rea-
son cannot change the principle and persistent character of human life,
it can only effect various mechanisations, manipulations, developments
and formulations. But neither is mind as a whole, even spiritualised,
able to change it; spirituality liberates and illumines the inner being,
it helps mind to communicate with what is higher than itself, to escape
even from itself, it can purify and uplift by the inner influence the out-
ward nature of individual human beings: but so long as it has to work
in the human mass through mind as the instrument, it can exercise an
influence on the earth-life but not bring about a transformation of that
life. For this reason there has been a prevalent tendency in the spiritual

788 THE LIFE DIVINE

mind to be satisfied with such an influence and in the main to seek ful-
filment in other-life elsewhere or to abandon altogether any outward-
going endeavour and concentrate solely on an individual spiritual salva-
tion or perfection. A higher instrumental dynamis than mind is needed
to transform totally a nature created by the Ignorance.

Another objection to the mystic and his knowledge is urged, not
against its effect upon life but against his method of the discovery of
Truth and against the Truth that he discovers. One objection to the
method is that it is purely subjective, not true independently of the per-
sonal consciousness and its constructions, not verifiable. But this ground
of cavil has no great value: for the object of the mystic is self-knowledge
and God-knowledge, and that can only be arrived at by an inward and
not by an outward gaze. Or it is the supreme Truth of things that he seeks,
and that too cannot be arrived at by an outward inquiry through the
senses or by any scrutiny or research that founds itself on outsides and
surfaces or by speculation based on the uncertain data of an indirect
means of knowledge. It must come by a direct vision or contact of the
consciousness with the soul and body of the Truth itself or through a
knowledge by identity, by the self that becomes one with the self of
things and with their truth of power and their truth of essence. But it is
urged that the actual result of this method is not one truth common to
all, there are great differences; the conclusion suggested is that this
knowledge is not truth at all but a subjective mental formation. But this
objection is based on a misunderstanding of the nature of spiritual knowl-
edge. Spiritual truth is a truth of the spirit, not a truth of the intellect,
not a mathematical theorem or a logical formula. It is a truth of the In-
finite, one in an infinite diversity, and it can assume an infinite variety
of aspects and formations: in the spiritual evolution it is inevitable that
there should be a many-sided passage and reaching to the one Truth, a
many-sided seizing of it; this many-sidedness is the sign of the approach
of the soul to a living reality, not to an abstraction or a constructed
figure of things that can be petrified into a dead or stony formula. The
hard logical and intellectual notion of truth as a single idea which all must
accept, one idea or system of ideas defeating all other ideas or systems, or
a single limited fact or single formula of facts which all must recognise, is
an illegitimate transference from the limited truth of the physical field
to the much more complex and plastic field of life and mind and spirit.

This transference has been responsible for much harm; it brings

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SPIRITUAL MAN 789

into thought narrowness, limitation, an intolerance of the necessary-
variation and multiplicity of view-points without which there can be no
totality of truth-finding, and by the narrowness and limitation much
obstinacy in error. It reduces philosophy to an endless maze of sterile
disputes; religion has been invaded by this misprision and infected
with credal dogmatism, bigotry and intolerance. The truth of the spirit
is a truth of being and consciousness and not a truth of thought: mental
ideas can only represent or formulate some facet, some mind-translated
principle or power of it or enumerate its aspects, but to know it one has
to grow into it and be it; without that growing and being there can be
no true spiritual knowledge. The fundamental truth of spiritual experi-
ence is one, its consciousness is one, everywhere it follows the same
general lines and tendencies of awakening and growth into spiritual being ;
for these are the imperatives of the spiritual consciousness. But also there
are, based on those imperatives, numberless possibilities of variation of
experience and expression: the centralisation and harmonisation of these
possibles, but also the intensive sole following out of any line of experi-
ence are both of them necessary movements of the emerging spiritual
Conscious-Force within us. Moreover, the accommodation of mind and
life to the spiritual truth, its expression in them, must vary with the
mentality of the seeker so long as he has not risen above all need of such
accommodation or such limiting expression. It is this mental and vital
element which has created the oppositions that still divide spiritual
seekers or enter into their differing affirmations of the truth that they
experience. This difference and variation is needed for the freedom of
spiritual search and spiritual growth: to overpass differences is quite
possible, but that is most easily done in pure experience ; in mental for-
mulation the difference must remain until one can exceed mind alto-
gether and in a highest consciousness integralise, unify and harmonise
the many-sided truth of the Spirit.

In the evolution of the spiritual man there must necessarily be
many stages and in each stage a great variety of individual formations
of the being, the consciousness, the life, the temperament, the ideas, the
character. The nature of instrumental mind and the necessity of deaHng
with the life must of itself create an infinite variety according to the
stage of development and the individuality of the seeker. But, apart from
that, even the domain of pure spiritual self-realisation and self-expression
need not be a single white monotone, there can be a great diversity in the

790 THE LIFE DIVINE

fundamental unity; the supreme Self is one, but the souls of the Self are
many and, as is the soul's formation of nature, so will be its_spiritual self-
expression. A diversity in oneness is the law of the manifestation; the
supramental unification and integration must harmonise these diversities,
but to abolish them is not the intention of the Spirit in Nature.

CHAPTER XXV

THE TRIPLE TRANSFORMATION

A conscious being is the centre of the self, who rules
past and future; he is like a fire without smoke. . . . That,
one must disengage with patience from one's own body.

Katha Upanishad}

An intuition in the heart sees that truth.

Rig Veda?

I abide in the spiritual being and from there destroy
the darkness born of ignorance with the shining lamp of
knowledge.

Gita?

These rays are directed downwards, their foundation is
above: may they be set deep within us. ... 0 Varuna,
here awake, make wide thy reign; may we abide in the law
of thy workings and be blameless before the Mother In-
finite.

Rig Veda.*-

The Swan that settles in the purity . . . born of the
Truth,— itself the Truth, the Vast.

Katha Upanishad.^

IF IT is the sole intention of Nature in the evolution of the spiritual
man to awaken him to the supreme Reality and release him from her-
self, or from the Ignorance in which she as the Power of the Eternal
has masked herself, by a departure into a higher status of being else-
where, if this step in the evolution is a close and an exit, then in the
essence her work has been already accomplished and there is nothing
more to be done. The ways have been built, the capacity to follow them
has been developed, the goal or last height of the creation is manifest ; all
that is left is for each soul to reach individually the right stage and turn
of its development, enter into the spiritual ways and pass by its own
chosen path out of this inferior existence. But we have supposed that
there is a farther intention, — not only a revelation of the Spirit, but a

UV. 12, 13; VI. 17. 'I. 24. 12. *X. II. * I. 24. 7, II, 15. 'V. 2.

791

792 THE LIFE DIVINE

radical and integral transformation of Nature. There is a will in her to
effectuate a true manifestation of the embodied life of the Spirit, to
complete what she has begun by a passage from the Ignorance to the
Knowledge, to throw off her mask and to reveal herself as the luminous
Consciousness-Force carrying in her the eternal Existence and its uni-
versal Delight of being. It then becomes obvious that there is some-
thing not yet accomplished, there becomes clear to view the much that
has still to be done, bhuri aspasta hartvam; there is a height still to be
reached, a wideness still to be covered by the eye of vision, the wing
of the will, the self-affirmation of the spirit in the material universe.
What the evolutionary Power has done is to make a few individuals
aware of their souls, conscious of their selves, aware of the eternal being
that they are, to put them into communion with the Divinity or the
Reality which is concealed by her appearances: a certain change of na-
ture prepares, accompanies or follows upon this illumination, but it is
not the complete and radical change which establishes a secure and
settled new principle, a new creation, a permanent new order of being
in the field of terrestrial Nature. The spiritual man has evolved, but
not the supramental being who shall thenceforward be the leader of that
Nature.

This is because the principle of spirituality has yet to affirm itself
in its own complete right and sovereignty; it has been up till now a
power for the mental being to escape from itself or to refine and raise
itself to a spiritual poise, it has availed for the release of the Spirit from
mind and for the enlargement of the being in a spiritualised mind and
heart, but not — or rather not yet sufficiently — for the self-affirmation of
the Spirit in its own dynamic and sovereign mastery free from the mind's
limitations and from the mental instrumentation. The development of
another instrumentation has begun, but has yet to become total and
effective ; it has besides to cease to be a purely individual self-creation in
an original Ignorance, something supernormal to earth-life that must
always be acquired as an individual achievement by a difficult en-
deavour. It must become the normal nature of a new type of being; as
mind is established here on a basis of Ignorance seeking for Knowledge
and growing into Knowledge, so supermind must be established here
on a basis of Knowledge growing into its own greater Light. But this
cannot be so long as the spiritual-mental being has not risen fully to
supermind and brought down its powers into terrestrial existence. For the
gulf between mind and supermind has to be bridged, the closed pas-

THE TRIPLE TRANSFORMATION 793

sages opened and roads of ascent and descent created where there is now
a void and a silence. This can be done only by the triple transformation
to which we have already made a passing reference: there must first be
the psychic change, the conversion of our whole present nature into a
soul-instrumentation; on that or along with that there must be the spir-
itual change, the descent of a higher Light, Knowledge, Power, Force,
Bliss, Purity into the whole being, even into the lowest recesses of the
life and body, even into the darkness of our subconscience; last, there
must supervene the supramental transmutation, — there must take place
as the crowning movement the ascent into the supermind and the trans-
forming descent of the supramental Consciousness into our entire being
and nature.

At the beginning the soul in Nature, the psychic entity, whose un-
folding is the first step towards a spiritual change, is an entirely veiled
part of us, although it is that by which we exist and persist as individual
beings in Nature. The other parts of our natural composition are not
only mutable but perishable ; but the psychic entity in us persists and is
fundamentally the same always: it contains all essential possibilities of
our manifestation but is not constituted by them; it is not limited by
what it manifests, not contained by the incomplete forms of the manifes-
tation, not tarnished by the imperfections and impurities, the defects and
depravations of the surface being. It is an ever-pure flame of the divinity
in things and nothing that comes to it, nothing that enters into our experi-
ence can pollute its purity or extinguish the flame. This spiritual stuff
is immaculate and luminous and, because it is perfectly luminous, it is
immediately, intimately, directly aware of truth of being and truth of
nature; it is deeply conscious of truth and good and beauty because
truth and good and beauty are akin to its own native character, forms
of something that is inherent in its own substance. It is aware also of all
that contradicts these things, of all that deviates from its own native
character, of falsehood and evil and the ugly and the unseemly; but it
does not become these things nor is it touched or changed by these op-
posites of itself which so powerfully affect its outer instrumentation of
mind, life and body. For the soul, the permanent being in us, puts forth
and uses mind, life and body as its instruments, undergoes the envelop-
ment of their conditions, but it is other and greater than its members.

If the psychic entity had been from the beginning unveiled and
known to its ministers, not a secluded King in a screened chamber, the
human evolution would have been a rapid soul-outflowering, not the

794 " THE LIFE DIVINE

difficult, chequered and disfigured development it now is; but the veil
is thick and we know not the secret Light within us, the light in the
hidden crypt of the heart's innermost sanctuary. Intimations rise to our
surface from the psyche, but our mind does not detect their source; it
takes them for its own activities because, before even they come to the
surface, they are clothed in mental substance: thus ignorant of their au-
thority, it follows or does not follow them according to its bent or turn
at the moment. If the mind obeys the urge of the vital ego, then there
is little chance of the psyche at all controlling the nature or manifesting
in us something of its secret spiritual stuff and native movement; or, if
the mind is over-confident to act in its own smaller light, attached to its
own judgment, will and action of knowledge, then also the soul will re-
main veiled and quiescent and wait for the mind's farther evolution. For
the psychic part within is there to support the natural evolution, and the
first natural evolution must be the development of body, life and mind,
successively, and these must act each in its own kind or together in their
ill-assorted partnership in order to grow and have experience and evolve.
The soul gathers the essence of all our mental. Vital and bodily experience
and assimilates it for the farther evolution of our existence in Nature;
but this action is occult and not obtruded on the surface. In the early
material and vital stages of the evolution of being there is indeed no
consciousness of soul ; there are psychic activities, but the instrumenta-
tion, the form of these activities are vital and physical — or mental when
the mind is active. For even the mind, so long as it is primitive or is de-
veloped but still too external, does not recognise their deeper character.
It is easy to regard ourselves as physical beings or beings of life or mental
beings using life and body and to ignore the existence of the soul alto-
gether: for the only definite idea that we have of the soul is of something
that survives the death of our bodies; but what this is we do not know
because even if w,e are conscious sometimes of its presence, we are not
normally conscious of its distinct reality nor do we feel clearly its direct
action in our nature.

As the evolution proceeds, Nature begins sl©w.Ly and tentatively to
manifest our occult parts; she leads us to look more and more within
ourselves or sets out to initiate more clearly recognisable intimations
and formations of them on the surface. The soul in us, the psychic prin-
ciple, has already begun to take secret form; it puts forward and de-
velops a soul personality, a distinct psychic being to represent it. This
psychic being remains still behind the veil in our subliminal part, like

THE TRIPLE TRANSFORMATION 795

the true mental, the true vital or the true or subtle physical ?jeing within
us: but, like them, it acts on the surface life by the influences and inti-
mations it throws up upon that surface; these form part of the surface
aggregate which is the conglomerate effect of the inner influences and up-
surgings, the visible formation and superstructure which we ordinarily
experience and think of as ourselves. On this ignorant surface we become
dimly aware of something that can be called a soul as distinct from
mind, life or body; we feel it not only as our mental idea or vague in-
stinct of ourselves, but as a sensible influence in our life and character
and action. A certain sensitive feeling for all that is true and good and
beautiful, fine and pure and noble, a response to it, a demand for it, a
pressure on mind and life to accept and formulate it in our thought, feel-
ings, conduct, character is the most usually recognised, the most general
and characteristic, though not the sole sign of this influence of the psyche.
Of the man who has not this element in him or does not respond at all
to this urge, we say that he has no soul. For it is this influence that we
can most easily recognise as a finer or even a diviner part in us and the
most powerful for the slow turning towards some aim at perfection in our
nature.

But this psychic influence or action does not come up to the sur-
face quite pure or does not remain distinct in its purity; if it did, we
could be able to distinguish clearly the soul element in us and follow con-
sciously and fully its dictates. An occult mental and vital and subtle-
physical action intervenes, mixes with it, tries to use it and turn it to its
own profit, dwarfs its divinity, distorts or diminishes its self-expression,
even causes it to deviate and stumble or stains it with the impurity, small-
ness and error of mind and life and body. After it reaches the surface,
thus alloyed and diminished, it is taken hold of by the surface nature in
an obscure reception and ignorant formation, and there is or can be by
this cause a still further deviation and mixture. A twist is given, a wrong
direction is imparted, a wrong application, a wrong formation, an erro-
neous result of what is in itself pure stuff and action of our spiritual being;
a formation of consciousness is accordingly made which is a mixture of
the psychic influence and its intimations jumbled with mental ideas and
opinions, vital desires and urges, habitual physical tendencies. There
coalesce too with the obscured soul-influence the ignorant though well-
intentioned efforts of these external parts towards a higher direction: a
mental ideation of a very mixed character, often obscure even in its ideal-
ism, sometimes even disastrously mistaken, a fervour and passion of the

796 THE LIFE DIVINE

emotional being throwing up its spray and foam of feelings, sentiments,
sentimentalisms, a dynamic enthusiasm of the life-parts, eager responses
of the physical, the thrills and excitements of nerve and body, — all these
influences coalesce in a composite formation which is frequently taken as
the soul and its mixed and confused action for the soul-stir, for a psychic
development and action or a realised inner influence. The pyschic entity
is itself free from stain or mixture, but what comes up from it is not pro-
tected by that immunity ; therefore this confusion becomes possible.

Moreover, the psychic being, the soul personality in us, does not
emerge full-grown and luminous ; it evolves, passes through a slow devel-
opment and formation; its figure of being may be at first indistinct and
may afterwards remain for a long time weak and undeveloped, not im-
pure but imperfect: for it rests its formation, its dynamic self-building on
the power of soul that has been actually and more or less successfully,
against the resistance of the Ignorance and Inconscience, put forth in the
evolution upon the surface. Its appearance is the sign of a soul-emergence
in Nature, and if that emergence is as yet small and defective, the psychic
personality also will be stunted or feeble. It is too, by the obscurity of
our consciousness, separated from its inner reality, in imperfect commu-
nication with its own source in the depths of the being; for the road is as
yet ill-built, easily obstructed, the wires often cut or crowded with com-
munications of another kind and proc^ding from another origin: its
power to impress what it receives upon the outer instruments is also im-
perfect; in its penury it has for most things to rely on these instruments
and it forms its push to expression and action on their data and not solely
on the unerring perceptions of the psychic entity. In these conditions it
cannot prevent the true psychic light from being diminished or distorted
in the mind into a mere idea or opinion, the psychic feeling in the heart
into a fallible emotion or mere sentiment, the psychic will to action in
the life-parts into a blind vital enthusiasm or a fervid excitement: it even
accepts these mistranslations for want of something better and tries to
fulfil itself through them. For it is part of the work of the soul to influ-
ence mind and heart and vital being and turn their ideas, feelings, enthu-
siasms, dynamisms in the direction of what is divine and luminous; but
this has to be done at first imperfectly, slowly and with a mixture. As
the psychic personality grows stronger, it begins to increase its com-
munion with the psychic entity behind it and improve its communications
with the surface: it can transmit its intimations to the mind and heart
and life with a greater purity and force; for it is more able to exercise

THE TRIPLE TRANSFORMATION 797

a Strong control and react against false mixtures ; now more and more it
makes itself distinctly felt as a power in the nature. But even so this evo-
lution would be slow and long if left solely to the difficult action of the
evolutionary Energy; it is only when man awakes to the knowledge of
the soul and feels a need to bring it to the front and make it the master
of his life and action that a quicker conscious method of evolution inter-
venes and a psychic transformation becomes possible.

This slow development can be aided by the mind's clear perception
and insistence on something within that survives the death of the body
and an effort to know its nature. But at first this knowledge is impeded
by the fact that there are many elements in us, many formations which
present themselves as soul elements and can be mistaken for the psyche.
In the early Greek and some other traditions about the after-life, the de-
scriptions given show very clearly that what was then mistaken for the
soul was a subconscious formation, a subphysical impression-mould or
shadow-form of the being or else a wraith or ghost of the personality.
This ghost, which is mistakenly called the spirit, is sometimes a vital for-
mation reproducing the man's characteristics, his surface life-manner-
isms, sometimes a subtle-physical prolongation of the surface form of the
mind-shell : at best it is a sheath of the life personality which still remains
in the front for some time after the departure from the body. Apart from
these confusions born of an after-death contact with discarded phantasms
or remnants of the sheaths of the personality, the difficulty is due to our
ignorance of the subliminal parts of our nature and the form and powers
of the conscious being or Purusha which preside over their action ; owing
to this inexperience we can easily mistake something of the inner mind
or vital self for the psychic. For as Being is one yet multiple, so also the
same law prevails in ourselves and our members ; the spirit, the Purusha
is one but it adapts itself to the formations of Nature. Over each grade
of our being a power of the Spirit presides; we have within us and dis-
cover when we go deep enough inwards a mind-self, a life-self, a physical
self; there is a being of mind, a mental Purusha, expressing something
of itself on our surface in the thoughts, perceptions, activities of our mind
nature, a being of life which expresses something of itself in the im-
pulses, feelings, sensations, desires, external life activities of our vital na-
ture, a physical being, a being of the body which expresses something of
itself in the instincts, habits, formulated activities of our physical nature.
These beings or part selves of the self in us are powers of the Spirit and
therefore not limited by their temporary expression, for what is thus

798 THE LIFE DIVINE

formulated is only a fragment of its possibilities; but the expression
creates a temporary mental, vital or physical personality which grows
and develops even as the psychic being or soul personality grows and de-
velops within us. Each has its own distinct nature, its influence, its action
on the whole of us; but on our surface all these influences and all this
action, as they come up, mingle and create an aggregate surface being
which is a composite, an amalgam of them all, an outer persistent and
yet shifting and mobile formation for the purposes of this life and its
limited experience.

But this aggregate is, because of its composition, a heterogeneous
compound, not a single harmonious and homogeneous whole. This is the
reason why there is a constant confusion and even a conflict in our mem-
bers which our mental reason and will are moved to control and har-
monise and have often much difficulty in creating out of their confusion
or conflict some kind of order and guidance ; even so, ordinarily, we drift
too much or are driven by the stream of our nature and act from what-
ever in it comes uppermost at the time and seizes the instruments of
thought and action, — even our seemingly deliberate choice is more of an
automatism than we imagine; our co-ordination of our multifarious ele-
ments and of our consequent thoughts, feelings, impulses, actions by the
reason and will is incomplete and a half-measure. In animal being Na-
ture acts by her own mental and vital intuitions ; she works out an order
by the compulsion of habit and instinct which the animal implicitly
obeys, so that the shiftings of its consciousness do not matter. But man
cannot altogether act in the same way without forfeiting his prerogative
of manhood ; he cannot leave his being to be a chaos of instincts and im-
pulses regulated by the automatism of Nature: mind has become con-
scious in him and is therefore self-compelled to make some attempt, how-
ever elementary in many, to see and control and in the end more and
more perfectly harmonise the manifold components, the different and
conflicting tendencies that seem to make up his surface being. He does
succeed in setting up a sort of regulated chaos or ordered confusion in
him, or at least succeeds in thinking that he is directing himself by his
mind and will, even though in fact that direction is only partial; for
not only a disparate consortium of habitual motive-forces but also newly
emergent vital and physical tendencies and impulses, not always calcu-
lable or controllable, and many incoherent and inharmonious mental ele-
ments use his reason and will, enter into and determine his self-building,
his nature-development, his life action. Man is in his self a unique Person,

THE TRIPLE TRANSFORMATION 799

but he is also in his manifestation of self a multiperson ; he will never
succeed in being master of himself until the Person imposes itself on his
multipersonality and governs it: but this can only be imperfectly done
by the surface mental will and reason; it can be perfectly done only if
he goes within and finds whatever central being is by its predominant
influence at the head of all his expression and action. In inmost truth it
is his soul that is this central being, but in outer fact it is often one or
other of the part beings in him that rules, and this representative of the
soul, this deputy self he can mistake for the inmost soul principle.

This rule of different selves in us is at the root of the stages of the
development of human personality which we have already had occasion
to differentiate, and we can reconsider them now from the point of view
of the government of the nature by the inner principle. In some human
beings it is the physical Purusha, the being of body, who dominates the
mind, will and action ; there is then created the physical man mainly oc-
cupied with his corporeal life and habitual needs, impulses, life habits,
mind habits, body habits, looking very little or not at all beyond that,
subordinating and restricting all his other tendencies and possibilities to
that narrow formation. But even in the physical man there are other ele-
ments and he cannot live altogether as the human animal concerned with
birth and death procreation and the satisfaction of common impulses and
desires and the maintenance of the life and the body: this is his normal
type of personality, but it is crossed, however feebly, with influences by
which he can proceed, if they are developed, to a higher human evolution.
If the inner subtle-physical Purusha insists, he can arrive at the idea of a
finer, more beautiful and perfect physical life and hope or attempt to re-
alise it in his own or in the collective or group existence. In others it is
the vital self, the being of life, who dominates and rules the mind, the
will, the action; then is created the vital man, concerned with self-affir-
mation, self-aggrandisement, life-enlargement, satisfaction of ambition
and passion and impulse and desire, the claims of his ego, domination,
power, excitement, battle and struggle, inner and outer adventure: all
else is incidental or subordinated to this movement and building and ex-
pression of the vital ego. But still in the vital man too there are or can be
other elements of a growing mental or spiritual character, even if these
happen to be less developed than his life-personality and life-power. The
nature of the vital man is more active, stronger and mor& mobile, more
turbulent and chaotic, often to the point of being quite unregulated, than
that of the physical man who holds on to the soil and has a certain ma-

800 THE LIFE DIVINE

terial poise and balance, but it is more kinetic and creative: for the ele-
ment of the vital being is not earth but air; it has more movement, less
status. A vigorous vital mind and will can grasp and govern the kinetic vi-
tal energies, but it is more by a forceful compulsion and constraint than
by a harmonisation of the being. If, however, a strong vital personality,
mind and will can get the reasoning intelligence to give it a firm support
and be its minister, then a certain kind of forceful formation can be made,
more or less balanced but always powerful, successful and effective,
which can impose itself on the nature and environment and arrive at a
strong self-affirmation in life and action. This is the second step of har-
monised formulation possible in the ascent of the nature.

At a higher stage of the evolution of personality the being of mind
may rule ; there is then created the mental man who lives predominantly
in the mind as the others live in the vital or the physical nature. The men-
tal man tends to subordinate to his mental self-expression, mental aims,
mental interests or to a mental idea or ideal the rest of his being: because
of the difficulty of this subordination and its potent effect when achieved,
it is at once more difficult for him and easier to arrive at a harmony of
his nature. It is easier because the mental will once in control can con-
vince by the power of the reasoning intelligence and at the same time
dominate, compress or suppress the life and the body and their demands,
arrange and harmonise them, force them to be its instruments, even re-
duce them to a minimum so that they shall not disturb the mental life
or pull it down from its ideative or idealising movement. It is more dif-
ficult because life and body are the first powers and, if they are in the
least strong, can impose themselves with an almost irresistible insistence
on the mental ruler. Man is a mental being and the mind is the leader
of his life and body; but this is a leader who is much led by his followers
and has sometimes no other will than what they impose on him. Mind
in spite of its power is often impotent before the inconscient and subcon-
scient which obscure its clarity and carry it away on the tide of instinct
or impulse ; in spite of its clarity it is fooled by vital and emotional sug-
gestions into giving sanction to ignorance and error, to wrong thought
and to wrong action, or it is obliged to look on while the nature follows
what it knows to be wrong, dangerous or evil. Even when it is strong and
clear and dominant. Mind, though it imposes a certain, a considerable
mentalised haj^mony, cannot integrate the whole being and nature. These
harmonisations by an inferior control are, besides, inconclusive, because
it is one part of the nature which dominates and fulfils itself while the

THE TRIPLE TRANSFORMATION 8oi

others are coerced and denied their fullness. They can be steps on the
way, but not final; therefore in most men there is no such sole dominance
and effected partial harmony, but only a predominance and for the rest
an unstable equilibrium of a personality half formed, half in formation,
sometimes a disequilibrium or unbalance due to the lack of a central
government or the disturbance of a formerly achieved partial poise. All
must be transitional until a first, though not a final, true harmonisation
is achieved by finding our real centre. For the true central being is the
soul, but this being stands back and in most human natures is only the
secret witness or, one might say, a constitutional ruler who allows his
ministers to rule for him, delegates to them his empire, silently assents
to their decisions and only now and then puts in a word which they can
at any moment override and act otherwise. But this is so long as the soul
personality put forward by the psychic entity is not yet sufficiently de-
veloped ; when this is strong enough for the inner entity to impose itself
through it, then the soul can come forward and control the nature. It is
by the coming forward of this true monarch and his taking up of the reins
of government that there can take place a real harmonisation of our
being and our life.

A first condition of the soul's complete emergence is a direct contact
in the surface being with the spiritual Reality. Because it comes from
that, the psychic element in us turns always towards whatever in phe-
nomenal Nature seems to belong to a higher Reality and can be accepted
as its sign and character. At first, it seeks this Reality through the good,
the true, the beautiful, through all that is pure and fine and high and
noble: but although this touch through outer signs and characters can
modify and prepare the nature, it cannot entirely or most inwardly and
profoundly change it. For such an inmost change the direct contact with
the Reality itself is indispensable since nothing else can so deeply touch
the foundations of our being and stir it or cast the nature by its stir into
a ferment of transmutation. Mental representations, emotional and dy-
namic figures have their use and value; Truth, Good and Beauty are in
themselves primary and potent figures of the Reality, and even in their
forms as seen by the mind, as felt by the heart, as realised in the life
can be lines of an ascent: but it is in a spiritual substance and being of
them and of itself that That which they represent has to come into our
experience.

The soul may attempt to achieve this contact mainly through the
thinking mind as intermediary and instrument; it puts a psychic impres-

802 THE LIFE DIVINE

sion on the intellect and the larger mind of insight and intuitional intelli-
gence and turns them in that direction. At its highest the thinking mind
is drawn always towards the impersonal; in its search it becomes con-
scious of a spiritual essence, an impersonal Reality which expresses itself
in all these outward signs and characters but is more than any formation
or manifesting figure. It feels something of which it becomes intimately
and invisibly aware, — a supreme Truth, a supreme Good, a supreme
Beauty, a supreme Purity, a supreme Bliss; it bears the increasing touch,
less and less impalpable and abstract, more and more spiritually real and
concrete, the touch and pressure of an Eternity and Infinity which is all
this that is and more. There is a pressure from this Impersonality that
seeks to mould the whole mind into a form of itself ; at the same time the
impersonal secret and law of things becomes more and more visible. The
mind develops into the mind of the sage, at first the high mental thinker,
then the spiritual sage who has gone beyond the abstractions of thought
to the beginnings of a direct experience. As a result the mind becomes
pure, large, tranquil, impersonal; there is a similar tranquillising influ-
ence on the parts of life: but otherwise the result may remain incomplete;
for the mental change leads more naturally towards an inner status and
an outer quietude, but, poised in this purifying quietism, not drawn like
the vital parts towards a discovery of new life-energies, does not press
for a full dynamic effect on the nature.

A higher endeavour through the mind does not change this balance;
for the tendency of the spiritualised mind is to go on upwards and, since
above itself the mind loses its hold on forms, it is into a vast formless
and featureless impersonality that it enters. It becomes aware of the un-
changing Self, the sheer Spirit, the pure bareness of an essential Exist-
ence, the formless Infinite and the nameless Absolute. This culmination
can be arrived at more directly by tending immediately beyond all forms
and figures, beyond all ideas of good or evil or true or false or beautiful
or unbeautiful to That which exceeds all dualities, to the experience of a
supreme oneness, infinity, eternity or other ineffable sublimation of the
mind's ultimate and extreme percept of Self or Spirit. A spiritualised con-
sciousness is achieved and the life falls quiet, the body ceases to need
and to clamour, the soul itself merges into the spiritual silence. But this
transformation through the mind does not give us the integral transfor-
mation; the psychic transmutation is replaced by a spiritual change on
the rare and high summits, but this is not the complete divine dynamisa-
tion of Nature.

THE TRIPLE TRANSFORMATION 803

A second approach made by the soul to the direct contact is through
the heart: this is its own more close and rapid way because its occult seat
is there, just behind in the heart-centre, in close contact with the emo-
tional being in us; it is consequently through the emotions that it can
act best at the beginning with its native power, with its living force of
concrete experience. It is through a love and adoration of the All-beauti-
ful and All-blissful, the All-Good, the True, the spiritual Reality of love,
that the approach is made; the aesthetic and emotional parts join together
to offer the soul, the life, the whole nature to that which they worship.
This approach through adoration can get its full power and impetus only
when the mind goes beyond impersonality to the awareness of a supreme
Personal Being: then all becomes intense, vivid, concrete; the heart's
emotion, feeling, spiritualised sense reach their absolute; an entire self-
giving becomes possible, imperative. The nascent spiritual man makes his
appearance in the emotional nature as the devotee, the bhakta ; if, in addi-
tion, he becomes directly aware of his soul and its dictates, unites his
emotional with his psychic personality and changes his life and vital
parts by purity, God-ecstasy, the love of God and men and all creatures
into a thing of spiritual beauty, full of divine light and good, he develops
into the saint and reaches the highest inner experience and most consid-
erable change of nature proper to this way of approach to the Divine
Being, But for the purpose of an integral transformation this too is not
enough ; there must be a transmutation of the thinking mind and all the
vital and physical parts of consciousness in their own character.

This larger change can be partly attained by adding to the experi-
ences of the heart a consecration of the pragmatic will which must suc-
ceed in carrying with it — for otherwise it cannot be effective — the adhe-
sion of the dynamic vital part which supports the mental dynamis and
is our first instrument of outer action. This consecration of the will in
works proceeds by a gradual elimination of the ego-will and its motive-
power of desire; the ego subjects itself to some higher law and finally
effaces itself, seems not to exist or exists only to serve a higher Power or
a higher Truth or to offer its will and acts to the Divine Being as an
instrument. The law of being and action or the light of Truth which
then guides the seeker, may be a clarity or power or principle which
he perceives on the highest height of which his mind is capable; or
it may be a truth of the divine Will which he feels present and work-
ing within him or guiding him by a Light or a Voice or a Force or a
divine Person or Presence. In the end by this way one arrives at a

8 04 THE LIFE DIVINE

consciousness in which one feels the Force or Presence acting within and
moving or governing all the actions and the personal will is entirely sur-
rendered or identified with that greater Truth-Will, Truth-Power or
Truth-Presence. A combination of all these three approaches, the ap-
proach of the mind, the approach of the will, the approach of the heart,
creates a spiritual or psychic condition of the surface being and nature
in which there is a larger and more complex openness to the psychic light
within us and to the spiritual Self or the Ishwara, to the Reality now felt
above and enveloping and penetrating us. In the nature there is a more
powerful and many-sided change, a spiritual building and self-creation,
the appearance of a composite perfection of the saint, the selfless worker
and the man of spiritual knowledge.

But, for this change to arrive at its widest totality and profound
completeness, the consciousness has to shift its centre and its static and
dynamic position from the surface to the inner being ; it is there that we
must find the foundation for our thought, life and action. For to stand
outside on our surface and to receive from the inner being and follow its
intimations is not a sufficient transformation; one must cease to be the
surface personality and become the inner Person, the Purusha. But this
is difficult, first because the outer nature opposes the movement and
clings to its normal accustomed poise and externalised way of existence
and, in addition, because there is a long way from the surface to the depths
in which the psychic entity is veiled from us, and this intervening space
is filled with a subliminal nature and nature-movements which are not by
any means all of them favourable to the completion of the inward move-
ment. The outer nature has to undergo a change of poise, a quieting, a
purification and fine mutation of its substance and energy by which the
many obstacles in it rarefy, drop away or otherwise disappear; it then
becomes possible to pass through to the depths of our being and from the
depths so reached a new consciousness can be formed, both behind the
exterior self and in it, joining the depths to the surface. There must grow
up within us or there must manifest a consciousness more and more open
to the deeper and the higher being, more and more laid bare to the cos-
mic Self and Power and to what comes down from the Transcendence,
turned to a higher Peace, permeable to a greater light, force and ecstasy,
a consciousness that exceeds the small personality and surpasses the
limited light and experience of the surface mind, the limited force and as-
piration of the normal life consciousness, the obscure and limited respon-
siveness of the body.

THE TRIPLE TRANSFORMATION 805

Even before the tranquillising purification of the outer nature has
been effected or before it is sufficient, one can still break down the wall
screening our inner being from our outer awareness by a strong force of
call and aspiration, a vehement will or. violent effort or an effective dis-
cipline or process; but this may be a premature movement and is not
without its serious dangers. In entering within one may find oneself
amidst a chaos of unfamiliar and supernormal experiences to which one
has not the key or a press of subliminal or cosmic forces, subconscient,
mental, vital, subtle-physical, which may unduly sway or chaotically
drive the being, encircle it in a cave of darkness, or keep it wandering in
a wilderness of glamour, allurement, deception, or push it into an ob-
scure battle-field full of secret and treacherous and misleading or open
and violent oppositions ; beings and voices and influences may appear to
the inner sense and vision and hearing claiming to be the Divine Being
or His messengers or Powers and Godheads of the Light or guides of the
path to realisation, while in truth they are of a very different character.
If there is too much egoism in the nature of the seeker or a strong passion
or an excessive ambition, vanity or other dominating weakness, or an ob-
scurity of the mind or a vacillating will or a weakness of the life-force or
an unsteadiness in it or want of balance, he is likely to be seized on
through these deficiencies and to be frustrated or to deviate, misled from
the true way of the inner life and seeking into false paths, or to be left
wandering about in an intermediate chaos of experiences and fail to find
his way out into the true realisation. These perils were w^ell-known to a
past spiritual experience and have been met by imposing the necessit}' of
initiation, of discipHne, of methods of purification and testing by ordeal,
of an entire submission to the directions of the path-finder or path-leader,
one who has realised the Truth and himself possesses and is able to com-
municate the light, the experience, a guide who is strong to take by the
hand and carry over difficult passages as well as to instruct and point out
the way. But even so the dangers will be there and can only be surmounted
if there is or there grows up a complete sincerity, a will for purity, a read-
iness for obedience to the Truth, for surrender to the Highest, a readiness
to lose or to subject to a divine yoke the limiting and self-affirming ego.
These things are the sign that the true will for realisation, for conversion
of the consciousness, for transformation is there, the necessary stage of
the evolution has been reached: in that condition the defects of nature
which belong to the human being cannot be a permanent obstacle to the
change from the mental to the spiritual status; the process may never

8o6 THE LIFE DIVINE

be entirely easy, but the way will have been made open and practicable.
One effective way often used to facilitate this entry into the inner
self is the separation of the Purusha, the conscious being, from the Pra-
kriti, the formulated nature. If one stands back from the mind and its
activities so that they fall silent at will or go on as a surface movement
of which one is the detached and disinterested witness, it becomes pos-
sible eventually to realise oneself as the inner Self of mind, the true and
pure mental being, the Purusha ; by similarly standing back from the life
activities, it is possible to realise oneself as the inner Self of life, the true
and pure vital being, the Purusha ; there is even a Self of body of which,
by standing back from the body and its demands and activities and en-
tering into a silence of the physical consciousness watching the action
of its energy, it is possible to become aware, a true and pure physical
being, the Purusha. So too, by standing back from all these activities of
nature successively or together, it becomes possible to realise one's inner
being as the silent impersonal self, the witness Purusha. This will lead to
a spiritual realisation and liberation, but will not necessarily bring about
a transformation; for the Purusha, satisfied to be free and himself, may
leave the Nature, the Prakriti, to exhaust its accumulated impetus by an
unsupported action, a mechanical continuance not renewed and rein-
forced or vivified and prolonged by his consent, and use this rejection
as a means of withdrawing from all nature. The Purusha has to become
not only the witness but the knower and source, the master of all the
thought and action, and this can only be partially done so long as one
remains on tlie mental level or has still to use the ordinary instrumen-
tation of mind, life and body. A certain mastery can indeed be achieved,
but mastery is not transformation ; the change made by it cannot be suf-
ficient to be integral: for that it is essential to get back, beyond mind-
being, life-being, body-being, still more deeply inward to the psychic
entity inmost and profoundest within us — or else to open to the supercon-
scient highest domains. For this penetration into the luminous crypt of
the soul one has to get through all the intervening vital stuff to the psy-
chic centre within us, however long, tedious or difficult may be the proc-
ess. The method of detachment from the insistence of all mental and
vital and physical claims and calls and impulsions, a concentration in the
heart, austerity, self-purification and rejection of the old mind move-
ments and life movements, rejection of the ego of desire, rejection of
false needs and false habits, are all useful aids to this difficult passage:
but the strongest, most central way is to found all such or other methods

THE TRIPLE TRANSFORMATION 807

on a self-offering and surrender of ourselves and of our parts of nature
to the Divine Being, the Ishwara. A strict obedience to the wise and in-
tuitive leading of a Guide is also normal and necessary for all but a few
specially gifted seekers.

As the crust of the outer nature cracks, as the walls of inner separa-
tion break down, the inner light gets through, the inner fire burns in the
heart, the substance of the nature and the stuff of consciousness refine
to a greater subtlety and purity, and the deeper psychic experiences,
those which are not solely of an inner mental or inner vital character,
become possible in this subtler, purer, finer substance; the soul begins
to unveil itself, the psychic personality reaches its full stature. The soul,
the psychic entity, then manifests itself as the central being which up-
holds mind and life and body and supports all the other powers and func-
tions of the Spirit; it takes up its greater function as the guide and ruler
of the nature. A guidance, a governance begins from within which ex-
poses every movement to the light of Truth, repels what is false, obscure,
opposed to the divine realisation: every region of the being, every nook
and corner of it, every movement, formation, direction, inclination of
thought, will, emotion, sensation, action, reaction, motive, disposition,
propensity, desire, habit of the conscious or subconscious physical, even
the most concealed, camouflaged, mute, recondite, is lighted up with the
unerring psychic light, their confusions dissipated, their tangles disen-
tangled, their obscurities, deceptions, self-deceptions precisely indicated
and removed; all is purified, set right, the whole nature harmonised,
modulated in the psychic key, put in spiritual order. This process may
be rapid or tardy according to the amount of obscurity and resistance still
left in the nature, but it goes on unfalteringly so long as it is not com-
plete. As a final result the whole conscious being is made perfectly apt for
spiritual experience of every kind, turned towards spiritual truth of
thought, feeling, sense, action, tuned to the right responses, delivered
from the darkness and stubbornness of the tamasic inertia, the turbidities
and turbulences and impurities of the rajasic passion and restless unhar-
monised kinetism, the enlightened rigidities and sattwic limitations or
poised balancements of constructed equilibrium which are the character
of the Ignorance.

This is the first result, but the second is a free inflow of all kinds
of spiritual experience, experience of the Self, experience of the Ishwara
and the Divine Shakti, experience of cosmic consciousness, a direct touch
with cosmic forces and with the occult movements of universal Nature,

8o8 THE LIFE DIVINE

a psychic sympathy and unity and inner communication and interchanges
of all kinds with other beings and with Nature, illuminations of the mind
by knowledge, illuminations of the heart by love and devotion and spir-
itual joy and ecstasy, illuminations of the sense and body by higher ex-
perience, illuminations of dynamic action in the truth and largeness of
a purified mind and heart and soul, the certitudes of the divine light and
guidance, the joy and power of the divine force working in the will and
the conduct. These experiences are the result of an opening outward of
the inner and inmost being and nature ; for then there comes into play the
soul's power of unerring inherent consciousness, its vision, its touch on
things which is superior to any mental cognition; there is there, native
to the psychic consciousness in its pure working, an immediate sense of
the world and its being, a direct inner contact with them and a direct
contact with the Self and with the Divine, — a direct knowledge, a direct
sight of Truth and of all truths, a direct penetrating spiritual emotion
and feeling, a direct intuition of right will and right action, a power to
rule and to create an order of the being not by the gropings of the super-
ficial self, but from within, from the inner truth of self and things and
the occult realities of Nature.

Some of these experiences can come by an opening of the inner
mental and vital being, the inner and larger and subtler mind and heart
and life within us, without any full emergence of the soul, the psychic
entity, since there too there is a power of direct contact of consciousness:
but the experience might then be of a mixed character; for there could
be an emergence not only of the subliminal knowledge but of the sublim-
inal ignorance. An insufficient expansion of the being, a limitation by
mental idea, by narrow and selective emotion or by the form of the tem-
perament so that there would be only an imperfect self-creation and
action and not the free soul-emergence, could easily occur. In the ab-
sence of any or of a complete psychic emergence, experiences of certain
kinds, experiences of greater knowledge and force, a surpassing of the
ordinary limits, might lead to a magnified ego and even bring about in-
stead of an out-flowering of what is divine or spiritual an uprush of the
titanic or demoniac, or might call in agencies and powers which, though
not of this disastrous type, are of a powerful but inferior cosmic charac-
ter. But the rule and guidance of the soul brings into all experience the
tendency of light, of intergration, of harmony and intimate Tightness
which is native to the psychic essence. A psychic or, more widely speak-

THE TRIPLE TRANSFORMATION 809

ing, a psycho-spiritual transformation of this kind would be already a
vast change of our mental human nature.

But all this change and all this experience, though psychic and spir-
itual in essence and character, would still be, in its parts of life-effectua-
tion, on the mental, vital and physical level; its dynamic spiritual out-
come^ would be a flowering of the soul in mind and life and body, but in
act and form it would be circumscribed within the limitations — however
enlarged, uplifted and rarefied — of an inferior instrumentation. It would
be a reflected and modified manifestation of things whose full reality,
intensity, largeness, oneness and diversity of truth and power and delight
are above us, above mind and therefore above any perfection, within
mind's own formula, of the foundations or superstructure of our present
nature. A highest spiritual transformation must intervene on the psychic
or psycho-spiritual change; the psychic movement inward to the inner
being, the Self or Divinity within us, must be completed by an opening
upward to a supreme spiritual status or a higher existence. This can be
done by our opening into what is above us, by an ascent of consciousness
into the ranges of overmind and supramental nature in which the sense of
self and spirit is ever unveiled and permanent and in which the self-
luminous instrumentation of the self and spirit is not restricted or divided
as in our mind-nature, life-nature, body-nature. This also the psychic
change makes possible; for as it opens us to the cosmic consciousness
now hidden from us by many walls of limiting individuality, so also
it opens us to what is now superconscient to our normality because
it is hidden from us by the strong hard and bright lid of mind, — mind
constricting, dividing and separative. The lid thins, is slit, breaks asun-
der or opens and disappears under the pressure of the psycho-spiritual
change and the natural urge of the new spiritualised consciousness to-
wards that of which it is an expression here. This effectuation of an aper-
ture and its consequences may not at all take place if there is only a
partial psychic emergence satisfied with the experience of the Divine
Reality in the normal degrees of the spiritualised mind: but if there is
any awakening to the existence of these higher supernormal levels, then
an aspiration towards them may break the lid or operate a rift in it. This
may happen long before the psycho-spiritual change is complete or even
before it has well begun or proceeded far, because the psychic personality

° The psychic and the spiritual opening wdth their experiences and consequences
can lead away from life or to a Nirvana ; but they are here being considered solely
as steps in a transformation of the nature.

8lO THE LIFE DIVINE

has become aware and has an eager concentration towards the super-
conscience. An early illumination from above or a rending of the upper
velamen can come as an outcome of aspiration or some inner readiness,
or it may even come uncalled for or not called for by any conscious part
of the mind, — ^perhaps by a secret subliminal necessity or by an action
or pressure from the higher levels, by something which is felt as the
touch of the Divine Being, the touch of the Spirit, — and its results can be
exceedingly powerful. But if it is brought about by a premature pressure
from below, it can be attended with difficulties and dangers which are
absent when the full psychic emergence precedes this first admission to
the superior ranges of our spiritual evolution. The choice, however, does
not always rest with our will, for the operations of the spiritual evolu-
tion in us are very various, and according to the line it has followed will
be the turn taken at any critical phase by the action of the Conscious-
ness-Force in its urge towards a higher self-manifestation and formation
of our existence.

If the rift in the lid of mind is made, what happens is an opening
of vision to something above us or a rising up towards it or a descent of
its powers into our being. What we see by the opening of vision is an
Infinity above us, an eternal Presence or an infinite Existence, an infinity
of consciousness, an infinity of bliss, — a boundless Self, a boundless Light,
a boundless Power, a boundless Ecstasy. It may be that for a long time
all that is obtained is the occasional or frequent or constant vision of it
and a longing and aspiration, but without anything further, because, al-
though something in the mind, heart or other part of the being has opened
to this experience, the lower nature as a whole is too heavy and obscure
as yet for more. But there may be, instead of this first wide awareness
from below or subsequently to it, an ascension of the mind to heights
above: the nature of these heights we may not know or clearly discern,
but some consequence of the ascent is felt; there is often too an aware-
ness of infinite ascension and return but no record or translation of that
higher state. This is because it has been superconscient to mind and
therefore mind, when it rises into it, is unable at first to retain there its
power of conscious discernment and defining experience. But when this
power begins to awake and act, when mind becomes by degrees conscious
in what was to it superconscient, then there begins a knowledge and ex-
perience of superior planes of existence. The experience is in accord with
that which is brought to us by the first opening of vision: the mind rises
into a higher plane of pure self, silent, tranquil, illimitable; or it rises

THE TRIPLE TRANSFORMATION 8X1

into regions of light or of felicity, or into planes where it feels an infinite
Power or a divine Presence or experiences the contact of a divine Love
or Beauty or the atmosphere of a wider and greater and luminous Knowl-
edge. In the return the spiritual impression abides ; but the mental record
is often blurred and remains as a vague or a fragmentary memory; the
lower consciousness from which the ascent took place falls back to what
it was, with only the addition of an unkept or a remembered but no
longer dynamic experience. In time the ascent comes to be made at will
and the consciousness brings back and retains some effect or some gain
of its temporary sojourn in these higher countries of the spirit. These
ascents take place for many in trance, but are perfectly possible in a
concentration of the waking consciousness or, where that consciousness
has become sufficiently psychic, at any unconcentrated moment by an
upward attraction or affinity. But these two types of contact with the
superconscient, though they can be powerfully illuminating, ecstatic or
liberating, are by themselves insufficiently effective: for the full spirit-
ual transformation more is needed, a permanent ascension from the
lower into the higher consciousness and an effectual permanent descent
of the higher into the lower nature.

This is the third motion, the descent which is essential for bringing
the permanent ascension, an increasing inflow from above, an experience
of reception and retention of the descending spirit or its powers and ele-
ments of consciousness. This experience of descent can take place as a
result of the other two movements or automatically before either has
happened, through a sudden rift in the lid or a percolation, a downpour
or an influx. A light descends and touches or envelops or penetrates the
lower being, the mind, the life or the body; or a presence or a power or a
stream of knowledge pours in waves or currents, or there is a flood of
bliss or a sudden ecstasy; the contact with the superconscient has been
established. For such experiences repeat themselves till they become nor-
mal, familiar and well-understood, revelatory of their contents and their
significance which may have at first been involved and wrapped into
secrecy by the figure of the covering experience. For a knowledge from
above begins to descend, frequently, constantly, then uninterruptedly,
and to manifest in the mind's quietude or silence ; intuitions and inspira-
tions, revelations born of a greater sight, a higher truth and -wisdom,
enter into the being, a luminous intuitive discrimination works which dis-
pels all darkness of understanding or dazzling confusions, puts all in
order; a new consciousness begins to form, the mind of a high wide

8l2 THE LIFE DIVINE

self-existent thinking knowledge or an illumined or an intuitive or an
overmental consciousness with new forces of thought or sight and a
greater power of direct spiritual realisation which is more than thought
or sight, a greater becoming in the spiritual substance of our present
being; the heart and the sense become subtle, intense, large to embrace
all existence, to see God, to feel and hear and touch the Eternal, to
make a deeper and closer unity of self and the world in a transcendent
realisation. Other decisive experiences, other changes of consciousness
determine themselves which are corollaries and consequences of this
fundamental change. No limit can be fixed to this revolution ; for it is in
its nature an invasion by the Infinite.

This, effected little by little or in a succession of great and swift
definitive experiences, is the process of the spiritual transformation. It
achieves itself and culminates in an upward ascent often repeated by
which in the end the consciousness fixes itself on a higher plane and
from there sees and governs the mind, life and body; it achieves itself
also in an increasing descent of the powers of the higher consciousness
and knowledge which become more and more the whole normal con-
sciousness and knowledge. A light and power, a knowledge and force are
felt which first take possession of the mind and remould it, afterwards
of the life part and remould that, finally of the little physical conscious-
ness and leave it no longer little but wide and plastic and even infinite.
For this new consciousness has itself the nature of infinity: it brings to us
the abiding spiritual sense and awareness of the infinite and eternal with
a great largeness of the nature and a breaking down of its limitations;
immortality becomes no longer a belief or an experience but a normal
self-awareness; the close presence of the Divine Being, his rule of the
world and of our self and natural members, his force working in us and
everyw^here, the peace of the infinite, the joy of the infinite are now
concrete and constant in the being; in all sights and forms one sees the
Eternal, the Reality, in all sounds one hears it, in all touches feels it;
there is nothing else but its forms and personalities and manifestations ;
the joy or adoration of the heart, the embrace of all existence, the unity
of the spirit are abiding realities. The consciousness of the mental crea-
ture is turning or has been already turned wholly into the consciousness
of the spiritual being. This is the second of the three transformations;
uniting the manifested existence with what is above it, it is the middle
step of the three, the decisive transition of the spiritually evolving nature.

If the spirit could from the first dwell securely on the superior

THE TRIPLE TRANSFORMATION 813

heights and deal with a blank and virgin stuff of mind and matter, a
complete spiritual transformation might be rapid, even facile: but the
actual process of Nature is more difficult, the logic of her movement more
manifold, contorted, winding, comprehensive; she recognises all the
data of the task she has set to herself and is not satisfied with a sum-
mary triumph over her own complexities. Every part of our being
has to be taken in its own nature and character, with all the moulds
and writings of the past still there in it: each minutest portion and move-
ment must either be destroyed and replaced if it is unfit, or, if it is capable,
transmuted into the truth of the higher being. If the psychic change is
complete, this can be done by a painless process, though still the pro-
gramme must be long and scrupulous and the progress deliberate; but
otherwise one has to be satisfied with a partial result or, if one's own
scrupulousness of perfection or hunger of the spirit is insatiable, consent
to a difficult, often painful and seemingly interminable action. For or-
dinarily the consciousness does not rise to the summits except in the
highest moments; it remains on the mental level and receives descents
from above, sometimes a single descent of some spiritual power that
stays and moulds the being into something predominatingly spiritual, or
a succession of descents bringing into it more and more of the spiritual
status and dynamis: but unless one can live on the highest height
reached, there cannot be the complete or more integral change. If the
psychic mutation has not taken place, if there has been a premature pull-
ing down of the higher Forces, 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; or the descending influence may withdraw or be spilt be-
cause the nature cannot contain or keep it. Again, if it is Power that
descends, the egoistic mind or vital may try to seize on it for its own
use and a magnified ego or a hunting after powers and self-aggrandising
masteries may be the untoward result. The .^nanda descending cannot
be held if there is too m.uch sexual impurity creating an intoxicant or
degrading mixture; the Power recedes, if there is ambition, vanity or
other aggressive form of lower self, the Light, if there is an attachment
to obscurity or to any form of the Ignorance, the Presence if the cham-
ber of the heart has not been made pure. Or some undivine Force may
try to seize hold, not of the Power itself, for that withdraws, but of the
result of force it leaves behind in the instrument and use it for the pur-
poses of the Adversary. Even if none of these more disastrous faults or

8 14 THE LIFE DIVINE

errors should take place, still the numerous mistakes of reception or the
imperfections of the vessel may impede the transformation. The Power
has to come at intervals and work meanwhile behind the veil or hold it-
self back through long periods of obscure assimilation or preparation
of the recalcitrant parts of Nature ; the Light has to work in darkness or
semi-darkness on the regions in us that are still in the Night. At any
moment the work may be stayed, personally for this life, because the
nature is able to receive or assimilate no more, — for it has reached the
present limits of its capacity, — or because the mind may be ready but
the vital, when faced with a choice between the old life and the new re-
fuses, or if the vital accepts, the body may prove too weak, unfit or flawed
for the necessary change of its consciousness and its dynamic transfor-
mation.

Moreover, the necessity of working out the change separately in
each part of the being in its own nature and character compels the con-
sciousness to descend into each in turn and act there according to its
state and its possibility. If the work were done from above, from some
spiritual height, there might be a sublimation or uplifting or the crea-
tion of a new structure compelled by the sheer force of the influence from
above: but this change might not be accepted as native to itself by the
lower being; it would not be a total growth, an integral evolution, but
a partial and imposed formation, affecting or liberating some parts of
the being, suppressing others or leaving them as they were; a creation
from outside the normal nature, by imposition upon it, it could be dur-
able in its entirety only as long as there was a maintenance of the creat-
ing influence. A descent of consciousness into the lower levels is therefore
necessary, but in this way also it is difficult to work out the full power of
the higher principle; there is a modification, dilution, diminution which
keeps up an imperfection and limitation in the results: the light of a
greater knowledge comes down but gets blurred and modified, its sig-
nificance misinterpreted or its truth mixed with mental and vital error,
or the force, the power to fulfil itself is not commensurate with its light.
A light and power of the overmind working in its own full right and in
its own sphere is one thing, the same light working in the obscurity of the
physical consciousness and under its conditions is something quite dif-
ferent and, owing to dilution and mixture, far inferior in its knowledge
and force and results. A mutilated power, a partial effect or hampered
movement is the consequence.

This is indeed the reason of the slow and difficult emergence of the

THE TRIPLE TRANSFORMATION 815

Consciousness-Force in Nature: for mind and life have to descend into
Matter and suit themselves to its conditions; changed and diminished by
the obscurity and reluctant inertia of the substance and force in which
they work, they -are not able to make a complete transformation of their
material into a fit instrument and a changed substance revelatory of their
real and native power. The life consciousness is unable to effectuate the
greatness and felicity of its mighty or beautiful impulses in the material
existence; its impetus fails it, its force of effectuation is inferior to the
truth of its conceptions, the form betrays the life intuition within it which
it tries to render into terms of life being. The mind is unable to achieve
its high ideas in the medium of life or matter without deductions and
compromises which deprive them of their divinity; its clarities of knowl-
edge and will are not matched by its force to mould this inferior substance
to obey and express it: on the contrary, its own powers get affected, its
will is divided, its knowledge confused and clouded by the turbidities of
life and the incomprehensiveness of Matter. Neither life nor mind suc-
ceeds in converting or perfecting the material existence, because they can-
not attain to their own full force in these conditions; they need to call
in a higher power to liberate and fulfil them. But the higher spiritual-
mental powers also undergo the same disability when they descend into
life and matter ; they can do much more, achieve much luminous change,
but the modification, the limitation, the disparity between the conscious-
ness that comes in and the force of effectuation that it can mentalise
and materialise, are constantly there and the result is a diminished crea-
tion. The change made is often extraordinary, there is even something
which looks like a total conversion and reversal of the state of conscious-
ness and an uplifting of its movements, but it is not dynamically absolute.
Only the supermind can thus descend without losing its full power
of action; for its action is always intrinsic and automatic, its will and
knowledge identical and the result commensurate: its nature is a self-
achieving Truth-consciousness and, if it limits itself or its working, it is
by choice and intention, not by compulsion; in the limits it chooses its
action and the results of its action are harmonious and inevitable. Again,
overmind is, like mind, a dividing principle, and its characteristic opera-
tion is to work out in an independent formation a selected harmony;
its global action enables it indeed to create a harmonj^ whole and perfect
in itself or to unite or fuse its harmonies together, to synthetise; but,
labouring under the restrictions of mind, life and matter, it is obliged to
do it by sections and their joinings. Its tendency of totalit\- is hampered

8l6 THE LIFE DIVINE

by its selective tendency which is accentuated by the nature of the men-
tal and life material in which it is working here; what it can achieve is
separate limited spiritual creations each perfect in itself, but not the
integral knowledge and its manifestation. For this reason and because
of the diminishing of its native light and power it is unable to do fully
what is needed and has to call in a greater power, the supramental force,
to liberate and fulfil it. As the psychic change has to call in the spiritual
to complete it, so the first spiritual change has to call in the supra-
mental transformation to complete it. For all these steps forward are, like
those before them, transitional; the whole radical change in the evolu-
tion from a basis of Ignorance to a basis of Knowledge can only come
by the intervention of the supramental Power and its direct action in
earth-existence.

This then must be the nature of the third and final transformation
which finishes the passage of the soul through the Ignorance and bases
its consciousness, its life, its power and form of manifestation on a com-
plete and completely effective self-knowledge. The Truth-consciousness,
finding evolutionary Nature ready, has to descend into her and enable
her to liberate the supramental principle within her; so must be created
the supramental and spiritual being as the first unveiled manifestation of
the truth of the Self and Spirit in the material universe.

CHAPTER XXVI

THE ASCENT TOWARDS SUPERMIND

Masters of the Truth-Light who make the Truth grow
by the Truth.

Rig Veda}

Three powers of Speech that carry the Light in their
front, ... a triple house of peace, a triple way of the Light.

Rig Veda.''

Four other worlds of beauty he creates as his form
when he has grown by the Truths.

Rig Veda}

He is born a seer with the mind of discernment ; an off-
spring of the Truth, a birth set within in the secrecy, half
arisen into manifestation.

Rig Veda.*

Possessed of a vast inspired wisdom, creators of the
Light, conscious all-knowers, growing in the Truth.

Rig Veda}

Beholding the higher Light beyond the darkness we
came to the divine Sun in the Godhead, to the highest Light
of all.

Rig Veda?

THE psychic transformation and the first stages of the spiritual
transformation are well within our conception; their perfection
would be the perfection, wholeness, consummated unity of a knowledge
and experience which is already part of things realised, though only by
a small number of human beings. But the supramental change in its
process carries us into less explored regions ; it initiates a vision of heights
of consciousness which have indeed been glimpsed and visited, but have
yet to be discovered and mapped in their completeness. The highest of
these peaks or elevated plateaus of consciousness, the supramental, hes
far beyond the possibility of any satisfying mental scheme or map of it

^123.5. ^VIL loi. I, 2. «IX. 70. I.

*IX. 68. S. ^X. 66. I. ''L so. 10.

817

8l8 THE LIFE DIVINE

or any grasp of mental seeing and description. It would be difficult for
the normal unillumined or untransformed mental conception to express
or enter into something that is based on so different a consciousness
with a radically different awareness of things ; even if they were seen or
conceived by some enlightenment or opening of vision, another language
than the poor abstract counters used by our mind would be needed to
translate them into terms by which their reality could become at all seiz-
able by us. As the summits of human mind are beyond animal perception,
so the movements of supermind are beyond the ordinary human mental
conception: it is only when we have already had experience of a higher
intermediate consciousness that any terms attempting to describe supra-
mental being could convey a true meaning to our intelligence; for
then, having experienced something akin to what is described, we could
translate an inadequate language into a figure of what we knew. If the
mind cannot enter into the nature of supermind, it can look towards it
through these high and luminous approaches and catch some reflected
impression of the Truth, the Right, the Vast which is the native kingdom
of the free Spirit.

But even what can be said about the intermediate consciousness
must perforce be inadequate; only certain abstract generalisations can
be hazarded which may serve for an initial light of guidance. The one
enabling circumstance here is that, however different in constitution
and principle, the higher consciousness is still, in its evolutionary form,
in what we can first achieve of it here, a supreme development of ele-
ments which are already present in ours in however rudimentary and
diminished a figure and power of themselves. It is also a helpful fact
that the logic of the process of evolutionary Nature continues, greatly
modified in some of the rules of its working but essentially the same,
in the ascension of the highest heights as in the lower beginnings; thus
we can discover and follow to a certain extent the lines of her supreme
procedure. For we have seen something of the nature and law of the
transition from intellectual to spiritual mind; from that achieved start-
ing-point we can begin to trace the passage to a higher dynamic degree
of the new consciousness and the farther transition from spiritual mind
towards supermind. The indications must necessarily be very imperfect,
for it is only some initial representations of an abstract and general
character that can be arrived at by the method of metaphysical inquiry:
the true knowledge and description must be left to the language of the

THE ASCENT TOWARDS SUPERMIND 819

mystic and the figures, at once more vivid and more recondite, of a direct
and concrete experience.

The transition to Supermind through overmind is a passage from
Nature as we know it into Super-Nature. It is.by that very fact impossible
for any effort of the mere Mind to achieve; our unaided personal aspira-
tion and endeavour cannot reach it: our effort belongs to the inferior
power of Nature; a power of the Ignorance cannot achieve by its own
strength or characteristic or available methods what is beyond its own
domain of nature. All the previous ascensions have been effectuated by a
secret Consciousness-Force operating first in Inconscience and then in
the Ignorance: it has worked by an emergence of its involved powers to
the surface, powers concealed behind the veil and superior to the past
formulations of Nature, but even so there is needed a pressure of the
same superior powers already formulated in their full natural force on
their own planes ; these superior planes create their own foundation in our
subliminal parts and from there are able to influence the evolutionary
process on the surface. Overmind and Supermind are also involved and
occult in earth-Nature, but they have no formations on the accessible
levels of our subliminal inner consciousness ; there is as yet no overmind
being or organised overmind nature, no supramental being or organised
supermind nature acting either on our surface or in our normal subliminal
parts: for these greater powers of consciousness are superconscient to the
level of our ignorance. In order that the involved principles of Overmind
and Supermind should emerge from their veiled secrecy, the being and
powers of the superconscience must descend into us and uplift us and
formulate themselves in our being and powers; this descent is a sine qua
non of the transition and transformation.

It is conceivable indeed that, without the descent, by a secret pres-
sure from above, by a long evolution, our terrestrial Nature might suc-
ceed in entering into a close contact with the higher now superconscient
planes and a formation of subliminal Overmind might take place behind
the veil ; as a result a slow emergence of the consciousness proper to these
higher planes might awake on our surface. It is conceivable that in this
way there might appear a race of mental beings thinking and acting not
by the intellect or reasoning and reflecting intelligence, or not mainly by
it, but by an intuitive mentality which would be the first step of an as-
cending change; this might be followed by an overmentalisation which
would carry us to the borders beyond which lies the Supermind or divine

820 THE LIFE DIVINE

Gnosis. But this process would inevitably be a long and toilsome en-
deavour of Nature. There is a possibility too that what would be achieved
might only be an imperfect superior mentalisation ; the new higher ele-
ments might strongly dominate the consciousness, but they would be still
subjected to a modification of their action by the principle of an inferior
mentality: there would be a greater expanded and illuminating knowl-
edge, a cognition of a higher order ; but it would still undergo a mixture
subjecting it to the law of the Ignorance, as Mind undergoes limitation by
the law of Life and Matter. For a real transformation there must be a
direct and unveiled intervention from above; there would be necessary
too a total submission and surrender of the lower consciousness, a cessa-
tion of its insistence, a will in it for its separate law of action to be
completely annulled by transformation and lose all rights over our being.
If these two conditions can be achieved even now by a conscious call and
will in the spirit and a participation of our whole manifested and inner
being in its change and elevation, the evolution, the transformation can
take place by a comparatively swift conscious change ; the supramental
Consciousness-Force from above and the evolving Consciousness-Force
from behind the veil acting on the awakened awareness and will of the
mental human being would accomplish by their united power the momen-
tous transition. There would be no farther need of a slow evolution count-
ing many millenniums for each step, the halting and difficult evolution
operated by Nature in the past in the unconscious creatures of the Ig-
norance.

It is a first condition of this change that the mental Man we now
are should become inwardly aware and in possession of his own deeper
law of being and its processes; he must become the psychic and inner
mental being master of his energies, no longer a slave of the movements
of the lower Prakriti, in control of it, seated securely in a free harmony
with a higher law of Nature. An increasing control of the individual over
his own action of nature, a more and more conscious participation in the
action of universal Nature, is a marked character, it is indeed a logical
consequence, of the evolutionary principle and process. All action, all
mental, vital, physical activities in the world are the operation of a uni-
versal Energy, a Consciousness-Force which is the power of the Cosmic
Spirit working out the cosmic and individual truth of things. But since
this creative Consciousness assumes in Matter a mask of inconscience
and puts on the surface appearance of a blind universal Force executing
a plan or organisation of things without seeming to know what it is doing.

THE ASCENT TOWARDS SUPERMIND 82 1

the first result is kin to this appearance; it is the phenomenon of an
inconscient physical individualisation, a creation not of beings but of
objects. These are formed existences with their own qualities, properties,
power of being, character of being; but. Nature's plan in them and or-
ganisation of them have to be worked out mechanically without any
beginning of participation, initiation or conscious awareness in the indi-
vidual object which emerges as the first dumb result and inanimate field
of her action and creation. In animal life the Force begins to become
slowly conscious on the surface and puts forth the form, no longer of an
object, but of an individual being; but this imperfectly conscious indi-
vidual, although it participates, senses, feels, yet only works out what
the Force does in it without any clear intelligence or observation of what
is being done ; it seems to have no other choice or will than that which is
imposed on it by its formed nature. In human mind there is the first
appearance of an observing intelligence that regards what is being done
and of a will and choice that have become conscious ; but the conscious-
ness is still limited and superficial: the knowledge also is limited and im-
perfect, it is a partial intelligence, a half understanding, groping and
empirical in great part or, if rational, then rational by constructions,
theories, formulas. There is not as yet a luminous seeing which knows
things by a direct grasp and arranges them with a spontaneous precision
according to the seeing, according to the scheme of their inherent truth;
although there is a certain element of instinct and intuition and insight
which has some beginning of this power, the normal character of human
intelligence is an inquiring reason or reflective thought which observes,
supposes, infers, concludes, arrives by labour at a constructed truth, a
constructed scheme of knowledge, a deliberately arranged action of its
own making. Or rather this is what it strives to be and partly is ; for its
knowledge and will are constantly invaded, darkened or frustrated by
forces of the being which are half -blind instruments of the mechanism
of Nature.

This is evidently not the utmost of which consciousness is capable,
not its last evolution and highest summit. A greater and more intimate
intuition must be possible which would enter into the heart of things,
be in luminous identity with the movements of Nature, assure to the
being a clear control of his life or at least a harmony with its universe.
It is only a free and entire intuitive consciousness which would be able to
see and to grasp things by direct contact and penetrating vision or a spon-
taneous truth-sense born of an underlying unity or identity and arrange

82 2 THE LIFE DIVINE

an action of Nature according to the truth of Nature. This would be a
real participation by the individual in the working of the universal Con-
sciousness-Force; the individual Purusha would become the master of
his own executive energy and at the same time a conscious partner, agent,
instrument of the Cosmic Spirit in the working of the universal Energy:
the universal Energy would work through him, but he also would work
through her and the harmony of the intuitive truth would make this
double working a single action. A growing conscious participation of this
higher and more intimate kind must be one accompaniment of the tran-
sition from our present state of being to a state of supernature.

A harmonious other-world in which an intuitive mental intelligence
of this kind and its control would be the rule, is conceivable ; but in our
plane of being, owing to the original intention and past history of the evo-
lutionary plan, such a rule and control could with difficulty be stabilised
and it is not likely that it could be complete, final and definitive. For an
intuitive mentality intervening in a mixed mental, vital, physical con-
sciousness would normally be forced to undergo a mixture with the in-
ferior stuff of consciousness already evolved; in order to act on it, it
would have to enter into it and, entering in it, would get entangled in it,
penetrated by it, affected by the separative and partial character of our
mind's action and the limitation and restricted force of the Ignorance.
The action of intuitive intelligence is keen and luminous enough to pene-
trate and modify, but not large and whole enough to swallow up into
itself and abolish the mass of the Ignorance and Inconscience ; it could
not effect an entire transformation of the whole consciousness into its
own stuff and power. Still, even in our present state, a participation of
a kind is there and our normal intelligence is sufficiently awake for the
universal Conscious-Force to work through it and allow the intelligence
and will to exercise a certain amount of direction of inner and outer
circumstance, fumbling enough and at every moment dogged by error,
capable only of a limited effect and power, not commensurate with the
larger totality of her vast operations. In the evolution towards Super-
nature, this initial power of conscious participation in the universal
working would enlarge in the individual into a more and more intimate
and extended vision of her workings in himself, a sensitive perception of
the course she was taking, a growing understanding or intuitive idea of
the methods that had to be followed for a more rapid and more conscious
self-evolution. As his inner psychic or occult inner mental being came
more to the front, there would be a strengthened power of choice, of

THE ASCENT TOWARDS SUPERMIND 823

sanction, a beginning of authentic free will which would grow more
and more effective. But this free will would be mostly in relation to his
own workings of Nature ; it would mean only a freer, fuller and more im-
mediately perceptive control of the motions of his own being: even there
it could not be at first completely free, so long as it was imprisoned
in the limits created by its own formations or combated by imperfection
due to a mixture of the old and the new consciousness. Still there would
be an increasing mastery and knowledge and an opening to a higher be-
ing and a higher nature.

Our notion of free will is apt to be tainted with the excessive indi-
vidualism of the human ego and to assume the figure of an independent
will acting on its own isolated account, in a complete liberty without any
determination other than its own choice and single unrelated movement.
This idea ignores the fact that our natural being is a part of cosmic
Nature and our spiritual being exists only by the supreme Transcend-
ence. Our total being can rise out of subjection to fact of present Nature
only by an identification with a greater Truth and a greater Nature. The
will of the individual, even when completely free, could not act in an
isolated independence, because the individual being and nature are in-
cluded in the universal Being and Nature and dependent on the all-over-
ruling Transcendence. There could indeed be in the ascent a dual line.
On one line the being could feel and behave as an independent self-exist-
ence uniting itself with its own impersonal Reality; it could, so self-
conceived, act with a great force, but either this action would be still
within an enlarged frame of its past and present self-formation of power
of Nature or else it would be the cosmic or supreme Force that
acted in it and there would be no personal initiation of action, no sense
therefore of individual free will but only of an impersonal cosmic or
supreme Will or Energy at its work. On the other line the being would
feel itself a spiritual instrument and so act as a power of the Supreme
Being, limited in its workings only by the potencies of the Supernature,
which are without bounds or any restriction except its own Truth and
self-law, and by the Will in her. But in either case there would be, as the
condition of a freedom from the control of a mechanical action of Na-
ture-forces, a submission to a greater conscious Power or an acquiescent
unity of the individual being with its intention and movement in his owti
and in the world's existence.

For the action of a new power of being in a higher range of con-
sciousness might, even in its control on outer Nature, be extraordinarily

824 THE LIFE DIVINE

effective, but only because of its light of vision and a consequent har-
mony or identification with the cosmic and transcendent Will; for it is
when it becomes an instrumentation of a higher instead of a lower Power
that the will of the being becomes free from a mechanical determinism by
action and process of cosmic Mind-Energy, Life-Energy, Matter-Energy
and an ignorant subjection to the drive of this inferior Nature. A power
of initiation, even of an individual overseeing of world-forces could be
there; but it would be an instrumental initiation, a delegated overseeing:
the choice of the individual would receive the sanction of the Infinite be-
cause it was itself an expression of some truth of the Infinite. Thus the
individuality would become more and more powerful and effective in
proportion as it realised itself as a centre and formation of the universal
and transcendent Being and Nature. For as the progression of the
change proceeded, the energy of the liberated individual would be no
longer the limited energy of mind, life and body, with which it started;
the being would emerge into and put on — even as there would emerge in
him and descend into him, assuming him into it — a greater light of
Consciousness and a greater action of Force: his natural existence
would be the instrumentation of a superior Power, an overmental and
supramental Consciousness-Force, the power of the original Divine Shakti.
All the processes of the evolution would be felt as the action of a supreme
and universal Consciousness, a supreme and universal Force working in
whatever way it chose, on whatever level, within whatever self-deter-
mined limits, a conscious working of the transcendent and cosmic Being,
the action of the omnipotent and omniscient World-Mother raising the
being into herself, into her supernature. In place of the Nature of Ig-
norance with the individual as its closed field and unconscious or half-
conscious instrument, there would be a Super-Nature of the divine
Gnosis and the individual soul would be its conscious, open and free field
and instrument, a participant in its action, aware of its purpose and proc-
ess, aware too of its own greater Self, the universal, the transcendent
Reality, and of its own Person as inimitably one with that and yet an
individual being of Its being, an instrument and a spiritual centre.

A first opening towards this participation in an action of Superna-
ture is a condition of the turn towards the last, the supramental trans-
formation: for this transformation is the completion of a passage from
the obscure harmony of a blind automatism with which Nature sets out
to the luminous authentic spontaneity, the infallible motion of the self-
existent truth of the Spirit. The evolution begins with the automatism of

THE ASCENT TOWARDS SUPERMIND 825

Matter and of a lower life in which all obeys implicitly the drive of
Nature, fulfils mechanically its law of being and therefore succeeds in
maintaining a harmony of its limited type of existence and action ; it pro-
ceeds through the pregnant confusion of the mind and life of a hu-
manity driven by this inferior Nature biit struggling to escape from her
limitations, to master and drive and use her; it emerges into a greater
spontaneous harmony and automatic self-fulfilling action founded on
the spiritual Truth of things. In this higher state the consciousness will
see that Truth and follow the line of its energies with a full knowledge,
with a strong participation and instrumental mastery, a complete delight
in action and existence. There will be a luminous and enjoyed perfection
of unity with all instead of a blind and suffered subjection of the indi-
vidual to the universal, and at every moment the action of the universal
in the individual and the individual in the universal will be enlightened
and governed by the rule of the transcendent Supernature.

But this highest condition is difficult and must evidently take long
to bring about; for the participation and consent of the Purusha to the
transition is not sufficient, there must be also the consent and participa-
tion of the Prakriti. It is not only the central thought and will that have
to acquiesce, but all the parts of our being must assent and surrender
to the law of the spiritual Truth; all has to learn to obey the govern-
ment of the conscious Divine Power in the members. There are obstinate
difficulties in our being born of its evolutionary constitution which mili-
tate against this assent. For some of these parts are still subject to the
inconscience and subconscience and to the lower automatism of habit
or so-called law of the nature, — mechanical habit of mind, habit of life,
habit of instinct, habit of personality, habit of character, the ingrained
mental, vital, physical needs, impulses, desires of the natural man, the
old functionings of all kinds that are rooted there so deep that it would
seem as if we had to dig to abysmal foundations in order to get them
out: these parts refuse to give up their response to the lower law founded
in the Inconscient; they continually send up to the conscious mind and
life the old reactions and seek to reaffirm them there as the eternal rule
of Nature. Other parts of the being are less obscure and mechanical and
rooted in inconscience, but all are imperfect and attached to their imper-
fection and have their own obstinate reactions; the vital part is wedded
to the law of self-affirmation and desire, the mind is attached to its own
formed movements, and both are willingly obedient to the inferior law
of the Ignorance. And yet the law of participation and the law of sur-

82 0 THE LIFE DIVINE

render are imperative; at each step of the transition the assent of the
Purusha is needed and there must be too the consent of each part of the
nature to the action of the higher power for its change. There must be
then a conscious self-direction of the mental being in us towards this
change, this substitution of Supernature for the old nature, this tran-
scendence. The rule of conscious obedience to the higher truth of the
spirit, the surrender of the whole being to the light and power that come
from the Supernature, is a second condition which has to be accom-
plished slowly and with difficulty by the being itself before the supramen-
tal transformation can become at all possible.

It follows that the psychic and the spiritual transformation must be
far advanced, even as complete as may be, before there can be any begin-
ning of the third and consummating supramental change; for it is only
by this double transmutation that the self-will of the Ignorance can be
totally altered into a spiritual obedience to the remoulding truth and will
of the greater Consciousness of the Infinite. A long, difficult stage of
constant effort, energism, austerity of the personal will, tapasyd, has or-
dinarily to be traversed before a more decisive stage can be reached in
which a state of self-giving of all the being to the Supreme Being and
the Supreme Nature can become total and absolute. There has to be a
preliminary stage of seeking and effort with a central offering or self-
giving of the heart and soul and mind to the Highest and a later mediate
stage of total conscious reliance on its greater Power aiding the personal
endeavour; that integral reliance again must grow into a final complete
abandonment of oneself in every part and every movement to the work-
ing of the higher Truth in the nature. The totality of this abandonment
can only come if the psychic change has been complete or the spiritual
transformation has reached a very high state of achievement. For it
implies a giving up by the mind of all its moulds, ideas, mental forma-
tions, of all opinion, of all its habits of intellectual observation and judg-
ment to be replaced first by an intuitive and then by an overmind or
supramental functioning which inaugurates the action of a direct Truth-
consciousness, Truth sight, Truth discernment, a new consciousness
which is in all its ways quite foreign to our mind's present nature. There
is demanded too a similar giving up by the vital of its cherished desires,
emotions, feelings, impulses, grooves of sensation, forceful mechanism of
action and reaction to be replaced by a luminous, desireless, free and yet
automatically self-determining force, the force of a centralised universal
and impersonal knowledge, power, delight of which the life must become

THE ASCENT TOWARDS SUPERMIND 827

an instrument and an epiphany, but of which it has at present no inkhng
and no sense of its greater joy and strength for fulfilment. Our physical
part has to give up its instincts, needs, blind conservative attachments,
settled grooves of nature, its doubt ancj disbelief in all that is beyond it-
self, its faith in the inevitability of the fixed functionings of the physical
mind, the physical life and the body, that they may be replaced by a new
power which establishes its own greater law and functioning in form and
force of Matter. Even the inconscient and subconscient have to become
conscient in us, susceptible to the higher light, no longer obstructive to
the fulfilling action of the Consciousness-Force, but more and more a
mould and lower basis of the Spirit. These things cannot be done so
long as either mind, life or physical consciousness are the leading powers
of being or have any dominance. The admission of such a change can
only be brought about by a full emergence of the soul and inner being,
the dominance of the psychic and spiritual will and a long working of
their light and power on the parts of the being, a psychic and spiritual
remoulding of the whole nature.

A unification of the entire being by a breaking down of the wall be-
tween the inner and outer nature, — a shifting of the position and centra-
tion of the consciousness from the outer to the inner self, a firm founda-
tion on this new basis, a habitual action from this inner self and its will
and vision and an opening up of the individual into the cosmic conscious-
ness,— is another necessary condition for the supramental change. It
would be chimerical to hope that the supreme Truth-consciousness can
establish itself in the narrow formulation of our surface mind and
heart and life, however turned towards spirituality. All the inner centres
must have burst open and released into action their capacities ; the psy-
chic entity must be unveiled and in control. If this first change establish-
ing the being in the inner and larger, a Yogic in place of an ordinary
consciousness has not been done, the greater transmutation is impossible.
Moreover the individual must have sufficiently universalised himself,
he must have recast his individual mind in the boundlessness of a cosmic
mentality, enlarged and vivified his individual life into the immediate
sense and direct experience of the dynamic motion of the universal life,
opened up the communications of his body with the forces of universal
Nature, before he can be capable of a change which transcends the pres-
ent cosmic formulation and lifts him beyond the lower hemisphere of
universality into a consciousness belonging to its spiritual upper hemi-
sphere. Besides he must have already become aware of what is now

828 THE LIFE DIVINE

to him superconscient ; he must be already a being conscious of the
higher spiritual Light, Power, Knowledge, Ananda, penetrated by its
descending influences, new-made by a spiritual change. It is possible for
the spiritual opening to take place and its action to proceed before the
psychic is far advanced or complete; for the spiritual influence from
above can awaken, assist and complete the psychic transmutation: all
that is necessary is that there should be a sufficient stress of the psychic
entity for the spiritual higher overture to take place. But the third, the
supramental change does not admit of any premature descent of the
highest Light; for it can only commence when the supramental Force
begins to act directly, and this it does not do if the nature is not ready.
For there is too great a disparity between the power of the supreme
Force and the capacity of the ordinary nature ; the inferior nature would
either be unable to bear or, bearing, unable to respond and receive or,
receiving, unable to assimilate. Till Nature is ready, the supramental
Force has to act indirectly; it puts the intermediary powers of over-
mind or intuition in front, or it works through a modification of itself to
which the already half-transformed being can be wholly or partially
responsive.

The spiritual evolution obeys the logic of a successive unfolding;
it can take a new decisive main step only when the previous main step
has been sufficiently conquered: even if certain minor stages can be
swallowed up or leaped over by a rapid and brusque ascension, the con-
sciousness has to turn back to assure itself that the ground passed over
is securely annexed to the new condition. It is true that the conquest of
the spirit supposes the execution in one life or a few lives of a process
that in the ordinary course of Nature would involve a slow and uncer-
tain procedure of centuries or even of millenniums: but this is a question
of the speed with which the steps are traversed ; a greater or concentrated
speed does not eliminate the steps themselves or the necessity of their
successive surmounting. The increased rapidity is possible only because
the conscious participation of the inner being is there and the power of
the Supernature is already at work in the half-transformed lower nature,
so that the steps which would otherwise have had to be taken tentatively
in the night of Inconscience or Ignorance can now be taken in an in-
creasing light and power of Knowledge. The first obscure material move-
ment of the evolutionary Force is marked by an aeonic graduality; the
movement of life progress proceeds slowly but still with a quicker step,
it is concentrated into the figure of millenniums; mind can still further

THE ASCENT TOWARDS SUPERMIND 829

compress the tardy leisureliness of Time and make long paces of the
centuries; but when the conscious spirit intervenes, a supremely concen-
trated pace of evolutionary swiftness becomes possible. Still, an involved
rapidity of the evolutionary course swallowing up the stages can only
come in when the power of the conscious Spirit has prepared the field
and the supramental Force has begun to use its direct influence. All
Nature's transformations do indeed wear the appearance of a miracle,
but it is a miracle with a method: her largest strides are taken over an
assured ground, her swiftest leaps are from a base that gives security
and certainty to the evolutionary saltus; a secret all-wisdom governs
everything in her, even the steps and processes that seem to be most
unaccountable.

This law of Nature's procedure brings in the necessity of a gradation
in the last transitional process, a climbing of degrees, an unfolding of
higher and higher states that lead us from the spiritualised mind to
supermind, — a steep passage that could not be accomplished otherwise.
There are above us, we have seen, successive states, levels or graded
powers of being overtopping our normal mind, hidden in our own super-
conscient parts, higher ranges of Mind, degrees of spiritual conscious-
ness and experience; without them there would be no links, no helpful
intervening spaces to make the immense ascension possible. It is indeed
from these higher sources that the secret spiritual Power acts upon the
being and by its pressure brings about the psychic transformation or the
spiritual change ; but in the early stages of our growth this action is not
apparent, it remains occult and unseizable. At first what is necessary is
that the pure touch of the spiritual force must intervene in mental na-
ture: that awakening pressure must stamp itself upon mind and heart
and life and give them their upward orientation ; a subtle light or a great
transmuting power must purify, refine and uplift their motions and suf-
fuse them with a higher consciousness that does not belong to their own.
normal capacity and character. This can be done from within by an in-
visible action through the psychic entity and the psychic personality; a
consciously felt descent from above is not indispensable. The presence
of the spirit is there in every living being, on every level, in all things,
and because it is there, the experience of Sachchidananda, of the pure
spiritual existence and consciousness, of the delight of a divine presence,
closeness, contact can be acquired through the mind or the heart or the
life-sense or even through the physical consciousness; if the inner doors
are flung sufficiently open, the light from the sanctuary can suffuse the

830 THE LIFE DIVINE

nearest and the farthest chambers of the outer being. The necessary
turn or change can also be brought about by an occult descent of the
spiritual force from above, in which the influx, the influence, the spirit-
ual consequence is felt, but the higher source is unknown and the actual
feeling of a descent is not there. A consciousness so touched may be so
much uplifted that the being turns to an immediate union with the Self
or with the Divine by departure from the evolution and, if that is sanc-
tioned, no question of graduality or steps or method intervenes, the
rupture with Nature can be decisive: for the law of departure, onCe it
is made possible, is not or need not be the same as the law of the evolu-
tionary transformation and perfection; it is or can be a leap, a breaking
out of bonds rapid or immediate, — the spiritual evasion is secured and
its only remaining sanction is the destined fall of the body. But if the
transformation of earth life is intended, the first touch of spiritualisa-
tion must be followed by an awakening to the higher sources and ener-
gies, a seeking for them and an enlargement and heightening of the be-
ing into their characteristic status and a conversion of the consciousness
to their greater law and dynamic nature. This change must go step by
step, till the stair of the ascension is transcended and there is an emer-
gence to those greatest wide-open spaces of which the Veda speaks, the
native spaces of a consciousness which is supremely luminous and in-
finite.

For here there is the same process of evolution as in the rest of the
movement of Nature; there is a heightening and widening of the con-
sciousness, an ascent to a new level and a taking up of the lower levels,
an assumption and new integration of the existence by a superior power
of Being which imposes its own way of action and its character and
force of substance-energy on as much as it can reach of the previously
evolved parts of nature. The demand for integration becomes at this
highest stage of Nature's workings a point of cardinal importance. In
the lower grades of the ascension the new assumption, the integration
into a higher principle of consciousness, remains incomplete: the mind
cannot whoUy mentalise life and matter; there are considerable parts
of the life being and the body which remain m the realm of the sub-
mental and the subconscient or inconscient. This is one serious obstacle
to the mind's endeavour towards the perfection of the nature; for the
continued share of the submental, the subconscient and inconscient in
the government of the activities, by bringing in another law than that
of the mental being, enables the conscious vital and the physical con-

THE ASCENT TOWARDS SUPERMIND 83 1

sciousness also to reject the law laid upon them by the mind and to
follow their own impulses and instincts in defiance of the mental reason
and the rational will of the developed intelligence. This makes it diffi-
cult for the mind to go beyond itself, to exceed its own level and spirit-
ualise the nature; for what it cannot even make fully conscious, cannot
securely mentalise and rationalise, it cannot spiritualise, since spirituali-
sation is a greater and more difficult integration. No doubt, by calling
in the spiritual force, it can establish an influence and a preliminary
change in some parts of the nature, especially in the thinking mind itself
and in the heart which is nearest to its own province: but this change
is not often a total perfection even within limits and what it does achieve
is rare and difficult. The spiritual consciousness using the mind is em-
ploying an inferior means and, even though it brings in a divine light
into the mind, a divine purity, passion, ardour into the heart or imposes
a spiritual law upon the life, this new consciousness has to work within
restrictions; for the most part it can only regulate or check the lower
action of the life and rigorously control the body, but these members,
even if refined or mastered, do not receive their spiritual fulfilment or
undergo a perfection and transformation. For that it is necessar}^ to
bring in a higher dynamic principle which is native to the spiritual
consciousness and by which, therefore, it can act in its own law and
completer natural light and power and impose them upon the members.
But even this intervention of a new dynamic principle and this
powerful imposition may take long to succeed; 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 diffi-
cult to bring about because the natural propensity of each part of us is
to prefer its own self-law, its dharma, however inferior, to a superior
law or dharma which it feels to be not its own; it clings to its own con-
sciousness or unconsciousness, its own impulsions and reactions, its own
dynamisation of being, its own way of the delight of existence. It clings
to them all the more obstinately if that way be a contradiction of delight,
a way of darkness and sorrow and pain and suffering; for that too has
acquired its own perverse and opposite taste, rasa, its pleasure of dark-
ness and sorrow, its sadistic or masochistic interest in pain and suffer-
ing. Even if this part of our being seeks better things, it is often obliged
to follow the worse because they are its own, natural to its energ>^, natu-
ral to its substance. A complete and radical change can only be brought
about by bringing in persistently the spiritual light and intimate experi-

832 THE LIFE DIVINE

ence of the spiritual truth, power, bliss into the recalcitrant elements
until they too recognise that their own way of fulfilment lies there, that
they are themselves a diminished power of the spirit and can recover by
this new way of being their own truth and integral nature. This illumi-
nation is constantly opposed by the Forces of the lower nature and still
more by the adverse Forces that live and reign by the world's imperfec-
tions and have laid down their formidable foundation on the black
rock of the Inconscience.

An indispensable step towards overcoming this difficulty is the
opening up of the inner being and its centres of action; for there the
task that the surface mind could not achieve begins to be more possible.
The inner mind, the inner life-consciousness and life-mind, the subtle-
physical consciousness and its subtle-physical mentality, once liberated
into action, create a larger, finer, greater mediating awareness able to
communicate with the universal and with what is above them, able also
to bring to bear their power on the whole range of the being, on the sub-
mental, on the subconscient mind, on the subconscient life, even on the
subconscience of the body: they can, though not wholly enlighten, yet
to some extent open, penetrate, work upon the fundamental Incon-
science. The spiritual Light, Power, Knowledge, Delight from above
can then descend beyond the mind and heart, which are always the
easiest to reach and illumine; occupying the whole nature from top
to bottom, they can pervade more fully the life and the body and by a
still profounder impact shake the foundations of the Inconscience. But
even this larger mentalisation and vitalisation from within is still an
inferior illumination: it can lessen but it does not get rid of the Igno-
rance; it assails and compels to recede but it does not overcome the
powers and forces that maintain the subtle and secret rule of the Incon-
science. The spiritual forces acting through this larger mentalisation and
vitalisation can bring in a higher light, strength and joy; but the full
spiritualisation, the completest new integration of consciousness, is at
this stage still impossible. If the inmost being, the psychic, takes charge,
then indeed a deeper mutation, not mental, can make the descent of
spiritual force more effective ; for the totality of the conscious being will
have undergone a preliminary soul change which emancipates mind, life,
body from the snare of their own imperfections and impurities. At this
point, a greater spiritual dynamisation, the working of the higher powers
of the spiritual mind and overmind, can fully intervene: they may indeed
have started their work before, though only as influences; but under the

THE ASCENT TOWARDS SUPERMIND 833

new conditions they can uplift the central being towards their own level
and commence the last new integration of the nature. These higher pow-
ers work already in the human unspiritualised mind, but indirectly and
in a fragmentary and diminished action ; they are changed into substance
and power of mind before they can work, and that substance and power
are illumined and intensified in their vibrations, exalted and ecstasised
in some of their movements by this entry, but not transformed. But
when the spiritualisation begins and, as its greater results manifest
themselves, — silence of the mind, the admission of our being into the
cosmic consciousness, the Nirvana of the little ego in the sense of uni-
versal self, the contact with the Divine Reality, — the interventions of
the higher dynamis and our openness to them can increase, they can
assume a fuller, more direct, more characteristic power of their work-
ing, and this progression continues until some complete and mature ac-
tion of them is possible. It is then that the turning of the spiritual to-
wards the supramental transformation commences; for the heightening
of the consciousness to higher and higher planes builds in us the grada-
tion of the ascent to supermind, that difficult and supreme passage.

It is not to be supposed that the circumstances and the lines of the
transition would be the same for all, for here we enter into the domain
of the infinite: but, since there is behind all of them the unity of a funda-
mental truth, the scrutiny of a given line of ascent may be expected to
throw light on the principle of all ascending possibilities ; such a scrutiny
of one Hne is all that can be attempted. This line is, as all must be, gov-
erned by the natural configuration of the stair of ascent: there are in it
many steps, for it is an incessant gradation and there is no gap any-
where; but, from the point of view of the ascent of consciousness from
our mind upwards through a rising series of dynamic powers by which
it can sublimate itself, the gradation can be resolved into a stairway of
four main ascents, each with its high level of fulfilment. These grada-
tions may be summarily described as a series of sublimations of the
consciousness through Higher Mind, Illumined Mind and Intuition into
Overmind and beyond it; there is a succession of self-transmutations
at the summit of which lies the Supermind or Divine Gnosis. .\11 these
degrees are gnostic in their principle and power; for even at the first we
begin to pass from a consciousness based on an original Inconscience
and acting in a general Ignorance or in a mixed Knowledge-Ignorance
to a consciousness based on a secret self-existent Knowledge and first
acted upon and inspired by that light and power and then itself changed

834 THE LIFE DIVINE

into that substance and using entirely this new instrumentation. In them-
selves these grades are grades of energy-substance of the Spirit: for it
must not be supposed, because we distinguish them according to their
leading character, means and potency of knowledge, that they are merely
a method or way of knowing or a faculty or power of cognition; they
are domains of being, grades of the substance and energy of the spiritual
being, fields of existence which are each a level of the universal Con-
sciousness-Force constituting and organising itself into a higher status.
When the powers of any grade descend completely into us, it is not only
our thought and knowledge that are affected, — the substance and very
grain of our being and consciousness, all its states and activities are
touched and penetrated and can be remoulded and wholly transmuted.
Each stage of this ascent is therefore a general, if not a total, conversion
of the being into a new light and power of a greater existence.

The gradation itself depends fundamentally upon a higher or lower
substance, potency, intensity of vibrations of the being, of its self-
awareness, of its delight of existence, of its force of existence. Conscious-
ness, as we descend the scale, becomes more and more diminished and
diluted, — dense indeed by its coarser crudity, but while that crudity
of consistence compacts the stuff of Ignorance, it admits less and less
the substance of light; it becomes thin in pure substance of conscious-
ness and reduced in power of consciousness, thin in light, thin and weak
in capacity of delight; it has to resort to a grosser thickness of its dimin-
ished stuff and to a strenuous output of its obscurer force to arrive at
anything, but this strenuousness of effort and labour is a sign not of
strength but of weakness. As we ascend, on the contrary, a finer but far
stronger and more truly and spiritually concrete substance emerges, a
greater luminosity and potent stuff of consciousness, a subtler, sweeter,
purer and more powerfully ecstatic energy of delight. In the descent of
these higher grades upon us it is this greater light, force, essence of being
and consciousness, energy of delight that enter into mind, life, body,
change and repair their diminished and diluted and incapable substance,
convert it into its own higher and stronger dynamis of spirit and in-
trinsic form and force of reality. This can happen because all is funda-
mentally the same substance, the same consciousness, the same force,
but in different forms and powers and degrees of itself: a taking up of
the lower by the higher is therefore a possible and, but for our second
nature of inconscience, a spiritually natural movement; what was put

THE ASCENT TOWARDS SUPERMIND 835

forth from the superior status is enveloped and taken up into its own
greater being and essence.

Our first decisive step out of our human intelligence, our normal
mentality, is an ascent into a higher Mind, a mind no longer of mingled
light and obscurity or half-light, but a large clarity of the spirit. Its
basic substance is a unitarian sense of being with a powerful multiple
dynamisation capable of the formation of a multitude of aspects of
knowledge, ways of action, forms and significances of becoming, of all
of which there is a spontaneous inherent knowledge. It is therefore a
power that has proceeded from the Overmind, — but with the Super-
mind as its ulterior origin, — as all these greater powers have proceeded:
but its special character, its activity of consciousness are dominated by
Thought; it is a luminous thought-mind, a mind of spirit-born concep-
tual knowledge. An all-awareness emerging from the original identity,
carrying the truths the identity held in itself, conceiving swiftly, vic-
toriously, multitudinously, formulating and by self-power of the Idea
effectually realising its conceptions, is the character of this greater mind
of knowledge. This kind of cognition is the last that emerges from the
original spiritual identity before the initiation of a separative knowl-
edge, base of the Ignorance ; it is therefore the first that meets us when
we rise from conceptive and ratiocinative mind, our best-organised
knowledge-power of the Ignorance, into the realms of the Spirit; it is,
indeed, the spiritual parent of our conceptive mental ideation, and it is
natural that this leading power of our mentality should, when it goes
beyond itself, pass into its immediate source.

But here in this greater Thought there is no need of a seeking and
self-critical ratiocination, no logical motion step by step towards a con-
clusion, no mechanism of express or implied deductions and inferences,
no building or deliberate concatenation of idea with idea in order to
arrive at an ordered sum or outcome of knowledge; for this limping
action of our reason is a movement of Ignorance searching for knowl-
edge, obliged to safeguard its steps against error, to erect a selective
mental structure for its temporary shelter and to base it on foundations
already laid and carefully laid but never firm, because it is not sup-
ported on a soil of native awareness but imposed on an original soil of
nescience. There is not here, either, that other way of our mind at its
keenest and swiftest, a rapid hazardous divination and insight, a play
of the searchlight of intelligence probing into the little known or the

836 THE LIFE DIVINE

unknown. This higher consciousness is a Knowledge formulating itself
on a basis of self-existent all-awareness and manifesting some part of
its integrality, a harmony of its significances put into thought-form. It
can freely express itself in single ideas, but its most characteristic move-
ment is a mass ideation, a system or totality of truth-seeing at a single
view; the relations of idea with idea, of truth with truth are not estab-
lished by logic but pre-exist and emerge already self-seen in the integral
whole. There is an initiation into forms of an ever-present but till now
inactive knowledge, not a system of conclusions from premisses or data ;
this thought is a self-revelation of eternal Wisdom, not an acquired
knowledge. Large aspects of truth come into view in which the ascending
Mind, if it chooses, can dwell with satisfaction and, after its former
manner, live in them as in a structure; but if progress is to be made,
these structures can constantly expand into a larger structure or several
of them combine themselves into a provisional greater whole on the
way to a yet unachieved integrality. In the end there is a great totality
of truth known and experienced but still a totality capable of infinite
enlargement because there is no end to the aspects of knowledge, ndsty-
anto vistarasya me.

This is the Higher Mind in its aspect of cognition; but there is also
the aspect of will, of dynamic effectuation of the Truth: here we find
that this greater more brilliant Mind works always on the rest of the
being, the mental will, the heart and its feelings, the life, the body,
through the power of thought, through the idea-force. It seeks to purify
through knowledge, to deliver through knowledge, to create by the in-
nate power of knowledge. The idea is put into the heart or the life as a
force to be accepted and worked out; the heart and life become conscious
of the idea and respond to its dynamisms and their substance begins
to modify itself in that sense, so that the feelings and actions become
the vibrations of this higher wisdom, are informed with it, filled with
the emotion and the sense of it: the will and the life impulses are simi-
larly charged with its power and its urge of self-effectuation; even in
the body the idea works so that, for example, the potent thought and
will of health replaces its faith in illness and its consent to illness, or
the idea''' of strength calls in the substance, power, motion, vibration of
strength; the idea generates the force and form proper to the idea and
imposes it on our substance of mind, life or matter. It is in this way that

' The word expressing the idea has the same power if it is surcharged with the
spiritual force; that is the rationale of the Indian use of the mantra.

THE ASCENT TOWARDS SUPERMIND 837

the first working proceeds; it charges the whole being with a new and
superior consciousness, lays a foundation of change, prepares it for a
superior truth of existence.

It has here to be emphasised, in order to obviate a natural miscon-
ception which can easily arise when the superior power of the higher
forces is first perceived or experienced, that these higher forces are not
in their descent immediately all-powerful as they would naturally be in
their own plane of action and in their own medium. In the evolution in
Matter they have to enter into a foreign and inferior medium and work
upon it; they encounter there the incapacities of our mind and life and
body, meet with the unreceptiveness or blind refusal of the Ignorance,
experience the negation and obstruction of the Inconscience. On their
own level they work upon a basis of luminous consciousness and lumi-
nous substance of being and are automatically effective; but here they
have to encounter an already and strongly formed foundation of Nesci-
ence,— not only the complete nescience of Matter, but the modified
nescience of mind and heart and life. Thus the higher Idea descending
into the developed mental intelligence has even there to overcome the
barrage of a mass or system of formed ideas which belong to the Knowl-
edge-Ignorance and the will to persistence and self-realisation of these
ideas ; for all ideas are forces and have a formative or self-effective fac-
ulty greater or less according to the conditions, — even reducible to nil
in practice when they have to deal with inconscient !Matter, but still
potential. There is thus ready-formed a power of resistance which op-
poses or minimises the effects of the descending Light, a resistance which
may amount to a refusal, a rejection of the Light, or take the shape of
an attempt to impair, subdue, ingeniously modify or adapt or per-
versely deform the light in order to suit it to the preconceived ideas of
the Ignorance. If the preconceived or already formed ideas are dismissed
and deprived of their right to persistence, they have still the right of
recurrence, from outside, from their prevalence in universal Mind, or
they may retire downwards into the vital, physical or subconscient parts
and from thence resurge at the least opportunity to repossess their lost
domain: for evolutionary Nature has to give this right of persistence to
things once established by her in order to bring a sufficient steadiness
and solidity to her steps. It is, moreover, the nature and claim of any
Force in the manifestation to be, to survive, to eft'ectuate itself wherever
possible and as long as possible, and it is therefore that in a world of
Ignorance all is achieved not only through a complexus but through a

838 THE LIFE DIVINE

collision and struggle and intermixture of Forces. But for this highest
evolution it is essential that all mixture of Ignorance with Knowledge
should be abolished; an action and evolution through strife of forces
must be replaced by an action and evolution through a harmony of
forces: but this stage can only be reached by a last strike and an over-
coming of the powers of Ignorance by the powers of Light and Knowl-
edge. In the lower levels of the being, in the heart and life and body, the
same phenomenon recurs and on a more intense scale ; for here it is not
ideas that have to be met but emotions, desires, impulses, sensations, vital
needs and habits of the lower Nature; these, since they are less con-
scious than ideas, are blinder in their response and are more obstinately
self-assertive: all have the same or a greater power of resistance and
recurrence, or take refuge in the circumconscient universal Nature or
in our own lower levels or in a seed-state in the subconscient and from
there have the power of new invasion or resurgence. This power of per-
sistence, recurrence, resistance of established things in Nature is always
the great obstacle which the evolutionary Force has to meet, which it
has indeed itself created in order to prevent a too rapid transmutation
even when that transmutation is its own eventual intention in things.
This obstacle will be there, — even though it may progressively
diminish, — at each stage of this greater ascent. In order to allow at all to
the higher Light an adequate entry and force of working, it is necessary
to acquire a power for quietude of the nature, to compose, tranquillise,
impress a controlled passivity or even an entire silence on mind and
heart, life and body: but even so a continued opposition, overt and felt
in the Force of the universal Ignorance or subliminal and obscure in the
substance-energy of the individual's make of mind, his form of life, his
body of Matter, an occult resistance or a revolt or reaffirmation of the
controlled or suppressed energies of the ignorant nature, is always pos-
sible and, if anything in the being consents to them, they can resume
dominance. A previously established psychic control is very desirable as
that creates a general responsiveness and inhibits the revolt of the lower
parts against the Light or their consent to the claims of the Ignorance.
A preliminary spiritual transformation will also reduce the hold of the
Ignorance; but neither of these influences altogether eliminates its ob-
struction and limitation: for these preliminary changes do not bring
the integral consciousness and knowledge; the original basis of Nesci-
ence proper to the Inconscient will still be there needing at every turn
to be changed, enlightened, diminished in its extent and in its force of

THE ASCENT TOWARDS SUPERMIND 839

reaction. The power of the spiritual Higher Mind and its idea-force,
modified and diminished as it must be by its entrance into our mentality,
is not sufficient to sweep out all these obstacles and create the gnostic
being, but it can make a first change, a modification that will capacitate
a higher ascent and a more powerful descent and further prepare an
integration of the being in a greater Force of consciousness and knowl-
edge.

This greater Force is that of the Illumined Mind, a Mind no longer
of higher Thought, but of spiritual light. Here the clarity of the spiritual
intelligence, its tranquil day-light, gives place or subordinates itself to
an intense lustre, a splendour and illumination of the spirit: a play of
lightnings of spiritual truth and power breaks from above into the con-
sciousness and adds to the calm and wide enlightenment and the vast
descent of peace which characterise or accompany the action of the
larger conceptual-spiritual principle, a fiery ardour of realisation and a
rapturous ecstasy of knowledge. A downpour of inwardly visible Light
very usually envelops this action; for it must be noted that, contrary to
our ordinary conceptions, light is not primarily a material creation and
the sense or vision of light accompanying the inner illumination is not
merely a subjective visual image or a symbolic phenomenon: light is
primarily a spiritual manifestation of the Divine Reality illuminative
and creative ; material light is a subsequent representation or conversion
of it into Matter for the purposes of the material Energy. There is also
in this descent the arrival of a greater dynamic, a golden drive, a lumi-
nous "enthousiasmos" of inner force and power which replaces the com-
paratively slow and deliberate process of the Higher Mind by a swift,
sometimes a vehement, almost a violent impetus of rapid transformation.

The Illumined Mind does not work primarily by thought, but by
vision; thought is here only a subordinate movement expressive of sight.
The human mind, which relies mainly on thought, conceives that to be
the highest or the main process of knowledge, but in the spiritual order
thought is a secondary and a not indispensable process. In its form of
verbal thought, it can almost be described as a concession made by
Knowledge to the Ignorance, because that Ignorance is incapable of
making truth wholly lucid and intelligible to itself in all its extent and
manifold implications except through the clarifying precision of signifi-
cant sounds; it cannot do without this device to give to ideas an exact
outline and an expressive body. But it is evident that this is a de\*ice, a
machinery; thought in itself, in its origin on the higher levels of con-

840 THE LIFE DIVINE

sciousness, is a perception, a cognitive seizing of the object or of some
truth of things which is a powerful but still a minor and secondary result
of spiritual vision, a comparatively external and superficial regard of
the self upon the self, the subject upon itself or something of itself as
object: for all there is a diversity and multiplicity of the self. In mind
there is a surface response of perception to the contact of an observed or
discovered object, fact or truth and a consequent conceptual formula-
tion of it ; but in the spiritual light there is a deeper perceptive response
from the very substance of consciousness and a comprehending formula-
tion in that substance, an exact figure or revelatory ideograph in the stuff
of the being, — nothing more, no verbal representation is needed for the
precision and completeness of this thought knowledge. Thought creates
a representative image of Truth; it offers that to the mind as a means
of holding Truth and making it an object of knowledge; but the body
itself of Truth is caught and exactly held in the sunlight of a deeper
spiritual sight to which the representative figure created by thought is
secondary and derivative, powerful for communication of knowledge,
but not indispensable for reception or possession of knowledge.

A consciousness that proceeds by sight, the consciousness of the
seer, is a greater power for knowledge than the consciousness of the
thinker. The perceptual power of the inner sight is greater and more
direct than the perceptual power of thought: it is a spiritual sense that
seizes something of the substance of Truth and not only her figure ; but
it outlines the figure also and at the same time catches the significance
of the figure, and it can embody her with a finer and bolder revealing
outline and a larger comprehension and power of totality than thought-
conception can manage. As the Higher Mind brings a greater conscious-
ness into the being through the spiritual idea and its power of truth, so
the Illumined Mind brings in a still greater consciousness through a
Truth sight and Truth Light and its seeing and seizing power. It can
effect a more powerful and dynamic integration; it illumines the thought-
mind with a direct inner vision and inspiration, brings a spiritual sight
into the heart and a spiritual light and energy into its feeling and emo-
tion, imparts to the life-force a spiritual urge, a truth inspiration that
dynamises the action and exalts the life movements; it infuses into the
sense a direct and total power of spiritual sensation so that our vital and
physical being can contact and meet concretely, quite as intensely as
the mind and emotion can conceive and perceive and feel, the Divine
in all things; it throws on the physical mind a transforming light

THE ASCENT TOWARDS SUPERMIND 84I

that breaks its limitations, its conservative inertia, replaces its narrow
thought-power and its doubts by sight and pours luminosity and con-
sciousness into the very cells of the body. In the transformation by the
Higher Mind the spiritual sage and thinker would fmd his total and
dynamic fulfilment; in the transformation by the Illumined Mind there
would be a similar fulfilment for the seer, the illumined mystic, those in
whom the soul lives in vision and in a direct sense and experience: for
it is from these higher sources that they receive their light and to rise
into that light and live there would be their ascension to their native
empire.

But these two stages of the ascent enjoy their authority and can
get their own united completeness only by a reference to a third level;
for it is from the higher summits where dwells the intuitional being that
they derive the knowledge which they turn into thought or sight and
bring down to us for the mind's transmutation. Intuition is a power of
consciousness nearer and more intimate to the original knowledge by
identity; for it is always something that leaps out direct from a con-
cealed identity. It is when the consciousness of the subject meets with
the consciousness in the object, penetrates it and sees, feels or vibrates
with the truth of what it contacts, that the intuition leaps out like a
spark or lightning-flash from the shock of the meeting; or when the
consciousness, even without any such meeting, locks into itself and feels
directly and intimately the truth or the truths that are there or so con-
tacts the hidden forces behind appearances, then also there is the out-
break of an intuitive light; or, again, when the consciousness meets the
Supreme Reality or the spiritual reality of things and beings and has
a contactual union with it, then the spark, the flash or the blaze of inti-
mate truth-perception is lit in its depths. This close perception is more
than sight, more than conception: it is the result of a penetrating and
revealing touch which carries in it sight and conception as part of itself
or as its natural consequence. A concealed or slumbering identity, not
yet recovering itself, still remembers or conveys by the intuition its own
contents and the intimacy of its self-feeling and self-vision of things, its
light of truth, its overwhelming and automatic certitude.

In the human mind the intuition is even such a truth-remembrance
or truth-conveyance, or such a revealing flash or blaze breaking into a
great mass of ignorance or through a veil of nescience : but we have seen
that it is subject there to an invading mixture or a mental coating or an
interception and substitution ; there is too a manifold possibiHty of mis-

842 THE LIFE DIVINE

interpretation which comes in the way of the purity and fullness of its
action. Moreover, there are seeming intuitions on all levels of the being
which are communications rather than intuitions, and these have a very
various provenance, value and character. The infrarational "mystic,"
so styled, — for to be a true mystic it is not sufficient to reject reason
and rely on sources of thought or action of which one has no understand-
ing,— is often inspired by such communications on the vital level from
a dark and dangerous source. In these circumstances we are driven to
rely mainly on the reason and are disposed even to control the sugges-
tions of the intuition — or the pseudo-intuition, which is the more fre-
quent phenomenon, — by the observing and discriminating intelligence;
for we feel in our intellectual part that we cannot be sure otherwise what
is the true thing and what the mixed or adulterated article or false sub-
stitute. But this largely discounts for us the utility of the intuition: for
the reason is not in this field a reliable arbiter, since its methods are
different, tentative, uncertain, an intellectual seeking; even though it
itself really relies on a camouflaged intuition for its conclusions, — for
without that help it could not choose its course or arrive at any assured
finding, — it hides this dependence from itself under the process of a
reasoned conclusion or a verified conjecture. An intuition passed in
judicial review by the reason ceases to be an intuition and can only have
the authority of the reason for which there is no inner source of direct
certitude. But even if the mind became predominantly an intuitive mind
rehant upon its portion of the higher faculty, the co-ordination of its
cognitions and its separated activities, — for in mind these would always
be apt to appear as a series of imperfectly connected flashes, — ^would
remain difficult so long as this new mentality has not a conscious liaison
with its suprarational source or a self-uplifting access to a higher plane
of consciousness in which an intuitive action is pure and native.

Intuition is always an edge or ray or outleap of a superior light;
it is in us a projecting blade, edge or point of a far-off supermind light
entering into and modified by some intermediate truth-mind substance
above us and, so modified, again entering into and very much blinded
by our ordinary or ignorant mind substance ; but on that higher level to
which it is native its light is unmixed and therefore entirely and purely
veridical, and its rays are not separated but connected or massed to-
gether in a play of waves of what might almost be called in the Sanskrit
poetic figure a sea or mass of "stable lightnings." When this original or
native Intuition begins to descend into us in answer to an ascension of

THE ASCENT TOWARDS SUPERMIND 843

our consciousness to its level or as a result of our finding of a clear way
of communication with it, it may continue to come as a play of lightning-
flashes, isolated or in constant action; but at this stage the judgment of
reason becomes quite inapplicable, it can only act as an observer or
registrar understanding or recording the more luminous intimations,
judgments and discriminations of the higher power. To complete or
verify an isolated intuition or discriminate its nature, its application, its
limitations, the receiving consciousness must rely on another complet-
ing intuition or be able to call down a massed intuition capable of
putting all in place. For once the process of the change has begun, a
complete transmutation of the stuff and activities of the mind into the
substance, form and power of intuition is imperative; until then, so long
as the process of consciousness depends upon the lower intelligence serv-
ing or helping out or using the intuition, the result can only be a sur-
vival of the mixed Knowledge-Ignorance uplifted or relieved by a higher
light and force acting in its parts of Knowledge.

Intuition has a fourfold power. A power of revelatory truth-seeing,
a power of inspiration or truth-hearing, a power of truth-touch or im-
mediate seizing of significance, which is akin to the ordinary nature of
its intervention in our mental intelligence, a power of true and automatic
discrimination of the orderly and exact relation of truth to truth, — these
are the fourfold potencies of Intuition. Intuition can therefore perform
all the action of reason — including the function of logical intelligence,
which is to work out the right relation of things and the right relation of
idea with idea, — but by its own superior process and with steps that do
not fail or falter. It takes up also and transforms into its own substance
not only the mind of thought, but the heart and life and the sense and
physical consciousness : already all these have their own peculiar powers
of intuition derivative from the hidden Light ; the pure power descending
from above can assume them all into itself and impart to these deeper
heart-perceptions and life-perceptions and the divinations of the body
a greater integrality and perfection. It can thus change the whole con-
sciousness into the stuff of intuition ; for it brings its own greater radiant
movement into the will, into the feelings and emotions, the life-impulses,
the action of sense and sensation, the very workings of the body con-
sciousness ; it recasts them in the light and power of truth and illumines
their knowledge and their ignorance. A certain integration can thus take
place, but whether it is a total integration must depend on the extent
to which the new light is able to take up the subconscient and penetrate

844 THE LIFE DIVINE

the fundamental Inconscience. Here the intuitive light and power may-
be hampered in its task because it is the edge of a delegated and modi-
fied supermind, but does not bring in the whole mass or body of the
identity knowledge. The basis of Inconscience in our nature is too vast,
deep and solid to be altogether penetrated, turned into light, transformed
by an inferior power of the Truth-nature.

The next step of the ascent brings us to the Overmind; the intui-
tional change can only be an introduction to this higher spiritual over-
ture. But we have seen that the Overmind, even when it is selective and
not total in its action, is still a power of cosmic consciousness, a prin-
ciple of global knowledge which carries in it a delegated light from the
supramental gnosis. It is, therefore, only by an opening into the cosmic
consciousness that the overmind ascent and descent can be made wholly
possible: a high and intense individual opening upwards is not sufficient,
— to that vertical ascent towards summit Light there must be added a
vast horizontal expansion of the consciousness into some totality of the
Spirit. At the least, the inner being must already have replaced by its
deeper and wider awareness the surface mind and its limited outlook and
learned to live in a large universality; for otherwise the overmind view
of things and the overmind dynamism will have no room to move in and
effectuate its dynamic operations. When the overmind descends, the
predominance of the centralising ego-sense is entirely subordinated, lost
in largeness of being and finally abolished ; a wide cosmic perception and
feeling of a boundless universal self and movement replaces it: many
motions that were formerly ego-centric may still continue, but they
occur as currents or ripples in the cosmic wideness. Thought, for the
most part, no longer seems to originate individually in the body or the
person but manifests from above or comes in upon the cosmic mind-
waves: all inner individual sight or intelligence of things is now a revela-
tion or illumination of what is seen or comprehended, but the source of
the revelation is not in one's separate self but in the universal knowl-
edge; the feelings, emotions, sensations are similarly felt as waves from
the same cosmic immensity breaking upon the subtle and the gross body
and responded to in kind by the individual centre of the universality;
for the body is only a small support or even less, a point of relation, for
the action of a vast cosmic instrumentation. In this boundless largeness,
not only the separate ego but all sense of individuality, even of a subor-
dinated or instrumental individuality, may entirely disappear; the cos-
mic existence, the cosmic consciousness, the cosmic delight, the play of

THE ASCENT TOWARDS SUPERMIND 845

cosmic forces are alone left: if the delight or the centre of Force is felt
in what was the personal mind, life or body, it is not with a sense of per-
sonality but as a field of manifestation, and this sense of the delight or
of the action of Force is not confined to the person or the body but can
be felt at all points in an unlimited consciousness of unity which per-
vades everywhere.

But there can be many formulations of overmind consciousness and
experience; for the overmind has a great plasticity and is a field of mul-
tiple possibilities. In place of an uncentred and unplaced diffusion there
may be the sense of the universe in oneself or as oneself: but there too
this self is not the ego; it is an extension of a free and pure essential
self-consciousness or it is an identification with the All, — the extension
or the identification constituting a cosmic being, a universal individual.
In one state of the cosmic consciousness there is an individual included
in the cosmos but identifying himself with all in it, with the things and
beings, with the thought and sense, the joy and grief of others; in an-
other state there is an inclusion of beings in oneself and a reality of their
life as part of one's own being. Often there is no rule or governance of
the immense movement, but a free play of universal Nature to which
what was the personal being responds with a passive acceptance or a
dynamic identity, while yet the spirit remains free and undisturbed by
any bondage to the reactions of this passivity or this universal and im-
personal identification and sympathy. But with a strong influence or
full action of the overmind a very integral sense of governance, a com-
plete supporting or overruling presence and direction of the cosmic Self
or the Ishwara can come in and become normal; or a special centre may
be revealed or created overtopping and dominating the physical instru-
ment, individual in fact of existence, but impersonal in feeling and
recognised by a free cognition as something instrumental to the action
of a Transcendent and Universal Being. In the transition towards the
supermind this centralising action tends towards the discovery of a true
individual replacing the dead ego, a being who is in his essence one with
the supreme Self, one with the universe in extension and yet a cosmic
centre and circumference of the specialised action of the Infinite.

These are the general first results and create the normal foundation
of the overmind consciousness in the evolved spiritual being, but its
varieties and developments are innumerable. The consciousness that
thus acts is experienced as a consciousness of Light and Truth, a power,
force, action full of Light and Truth, an aesthesis and sensation of beauty

846 THE LIFE DIVINE

and delight universal and multitudinous in detail, an illumination in the I
whole and in all things, in the one movement and all movements, with
a constant extension and play of possibiHties which is infinite, even in
its multitude of determinations endless and indeterminable. If the power
of an ordering overmind gnosis intervenes, then there is a cosmic struc-
ture of the consciousness and action, but this is not like the rigid mental
structures; it is plastic, organic, something that can grow and develop
and stretch into the infinite. All spiritual experiences are taken up and
become habitual and normal to the new nature ; all essential experiences
belonging to the mind, life, body are taken up and spiritualised, trans-
muted and felt as forms of the consciousness, delight, power of the in-
finite existence. Intuition, illumined sight and thought enlarge them-
selves; their substance assumes a greater substantiality, mass, energy,
their movement is more comprehensive, global, many-faceted, more wide
and potent in its truth-force: the whole nature, knowledge, aesthesis,
sympathy, feeling, dynamism become more catholic, all-understanding,
all-embracing, cosmic, infinite.

The overmind change is the final consummating movement of the
dynamic spiritual transformation; it is the highest possible status-
dynamis of the spirit in the spiritual-mind plane. It takes up all that is
in the three steps below it and raises their characteristic workings to
their highest and largest power, adding to them a universal wideness
of consciousness and force, a harmonious concert of knowledge, a more
manifold delight of being. But there are certain reasons arising from
its own characteristic status and power that prevent it from being the
final possibility of the spiritual evolution. It is a power, though the
highest power, of the lower hemisphere; although its basis is a cosmic
unity, its action is an action of division and interaction, an action taking
its stand on the play of the multiplicity. Its play is, like that of all Mind,
a play of possibilities; although it acts not in the Ignorance but with
the knowledge of the truth of these possibilities, yet it works them out
through their own independent evolution of their powers. It acts in each
cosmic formula according to the fundamental meaning of that formula
and is not a power for a dynamic transcendence. Here in earth-life it
has to work upon a cosmic formula whose basis is the entire nescience
which results from the separation of Mind, Life and Matter from their
own source and supreme origin. Overmind can bridge that division up
to the point at which sparative Mind enters into Overmind and be-
comes a part of its action; it can unite individual mind with cosmic .

THE ASCENT TOWARDS SUPERMIND 847

mind on its highest plane, equate individual self with cosmic self and
give to the nature an action of universality; but it cannot lead Mind
beyond itself, and in this world of original Inconscience it cannot dyna-
mise the Transcendence: for it is the supermind alone that is the su-
preme self-determining truth-action and the direct power of manifestation
of that Transcendence. If then the action of evolutionary Nature ended
here, the Overmind, having carried the consciousness to the point of a
vast illumined universality and an organised play of this wide and potent
spiritual awareness of utter existence, force-consciousness and delight,
could only go farther by an opening of the gates of the Spirit into the
upper hemisphere and a will to enable the soul to depart out of its cos-
mic formation into Transcendence.

In the terrestrial evolution itself the overmind descent would not
be able to transform wholly the Inconscience ; all that it could do would
be to transform in each man it touched the whole conscious being, inner
anxi outer, personal and universally impersonal, into its own stuff and
impose that upon the Ignorance illumining it into cosmic truth and
knowledge. But a basis of Nescience would remain; it would be as if a
sun and its system were to shine out in an original darkness of Space
and illumine everything as far as its rays could reach so that all that
dwelt in the light would feel as if no darkness were there at all in their
experience of existence. But outside that sphere or expanse of experience
the original darkness would still be there and, since all things are possible
in an overmind structure, could reinvade the island of light created
within its empire. Moreover, since Overmind deals with different pos-
sibilities, its natural action would be to develop the separate possibility
of one or more or numerous dynamic spiritual formulations to their
utmost or combine or harmonise several possibilities together; but
this would be a creation or a number of creations in the original ter-
restrial creation, each complete in its separate existence. The evolved
spiritual individual would be there, there might evolve also a spiritual
community or communities in the same world as mental man and the
vital being of the animal, but each working out its independent existence
in a loose relation within the terrestrial formula. The supreme power of
the principle of unity taking all diversities into itself and controlHng
them as parts of the unity, which must be the law of the new evolu-
tionary consciousness, would not as yet be there. Also by this much
evolution there could be no security against the downward pull or gra\'i-
tation of the Inconscience which dissolves all the formations that life and

848 THE LIFE DIVINE

mind build in it, swallows all things that arise out of it or are imposed
upon it and disintegrates them into their original matter. The liberation
from this pull of the Inconscience and a secured basis for a continuous
divine or gnostic evolution would only be achieved by a descent of the
Supermind into the terrestrial formula, bringing into it the supreme
law and light and dynamis of the spirit and penetrating with it and
transforming the inconscience of the material basis. A last transition
from Overmind to Supermind and a descent of Supermind must there-
fore intervene at this stage of evolutionary Nature.

Overmind and its delegated powers, taking up and penetrating
mind and the life and body dependent upon mind, would subject all to
a greatening process; at each step of this process a greater power and a
higher intensity of gnosis less and less mixed with the loose, diffused,
diminishing and diluting stuff of mind could establish itself: but all
gnosis is in its origin power of supermind, so that this would mean a
greater and greater influx of a half-veiled and indirect supramental
light and power into the nature. This would continue until the point
was reached at which overmind would begin itself to be transformed into
supermind; the supramental consciousness and force would take up
the transformation directly into its own hands, reveal to the terrestrial
mind, life, bodily being their own spiritual truth and divinity and,
finally, pour into the whole nature the perfect knowledge, power, signifi-
cance of the supramental existence. The soul would pass beyond the
borders of the Ignorance and cross its original line of departure from the
supreme Knowledge: it would enter into the integrality of the supra-
mental gnosis; the descent of the gnostic Light would effectuate a com-
plete transformation of the Ignorance.

This or something more largely planned on these lines might be
regarded as the schematic, logical or ideal account of the spiritual trans-
formation, a structural map of the ascent to the supramental summit,
looked at as a succession of separate steps, each accomplished before
the passage to the next commences. It would be as if the soul, putting
forth an organised natural individuality, were a traveller mounting the
degrees of consciousness cut out in universal Nature, each ascent carry-
ing it totally as a definite integer, as a separate body of conscious being,
from one state of its existence to the next in order. This is so far cor-
rect that a sufficient integration of one status has to be complete before
an ascent to the next higher station can be entirely secure: this clear suc-
cession might also be the course followed by a few even in the early

THE ASCENT TOWARDS SUPERMIND 849

stages of this evolution, and it might become too a normal process after
the whole stair-flight of the evolution had been built and made safe.
But evolutionary Nature is not a logical series of separate segments; it is
a totality of ascending powers of being which interpenetrate and dovetail
and exercise in their action on each other a power of mutual modification.
When the higher descends into the lower consciousness, it alters the lower
but is also modified and diminished by it; when the lower ascends, it is
sublimated but at the same time qualifies the sublimating substance and
power. This interaction creates an abundant number of different inter-
mediate and interlocked degrees of the force and consciousness of being,
but it also makes it difficult to bring about a complete integration of all
the powers under the full control of any one power. For this reason there
is not actually a series of simple clear-cut and successive stages in the
individual's evolution; there is instead a complexity and a partly deter-
minate, partly confused comprehensiveness of the movement. The soul
may still be described as a traveller and climber who presses towards
his high goal by step on step, each of which he has to build up as an in-
teger but most frequently redescend in order to rebuild and make sure of
the supporting stair so that it may not crumble beneath him: but the
evolution of the whole consciousness has rather the movement of an
ascending ocean of Nature; it can be compared to a tide or a mounting
flux, the leading fringe of which touches the higher degrees of a cliff or
hill while the rest is still below. At each stage the higher parts of the
nature may be provisionally but incompletely organised in the new con-
sciousness while the lower are in a state of flux or formation, partly
moving in the old way though influenced and beginning to change,
partly belonging to the new kind but still imperfectly achieved and not
yet firm in the change. Another image might be that of an army advanc-
ing in columns which annexes new ground, while the main body is still
behind in a territory overrun but too large to be effectively occupied,
so that there has to be a frequent halt and partial return to the traversed
areas for consolidation and assurance of the hold on the occupied country
and assimilation of its people. A rapid conquest might be possible, but
it would be of the nature of an encampment or a domination established
in a foreign country; it would not be the assumption, total assimilation,
integration needed for the entire supramental change.

This entails certain consequences which modify the clear succes-
sions of the evolution and prevent it from following the cleanly deter-
mined and firmly arranged course which our logical intelligence demands

850 THE LIFE DIVINE

from Nature but seldom gets from her. As life and mind begin to ap-
pear when the organisation of Matter is sufficient to admit them but the
more complex and perfect organisation of Matter comes with the evolu-
tion of life and mind, as mind appears when life is sufficiently organised
to admit of a developed vibration of consciousness but life receives its
full organisation and development only after mind can act upon it, as
the spiritual evolution begins when man as mind is capable of the move-
ments of spirituality but mind also rises to its own highest perfection
by the growth of the intensities and luminosities of the spirit, so it is
with this higher evolution of the ascending powers of the Spirit. As soon
as there is a sufficient spiritual development, something of intuition,
illumination of the being, the movements of the higher spiritual grades
of Consciousness begins to manifest, — sometimes one, sometimes the
other or all together, and they do not wait for each power in the series
to complete itself before a higher power comes into action. An Overmind
light and power may descend in some sort, create a partial form of it-
self in the being and take a leading part or supervise or intervene while
the intuitive and illumining mind and higher mind are still incomplete;
these would then remain in the whole, acting along with the greater
Power, often penetrated or sublimated by it or rising into it to form a
greater or overmind intuition, a greater or overmind illumination, a
greater or overmind spiritual thinking. This intricate action takes place
because each descending power by its intensity of pressure on the nature
and uplifting effect makes the being already capable of a still higher
invasion before that earlier power itself is complete in its self-formation;
but also it happens because the work of assumption and transformation
of the lower nature can with difficulty be done if a higher and higher in-
tervention does not take place. The illumination and the higher thought
need the help of the intuition, the intuition needs the help of the over-
mind to combat the darkness or ignorance in which they labour and to
give them their own fullness. Still, it is not possible in the end for the
overmind status and integration to be complete until the higher mind
and the illumined mind have been integrated and taken up into the intui-
tion and the intuition itself subsequently integrated and taken up into
the all-enlarging and all-sublimating overmind energy. The law of the
gradation has to be satisfied even in the complexity of the process of evo-
lutionary Nature.

A further cause of complexity arises from the need of integration
itself ; for the process is not only an ascent of the soul to a higher status,

THE ASCENT TOWARDS SUPERMIND 85 1

but a descent of the higher consciousness so gained to take up and trans-
form the inferior nature. But this nature has a density of previous
formation which resists and obstructs the descent; even when the higher
power has broken the barrier and descended and is at work, we have
seen that the nature of the Ignorance resists and obstructs the working,
that it either strives to refuse transformation altogether or tries to
modify the new power into some conformity with its own workings, or
even throws itself upon it to seize and degrade and enslave it to its own
way of action and lower purpose. Ordinarily, in their task of assumption
and assimilation of this difficult stuff of Nature, the higher powers de-
scend first into the mind and occupy the mind centres because these are
nearest to themselves in intelligence and knowledge-power; if they de-
scend first into the heart or into the vital being of force and sensation,
as they sometimes do because these happen to be in some individuals
more open and call them first, the results are more mixed and dubious,
imperfect and insecure than if things happen in the logical order. But,
even in its normal working when it takes up the being part by part in
the natural order of descent, the descending power is not able to bring
about a total occupation and transformation of each before it goes
farther. It can only effect a general and incomplete occupation, so that
the workings of each remain still partly of the new higher, partly of a
mixed, partly of the old unchanged lower order. All the mind in its whole
range cannot be transmuted at once, for the mind centres are not a re-
gion isolated from the rest of the being; the mind action is penetrated
by the action of the vital and physical parts, and in those parts them-
selves are lower formations of mind, a vital mind, a physical mind, and
these have to be changed before there can be an entire transformation of
the mental being. The higher transforming power has, therefore, to
descend, as soon as may be and without waiting for an integral m.ental
change, into the heart so as to occupy and change the emotional nature,
and afterwards into the inferior vital centres to occupy and change the
whole vital and kinetic and sensational nature, and, finally, into the
physical centres so as to occupy and change the whole physical nature.
But even this finality is not final, for there are still left the subconscient
parts and the inconscient foundation. The intricacy, the interwoven ac-
tion of these powers and parts of the being is so great that it may almost
be said that in this change nothing is accomplished until all is ac-
complished. There is a tide and ebb, the forces of the old nature reced-
ing and again partially occupying their old dominions, eft'ectuating a

852 THE LIFE DIVINE

slow retreat with rear-line actions and return attacks and aggressions,
the higher influx occupying each time more conquered territory but im-
perfectly sure of sovereignty so long as anything is left that has not be-
come part of its luminous regime.

A third complexity is brought in by the power of the consciousness
to live in more than one status at a time; especially, a difficulty is
created by the division of our being into an inner and an outer or surface
nature and the farther intricacy of a secret circumconscient or environ-
mental consciousness in which are determined our unseen connections
with the world outside us. In the spiritual opening, it is the awakened
inner being that readily receives and assimilates the higher influences
and puts on the higher nature; the external surface self, more entirely
moulded by the forces of the Ignorance and Inconscience, is slower
to awake, slower to receive, slower to assimilate. There is therefore a
long stage in which the inner being is sufficiently transformed but the
outer is still involved in a mixed and difficult movement of imperfect
change. This disparity repeats itself at each step of the ascent; for in
each change the inner being follows more readily, the outer limps after,
reluctant or else incompetent in spite of its aspiration and desire: this
necessitates a constantly repeated labour o'f assumption, adaptation,
orientation, a labour reproduced in new terms always but always the
same in principle. But even when the outer and the inner nature of the
individual are unified in a harmonised spiritual consciousness, that still
more external but occult part of him in which his being mixes with the
being of the outside world and through which the outside world invades
his consciousness remains a field of imperfection. There is necessarily
a commerce here between disparate influences: the inner spiritual in-
fluence is met by quite opposite influences strong in their control of
the present world-order; the new spiritual consciousness has to bear
the shock of the dominant and established unspiritualised powers of the
Ignorance. This creates a difficulty which is of capital importance in all
stages of the spiritual evolution and its urge towards a change of the
nature.

A subjective spirituality can be established which refuses or mini-
mises commerce with the world or is content to witness its action and
throw back or throw out its invading influences without allowing any
reaction to them or admitting their intrusion: but if the inner spirituality
is to be objectivised in a free world-action, if the individual has to pro-
ject himself into the world and in a sense take the world into himself,

THE ASCENT TOWARDS SUPERMIND 853

this cannot be dynamically done without receiving the world influences
through one's own circumconscient or environmental being. The spiritual
inner consciousness has then to deal with these influences in such a way
that, as soon as they approach or enter, they become either obliterated
and without result or transformed by their very entry into its own
mode and substance. Or it may force them to receive the spiritual influ-
ence and return with a transforming power on the world they come from,
for such a compulsion on the lower universal Nature is part of a perfect
spiritual action. But for that the circumconscient or environmental be-
ing must be so steeped in the spiritual light and spiritual substance that
nothing can enter into it without undergoing this transformation: the
invading external influences have not to bring in at all their lov/er
awareness, their lower sight, their lower dynamism. But this is a difficult
perfection, because ordinarily the circumconscient is not wholly our own
formed and realised self but ourself plus the external world-nature. It is,
for this reason, always easier to spiritualise the inner self-sufficient parts
than to transform the outer action; a perfection of introspective, in-
dwelling or subjective spirituality aloof from the world or self-protected
against it is easier than a perfection of the whole nature in a dynamic,
kinetic spirituality objectivised in the life, embracing the world, master
of its environment, sovereign in its commerce with world-nature. But
since the integral transformation must embrace fully the dynamic being
and take up into it the life of action and the world-self outside us, this
completer change is demanded of the evolving nature.

The essential difficulty comes from the fact that the substance of
our normal being is moulded out of the Inconscience. Our ignorance is
a growth of knowledge in a substance of being which is nescient; the
consciousness it develops, the knowledge it establishes are always
dogged, penetrated, enveloped by this nescience. It is this substance of
nescience that has to be transformed into a substance of superconsci-
ence, a substance in which consciousness and a spiritual awareness are
always there even when they are not active, not expressed, not put into
form of knowledge. Till that is done, the nescience invades or encom-
passes or even swallows up and absorbs into its oblivious darkness all
that enters into it; it compels the descending light to compromise with
the lesser light it enters: there is a mixture, a diminution and dilution
of itself, a diminution, a modification, an incomplete authenticity of its
truth and power. Or, at the least, the nescience limits its truth and cir-
cumscribes its force, segments its applicability and its range; its truth

854 THE LIFE DIVINE

of principle is barred from a full truth of individual realisation or from
an achieved truth of cosmic practice. Thus love as a law of life can
affirm itself practically as an inner active principle; but unless it oc-
cupies the whole substance of being, the entire individual feeling and
action cannot be moulded by the law of love: even if perfected in the
individual, it can be rendered unilateral and ineffective by the general
nescience which is blind to it and hostile, or it is forced to circumscribe
its range of cosmic application. A full action in harmony with a new law
of the being is always difficult in human nature ; for in the substance of
the Inconscience there is a self-protective law of blind imperative Neces-
sity which limits the play of the possibilities that emerge from it or enter
into it and prevents them from establishing their free action and result
or realising the intensity of their own absolute. A mixed, relative, curbed
and diminished play is all that is conceded to them: otherwise they
would cancel the frame of Inconscience and violently perturb without
effectively changing the basis of the world-order ; for none of them have
in their mental or vital play the divine power to replace this dark origi-
nal principle and organise a totally new world-order.

A transformation of human nature can only be achieved when the
substance of the being is so steeped in the spiritual principle that all its
movements are a spontaneous dynamism and a harmonised process of
the spirit. But even when the higher powers and their intensities enter
into the substance of the Inconscience, they are met by this blind oppos-
ing Necessity and are subjected to this circumscribing and diminishing
law of the nescient substance. It opposes them with its strong titles of
an established and inexorable Law, meets always the claim of life with
the law of death, the demand of Light with the need of a relief of shadow
and a background of darkness, the sovereignty and freedom and dy-
namism of the spirit with its own force of adjustment by limitation,
demarcation by incapacity, foundation of energy on the repose of an
original Inertia. There is an occult truth behind its negations which only
the Supermind with its reconciliation of contraries in the original Reality
can take up and so discover the pragmatic solution of the enigma. Only
the supramental Force can entirely overcome this difficulty of the funda-
mental Nescience; for with it enters an opposite and luminous impera-
tive Necessity which underlies all things and is the original and final
self-determining truth-force of the self-existent Infinite. This greater
luminous spiritual Necessity and its sovereign imperative alone can

THE ASCENT TOWARDS SUPERMIND 855

displace or entirely penetrate, transform into itself and so replace the
blind Ananke of the Inconscience.

A supramental change of the whole substance of the being and
therefore necessarily of all its characters, powers, movements takes
place when the involved supermind in Nature emerges to meet and join
with the supramental light and power descending from Supernature.
The individual must be the instrument and first field of the transforma-
tion; but an isolated individual transformation is not enough and may
not be wholly feasible. Even when achieved, the individual change v/ill
have a permanent and cosmic significance only if the individual becomes
a centre and a sign for the establishment of the supramental Conscious-
ness-Force as an overtly operative power in the terrestrial workings of
Nature, — in the same way in which thinking Mind has been established
through the human evolution as an overtly operative power in Life and
Matter. This would mean the appearance in the evolution of a gnostic
being or Purusha and a gnostic Prakriti, a gnostic Nature. There must
be an emergent supramental Consciousness-Force liberated and active
within the terrestrial whole and an organised supramental instrumen-
tation of the Spirit in the life and the body, — for the body consciousness
also must become sufficiently awake to be a fit instrument of the work-
ings of the new supramental Force and its new order. Till then any
intermediate change could be only partial or insecure; an overmind or
intuitive instrumentation of Nature could be developed, but it would be
a luminous formation imposed on a fundamental and environmental
Inconscience. A supramental principle and its cosmic operation once
established permanently on its own basis, the intervening powers of
Overmind and spiritual Mind could found themselves securely upon it
and reach their own perfection; they would become in the earth-exist-
ence a hierarchy of states of consciousness rising out of Mind and physi-
cal life to the suprem.e spiritual level. Mind and mental humanity would
remain as one step in the spiritual evolution; but other degrees above
it would be there formed and accessible by which the embodied mental
being, as it became ready, could climb into the gnosis and change into
an embodied supramental and spiritual being. On this basis the prin-
ciple of a divine life in terrestrial Nature would be manifested ; even the
world of ignorance and inconscience might discover its own submerged
secret and begin to realise in each lower degree its divine significance.

CHAPTER XXVII

THE GNOSTIC BEING

A perfect path of the Truth has come into being for
our journey to the other shore beyond the darkness.

Rig Veda?

0 Truth-Conscious, be conscious of the Truth, cleave
out many streams of the Truth.

Rig Veda/"

0 Flame, O Wine, your force has become conscious;
you have discovered the One Light for the many.

Rig Veda?

Pure-white and dual in her largenesses, she follows ef-
fectively, like one who knows, the path of the Truth and
diminishes not its directions.

Rig Veda.*

By the Truth they hold the Truth that holds all, in the
power of the Sacrifice, in the supreme ether.

Rig VedaP

O Immortal, thou art born in mortals in the law of
the Truth, of Immortality, of Beauty. , . . Born from the
Truth, he grows by the Truth, — a King, a Godhead, the
Truth, the Vast.

Rig Veda?

A S WE reach in our thought the line at which the evolution of mind
jfj^ into overmind passes over into an evolution of overmind into
supermind, we are faced with a difficulty which amounts almost to an
impossibility. For we are moved to seek for some precise idea, some
clear mental description of the supramental or gnostic existence of
which evolutionary Nature in the Ignorance is in travail; but by cross-
ing this extreme line of sublimated mind the consciousness passes out
of the sphere, exceeds the characteristic action and escapes from the
grasp, of mental perception and knowledge. It is evident indeed that
supramental nature must be a perfect integration and consummation of

M. 46. II.

* V. 80. 4.

=^V. 12. 2.
^V. IS. 2.

856

= 1. 93. 4.

'IX. iio. 4; 108. 8.

THE GNOSTIC BEING 857

spiritual nature and experience: it would also contain in itself, by the
very character of the evolutionary principle, though it would not be
limited to that change, a total spiritualisation of mundane Nature; our
world-experience would be taken up in this step of our evolution and,
by a transformation of its parts of divinity, a creative rejection of its
imperfections and disguises, reach some divine truth and plenitude.
But these are general formulas and give us no precise idea of the change.
Our normal perception or imagination or formulation of things spiritual
and things mundane is mental, but in the gnostic change the evolution
crosses a line beyond which there is a supreme and radical reversal of
consciousness and the standards and forms of mental cognition are no
longer sufficient: it is difficult for mental thought to understand or
describe supramental nature.

Mental nature and mental thought are based on a consciousness of
the finite; supramental nature is in its very grain a consciousness and
power of the Infinite. Supramental Nature sees everything from the
stand-point of oneness and regards all things, even the greatest multi-
plicity and diversity, even what are to the mind the strongest contra-
dictions, in the light of that oneness; its will, ideas, feelings, sense are
made of the stuff of oneness, its actions proceed upon that basis. Mental
Nature, on the contrary, thinks, sees, wills, feels, senses with division
as a starting-point and has only a constructed understanding of unity;
even when it experiences oneness it has to act from the oneness on a
basis of limitation and difference. But the supramental, the divine life is
a life of essential, spontaneous and inherent unity. It is impossible for
the mind to forecast in detail what the supramental change must be in
its parts of life action and outward behaviour or lay down for it what
forms it shall create for the individual or the collective existence. For the
mind acts by intellectual rule or device or by reasoned choice of will or
by mental impulse or in obedience to life impulse; but supramental
nature does not act by mental idea or rule or in subjection to any in-
ferior impulse: each of its steps is dictated by an innate spiritual vision,
a comprehensive and exact penetration into the truth of all and the truth
of each thing; it acts always according to inherent reality, not by the
mental idea, not according to an imposed law of conduct or a con-
structive thought or perceptive contrivance. Its movement is calm, self-
possessed, spontaneous, plastic; it arises naturally and inevitably out
of a harmonic identity of the truth which is felt in the very substance of
the conscious being, a spiritual substance which is universal and there-

858 THE LIFE DIVINE

fore intimately one with all that is included in its cognition of existence.
A mental description of supramental nature could only express itself
either in phrases which are too abstract or in mental figures which might
turn it into something quite different from its reality. It would not seem
to be possible, therefore, for the mind to anticipate or indicate what a
supramental being shall be or how he shall act; for here mental ideas
and formulations cannot decide anything or arrive at any precise defini-
tion or determination, because they are not near enough to the law and
self-vision of supramental Nature. At the same time certain deductions
can be made from the very fact of this difference of nature which might
be valid at least for a general description of the passage from Overmind
to Supermind or might vaguely construct for us an idea of the first status
of the evolutionary supramental existence.

This passage is the stage at which the supermind gnosis can take
over the lead of the evolution from the overmind and build the first
foundations of its own characteristic manifestation and unveiled activi-
ties; it must be marked therefore by a decisive but long-prepared tran-
sition from an evolution in the Ignorance to an always progressive
evolution in the Knowledge. It will not be a sudden revelation and effec-
tuation of the absolute Supermind and the supramental being as they are
in their own plane, the swift apocalypse of a truth-conscious existence
ever self- fulfilled and complete in self-knowledge; it will be the phe-
nomenon of the supramental being descending into a world of evolution-
ary becoming and forming itself there, unfolding the powers of the
gnosis within the terrestrial nature. This is indeed the principle of all
terrestrial being; for the process of earth-existence is the play of an
infinite Reality concealing itself first in a succession of obscurely lim-
ited, opaque and incomplete half-figures which by their imperfection and
character of disguise distort the truth of which they are in labour, but
afterwards arriving more and more at half-luminous figures of itself
which can become, once there is the supramental descent, a true pro-
gressive revelation. The descent from original supermind, the assump-
tion of evolutionary supermind is a step which the supramental gnosis
can very well undertake and accomplish without changing its own essen-
tial character. It can assume the formula of a truth-conscious existence
founded in an inherent self-knowledge but at the same time taking up
into itself mental nature and nature of life and material body. For the
supermind as the truth-consciousness of the Infinite has in its dynamic
principle the infinite power of a free self-determination. It can hold all

THE GNOSTIC BEING . 859

knowledge in itself and yet put forward in formulation only what is
needed at each stage of an evolution; it formulates whatever is in ac-
cordance with the Divine Will in manifestation and the truth of the
thing to be manifested. It is by this power that it is able to hold back
its knowledge, hide its own character and law of action and manifest
overmind and under overmind a world of ignorance in which the being
wills on its surface not to know and even puts itself under the control
of a pervading Nescience. But in this new stage the veil thus put on
will be lifted; the evolution at every step will move in the power of the
truth-consciousness and its progressive determinations will be made by
a conscious Knowledge and not in the forms of an Ignorance or Incon-
science.

As there has been established on earth a mental Consciousness and
Power which shapes a race of mental beings and takes up into itself all
of earthly nature that is ready for the change, so now there will be
established on earth a gnostic Consciousness and Power which will
shape a race of gnostic spiritual beings and take up into itself all of
earth-nature that is ready for this new transformation. It will also
receive into itself from above, progressively, from its own domain of
perfect light and power and beauty all that is ready to descend from
that domain into terrestrial being. For the evolution proceeded in the
past by the upsurging, at each critical stage, of a concealed Power from
its involution in the Inconscience, but also by a descent from above,
from its own plane, of that Power already self-realised in its own higher
natural province. In all these previous stages there has been a division
between surface self and consciousness and subliminal self and con-
sciousness; the surface was formed mainly under the push of the up-
surging force from below, by the Inconscient developing a slowly emer-
gent formulation of a concealed force of the spirit, the subliminal partly
in this way but mainly by a simultaneous influx of the largeness of the
same force from above: a mental or a vital being descended into the
subliminal parts and formed from its secret station there a mental or a
vital personality on the surface. But before the supramental change
can begin, the veil between the subliminal and the surface parts must
have been already broken down; the influx, the descent will be in the
entire consciousness as a whole, it will not take place partly behind a
veil: the process will be no longer a concealed, obscure and ambiguous
procedure but an open outflowering consciously felt and followed by
the whole being in its transmutation. In other respects the process will

86o THE LIFE DIVINE

be identical, — a. supramental inflow from above, the descent of a gnostic
being into the nature, and an emergence of the concealed supramental
force from below; the influx and the unveiling between them will re-
move what is left of the nature of the Ignorance. The rule of the Incon-
scient will disappear: for the Inconscience will be changed by the out-
burst of the greater secret Consciousness within it, the hidden Light,
into what it always was in reality, a sea of the secret Superconscience.
A first formation of a gnostic consciousness and nature will be the
consequence.

The creation of a supramental being, nature, life on earth, will not
be the sole result of this evolution; it will also carry with it the consum-
mation of the steps that have led up to it: for it will confirm in posses-
sion of terrestrial birth the overmind, the intuition and the other grada-
tions of the spiritual nature-force and establish a race of gnostic beings
and a hierarchy, a shining ladder of ascending degrees and successive
constituent formations of the gnostic light and power in earth-nature.
For the description of gnosis applies to all consciousness that is based
upon Truth of being and not upon the Ignorance or Nescience. All life
and living beings ready to rise beyond the mental ignorance, but not
ready yet for the supramental height, would find in a sort of echelon or
a scale with overlapping degrees their assured basis, their intermediate
steps of self-formation, their expression of realised capacity of spiritual
existence on the way to the supreme Reality. But also the presence of
the liberated and now sovereign supramental light and force at the head
of evolutionary Nature might be expected to have its consequences in
the whole evolution. An incidence, a decisive stress would affect the life
of the lower evolutionary stages; something of the light, something of
the force would penetrate downwards and awaken into a greater action
the hidden Truth-Power everywhere in Nature. A dominant principle
of harmony would impose itself on the life of the Ignorance; the dis-
cord, the blind seeking, the clash of struggle, the abnormal vicissitudes
of exaggeration and depression and unsteady balance of the unseeing
forces at work in their mixture and conflict, would feel the influence and
yield place to a more orderly pace and harmonic steps of the develop-
ment of being, a more revealing arrangement of progressing life and
consciousness, a better life-order. A freer play of intuition and sympathy
and understanding would enter into human life, a clearer sense of the
truth of self and things and a more enlightened dealing with the oppor-
tunities and difficulties of existence. Instead of a constant intermixed

THE GNOSTIC BEING 86 1

and confused struggle between the growth of Consciousness and the
power of the Inconscience, between the forces of Hght and the forces of
darkness, the evolution would become a graded progression from lesser
light to greater light; in each stage of it the conscious beings belonging
to that stage would respond to the inner Consciousness-Force and ex-
pand their own law of cosmic Nature towards the possibility of a higher
degree of that Nature. This is at least a strong possibility and might be
envisaged as the natural consequence of the direct action of supermind
on the evolution. This intervention would not annul the evolutionary
principle, for supermind has the power of withholding or keeping in
reserve its force of knowledge as well as the power of bringing it into
full or partial action; but it would harmonise, steady, facilitate, tran-
quillise and to a great extent hedonise the difficult and afflicted process
of the evolutionary emergence.

There is something in the nature of supermind itself that would
make this great result inevitable. It is in its foundation a unitarian and
integralising and harmonic consciousness, and in its descent and evolu-
tionary working out of the diversity of the Infinite it would not lose its
unitarian trend, its push towards integralisation or its harmonic influ-
ence. The Overmind follows out diversities and divergent possibilities
on their own lines of divergence: it can allow contradictions and dis-
cords, but it makes them elements of a cosmic whole so that they are
forced, however unwittingly and in spite of themselves, to contribute
their shares to its wholeness. Or we may say that it accepts and even
encourages contradictions, but obliges them to support each other's
existence so that there may be divergent roads of being and conscious-
ness and experience that lead away from the One and from each other
but still maintain themselves on the Oneness and can lead back again
each on its own path to the Oneness. That is the secret sense even of
our own world of Ignorance which works from the Inconscience but
with the underlying cosmicity of the overmind principle. But the indi-
vidual being in such a creation does not possess this secret principle in
knowledge and does not base upon it his action. An overmind being here
would perceive this secret; but he might still work on his own lines of
Nature and law of action, Swabhava, Swadharma, according to the in-
spiration, the dynamic control or the inner governance of the Spirit or
the Divine within him and leave the rest of their own line in the whole:
an overmind creation of knowledge in the Ignorance might therefore be
something separate from the surrounding world of Ignorance and

862 THE LIFE DIVINE

guarded from it by the luminous encircling and separating wall of its
own principle. The supramental gnostic being, on the contrary, would
not only found all his living on an intimate sense and effective realisa-
tion of harmonic unity in his own inner and outer life or group life, but
would create a harmonic unity also with the still surviving mental world,
even if that world remained altogether a world of Ignorance. For the
gnostic consciousness in him would perceive and bring out the evolving
truth and principle of harmony hidden in the formations of the Igno-
rance; it would be natural to his sense of integrality and it would be
within his power to link them in a true order with his own gnostic prin-
ciple and the evolved truth and harmony of his own greater life-creation.
That might be impossible without a considerable change in the life of
the world, but such a change would be a natural consequence of the
appearance of a new Power in Nature and its universal influence. In
the emergence of the gnostic being would be the hope of a more har-
monious evolutionary order in terrestrial Nature.

A supramental or gnostic race of beings would not be a race made
according to a single type, moulded in a single fixed pattern; for the
law of the supermind is unity fulfilled in diversity, and therefore there
would be an infinite diversity in the manifestation of the gnostic con-
sciousness although that consciousness would still be one in its basis, in
its constitution, in its all-revealing and all-uniting order. It is evident
that the triple status of the supermind would reproduce itself as a prin-
ciple in this new manifestation: there would be below it and yet belong-
ing to it the degrees of the overmind and intuitive gnosis with the souls
that had realised these degrees of the ascending consciousness; there
would be also at the summit, as the evolution in Knowledge proceeded,
individual beings who would ascend beyond a supermind formulation
and reach from the highest height of supermind to the summits of uni-
tarian self-realisation in the body which must be the last and supreme
state of the epiphany of the Creation. But in the supramental race itself,
in the variation of its degrees, the individuals would not be cast accord-
ing to a single type of individuality; each would be different from the
other, a unique formation of the Being, although one with all the rest
in foundation of self and sense of oneness and in the principle of his
being. It is only this general principle of the supramental existence of
which we can attempt to form an idea however diminished by the limi-
tations of mental thought and mental language. A more living picture

THE GNOSTIC BEING 863

of the gnostic being supermind only could make; for the mind some
abstract outlines of it are alone possible.

The gnosis is the effective principle of the Spirit, a highest dynamis
of the spiritual existence. The gnostic individual would be the consum-
mation of the spiritual man; his whole way of being, thinking, living,
acting would be governed by the power of a vast universal spirituality.
All the trinities of the Spirit would be real to his self-awareness and
realised in his inner life. All his existence would be fused into oneness
with the transcendent and universal Self and Spirit ; all his action would
originate from and obey the supreme Self and Spirit's divine governance
of Nature. All life would have to him the sense of the Conscious Being,
the Purusha within, finding its self-expression in Nature; his life and
all its thoughts, feelings, acts would be filled for him with that signifi-
cance and built upon that foundation of its reality. He would feel the
presence of the Divine in every centre of his consciousness, in every vi-
bration of his life-force, in every cell of his body. In all the workings of
his force of Nature he would be aware of the workings of the supreme
World-Mother, the Supernature; he would see his natural being as the
becoming and manifestation of the power of the World-Mother. In this
consciousness he would live and act in an entire transcendent freedom,
a complete joy of the spirit, an entire identity with the cosmic self and
a spontaneous sympathy with all in the universe. All beings would be
to him his own selves, all ways and powers of consciousness would be
felt as the ways and powers of his own universality. But in that in-
clusive universality there would be no bondage to inferior forces, no
deflection from his own highest truth: for this truth would envelop all
truth of things and keep each in its own place, in a relation of diversified
harmony, — it would not admit any confusion, clash, infringing of
boundaries, any distortion of the different harmonies that constitute
the total harmony. His own life and the world life would be to him like
a perfect work of art; it would be as if the creation of a cosmic and
spontaneous genius infallible in its working out of a multitudinous
order. The gnostic individual would be in the world and of the world,
but would also exceed it in his consciousness and live in his self of
transcendence above it; he would be universal but free in the universe,
individual but not limited by a separative individuality. The true Per-
son is not an isolated entity, his individuality is universal; for he indi-
vidualises the universe: it is at the same time divinely emergent in a

864 THE LIFE DIVINE

spiritual air of transcendental infinity, like a high cloud-surpassing
summit; for he individualises the divine Transcendence.

The three powers which present themselves to our life as the three
keys to its mystery are the individual, the cosmic entity and the Reality
present in both and beyond them. These three mysteries of existence
would find in the life of the supramental being a united fulfilment of
their harmony. He will be the perfected and complete individual, ful-
filled in the satisfaction of his growth and self-expression; for all his
elements would be carried to a highest degree and integrated in some
kind of comprehensive largeness. What we are striving towards is com-
pleteness and harmony; an imperfection and incapacity or a discord of
our nature is that from which inwardly we most suffer. But this is be-
cause of our incompleteness of being, our imperfect self-knowledge, our
imperfect possession of our self and our nature, A complete self-knowl-
edge in all things and at all moments is the gift of the supramental
gnosis and with it a complete self-mastery, not merely in the sense of
control of Nature but in the sense of a power of perfect self-expression
in Nature. Whatever knowledge of self there would be, would be per-
fectly embodied in the will of the self, the will perfectly embodied in the
action of the self; the result would be the self's complete dynamic self-
formulation in its own nature. In the lower grades of gnostic being,
there would be a limitation of self-expression according to the variety
of the nature, a limited perfection in order to formulate some side, ele-
ment or combined harmony of elements of some Divine Totality, a re-
stricted selection of powers from the cosmic figure of the infinitely
manifold One. But in the supramental being this need of limitation for
perfection would disappear; the diversity would not be secured by
limitation but by a diversity in the power and hue of the Supernature:
the same whole of being and the same whole of nature would express
themselves in an infinitely diverse fashion; for each being would be a
new totality, harmony, self-equation for the One Being. What would
be expressed in front or held behind at any moment would depend not
on capacity or incapacity, but on the dynamic self-choice of the Spirit,
its delight of self-expression, on the truth of the Divine's will and joy
of itself in the individual and, subordinately, on the truth of the thing
that had to be done through the individual in the harmony of the to-
tality. For the complete individual is the cosmic individual, since only
when we have taken the universe into ourselves — and transcended it —
can our individuality be complete.

THE GNOSTIC BEING 865

The supramental being in his cosmic consciousness seeing and
feeling all as himself would act in that sense; he would act in a universal
awareness and a harmony of his individual self with the total self, of
his individual will with the total will, of his individual action with the
total action. For what we most suffer from in our outer life and its
reactions upon our inner life is the imperfection of our relations with
the world, our ignorance of others, our disharmony with the whole of
things, our inability to equate our demand on the world with the
world's demand on us. There is a conflict — a conflict from which there
seems to be no ultimate issue except an escape from both world and
self — between our self-affirmation and a world on which we have to im-
pose that affirmation, a world which seems to be too large for us and
to pass indifferently over our soul, mind, life, body in the sweep of its
course to its goal. The relation of our course and goal to the world's is
unapparent to us, and to harmonise ourselves with it we have either to
enforce ourselves upon it and make it subservient to us or suppress our-
selves and become subservient to it or else to compass a difficult balance
between these two necessities of the relation between the individual per-
sonal destiny and the cosmic whole and its hidden purpose. But for the
supramental being living in a cosmic consciousness the difficulty would
not exist, since he has no ego; his cosmic individuality would know the
cosmic forces and their movement and their significance as part of him-
self, and the truth-consciousness in him would see the right relation at
each step and find the dynamic right expression of that relation.

For in fact both individual and universe are simultaneous and
interrelated expressions of the same transcendent Being; even though
in the Ignorance and under its law there is maladjustment and conflict,
yet there must be a right relation, an equation to which all arrives but
which is missed by our blindness of ego, our attempt to affirm the ego
and not the Self one in all. The supramental consciousness has that
truth of relation in itself as its natural right and privilege, since it is the
supermind that determines the cosmic relations and the relations of the
individual with the universe, determines them freely and sovereignly as
a power of the Transcendence. In the mental being even the pressure of
the cosmic consciousness overpowering the ego and an awareness of the
transcendent Reality might not of themselves bring about a dynamic
solution; for there might still be an incompatibility between its liber-
ated spiritual mentaHty and the obscure life of the cosmic Ignorance
which the mind would not have the power to solve or overcome. But in

866 THE LIFE DIVINE

the supramental being, not only statically conscious but fully dynamic
and acting in the creative light and power of the Transcendence, the
supramental light, the truth light, rtam jyotih, would have that power.
For there would be a unity with the cosmic self, but not a bondage to
the Ignorance of cosmic Nature in its lower formulation; there would
on the contrary be a power to act in the light of the Truth on that Igno-
rance. A large universality of self-expression, a large harmonic universal-
ity of world-being would be the very sign of the supramental Person in
his gnostic nature.

The existence of the supramental being would be the play of a
manifoldly and multiply manifesting truth-power of one-existence and
one-consciousness for the delight of one-existence. Delight of the mani-
festation of the Spirit in its truth of being would be the sense of the
gnostic life. All its movements would be a formulation of the truth of
the spirit, but also of the joy of the spirit, — an affirmation of spiritual
existence, an affirmation of spiritual consciousness, an affirmation of
spiritual delight of being. But this would not be what self-affirmation
tends to be in us in spite of the underlying unity, something ego-centric,
separative, opposed or indifferent or insufficiently alive to the self-
affirmation of others or their demand on existence. One in self with all,
the supramental being will seek the delight of self-manifestation of the
Spirit in himself but equally the delight of the Divine in all: he will
have the cosmic joy and will be a power for bringing the bliss of the
spirit, the joy of being to others; for their joy will be part of his own
joy of existence. To be occupied with the good of all beings, to make
the joy and grief of others one's own has been described as a sign of the
liberated and fulfilled spiritual man. The supramental being will have
no need, for that, of an altruistic self-effacement, since this occupation
will be intimate to his self-fulfilment, the fulfilment of the One in all,
and there will be no contradiction or strife between his own good and
the good of others: nor will he have any need to acquire a universal
sympathy by subjecting himself to the joys and griefs of creatures in
the Ignorance; his cosmic sympathy will be part of his inborn truth of
being and not dependent on a personal participation in the lesser joy
and suffering; it will transcend what it embraces and in that transcend-
ence will be its power. His feeling of universality, his action of univer-
sality will be always a spontaneous state and natural movement, an
automatic expression of the Truth, an act of the joy of the spirit's self-
existence. There could be in it no place for limited self or desire or for

THE GNOSTIC BEING 867

the satisfaction or frustration of the limited self or the satisfaction or
frustration of desire, no place for the relative and dependent happiness
and grief that visit and afflict our limited nature; for these are things
that belong to the ego and the Ignorance, not to the freedom and truth
of the Spirit.

The gnostic being has the will of action but also the knowledge of
what is to be willed and the power to effectuate its knowledge; it will not
be led from ignorance to do what is not to be done. Moreover, its action
is not the seeking for a fruit or result; its joy is in being and doing, in
pure state of spirit, in pure act of spirit, in the pure bliss of the spirit.
As its static consciousness will contain all in itself and must be, there-
fore, for ever self-fulfilled, so its dynamis of consciousness will find in
each step and in each act a spiritual freedom and a self-fulfilment. All
will be seen in its relation to the whole, so that each step will be lumi-
nous and joyous and satisfying in itself because each is in unison with a
luminous totality. This consciousness, this living in the spiritual totality
and acting from it, a satisfied totality in essence of being and a satisfied
totality in the dynamic movement of being, the sense of the relations of
that totality accompanying each step, is indeed the very mark of a
supramental cohsciousness and distinguishes it from the disintegrated,
ignorantly successive steps of our consciousness in the Ignorance. The
gnostic existence and delight of existence is a universal and total being
and delight, and there will be the presence of that totality and uni-
versality in each separate movement: in each there will be, not a partial
experience of self or a fractional bit of its joy, but the sense of the whole
movement of an integral being and the presence of its entire and integral
bliss of being, Ananda. The gnostic being's knowledge self-realised in
action will be, not an ideative knowledge, but the Real-Idea of the
supermind, the instrumentation of an essential light of Consciousness;
it will be the self-light of all the reality of being and becoming pouring
itself out continually and filling every particular act and activity with
the pure and whole delight of its self-existence. For an infinite conscious-
ness with its knowledge by identity there is in each differentiation the
joy and experience of the Identical, in each finite is felt the Infinite.

An evolution of gnostic consciousness brings with it a transforma-
tion of our world-consciousness and world-action: for it takes up into
the new power of awareness not only the inner existence but our outer
being and our world-being; there is a remaking of both, an integration
of them in the sense and power of the spiritual existence. There must

868 THE LIFE DIVINE

come upon us in the change at once a reversal and rejection of our pres-
ent way of existence and a fulfilment of its inner trend and tendency.
For we stand now between these two terms, an outer world of Life and
Matter that has made us and a remaking of the world by ourselves in
the sense of the evolving Spirit. Our present way of living is at once a
subjection to Life-Force and Matter and a struggle with Life and Mat-
ter. In its first appearance an outer existence creates by our reactions to
it an inner or mental existence; if we shape ourselves at all, it is in most
men less by the conscious pressure of a free soul or intelligence from
within than by a response to our environment and the world-Nature
acting upon us: but what we move towards in the development of our
conscious being is an inner existence creating by its knowledge and
power its own outer form of living and self-expressive environment of
living. In the gnostic nature this movement will have consummated
itself; the nature of living will be an accomplished inner existence whose
light and power will take perfect body in the outer life. The gnostic
being will take up the world of Life and Matter, but he will turn and
adapt it to his own truth and purpose of existence; he will mould life
itself into his own spiritual image, and this he will be able to do because
he has the secret of a spiritual creation and is in communion and oneness
with the Creator within him. This will be first effective in the shaping of
his own inner and outer individual existence, but the same power and
principle will operate in any common gnostic life ; the relations of gnos-
tic being with gnostic being will be the expression of their one gnostic
self and supernature shaping into a significant power and form of itself
the whole common existence.

In all spiritual living the inner life is the thing of first importance ;
the spiritual man lives always within, and in a world of the Ignorance
that refuses to change he has to be in a certain sense separate from it
and to guard his inner life against the intrusion and influence of the
darker forces of the Ignorance: he is out of the world even when he is
within it; if he acts upon it, it is from the fortress of his inner spiritual
being where in the inmost sanctuary he is one with the Supreme Exist-
ence or the soul and God are alone together. The gnostic life will be an
inner life in which the antinomy of the inner and the outer, the self and
the world will have been cured and exceeded. The gnostic being will
have indeed an inmost existence in which he is alone with God, one
with the Eternal, self -plunged into the depths of the Infinite, in com-
munion with its heights and its luminous abysses of secrecy; nothing

THE GNOSTIC BEING 869

will be able to disturb or to invade these depths or bring him down from
the summits, neither the world's contents nor his action nor all that is
around him. This is the transcendence aspect of the spiritual life and
it is necessary for the freedom of the spirit ; for otherwise the identity in
Nature with the world would be a binding limitation and not a free
identity. But at the same time God-love and the delight of God will
be the heart's expression of that inner communion and oneness, and
that delight and 'love will expand itself to embrace all existence. The
peace of God within will be extended in the gnostic experience of the
universe into a universal calm of equality not merely passive but dy-
namic, a calm of freedom in oneness dominating all that meets it, tran-
quillising all that enters into it, imposing its law of peace on the supra-
mental being's relations with the world in which he is living. Into all his
acts the inner oneness, the inner communion will attend him and enter
into his relations with others, who will not be to him others but selves
of himself in the one existence, his own universal existence. It is this
poise and freedom in the spirit that will enable him to take all life into
himself while still remaining the spiritual self and to embrace even the
world of the Ignorance without himself entering into the Ignorance.

For his experience of cosmic existence will be, by its form of nature
and by an individualised centration, that of one living in the universe
but, at the same time, by self-diffusion and extension in oneness, that
of one who carries the universe and all its beings within him. This ex-
tended state of being will not only be an extension in oneness of self
or an extension in conceptive idea and vision, but an extension of one-
ness in heart, in sense, in a concrete physical consciousness. He will
have the cosmic consciousness, sense, feeling, by which all objective life
will become part of his subjective existence and by which he will realise,
perceive, feel, see, hear the Divine in all forms; all forms and move-
ments will be realised, sensed, seen, heard, felt as if taking place within
his own vast self of being. The world will be connected not only with
his outer but with his inner life. He will not meet the world only in its
external form by an external contact; he will be inwardly in contact with
the inner self of things and beings: he will meet consciously their inner
as well as their outer reactions; he will be aware of that within them of
which they themselves will not be aware, act upon all with an inner
comprehension, encounter all with a perfect sympathy and sense of one-
ness but also an independence which is not overmastered by any con-
tact. His action on the world will be largely an inner action by the

870 THE LIFE DIVINE

power of the spirit, by the spiritual-supramental idea-force formulating
itself in the world, by the secret unspoken word, by the power of the
heart, by the dynamic life-force, by the enveloping and penetrating
power of the self one with all things; the outer expressed and visible
action will be only a fringe, a last projection of this vaster single total
of activity.

At the same time the universal inner life of the individual will not
be confined to an inner pervasive and inclusive contact with the physical
world alone: it will extend beyond it through the full realisation of the
subliminal inner being's natural connection with other planes of being;
a knowledge of their powers and influences will have become a normal
element of the inner experience, and the happenings of this world will be
seen not solely in their external aspect but also in the light of all that is
secret behind the physical and terrestrial creation and movement. A
gnostic being will possess not only a truth-conscious control of the real-
ised spirit's power over its physical world, but also the full power of the
mental and vital planes and the use of their greater forces for the per-
fection of the physical existence. This greater knowledge and wider hold
of all existence will enormously increase the power of instrumentation
of the gnostic being on his surroundings and on the world of physical
Nature.

In the Self-Existence of which supermind is the dynamic Truth-
consciousness, there can be no aim of being except to be, no aim of con-
sciousness except to be conscious of being, no aim of delight of being
other than its delight; all is a self -existent and self-sufficient Eternity.
Manifestation, becoming, has in its original supramental movement the
same character; it sustains in a self-existent and self-sufficient rhythm
an activity of being which sees itself as a manifold becoming, an activ-
ity of consciousness which takes the form of a manifold self-knowledge,
an activity of force of conscious existence which exists for the glory and
beauty of its own manifold power of being, an activity of delight which
assumes innumerable forms of delight. The existence and consciousness
of the supramental being here in Matter will have fundamentally the
same nature, but with subordinate characters which mark the difference
between supermind in its own plane and supermind working in its mani-
fested power in the earth existence. For here there will be an evolving
being, an evolving consciousness, an evolving delight of existence. The
gnostic being will appear as the sign of an evolution from the conscious-
ness of the Ignorance into the consciousness of Sachchidananda. In the

THE GNOSTIC BEING 87 1

Ignorance one is there primarily to grow, to know and to do, or, more
exactly to grow into something, to arrive by knowledge at something,
to get something done. Imperfect, we have no satisfaction of our being,
we must perforce strive with labour and difficulty to grow into some-
thing we are not; ignorant and burdened with a consciousness of our
ignorance, we have to arrive at something by which we can feel that we
know; bounded with incapacity, we have to hunt after strength and
power, afflicted with a consciousness of suffering, we have to try to get
something done by which we catch at some pleasure or lay hold on some
satisfying reality of life. To maintain existence is, indeed, our first occu-
pation and necessity, but it is only a starting-point: for the mere main-
tenance of an imperfect existence chequered with suffering cannot be
sufficient as an aim of our being; the instinctive will of existence, the
pleasure of existence, which is all that the Ignorance can make out of
the secret underlying Power and Ananda, has to be supplemented by
the need to do and become. But what to do and what to become is not
clearly known to us; we get what knowledge we can, what power,
strength, purity, peace we can, what delight we can, become w^hat we
can. But our aims and our effort towards their achievement and the
little we can hold as our gains turn into meshes by which we are bound ;
it is these things that become for us the object of life: to know our souls
and to be our selves, which must be the foundation of our true way of
being, is a secret that escapes us in our preoccupation with an external
learning, an external construction of knowledge, the achievement of an
external action, an external delight and pleasure. The spiritual man is
one who has discovered his soul: he has found his self and lives in that,
is conscious of it, has the joy of it; he needs nothing external for his
completeness of existence. The gnostic being starting from this new
basis takes up our ignorant becoming and turns it into a luminous be-
coming of knowledge and a realised power of being. All therefore that
is our attempt to be in the Ignorance, he will fulfil in the Knowledge.
All knowledge he will turn into a manifestation of the self-knowledge of
being, all power and action into a power and action of the self-force of
being, all delight into a universal delight of self-existence. Attachment
and bondage will fall away, because at each step and in each thing there
will be the full satisfaction of self-existence, the light of the conscious-
ness fulfilling itself, the ecstasy of delight of existence finding itself.
Each stage of the evolution in the knowledge will be an unfolding of
this power and will of being and this joy to be, a free becoming sup-

872 THE LIFE DIVINE

ported by the sense of the Infinite, the bliss of the Brahman, the lumi-
nous sanction of the Transcendence.

The supramental transformation, the supramental evolution must
carry with it a lifting of mind, life and body out of themselves into a
greater way of being in which yet their own ways and powers would be,
not suppressed or abolished, but perfected and fulfilled by the self-
exceeding. For in the Ignorance all paths are the paths of the spirit
seeking for itself blindly or with a growing light; the gnostic being and
life would be the spirit's self-discovery and its seeing and reaching of
the aims of all these paths but in the greater way of its own revealed
and conscious truth of being. Mind seeks for light, for knowledge, — for
knowledge of the one truth basing all, an essential truth of self and
things, but also of all truth of diversity of that oneness, all its detail,
circumstance, manifold way of action, form, law of movement and hap-
pening, various manifestation and creation; for thinking mind the joy
of existence is discovery and the penetration of the mystery of creation
that comes with knowledge. This the gnostic change will fulfil in an
ample measure; but it will give it a new character. It will act not by the
discovery of the unknown, but by the bringing out of the known; all will
be the finding "of the self by the self in the self." For the self of the
gnostic being will not be the mental ego but the Spirit that is one in all ;
he will see the world as a universe of the Spirit. The finding of the one
truth underlying all things will be the Identical discovering identity and
identical truth everywhere and discovering too the power and workings
and relations of that identity. The revelation of the detail, the circum-
stance, the abundant ways and forms of the manifestation will be the
unveiling of the endless opulence of the truths of that identity, its forms
and powers of self, its curious manifoldness and multiplicity of form
bringing out infinitely its oneness. This knowledge will proceed by
identification with all, by entering into all, by a contact bringing with
it a leap of self-discovery and a flame of recognition, a greater and surer
intuition of truth than the mind can reach; there will be an intuition too
of the means of embodying and utilising the truth seen, an operative
intuition of its dynamic processes, a direct intimate awareness guiding
the life and the physical sense in every step of their action and service
to the Spirit when they have to be called in as instruments for the effec-
tuation of process in life and matter.

A replacement of intellectual seeking by supramental identity and
gnostic intuition of the contents of the identity, an omnipresence of

THE GNOSTIC BEING 873

spirit with its light penetrating the whole process of knowledge and all
its use, so that there is an integration between the knower, knowledge
and the thing known, between the operating consciousness, the instru-
mentation and the thing done, while the single self watches over the
whole integrated movement and fulfils itself intimately in it, making it
a flawless unit of self-effectuation, will be the character of each gnostic
movement of knowledge and action of knowledge. Mind, observing and
reasoning, labours to detach itself and see objectively and truly what
it has to know; it tries to know it as not-self, independent other-reality
not affected by process of personal thinking or by any presence of self:
the gnostic consciousness will at once intimately and exactly know its
object by a comprehending and penetrating identification with it. It
will overpass what it has to know, but it will include it in itself; it will
know the object as part of itself as it might know any part or movement
of its own being, without any narrowing of itself by the identification
or snaring of its thought in it so as to be bound or limited in knowledge.
There will be the intimacy, accuracy, fullness of a direct internal knowl-
edge, but not that misleading by personal mind by which we constantly
err, because the consciousness will be that of a universal and not a re-
stricted and ego-bound person. It will proceed towards all knowledge,
not setting truth against truth to see which will stand and survive, but
completing truth by truth in the light of the one Truth of which all are
the aspects. All idea and vision and perception will have this character
of an inner seeing, an intimate extended self-perception, a large self-
integrating knowledge, an indivisible whole working itself out by light
acting upon light in a self-executing harmony of truth-being. There will
be an unfolding, not as a delivery of light out of darkness, but as a
delivery of light out of itself; for if an evolving supramental Conscious-
ness holds back part of its contents of self-awareness behind in itself, it
does this not as a step or by an act of Ignorance, but as the movement
of a deliberate bringing out of its timeless knowledge into a process of
Time-manifestation. A self-illumination, a revelation of light out of
light will be the method of cognition of this evolutionary supramental
Nature.

As mind seeks for light, for the discovery of knowledge and for
mastery by knowledge, so life seeks for the development of its own force
and for mastery by force: its quest is for growth, power, conquest, pos-
session, satisfaction, creation, joy, love, beauty; its joy of existence is
in a constant self-expression, development, diverse manifoldness of

874 THE LIFE DIVINE

action, creation, enjoyment, an abundant and strong intensity of itself
and its power. The gnostic evolution will lift that to its highest and
fullest expression, but it will not act for the power, satisfaction, enjoy-
ment of the mental or vital ego, for its narrow possession of itself and
its eager ambitious grasp on others and on things or for its greater self-
affirmation and magnified embodiment; for in that way no spiritual
fullness and perfection can come. The gnostic life will exist and act for
the Divine in itself and in the world, for the Divine in all; the increas-
ing possession of the individual being and the world by the Divine Pres-
ence, Light, Power, Love, Delight, Beauty will be the sense of life to
the gnostic being. In the more and more perfect satisfaction of that
growing manifestation will be the individual's satisfaction: his power
will be the instrumentation of the power of Supernature for bringing in
and extending that greater life and nature; whatever conquest and ad-
venture will be there, will be for that only and not for the reign of any
individual or collective ego. Love will be for him the contact, meeting,
union of self with self, of spirit with spirit, a unification of being, a
power and joy and intimacy and closeness of soul to soul, of the One
to the One, a joy of identity and the consequences of a diverse identity.
It is this joy of an intimate self-revealing diversity of the One, the
multitudinous union of the One and a happy interaction in the identity,
that will be for him the full revealed sense of life. Creation aesthetic or
dynamic, mental creation, life creation, material creation will have for
him the same sense. It will be the creation of significant forms of the
Eternal Force, Light, Beauty, Reality, — the beauty and truth of its
forms and bodies, the beauty and truth of its powers and qualities, the
beauty and truth of its spirit, its formless beauty of self and essence.

As a consequence of the total change and reversal of consciousness
establishing a new relation of spirit with mind and life and matter, and
a new significance and perfection in the relation, there will be a reversal,
a perfecting new significance also of the relations between the spirit and
the body it inhabits. In our present way of living the soul expresses
itself, as best it can or as badly as it must, through the mind and the
vitality, or, more often, allows the mind and the vitality to act with its
support: the body is the instrument of this action. But the body, even
in obeying, limits and determines the mind's and the life's self-expression
by the limited possibilities and acquired character of its own physical
instrumentation ; it has besides a law of its own action, a movement and
will or force or urge of movement of its own subconscious or half-

THE GNOSTIC BEING 875

emerged conscious power of being which they can only partially — and
even in that part more by an indirect than by a direct or, if direct, then
more by a subconscious than a willed and conscious action — influence
or alter. But in the gnostic way of being and living the will of the spirit
must directly control and determine the movements and law of the
body. For the law of the body arises from the subconscient or incon-
scient: but in the gnostic being the subconscient will have become
conscious and subject to the supramental control, penetrated with its
light and action; the basis of inconscience with its obscurity and am-
biguity, its obstruction or tardy responses will have been transformed
into a lower or supporting superconscience by the supramental emer-
gence. Already even in the realised higher-mind being and in the intui-
tive and overmind being the body will have become sufficiently conscious
to respond to the influence of the Idea and the Will-Force so that the
action of mind on the physical parts, which is rudimentary, chaotic and
mostly involuntary in us, will have developed a considerable potency:
but in the supramental being it is the consciousness with the Real-Idea
in it which will govern everything. This real-idea is a truth-perception
which is self-effective; for it is the idea and will of the spirit in direct
action and originates a movement of the substance of being which must
inevitably effectuate itself in state and act of being. It is this dynamic
irresistible spiritual realism of the Truth-consciousness in the highest
degree of itself that will have here grown conscient and consciously com-
petent in the evolved gnostic being: it vidll not act as now, veiled in an
apparent inconscience and self-limited by law of mechanism, but as the
sovereign Reality in self-effectuating action. It is this that will rule the
existence with an entire knowledge and power and include in its rule
the functioning and action of the body. The body will be turned by the
power of the spiritual consciousness into a true and fit and perfectly
responsive instrument of the Spirit.

This new relation of the spirit and the body assumes — and makes
possible — a free acceptance of the w^hole of material Nature in place of
a rejection; the drawing back from her, the refusal of all identification
or acceptance, which is the first normal necessity of the spiritual con-
sciousness for its liberation, is no longer imperative. To cease to be
identified with the body, to separate oneself from the body conscious-
ness, is a recognised and necessary step whether towards spiritual libera-
tion or towards spiritual perfection and mastery over Nature. But, this
redemption once effected, the descent of the spiritual light and force

876 THE LIFE DIVINE

can invade and take up the body also and there can be a new liberated
and sovereign acceptance of material Nature. That is possible, indeed,
only if there is a changed communion of the Spirit with Matter, a con-
trol, a reversal of the present balance of interaction which allows physi-
cal Nature to veil the Spirit and affirm her own dominance. In the light
of a larger knowledge Matter also can be seen to be the Brahman, a
self -energy put forth by the Brahman, a form and substance of Brah-
man; aware of the secret consciousness within material substance, se-
cure in this larger knowledge, the gnostic light and power can unite itself
with Matter, so seen, and accept it as an instrument of a spiritual mani-
festation. A certain reverence, even, for Matter and a sacramental atti-
tude in all dealings with it is possible. As in the Gita the act of the tak-
ing of food is spoken of as a material sacrament, a sacrifice, an offering
of Brahman to Brahman by Brahman, so also the gnostic consciousness
and sense can view all the operations of Spirit with Matter. The Spirit
has made itself Matter in order to place itself there as an instrument for
the well-being and joy, yogaksema, of created beings, for a self-offering
of universal physical utility and service. The gnostic being, using Matter
but using it without material or vital attachment or desire, will feel that
he is using the Spirit in this form of itself with its consent and sanction
for its own purpose. There will be in him a certain respect for physical
things, an awareness of the occult consciousness in them, of its dumb will
of utility and service, a worship of the Divine, the Brahman in what he
uses, a care for a perfect and faultless use of his divine material, for a
true rhythm, ordered harmony, beauty in the life of Matter, in the utilisa-
tion of Matter.

As a result of this new relation between the Spirit and the body,
the gnostic evolution will effectuate the spiritualisation, perfection and
fufilment of the physical being; it will do for the body as for the mind
and life. Apart from the obscurity, frailties and limitations, which this
change will overcome, the body-consciousness is a patient servant and
can be in its large reserve of possibilities a potent instrument of the
individual life, and it asks for little on its own account: what it craves
for is duration, health, strength, physical perfection, bodily happiness,
liberation from suffering, ease. These demands are not in themselves un-
acceptable, mean or illegitimate, for they render into the terms of Matter
the perfection of form and substance, the power and delight which should
be the natural outflowing, the expressive manifestation of the Spirit.
When the gnostic Force can act in the body, these things can be estab-

THE GNOSTIC BEING 877

lished; for their opposites come from a pressure of external forces on
the physical mind, on the nervous and material life, on the body-organ-
ism, from an ignorance that does not know how to meet these forces or
is not able to meet them rightly or with power, and from some obscurity,
pervading the stuff of the physical consciousness and distorting its re-
sponses, that reacts to them in a wrong way. A supramental self-acting
self-effectuating awareness and knowledge, replacing this ignorance, will
liberate and restore the obscured and spoiled intuitive instincts in the
body and enlighten and supplement them with a greater conscious ac-
tion. This change would institute and maintain a right physical percep-
tion of things, a right relation and right reaction to objects and energies,
a right rhythm of mind, nerve and organism. It would bring into the
body a higher spiritual power and a greater life-force unified with the
universal Hfe-force and able to draw on it, a luminous harmony with
material Nature and the vast and calm touch of the eternal repose which
can give to it its diviner strength and ease. Above all, — for this is the
most needed and fundamental change, — it will flood the whole being with
a supreme energy of Consciousness- Force which would meet, assimilate
or harmonise with itself all the forces of existence that surround and
press upon the body.

It is the incompleteness and weakness of the Consciousness-Force
manifested in the mental, vital and physical being, its inability to re-
ceive or refuse at will, or, receiving, to assimilate or harmonise the con-
tacts of the universal Energy cast upon it, that is the cause of pain and
suffering. In the material realm Nature starts with an entire insensibility,
and it is a notable fact that either a comparative insensibility or a defi-
cient sensibility or, more often, a greater endurance and hardness to
suffering is found in the beginnings of life, in the animal, in primitive
or less developed man; as the human being grows in evolution, he grows
in sensibility and suffers more keenly in mind and life and body. For
the growth in consciousness is not sufficiently supported by a growth in
force: the body becomes more subtle, more finely capable, but less
solidly efficient in its external energy: man has to call in his will, his
mental power to dynamise, correct and control his nervous being, force
it to the strenuous tasks he demands from his instruments, steel it
against suffering and disaster. In the spiritual ascent this power of the
consciousness and its will over the instruments, the control of spirit and
inner mind over the outer mentality and the nervous being and the body,
increases immensely; a tranquil and wide equality of the spirit to all

878 THE LIFE DIVINE

shocks and contacts comes in and becomes the habitual poise, and this
can pass from the mind to the vital parts and establish there too an
immense and enduring largeness of strength and peace; even in the body
this state may form itself and meet inwardly the shocks of grief and
pain and all kinds of suffering. Even, a power of willed physical insen-
sibility can intervene or a power of mental separation from all shock and
injury can be acquired which shows that the ordinary reactions and the
debile submission of the bodily self to the normal habits of response of
material Nature are not obligatory or unalterable. Still more significant
is the power that comes on the level of spiritual mind or overmind to
change the vibrations of pain into vibrations of Ananda: even if this were
to go only up to a certain point, it indicates the possibility of an entire
reversal of the ordinary rule of the reacting consciousness; it can be as-
sociated too with a power of self-protection that turns away the shocks
that are more difficult to transmute or to endure. The gnostic evolution
at a certain stage must bring about a completeness of this reversal and
of this power of self-protection which will fulfil the claim of the body for
immunity and serenity of its being and for deliverance from suffering and
build in it a power for the total delight of existence. A spiritual Ananda
can flow into the body and inundate cell and tissue; a luminous ma-
terialisation of this higher Ananda could of itself bring about a total
transformation of the deficient or adverse sensibilities of physical nature.
An aspiration, a demand for the supreme and total delight of exist-
ence is there secretly in the whole make of our being, but it is disguised
by the separation of our parts of nature and their differing urge and
obscured by their inability to conceive or seize anything more than a su-
perficial pleasure. In the body consciousness this demand takes shape as
a need of bodily happiness, in our life parts as a yearning for life happi-
ness, a keen vibrant response to joy and rapture of many kinds and to
all surprise of satisfaction; in the mind it shapes into a ready reception
of all forms of mental delight; on a higher level it becomes apparent
in the spiritual mind's call for peace and divine ecstasy. This trend is
founded in the truth of the being; for Ananda is the very essence of the
Brahman, it is the supreme nature of the omnipresent Reality. The su-
permind itself in the descending degrees of the manifestation emerges
from the Ananda and in the evolutionary ascent merges into the Ananda.
It is not, indeed, merged in the sense of being extinguished or abolished
but is there inherent in it, indistinguishable from the self of awareness
and the self-effectuating force of the Bliss of Being. In the involution-

THE GNOSTIC BEING 879

ary descent as in the evolutionary return supermind is supported by the
original Delight of Existence and carries that in it in all its activities
as their sustaining essence ; for Consciousness, we may say, is its parent
power in the Spirit, but Ananda is the spiritual matrix from which it
manifests and the maintaining source into which it carries back the soul
in its return to the status of the Spirit. A supramental manifestation in
its ascent would have as a next sequence and culmination of self-result
a manifestation of the Bliss of the Brahman: the evolution of the being
of gnosis would be followed by an evolution of the being of bliss ; an em-
bodiment of gnostic existence would have as its consequence an embodi-
ment of the beatific existence. Always in the being of gnosis, in the life
of the gnosis some power of the Ananda would be there as an inseparable
and pervading significance of supramental self-experience. In the libera-
tion of the soul from the Ignorance the first foundation is peace, calm,
the silence and quietude of the Eternal and Infinite; but a consummate
power and greater formation of the spiritual ascension takes up this
peace of liberation into the bliss of a perfect experience and realisation
of the eternal beatitude, the bliss of the Eternal and Infinite. This
Ananda would be inherent in the gnostic consciousness as a universal
delight and would grow with the evolution of the gnostic nature.

It has been held that ecstasy is a lower and transient passage, the
peace of the Supreme is the supreme realisation, the consummate abid-
ing experience. This may be true on the spiritual-mind plane: there the
first ecstasy felt is indeed a spiritual rapture, but it can be and is very
usually mingled with a supreme happiness of the vital parts taken up
by the spirit; there is an exaltation, exultation, excitement, a highest
intensity of the joy of the heart and the pure inner soul-sensation that
can be a splendid passage or an uplifting force but is not the ultimate
permanent foundation. But in the highest ascents of the spiritual bliss
there is not this vehement exaltation and excitement; there is instead
an illimitable intensity of participation in an eternal ecstasy which is
founded on the eternal Existence and therefore on a beatific tranquillity
of eternal peace. Peace and ecstasy cease to be different and become one.
The supermind, reconciling and fusing all differences as well as all con-
tradictions, brings out this unity; a wide calm and a deep delight of all-
existence are among its first steps of self-realisation, but this calm and
this delight rise together, as one state, into an increasing intensity and
culminate in the eternal ecstasy, the bliss that is the Infinite. In the
gnostic consciousness at any stage there would be always in some degree

880 THE LIFE DIVINE

this fundamental and spiritual conscious delight of existence in the whole
depth of the being; but also all the movements of Nature would be per-
vaded by it, and all the actions and reactions of the life and the body:
none could escape the law of the Ananda. Even before the gnostic change
there can be a beginning of this fundamental ecstasy of being translated
into a manifold beauty and delight. In the mind, it translates into a
calm of intense delight of spiritual perception and vision and knowledge,
in the heart into a wide or deep or passionate delight of universal union
and love and sympathy and the joy of beings and the joy of things. In
the will and vital parts it is felt as the energy of delight of a divine life-
power in action or a beatitude of the senses perceiving and meeting the
One everywhere, perceiving as their normal sesthesis of things a univer-
sal beauty and a secret harmony of creation of which our mind can catch
only imperfect glimpses or a rare supernormal sense. In the body it re-
veals itself as an ecstasy pouring into it from the heights of the spirit
and the peace and bliss of a pure and spiritualised physical existence.
A universal beauty and glory of being begins to manifest; all objects
reveal hidden lines, vibrations, power, harmonic significances concealed
from the normal mind and the physical sense. In the universal phe-
nomenon is revealed the eternal Ananda.

These are the first major results of the spiritual transformation that
follow as a necessary consequence of the nature of Supermind. But if
there is to be not only a perfection of the inner existence, of the con-
sciousness, of an inner delight of existence, but a perfection of the life
and action, two other questions present themselves from our mental view-
point which have to our human thought about our life and its dyna-
misms a considerable, even a premier importance. First, there is the
place of personality in the gnostic being, — ^whether the status, the build-
ing of the being will be quite other than what we experience as the form
and life of the person or similar. If there is a personality and it is in
any way responsible for its actions, there intervenes, next, the question
of the place of the ethical element and its perfection and fulfilment in
the gnostic nature. Ordinarily, in the common notion, the separative ego
is our self and, if ego has to disappear in a transcendental or universal
Consciousness, personal life and action must cease; for, the individual
disappearing, there can only be an impersonal consciousness, a cosmic
self ; but if the individual is altogether extinguished, no further question
of personality or responsibility or ethical perfection can arise. According
to another line of ideas the spiritual person remains, but liberated,

THE GNOSTIC BEING 88 1

purified, perfected in nature in a celestrial existence. But here we are
still on earth, and yet it is supposed that the ego personality is extin-
guished and replaced by a universalised spiritual individual who is a
centre and power of the transcendent Being. It might be deduced that
this gnostic or supramental individual is a self without personality, an
impersonal Purusha. There could be many gnostic individuals but there
would be no personality, all would be the same in being and nature.
This, again, would create the idea of a void or blank of pure being from
which an action and function of experiencing consciousness would arise,
but without a construction of differentiated personality such as that
which we now observe and regard as ourselves on our surface. But this
would be a mental rather than a supramental solution of the problem of
a spiritual individuality surviving ego and persisting in experience. In
the supermind consciousness personality and impersonality are not op-
posite principles; they are inseparable aspects of one and the same real-
ity. This reality is not the ego but the being, who is impersonal and
universal in his stuff of nature, but forms out of it an expressive person-
ality which is his form of self in the changes of Nature.

Impersonality is in its source something fundamental and univer-
sal; it is an existence, a force, a consciousness that takes on various
shapes of its being and energy; each such shape of energy, quality, power
or force, though still in itself general, impersonal and universal, is taken
by the individual being as material for the building of his personality.
Thus impersonality is in the original undifferentiated truth of things the
pure substance of nature of the Being, the Person ; in the dynamic truth
of things it differentiates its powers and lends them to constitute by their
variations the manifestation of personality. Love is the nature of the
lover, courage the nature of the warrior; love and courage are imper-
sonal and universal forces or formulations of the cosmic Force, they are
the spirit's powers of its universal being and nature. The Person is the
Being supporting what is thus impersonal, holding it in himself as his,
his nature of self; he is that which is the lover and warrior. What we
call the personality of the Person is his expression in nature-status and
nature-action, — ^he himself being in his self-existence, originally and ul-
timately, much more than that; it is the form of himself that he puts
forth as his manifested already developed natural being or self in na-
ture. In the formed limited individual it is his personal expression of
what is impersonal, his personal appropriation of it, we may say, so as
to have a material with which he can build a significant figure of himself

882 THE LIFE DIVINE

in manifestation. In his formless unlimited self, his real being, the true
Person or Purusha, he is not that, but contains in himself boundless and
universal possibilities; but he gives to them, as the divine Individual,
his own turn in the manifestation so that each among the Many is a
unique self of the one Divine. The Divine, the Eternal, expresses him-
self as existence, consciousness, bliss, wisdom, knowledge, love, beauty,
and we can think of him as these impersonal and universal powers of
himself, regard them as the nature of the Divine and Eternal; we can
say that God is Love, God is Wisdom, God is Truth or Righteousness:
but he is not himself an impersonal state or abstract of states or qual-
ities; he is the Being, at once absolute, universal and individual. If we
look at it from this basis, there is, very clearly, no opposition, no incom.-
patibility, no impossibility of a co-existence or one-existence of the Im-
personal and the Person; they are each other, live in one another, melt
into each other, and yet in a way can appear as if different ends, sides,
obverse and reverse of the same Reality. The gnostic being is of the
nature of the Divine and therefore repeats in himself this natural mys-
tery of existence.

A supramental gnostic individual will be a spiritual Person, but not
a personality in the sense of a pattern of being marked out by a settled
combination of fixed qualities, a determined character; he cannot be
that since he is a conscious expression of the universal and the tran-
scendent. But neither can his being be a capricious impersonal flux throw-
ing up at random waves of various form, waves of personality as it pours
through Time. Something like this may be felt in men who have no
strong centralising Person in their depths but act from a sort of confused
multi-personality according to whatever element in them becomes prom-
inent at the time; but the gnostic consciousness is a consciousness of har-
mony and self-knowledge and self-mastery and would not present such
a disorder. There are, indeed, varying notions of what constitutes per-
sonality and what constitutes character. In one view personality is
regarded as a fixed structure of recognisable qualities expressing a power
of being; but another idea distinguishes personality and character, per-
sonality as a flux of self-expressive or sensitive and responsive being,
character as a formed fixity of Nature's structure. But flux of nature
and fixity of nature are two aspects of being neither of which, nor indeed
both together, can be a definition of personality. For in all men there
is a double element, the unformed though limited flux of being or Na-

THE GNOSTIC BEING 883

ture out of which personahty is fashioned and the personal formation
out of that flux. The formation may become rigid and ossify or it may
remain sufficiently plastic to change constantly and develop; but it
develops out of the formative flux, by a modification or enlargement or
remoulding of the personality, not, ordinarily, by an abolition of the
formation already made and the substitution of a new form of being, —
this can only occur in an abnormal turn or a supernormal conversion.
But besides this flux and this fixity there is also a third and occult ele-
ment, the Person behind of whom the personality is a self-expression;
the Person puts forward the personality as his role, character, persona,
in the present act of his long drama of manifested existence. But the
Person is larger than his personality, and it may happen that this inner
largeness overflows into the surface formation ; the result is a self-expres-
sion of being which can no longer be described by fixed qualities, nor-
malities of mood, exact lineaments, or marked out by any structural
limits. But neither is it a mere indistinguishable, quite amorphous and
unseizable flux: though its acts of nature can be characterised but not
itself, still it can be distinctively felt, followed in its action, it can be
recognised, though it cannot easily be described; for it is a power of
being rather than a structure. The ordinary restricted personality can
be grasped by a description of the characters stamped on its life and
thought and action, its very definite surface buflding and expression of
self; even if we may miss whatever was not so expressed, that might
seem to detract little from the general adequacy of our understanding,
because the element missed is usually little more than an amorphous raw
material, part of the flux, not used to form a significant part of the
personality. But such a description would be pitifully inadequate to
express the Person when its Power of Self within manifests more amply
and puts forward its hidden daemonic force in the surface composition
and the life. We feel ourselves in presence of a light of consciousness, a
potency, a sea of energy, can distinguish and describe its free waves of
action and quality, but not fix itself; and yet there is an impression of
personality, the presence of a powerful being, a strong, high or beauti-
ful recognisable Someone, a Person, not a limited creature of Nature
but a Self or Soul, a Purusha. The gnostic Individual would be such an
inner Person u"nveiled, occupying both the depths — ^no longer self-
hidden — and the surface in a unified self-awareness; he would not be a
surface personality partly expressive of a larger secret being, he would

884 THE LIFE DIVINE

be not the wave but the ocean: he would be the Purusha, the inner
conscious Existence self-revealed, and would have no need of a carved
expressive mask or persona.

This, then, would be the nature of the gnostic Person, an infinite
and universal being revealing — or, to our mental ignorance, suggesting
— ^its eternal self through the significant form and expressive power
of an individual and temporal self-manifestation. But the individual
nature-manifestation, whether strong and distinct in outline or multi-
tudinous and protean but still harmonic, would be there as an index of
the being, not as the whole being: that would be felt behind, recognisable
but indefinable, infinite. The consciousness also of the gnostic Person
would be an infinite consciousness throwing up forms of self-expression,
but aware always of its unbound infinity and universality and convey-
ing the power and sense of its infinity and universality even in the finite-
ness of the expression, — by which, moreover, it would not be bound in
the next movement of farther self-revelation. But this would still not
be an unregulated unrecognisable flux but a process of self-revelation
making visible the inherent truth of its powers of existence according
to the harmonic law natural to all manifestation of the Infinite.

All the character of the life and action of the gnostic being would
arise self-determined out of this nature of his gnostic individuality.
There could be in it no separate problem of an ethical or any similar
content, any conflict of good and evil. There could indeed be no problem
at all, for problems are the creations of mental ignorance seeking for
knowledge and they cannot exist in a consciousness in which knowledge
arises self-born and the act is self-born out of the knowledge, out of a
pre-existent truth of being conscious and self-aware. An essential and
universal spiritual truth of being manifesting itself, freely fulfilling itself
in its own nature and self-effectuating consciousness, a truth of being
one in all even in an infinite diversity of its truth and making all to be
felt as one, would also be in its very nature an essential and universal
good manifesting itself, fulfilling itself in its own nature and self-effectu-
ating consciousness, a truth of good one in all and for all even in an
infinite diversity of its good. The purity of the eternal Self-existence
would pour itself into all the activities, making and keeping all things
pure; there could be no ignorance leading to wrong will and falsehood
of the steps, no separative egoism inflicting by its ignorance and separate
contrary will harm on oneself or harm on others, self-driven to a wrong
dealing with one's own soul, mind, life or body or a wrong dealing with

THE GNOSTIC BEING 885

the soul, mind, life, body of others, which is the practical sense of all
human evil. To rise beyond virtue and sin, good and evil is an essential
part of the Vedantic idea of liberation, and there is in this correlation
a self-evident sequence. For liberation signifies an emergence into the
true spiritual nature of being where all action is the automatic self-
expression of that truth and there can be nothing else. In the imperfec-
tion and conflict of our members there is an effort to arrive at a right
standard of conduct and to observe it; that is ethics, virtue, merit,
punya, to do otherwise is sin, demerit, papa. Ethical mind declares a
law of love, a law of justice, a law of truth, laws without number, diffi-
cult to observe, difficult to reconcile. But if oneness with others, oneness
with truth is already the essence of the realised spiritual nature, there
is no need of a law of truth or of love, — the law, the standard has to
be imposed on us now because there is in our natural being an opposite
force of separateness, a possibility of antagonism, a force of discord,
ill-will, strife. All ethics is a construction of good in a Nature which
has been smitten with evil by the powers of darkness born of the Igno-
rance, even as it is expressed in the ancient legend of the Vedanta. But
where all is self-determined by truth of consciousness and truth of
being, there can be no standard, no struggle to observe it, no virtue or
merit, no sin or demerit of the nature. The power of love, of truth, of
right will be there, not as a law mentally constructed but as the very
substance and constitution of the nature and, by the integration of the
being, necessarily also the very stuff and constituting nature of the
action. To grow into this nature of our true being, a nature of spiritual
truth and oneness, is the liberation attained by an evolution of the
spiritual being: the gnostic evolution gives us the complete dynamism
of that return to ourselves. Once that is done, the need of standards of
virtue, dharmas, disappears; there is the law and self-order of the lib-
erty of the spirit, there can be no imposed or constructed law of conduct,
dharma. All becomes a self-flow of spiritual self-nature, Swadharma of
Swabhava.

Here we touch the kernel of the dynamic difference between life in
the mental ignorance and life in the gnostic being and nature. It is the
difference between an integral fully conscious being in full possession
of its own truth of existence and working out that truth in its own free-
dom, free from all constructed laws, while yet its life is a fulfilment of
all true laws of becoming in their essence of meaning, and an ignorant
self-divided existence which seeks for its own truth and tries to con-

886 THE LIFE DIVINE

Struct its findings into laws and construct its life according to a pattern
so made. All true law is the right motion and process of a reality, an
energy or power of being in action fulfilling its own inherent movement
self-implied in its own truth of existence. This law may be inconscient
and its working appear to be mechanical, — that is the character or, at
least, the appearance of law in material Nature: it may be a conscious
energy, freely determined in its action by the consciousness in the being
aware of its own imperative of truth, aware of its plastic possibilities of
self-expression of that truth, aware, always in the whole and at each
moment in the detail, of the actualities it has to realise; this is the figure
of the law of the Spirit. An entire freedom of the spirit, an entire self-
existent order self-creating, self-effectuating, self-secure in its own natu-
ral and inevitable movement, is the character of this dynamis of the
gnostic Supernature.

At the summit of being is the Absolute with its absolute freedom
of infinity but also its absolute truth of itself and power of that truth of
being; these two things repeat themselves in the life of the spirit in
supernature. All action there is the action of the supreme Self, the su-
preme Ishwara in the truth of the supernature. It is at once the truth of
the being of the self and the truth of the will of the Ishwara one with
that truth — a biune reality — ^which expresses itself in each individual
gnostic being according to his supernature. The freedom of the gnostic
individual is the freedom of his spirit to fulfil dynamically the truth of
his being and the power of his energies in life; but this is synonymous
with an entire obedience of his nature to the truth of Self manifested in
his existence and to the will of the Divine in him and all. This All-Will
is one in each gnostic individual and in many gnostic individuals and in
the conscious All which holds and contains them in itself; it is conscious
of itself in each gnostic being and is there one with his own will, and
at the same time he is conscious of the same Will, the same Self and
Energy variously active in all. Such a gnostic consciousness and gnostic
will aware of its oneness in many gnostic individuals, aware of its con-
cordant totality and the meaning and meeting-point of its diversities,
must assure a symphonic movement, a movement of unity, harmony,
mutuality in the action of the whole. It assures at the same time in the
individual a unity and symphonic concord of all the powers and move-
ments of his being. All energies of being seek their self-expression and
at their highest seek their absolute; this they find in the supreme Self,
and they find at the same time their supreme oneness, harmony and

THE GNOSTIC BEING 887

mutuality of united and common self-expression in its all-seeing and all-
uniting dynamic power of self-determination and self-effectuation, the
supramental gnosis. A separate self-existent being could be at odds with
other separate beings, at variance with the universal All in which they
co-exist, in a state of contradiction with any supreme Truth that was
willing its self-expression in the universe; this is what happens to the
individual in the Ignorance, because he takes his stand on the conscious-
ness of a separate individuality. There can be a similar conflict, discord,
disparity between the truths, the energies, qualities, powers, modes of
being that act as separate forces in the individual and in the universe. A
world full of conflict, a conflict in ourselves, a conflict of the individual
with the world around him are normal and inevitable features of the
separative consciousness of the Ignorance and our ill-harmonised exist-
ence. But this cannot happen in the gnostic consciousness because there
each finds his complete self and all find their own truth and the har-
mony of their different motions in that which exceeds them and of which
they are the expression. In the gnostic life, therefore, there is an entire
accord between the free self-expression of the being and his automatic
obedience to the inherent law of the supreme and universal Truth of
things. These are to him interconnected sides of the one Truth ; it is his
own supreme truth of being which works itself out in the whole united
truth of himself and things in one supernature. There is also an entire
accord between all the many and different powers of the being and their
action; for even those that are contradictory in their apparent motion
and seem in our mental experience of them to enter into conflict, fit
themselves and their action naturally into each other, because each has
its self-truth and its truth of relation to the others and this is self-found
and self-formed in the gnostic supernature.

In the supramental gnostic nature there will therefore be no need
of the mental rigid way and hard style of order, a limiting standardisa-
tion, an imposition of a fixed set of principles, the compulsion of life
into one system or pattern which is alone valid because it is envisaged
by mind as the one right truth of being and conduct. For such a stand-
ard cannot include and such a structure cannot take up into itself the
whole of life, nor can it adapt itself freely to the pressure of the All-life
or to the needs of the evolutionary Force ; it has to escape from itself or
to escape from its self-constructed limits by its own death, by disintegra-
tion or by an intense conflict and revolutionary disturbance. INIind has
thus to select its limited rule and way of life, because it is itself bound

888 THE LIFE DIVINE

and limited in vision and capacity; but gnostic being takes up into itself
the whole of life and existence, fulfilled, transmuted into the harmonic
self-expression of a vast Truth one and diverse, infinitely one, infinitely
multiple. The knowledge and action of the gnostic being would have the
wideness and plasticity of an infinite freedom. This knowledge would
grasp its objects as it went in the largeness of the whole; it would be
bound only by the integral truth of the whole and the complete and
inmost truth of the object, but not by the formed idea or fixed mental
symbols by which the mind is caught and held and confined in them so
as to lose the freedom of its knowledge. The entire activity also would
be unbound by an obligation of unelastic rule or by the obligation of a
past state or action or by its compelling consequence, Karma; it would
have the sequent but self-guided and self-evolving plasticity of the In-
finite acting directly upon its own finites. This movement will not create
a flux or chaos, but a liberated and harmonic Truth-expression; there
would be a free self-determination of the spiritual being in a plastic
entirely conscious nature.

In the consciousness of the Infinite individuality does not break
up nor circumscribe cosmicity, cosmicity does not contradict transcend-
ence. The gnostic being living in the consciousness of the Infinite will
create his own self-manifestation as an individual, but he will do so as
a centre of a larger universality and yet at the same time a centre of
the transcendence. A universal individual, all his action would be in
harmony with the cosmic action, but, owing to his transcendence, it
would not be limited by a temporary inferior formulation or at the
mercy of any or every cosmic force. His universality would embrace
even the Ignorance around him in its larger self, but, while intimately
aware of it, he would not be affected by it: he would follow the greater
law of his transcendent individuality and express its gnostic truth in his
own way of being and action. His life would be a free harmonic expres-
sion of the self; but, since his highest self would be one with the being
of the Ishwara, a natural divine government of his self-expression by
the Ishwara, by his highest self, and by the Supernature, his own su-
preme nature, would automatically bring into the knowledge, the life,
the action a large and unbound but perfect order. The obedience of his
individual nature to the Ishwara and the Supernature would be a natural
consonance and indeed the very condition of the freedom of the self,
since it would be an obedience to his own supreme being, a response to
the Source of all his existence. The individual nature would be nothing

THE GNOSTIC BEING 889

separate, it would be a current of the Supernature. All antinomy of the
Purusha and the Prakriti, that curious division and unbalance of the
Soul and Nature which afflicts the Ignorance, would be entirely re-
moved; for the nature would be the outflowing of the self-force of the
Person and the Person would be the outflowing of the supreme Nature,
the supramental power of being of the Ishwara. It is this supreme truth
of his being, an infinitely harmonic principle, that would create the
order of his spiritual freedom, an authentic, automatic and plastic order.
In the lower existence the order is automatic, the binding of Nature
complete, her groove firm and imperative: the cosmic Consciousness-
Force evolves a pattern of Nature and its habitual mould or fixed round
of action and obliges the infrarational being to live and act according to
the pattern and in the mould or round made for it. Mind in man starts
with this prearranged pattern and routine, but, as it evolves, it enlarges
the design and expands the mould and tries to replace this fixed uncon-
scious or half-conscious law of automatism by an order based on ideas
and significances and accepted life-motives, or it attempts an intelligent
standardisation and a framework determined by rational purpose, util-
ity and convenience. There is nothing really binding or permanent in
man's knowledge-structures or his life-structures ; but still he cannot but
create standards of thought, knowledge, personality, life, conduct and,
more or less consciously and completely, base his existence on them or,
at least, try his best to frame his life in the ideative cadre of his chosen
or accepted dharmas. In the passage to the spiritual life the supreme
ideal held up is, on the contrary, not law, but liberty in the spirit; the
spirit breaks through all formulas to find its self and, if it has still to be
concerned with expression, it must arrive at the liberty of a free and
true instead of an artificial expression, a true and spontaneous spiritual
order. "Abandon all dharmas, all standards and rules of being and
action, and take refuge in Me alone," is the summit rule of the highest
existence held up by the Divine Being to the seeker. In the seeking for
this freedom, in the liberation from constructed law into law of self and
spirit, in the casting away of the mental control in order to substitute
for it the control of the spiritual Reality, an abandonment of the lower
constructed truth of mind for the higher essential truth of being, it is
possible to pass through a stage in which there is an inner freedom but
a lack of outer order, — an action in the flux of nature childlike or inert
like a leaf lying passive or driven by the wind or even incoherent or
extravagant in outer semblance. It is possible also to arrive at a tem-

890 THE LIFE DIVINE

porary ordered spiritual expression of the self which is sufficient for
the stage one can reach for a time or in this life; or it may be a personal
order of self-expression valid according to the norm of what one has
already realised of the spiritual truth but afterwards changing freely by
the force of spirituality to express the yet larger truth that one goes on
to realise. But the supramental gnostic being stands in a consciousness
in which knowledge is self-existent and manifests itself according to the
order self-determined by the Will of the Infinite in the supernature. This
self-determination according to a self-existent knowledge replaces the
automatism of Nature and the standards of Mind by the spontaneity
of a Truth self-aware and self-active in the very grain of the existence.
In the gnostic being this self-determining knowledge freely obedi-
ent to self-truth and the total truth of Being would be the very law of
his existence. In him Knowledge and Will become one and cannot be in
conflict; Truth of spirit and life become one and cannot be at variance:
in the self-effectuation of his being there can be no strife or disparity or
divergence between the spirit and the members. The two principles of
freedom and order, which in mind and life are constantly representing
themselves as contraries or incompatibles, though they have no need to
be that if freedom is guarded by knowledge and order based upon truth
of being, are in the supermind consciousness native to each other and
even fundamentally one. This is so because both are inseparable aspects
of the inner spiritual truth and therefore their determinations are one;
they are inherent in each other, for they arise from an identity and
therefore in action coincide in a natural identity. The gnostic being does
not in any way or degree feel his liberty infringed by the imperative
order of his thought or actions, because that order is intrinsic and spon-
taneous ; he feels both his liberty and the order of his liberty to be one
truth of his being. His liberty of knowledge is not a freedom to follow
falsehood or error, for he does not need like the mind to pass through
the possibility of error in order to know, — on the contrary, any such
deviation would be a departure from his plenitude of the gnostic self, it
would be a diminution of his self-truth and alien and injurious to his
being; for his freedom is a freedom of light, not of darkness. His liberty
of action is not a license to act upon wrong will or the impulsions of the
Ignorance, for that too would be alien to his being, a restriction and
diminution of it, not a liberation. A drive for fulfilment of falsehood or
wrong will would be felt by him, not as a movement towards freedom,
but as a violence done to the liberty of the spirit, an invasion and

THE GNOSTIC BEING 89 1

imposition, an inroad upon his supernature; a tyranny of some alien
Nature.

A supramental consciousness must be fundamentally a Truth-
consciousness, a direct and inherent awareness of the truth of being and
the truth of things; it is a power of the Infinite knowing and working
out its finites, a power of the Universal knowing and working out its
oneness and detail, its cosmicity and its individualities; self-possessed
of Truth, it would not have to seek for the Truth or suffer from the
liability to miss it as does the mind of the Ignorance. The evolved
gnostic being would have entered into this truth-consciousness of the
Infinite and Universal, and it would be that which would determine for
him and in him all his individual seeing and action. His would be a
consciousness of universal identity and a consequent or rather inherent
Truth-knowledge, Truth-sight, Truth-feeling, Truth-will, Truth-sense
and Truth-dynamis of action implicit in his identity with the One or
spontaneously arising from his identity with the All. His life would be
a movement in the steps of a spiritual liberty and largeness replacing
the law of the mental idea and the law of vital and physical need and
desire and the compulsion of a surrounding life; his life and action
would be bound by nothing else than the Divine Wisdom and Will act-
ing on him and in him according to its Truth-consciousness. An absence
of an imposed construction of law might be expected to lead in the life
of the human ignorance, because of the separativeness of the human
ego and its smallness, the necessity it feels to impinge on and possess
and utilise other life, to a chaos of conflict, license and egoistic disorder ;
but this could not exist in the life of the gnostic being. For in the gnostic
truth-consciousness of a supramental being there must necessarily be a
truth of relation of all the parts and movements of the being, — whether
_^^the being of the individual or the being of any gnostic collectivity, — a.
spontaneous and luminous oneness and wholeness in all the movements
of the consciousness and all the action of the life. There could be no strife
of the members, for not only the knowledge and will consciousness but
the heart consciousness and life consciousness and body consciousness,
what are in us the emotional, vital or physical parts of nature, would
be included in this integrated harmony of wholeness and oneness. In our
language we might say that the supermind knowledge-will of the gnostic
being would have a perfect control of the mind, heart, life and body; but
this description could apply only to the transitional stage when the
supernature was remoulding these members into its own nature: once

892 THE LIFE DIVINE

that transition was concluded, there would be no need of control, for
all would be one unified consciousness and therefore would act as a
whole in a spontaneous integrality and unity.

In a gnostic being there could be no conflict between self-affirma-
tion of the ego and a control by super-ego ; for since in his action of life
the gnostic individual would at once express himself, his truth of being,
and work out the Divine Will, since he would know the Divine as his true
self and the source and constituent of his spiritual individuality, these
two springs of his conduct would not only be simultaneous in a single
action, but they would be one and the same motor-force. This motive
power would act in each circumstance according to the truth of the
circumstance, with each being according to its need, nature, relation, in
each event according to the demand of the Divine Will upon that event:
for all here is the result of a complexus and a close nexus of many forces
of one Force, and the gnostic consciousness and Truth-Will would see
the truth of these forces, of each and of all together, and put forth the
necessary impact or intervention on the complex of forces to carry out
what was willed to be done through itself, that and no more. In conse-
quence of the Identity present everywhere, ruling everything and har-
monising all diversities, there would be no play of a separative ego bent
on its own separate self-affirmation; the will of the self of the gnostic
being would be one with the will of the Ishwara, it would not be a separa-
tive or contrary self-will. It would have the joy of action and result but
would be free from all ego claim, attachment to action or demand of
result; it would do what it saw had to be done and was moved to do. In
mental nature there can be an apposition or disparity between self-effort
and obedience to the Higher Will, for there the self or apparent person
sees itself as different from the supreme Being, Will or Person ; but here
the person is being of the Being and the opposition or disparity does not
arise. The action of the person is the action of the Ishwara in the per-
son, of the One in the many, and there can be no reason for a separative
assertion of self-will or pride of independence.

On this fact that the Divine Knowledge and Force, the supreme
Supernature, would act through the gnostic being with his full partici-
pation, is founded the freedom of the gnostic being ; it is this unity that
gives him his liberty. The freedom from law, including the moral law,
so frequently affirmed of the spiritual being, is founded on this unity
of its will with the will of the Eternal. All the mental standards would
disappear because all necessity for them would cease; the higher au-

THE GNOSTIC BEING 893

thentic law of identity with the Divine Self and identity with all beings
would have replaced them. There would be no question of selfishness or
altruism, of oneself and others, since all are seen and felt as the one self
and only what the supreme Truth and Good decided would be done.
There would be in the action a pervasive feeling of a self-existent uni-
versal love, sympathy, oneness, but the feeling would penetrate, colour
and move in the act, not solely dominate or determine it: it would not
stand for itself in opposition to the larger truth of things or dictate a
personally impelled departure from the divinely willed true movement.
This opposition and departure can happen in the Ignorance where love
or any other strong principle of the nature can be divorced from wisdom
even as it can be divorced from power; but in the supermind gnosis all
powers are intimate to each other and act as one. In the gnostic person
the Truth- Knowledge would lead and determine and all the other forces
of the being concur in the action: there would be no place for disharmony
or conflict between the powers of the nature. In all action there is an
imperative of existence that seeks to be fulfilled; a truth of being not
yet manifested has to be manifested or a truth manifesting has to be
evolved and achieved and perfected in manifestation or, if already
achieved, to take its delight of being and self -effectuation. In the half-
light and half-power of the Ignorance the imperative is secret or only
half-revealed and the push to fulfilment is an imperfect, struggling,
partly frustrated movement: but in the gnostic being and life the im-
peratives of being would be felt within, intimately perceived and brought
into action; there would be a free play of their possibilities; there would
be an actualisation in accordance with the truth of circumstance and the
intention in the Supernature. All this would be seen in the knowledge
and develop itself in act; there would be no uncertain combat or tor-
ment of forces at work; a disharmony of the being, a contradictory
working of the consciousness could have no place: the imposition of an
external standardisation of mechanised law would be entirely super-
fluous where there is this inherence of truth and its spontaneous working
in act of nature. A harmonic action, a working out of the div'ne motive,
an execution of the imperative truth of things would be the law and
natural dynamics of the whole existence.

A knowledge by identity using the powers of the integrated being
for richness of instrumentation would be the principle of the supra-
mental life. In the other grades of the gnostic being, although a truth
of spiritual being and consciousness would fulfil itself, the instrumen-

894 THE LIFE DIVINE

tation would be of a different order. A Higher-Mental being would act
through the truth of thought, the truth of the idea and accomplish that
in the life-action: but in the supramental gnosis thought is a derivative
movement, it is a formulation of truth-vision and not the determining
or the main driving force; it would be an instrument for expression of
knowledge more than for arrival at knowledge or for action, — or it
would intervene in action only as a penetrating point of the body of
identity-will and identity-knowledge. So too in the illumined gnostic
being truth-vision and in the intuitive gnostic being a direct truth-
contact and perceptive truth-sense would be the mainspring of action.
In the overmind a comprehensive immediate grasp of the truth of things
and the principle of being of each thing and all its dynamic conse-
quences would originate and gather up a great wideness of gnostic vision
and thought and create a foundation of knowledge and action; this
largeness of being and seeing and doing would be the varied result of an
underlying identity-consciousness, but the identity itself would not be
in the front as the very stuff of the consciousness or the very force of the
action. But in the supramental gnosis all this luminous immediate grasp
of the truth of things, truth-sense, truth-vision, truth-thought would
get back into its source of identity-consciousness and subsist as a single
body of its knowledge. The identity-consciousness would lead and con-
tain everything; it would manifest as an awareness in the very grain
of the being's substance putting forth its inherent self-fulfilling force
and determining itself dynamically in form of consciousness and^oriJi
of action. This inherent awareness is the origin and principle of the
working of supramental gnosis; it could be sufficient in itself with no
need of anything to formulate or embody it: but the play of illumined
vision, the play of a radiant thought, the play of all other movements of
the spiritual consciousness would not be absent; there would be a free
instrumentation of them for their own brilliant functioning, for a divine
richness and diversity, for a manifold delight of self-manifestation, for
the joy of the powers of the Infinite. In the intermediate stages or de-
grees of the gnosis there might be the manifestation of various and
separate expressions of the aspects of the divine Being and Nature, a
soul and life of love, a soul and life of divine light and knowledge, a
soul and life of divine power and sovereign action and creation, and
innumerable other forms of divine life; on the supramental height all
would be taken up into a manifold unity, a supreme integration of being
and life. A fulfilment of the being in a luminous and blissful integration

THE GNOSTIC BEING 895

of its States and powers and their satisfied dynamic action would be the
sense, of the gnostic existence.

All supramental gnosis is a twofold Truth-consciousness, a con-
sciousness of inherent self-knowledge and, by identity of self and world,
of intimate world-knowledge; this knowledge is the criterion, the char-
acteristic power of the gnosis. But this is not a purely ideative knowl-
edge, it is not consciousness observing, forming ideas, trying to carry
them out; it is an essential light of consciousness, the self-light of all
the realities of being and becoming, the self-truth of being determining,
formulating and effectuating itself. To be, not to know, is the object of
the manifestation; knowledge is only the instrumentation of an opera-
tive consciousness of being. This would be the gnostic life on earth, a
manifestation or play of truth-conscious being, being grown aware of
itself in all things, no longer lost to consciousness of itself, no longer
plunged into a self-oblivion or a half-oblivion of its real existence brought
about by absorption in form and action, but using form and action with
a delivered spiritual power for its free and perfect self-expression, no
longer seeking for its own lost or forgotten or veiled and hidden signifi-
cance or significances, no longer bound, but delivered from inconscience
and ignorance, aware of its own truths and powers, determining freely
in a movement always concurrent and in tune in every detail with its
supreme and universal Reality its manifestation, the play of its sub-
stance, the play of its consciousness, the play of its force of existence,
the play of its delight of existence.

In the gnostic evolution there would be a great diversity in the
poise, status, harmonised operations of consciousness and force and
delight of existence. There would naturally appear in time many grades
of the farther ascent of the evolutive supermind to its own summits ; but
in all there would be the common basis and principle. In the manifesta-
tion the Spirit, the Being, while knowing all itself, is not bound to put
forth all itself in the actual front of formation and action which is its
immediate power and degree of self-expression: it may put forth a
frontal self-expression and hold all the rest of itself behind in an unex-
pressed delight of self-being. That All behind and its delight would find
itself in the front, know itself in it, maintain and suffuse the expression,
the manifestation with its own presence and feeling of totality and
infinity. This frontal formation with all the rest behind it and held in
power of being within it would be an act of self-knowledge, not an act
of Ignorance; it would be a luminous self-expression of the Supercon-

896 THE LIFE DIVINE

science and not an upthrow from the Inconscience. A great harmonised
variation would thus be an element in the beauty and completeness of
the evolution of the gnostic consciousness and existence. Even in deal-
ing with the mind of ignorance around it, as in dealing with the still
lower degrees of the gnostic evolution, the supramental life would use
this innate power and movement of its Truth of being: it would relate
in the light of that integral Reality its own truth of being with the truth
of being that is behind the Ignorance; it would found all relations upon
the common spiritual unity, accept and harmonise the manifested differ-
ence. The gnostic Light would ensure the right relation and action or
reaction of each upon each in every circumstance; the gnostic power or
influence would affirm always a symphonic effectuation, secure the right
relation of the more developed and the less developed life and impose
by its influence a greater harmony on the lower existence.

This would be the nature of the being, life and action of the gnostic
individual so far as we can follow the evolution with our mental concep-
tion up to that point where it will emerge out of overmind and cross the
border into supramental gnosis. This nature of the gnosis would evi-
dently determine all the relations of the life or group-life of gnostic
beings ; for a gnostic collectivity would be a collective soul-power of the
Truth-consciousness, even as the gnostic individual would be an indi-
vidual soul-power of it: it would have the same integration of life and
action in unison, the same realised and conscious unity^^of-^semg, the
same spontaneity, intimate oneness-feeling, one and mutual truth-vision
and truth-sense of self and each other, the same truth-action in the rela-
tion of each with each and all with all; this collectivity would be and
act not as a mechanical but a spiritual integer. A similar inevitability of
the union of freedom and order would be the law of the collective life;
it would be a freedom of the diverse play of the Infinite in divine souls,
an order of the conscious unity of souls which is the law of the supra-
mental Infinite. Our mental rendering of oneness brings into it the rule
of sameness; a complete oneness brought about by the mental reason
drives towards a thorough-going standardisation as its one effective
means, — only minor shades of differentiation would be allowed to oper-
ate: but the greatest richness of diversity in the self-expression of one-
ness would be the law of the gnostic life. In the gnostic consciousness
difference would not lead to discord but to a spontaneous natural adapta-
tion, a sense of complementary plenitude, a rich many-sided execution
of the thing to be collectively known, done, worked out in life. For the

THE GNOSTIC BEING 897

difficulty in mind and life is created by ego, by separation of integers
into component parts which figure as contraries, opposites, disparates:
all in which they separate from each other is easily felt, affirmed and
stressed; that in which they meet, whatever holds their divergences to-
gether, is largely missed or found with difficulty; everything has to be
done by an overcoming or an adjustment of difference, by a constructed
unity. There is, indeed, an underlying principle of oneness and Nature
insists on its emergence in a construction of unity; for she is collective
and communal as well as individual and egoistic and has her instrumen-
tation of associativeness, sympathies, common needs, interests, attrac-
tions, affinities as well as her more brutal means of unification: but her
secondary imposed and too prominent basis of ego-life and ego-nature
overlays the unity and afflicts all its constructions with imperfection
and insecurity. A farther difficulty is created by the absence or rather
the imperfection of intuition and direct inner contact making each a
separate being forced to learn with difficulty the other's being and na-
ture, to arrive at understanding and mutuality and harmony from out-
side instead of inwardly through a direct sense and grasp, so that all
mental and vital interchange is hampered, rendered ego-tainted or
doomed to imperfection and incompleteness by the veil of mutual igno-
rance. In the collective gnostic life the integrating truth-sense, the con-
cording unity of gnostic nature would carry all divergences in itself as
its own opulence and turn a multitudinous thought, action, feeling into
the unity of a luminous life-whole. This would be the evident principle,
the inevitable result of the very character of the Truth-Consciousness
and its dynamic realisation of the spiritual unity of all being. This
realisation, the key to the perfection of life, difficult to arrive at on the
mental plane, difficult even when realised to dynamise or organise, would
be naturally dynamic, spontaneously self-organised in all gnostic crea-
tion and gnostic life.

This much is easily understandable if we regard the gnostic beings
as living their own life without any contact with a life of the Ignorance.
But by the very fact of the evolution here the gnostic manifestation
would be a circumstance, though a decisive circumstance, in the whole:
there would be a continuance of the lower degrees of the consciousness
and life, some maintaining the manifestation in the Ignorance, some
mediating between it and the manifestation in the gnosis; these two
forms of being and life would either exist side by side or interpenetrate.
In either case the gnostic principle might be expected, if not at once.

898 THE LIFE DIVINE

yet finally to dominate the whole. The higher spiritual-mental degrees
would be in touch with the supramental principle now overtly support-
ing them and holding them together and would be delivered from the
once enveloping hold of the Ignorance and Inconscience. As manifesta-
tions of the truth of being, though in a qualified and modified degree,
they would draw all their light and energy from the supramental gnosis
and would be in large contact with its instrumental powers; they would
themselves be conscious motive-powers of the spirit and, although not
yet in the full force of their entirely realised spiritual substance, they
would not be subjected to a lesser instrumentation fragmented, diluted,
diminished, obscured by the substance of the Nescience. All Ignorance
rising or entering into the overmind, into the intuitive, into the illumined
or higher-mind being would cease to be ignorant; it would enter into
the light, realise in that light the truth which it had covered with its
darkness and undergo a liberation, transmutation, new state of con-
sciousness and being which would assimilate it to these higher states
and prepare it for the supramental status. At the same time the involved
principle of the gnosis, acting now as an overt, arisen and constantly
dynamic force and no longer only as a concealed power with a secret
origination or a veiled support of things or an occasional intervention
as its only function, would be able to lay something of its law ofjiar-
mony on the still existing Inconscience and Ignorance. For the secret
gnostic power concealed in them would act with a greater strength of its
support and origination, a freer and more powerful intervention; the
beings of the Ignorance, influenced by the light of the gnosis through
their association with gnostic beings and through the evolved and effec-
tive presence of the supramental Being and Power in earth-nature,
would be more conscious and responsive. In the untransformed part of
humanity itself there might well arise a new and greater order of mental
human beings; for the directly intuitive or partly intuitivised but not
yet gnostic mental being, the directly or partly illumined mental being,
the mental being in direct or part communion with the higher-thought
plane would emerge: these would become more and more numerous,
more and more evolved and secure in their type, and might even exist
as a formed race of higher humanity leading upwards the less evolved
in a true fraternity born of the sense of the manifestation of the One
Divine in all beings. In this way, the consummation of the highest might
mean also a lesser consummation in its own degree of what must remain
still below. At the higher end of the evolution the ascending ranges and

THE GNOSTIC BEING 899

summits of supermind would begin to rise towards some supreme mani-
festation of the pure spiritual existence, consciousness and delight of
being of Sachchidananda.

A question might arise whether the gnostic reversal, the passage
into a gnostic evolution and beyond it would not mean sooner or later
the cessation of the evolution from the Inconscience, since the reason for
that obscure beginning of things here would cease. This depends on the
farther question whether the movement between the Superconscience
and the Inconscience as the two poles of existence is an abiding law of
the material manifestation or only a provisional circumstance. The lat-
ter supposition is difficult to accept because of the tremendous force of
pervasiveness and durability with which the inconscient foundation has
been laid for the whole material universe. Any complete reversal or
elimination of the first evolutionary principle would mean the simul-
taneous manifestation of the secret involved consciousness in every part
of this vast universal Inconscience; a change in a particular line of
Nature such as the earth-line could not have any such all-pervading
effect: the manifestation in earth-nature has its own curve and the com-
pletion of that curve is all that we have to consider. Here this much
might be hazarded that in the final result of the revelatory creation or
reproduction of the upper hemisphere of conscious being in the lower
triplicity the evolution here, though remaining the same in its degrees
and stages, would be subjected to the law of harmony, the law of unity
in diversity and of diversity working out unity: it would be no longer
an evolution through strife; it would become a harmonious development
from stage to stage, from lesser to greater light, from type to higher
type of the power and beauty of a self-unfolding existence. It would
only be otherwise if for some reason the law of struggle and suffering
still remained necessary for the working out of that mysterious possibil-
ity in the Infinite whose principle underlies the plunge into the Incon-
science. But for the earth-nature it would seem as if this necessity might
be exhausted once the supramental gnosis had emerged from the Incon-
science. A change would begin with its firm appearance; that change
would be consummated when the supramental evolution became com-
plete and rose into the greater fullness of a supreme manifestation of the
Existence-Consciousness-Delight, Sachchidananda.

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE DIVINE LIFE

0 seeing Flame, thou earnest man of the crooked ways
into the abiding truth and the knowledge.

Rig Veda}

1 purify earth and heaven by the Truth.

Rig Veda."

His ecstasy, in one who holds it, sets into motion the
two births, the human self-expression and the divine, and
moves between them.

Rig Veda?

May the invincible rays of his intuition be there seek-
ing immortality, pervading both the births; for byThem he
sets flowing in one movement human strengths and things
divine.

Rig Veda!

Let all accept thy will when thou art born a living god
from the dry tree, that they may attain to divinity and
reach by the speed of thy movements to possession of the
Truth and the Immortality.

Rig Veda?

OUR endeavour has been to discover what is the reality and sig-
nificance of our existence as conscious beings in the material
universe and in what direction and how far that significance once dis-
covered leads us, to what human or divine future. Our existence here
may indeed be an inconsequential freak of Matter itself or of some
Energy building up Matter, or it may be an inexplicable freak of the
Spirit. Or, again, our existence here may be an arbitrary fantasy of a
supracosmic Creator. In that case it has no essential significance, — no
significance at all if Matter or an inconscient Energy is the fantasy-
builder, for then it is at best the stray description of a wandering spiral
of Chance or the hard curve of a blind Necessity; it can have only an
illusory significance which vanishes into nothingness if it is an error

^L 31. 6. 'L 133. I. 'IX. 86. 42. *IX. 70. 3. ^L 68. 2.

900

THE DIVINE LIFE QOI

of the Spirit. A conscious Creator may indeed have put a meaning into
our existence, but it must be discovered by a revelation of his will and
is not self-implied in the self-nature of things and discoverable there.
But if there is a self-existent Reality of which our existence here is a
result, then there must be a truth of that Reality which is manifesting,
working itself out, evolving here, and that will be the significance of our
own being and life. Whatever that Reality may be, it is something that
has taken upon itself the aspect of a becoming in Time, — an indivisible
becoming, for our present and our future carry in themselves, trans-
formed, made other, the past that created them, and the past and present
already contained and now contain in themselves, invisible to us be-
cause still unmanifested, unevolved, their own transformation into the
still uncreated future. The significance of our existence here determines
our destiny: that destiny is something that already exists in us as a
necessity and a potentiality, the necessity of our being's secret and
emergent reality, a truth of its potentialities that is being worked out;
both, though not yet realised, are even now implied in what has been
already manifested. If there is a Being that is becoming, a Reality of
existence that is unrolling itself in Time, what that being, that reality
secretly is is what we have to become, and so to become is our life's
significance.

It is consciousness and life that must be the keywords to what is
being thus worked out in Time; for without them. Matter and the world
of Matter would be a meaningless phenomenon, a thing that has just hap-
pened by Chance or by an unconscious Necessity. But consciousness as
it is, life as it is cannot be the whole secret; for both are very clearly
something unfinished and still in process. In us consciousness is IMind,
and our mind is ignorant and imperfect, an intermediate power that has
grown and is still growing towards something beyond itself: there were
lower levels of consciousness that came before it and out of which it arose,
there must very evidently be higher levels to* which it is itself arising.
Before our thinking, reasoning, reflecting mind there was a consciousness
unthinking but living and sentient, and before that there was the sub-
conscious and the unconscious; after us or in our yet unevolved selves
there is likely to be waiting a greater consciousness, self-luminous, not
dependent on constructive thought: our imperfect and ignorant thought-
mind is certainly not the last word of consciousness, its ultimate possi-
bility. For the essence of consciousness is the power to be aware of itself
and its objects, and in its true nature this power must be direct, self-

902 THE LIFE DIVINE

fulfilled and complete: if it is in us indirect, incomplete, unfulfilled in its
workings, dependent on constructed instruments, it is because conscious-
ness here is emerging from an original veiling Inconscience and is yet
burdened and enveloped with the first Nescience proper to the Incon-
scient; but it must have the power to emerge completely, its destiny must
be to evolve into- its own perfection which is its true nature. Its true
nature is to be wholly aware of its objects, and of these objects the first is
self, the being which is evolving its consciousness here, and the rest is
what we see as not-self, — but if existence is indivisible, that too must in
reality be self: the destiny of evolving consciousness must be, then, to be-
come perfect in its awareness, entirely aware of self and all-aware. This
perfect and natural condition of consciousness is to us a superconscience,
a state which is beyond us and in which our mind, if suddenly transferred
to it, could not at first function; but it is towards that superconscience
that our conscious being must be evolving. But this evolution of our
consciousness to a superconscience or supreme of itself is possible only
if the Inconscience which is our basis here is really itself an involved
Superconscience; for what is to be in the becoming of the Reality in us
must be already there involved or secret in its beginning. Such an in-
volved Being or Power we can well conceive the Inconscient to be^wHeH
we closely regard this material creation of an unconscious Energy and
see it labouring out with curious construction and infinite device the
work of a vast involved Intelligence and see, too, that we ourselves are
something of that Intelligence evolving out of its involution, an emerg-
ing consciousness whose emergence cannot stop short on the way until
the Involved has evolved and revealed itself as a supreme totally self-
aware and all-aware Intelligence. It is this to which we have given the
name of Supermind or Gnosis. For that evidently must be the conscious-
ness of the Reality, the Being, the Spirit that is secret in us and slowly
manifesting here; of that Being we are the becomings and must grow
into its nature.

If consciousness is the central secret, life is the outward indication,
the effective power of being in Matter; for it is that which liberates con-
sciousness and gives it its form or embodiment of force and its effectua-
tion in material act. If some revelation or effectuation of itself in Matter
is the ultimate aim of the evolving Being in its birth, life is the exterior
and dynamic sign and index of that revelation and effectuation. But life
also, as it is now, is imperfect and evolving; it evolves through growth
of consciousness even as consciousness evolves through greater organisa-

THE DIVINE LIFE 903

tion and perfection of life: a greater consciousness means a greater life.
Man, the mental being, has an imperfect life because mind is not the
first and highest power of consciousness of the Being; even if mind were
perfected, there would be still something yet to be realised, not yet mani-
fested. For what is involved and emergent is not a Mind, but a Spirit,
and mind is not the native dynamism of consciousness of the Spirit;
supermind, the light of gnosis, is its native dynamism. If then life has
to become a manifestation of the Spirit, it is the manifestation of a
spiritual being in us and the divine life of a perfected consciousness in
a supramental or gnostic power of spiritual being that must be the
secret burden and intention of evolutionary Nature.

All spiritual life is in its principle a growth into divine living. It is
difficult to fix the frontier where the mental ceases and the divine life
begins, for the two project into each other and there is a long space for
their intermingled existence. A great part of this interspace, — ^when the
spiritual urge does not turn away from earth or world altogether, —
can be seen as the process of a higher life in the making. As the mind
and life become illumined with the light of the spirit, they put on or
reflect something of the divinity, the secret greater Reality, and this
must increase until the interspace has been crossed and the whole exist-
ence is unified in the full light and power of the spiritual principle. But,
for the full and perfect fulfilment of the evolutionary urge, this illumina-
tion and change must take up and re-create the whole being, mind, life
and body: it must be not only an inner experience of the Divinity, but
a remoulding of both the inner and outer existence by its power ; it must
take form not only in the life of the individual but as a collective life
of gnostic beings established as a highest power and form of the becom-
ing of the Spirit in the earth-nature. For this to be possible the spiritual
entity in us must have developed its own integralised perfection not
only of the inner state of the being but of the outgoing power of the
being and, with that perfection and as a necessity of its complete action,
it must have evolved its own dynamis and instrumentation of the outer
existence.

There can undoubtedly be a spiritual life within, a kingdom of
heaven within us which is not dependent on any outer manifestation
or instrumentation or formula of external being. The inner life has a
supreme spiritual importance and the outer has a value only in so far
as it is expressive of the inner status. However the man of spiritual reali-
sation lives and acts and behaves, in all ways of his being and acting.

904 THE LIFE DIVINE

it is said in the Gita, "he lives and moves in Me" ; he dwells in the Di-
vine, he has realised the spiritual existence. The spiritual man living in
the sense of the spiritual self, in the realisation of the Divine within him
and everywhere, would be living inwardly a divine life and its reflection
would fall on his outer acts of existence, even if they did not pass— or
did not seem to pass — beyond the ordinary instrumentation of human
thought and action in this world of earth-nature. This is the first truth
and the essence of the matter; but still, from the point of view of a
spiritual evolution, this would be only an individual liberation and per-
fection in an unchanged environmental existence; for a greater dynamic
change in earth-nature itself, a spiritual change of the whole principle
and instrumentation of life and action, the appearance of a new order
of beings and a new earth-life must be envisaged in our idea of the total
consummation, the divine issue. Here the gnostic change assumes a
primary importance; all that precedes can be considered as an upbuild-
ing and a preparation for this transmuting reversal of the whole nature.
For it is a gnostic way of dynamic living that must be the fulfilled divine
lif^ on earth, a way of living that develops higher instruments of world-
knowledge and world action for the dynamisation of consciousnessTHx
the physical existence and takes up and transforms the values of a world \
of material Nature.

But always the whole foundation of the gnostic life must be by its
very nature inward and not outward. In the life of the spirit it is the
spirit, the inner, Reality, that has built up and uses the mind, vital being
and body as its instrumentation; thought, feeling and action do not
exist for themselves, they are not an object, but the means; they serve
to express the manifested divine Reality within us: otherwise, without
this inwardness, this spiritual origination, in a too externalised conscious-
ness or by only external means, no greater or divine life is possible. In
our present life of Nature, in our externalised surface existence, it is the
world that seems to create us; but in the turn to the spiritual life it
is we who must create ourselves and our world. In this new formula of
creation, the inner life becomes of the first importance and the rest can
be only its expression and outcome. It is this, indeed, that is indicated
by our own strivings towards perfection, the perfection of our own soul
and mind and life and the perfection of the life of the race. For we are
given a world which is obscure, ignorant, material, imperfect, and our
external conscious being is itself created by the energies, the pressure,
the moulding operations of this vast mute obscurity, by physical birth,

THE DIVINE LIFE 905

by environment, by a training through the impacts and shocks of life ; and
yet we are vaguely aware of something that is there in us or seeking
to be, something other than what has been thus made, a spirit self -exist-
ent, self-determining, pushing the nature towards the creation of an
image of its own occult perfection or Idea of perfection. There is some-
thing that grows in us in answer to this demand, that strives to become
the image of a divine Somewhat, and is impelled also to labour at the
world outside that has been given to it and to remake that too in a
greater image, in the image of its own spiritual and mental and vital
growth, to make our world too something created according to our own
mind and self-conceiving spirit, something new, harmonious, perfect.

But our mind is obscure, partial in its notions, misled by opposite
surface appearances, divided between various possibilities; it is led in
three different directions to any of which it may give an exclusive prefer-
ence. Our mind, in its search for what must be, turns towards a concen-
tration on our own inner spiritual growth and perfection, on our own
individual being and inner living; or it turns towards a concentration
on an individual development of our surface nature, on the perfection
of our thought and outer dynamic or practical action on the world, on
some idealism of our personal relation with the world around us; or it
turns rather towards a concentration on the outer world itself, on making
it better, more suited to our ideas and temperament or to our conception
of what should be. On one side there is the call of our spiritual being
which is our true self, a transcendent reality, a being of the Divine Being,
not created by the world, able to live in itself, to rise out of world to
transcendence; on the other side there is the demand of the world
around us which is a cosmic form, a formulation of the Divine Being,
a power of the Reality in disguise. There is too the divided or double
demand of our being of Nature which is poised between these two terms,
depends on them and connects them; for it is apparently made by the
world and yet, because its true creator is in ourselves and the world
instrumentation that seems to make it is only the means first used, it
is really a form, a disguised manifestation of a greater spiritual being
within us. It is this demand that mediates between our preoccupation
with an inward perfection or spiritual liberation and our preoccupation
with the outer world and its formation, insists on a happier relation
between the two terms and creates the ideal of a better indi\idual in a
better world. But it is within us that the Reality must be found and
the source and foundation of a perfected life ; no outward formation can

g06 THE LIFE DIVINE

replace it: there must be the true self realised within if there is to be
the true life realised in world and Nature.

In the growth into a divine life the spirit must be our first preoccu-
pation ; until we have revealed and evolved it in our self out of its mental,
vital, physical wrappings and disguises, extracted it with patience from
our own body, as the Upanishad puts it, until we have built up in our-
selves an inner life of the spirit, it is obvious that no outer divine living
can become possible. Unless, indeed, it is a mental or vital godhead that
we perceive and would be, — but even then the individual mental being
or the being of power and vital force and desire in us must grow into a
form of that godhead before our life can be divine in that inferior sense,
the life of the infraspiritual superman, mental demi-god or vital Titan,
Deva or Asura. This inner life once created, to convert our whole sur-
face being, our thought, feeling, action in the world, into a perfect power
of that inner life, must be our other preoccupation. Only if we live in that
deeper and greater way in our dynamic parts, can there be a force for
creating a greater life or the world be remade whether in some power or
perfection of Mind and Life or the power and perfection of the Spirit.
A perfected human world cannot be created by men or composed of men
who are themselves imperfect. Even if all our actions are scrupulously
regulated by education or law or social or political machinery, what
will be achieved is a regulated pattern of minds, a fabricated pattern of
lives, a cultivated pattern of conduct; but a conformity of this kind can-
not change, cannot re-create the man within, it cannot carve or cut out
a perfect soul or a perfect thinking man or a perfect or growing living
being. For soul and mind and life are powers of being and can grow but
cannot be cut out or made; an outer process or formation can assist or
can express soul and mind and life but cannot create or develop it. One
can indeed help the being to grow, not by an attempt at manufacture,
but by throwing on it stimulating influences or by lending to it one's
forces of soul or mind or life; but even so the growth must still come
from within it, determining from there what shall be made of these
influences and forces, and not from outside. This is the first truth that
our creative zeal and aspiration have to learn, otherwise all our human
endeavour is foredoomed to turn in a futile circle and can end only in .
a success that is a specious failure.

To be or become something, to bring something into being is the
whole labour of the force of Nature; to know, feel, do are subordinate
energies that have a value because they help the being in its partial self-

THE DIVINE LIFE 907

realisation to express what it is and help it too in its urge to express the
still more not yet realised that it has to be. But knowledge, thought,
action, — whether religious, ethical, political, social, economic, utilitarian
or hedonistic, whether a mental, vital or physical form or construction of
existence, — cannot be the essence or object of life; they are only activi-
ties of the powers of being or the powers of its becoming, dynamic sym-
bols of itself, creations of the embodied spirit, its means of discovering or
formulating what it seeks to be. The tendency of man's physical mind
is to see otherwise and to turn the true method of things upside down,
because it takes as essential or fundamental the surface forces or ap-
pearances of Nature; it accepts her creation by a visible or exterior proc-
ess as the essence of her action and does not see that it is only a second-
ary appearance and covers a greater secret process: for Nature's occult
process is to reveal the being through the bringing out of its powers
and forms, her external pressure is only a means of awakening the in-
volved being to the need of this evolution, of this self-formation. When
the spiritual stage of her evolution is reached, this occult process must
become the whole process; to get through the veil of forces and get at
their secret mainspring, which is the spirit itself, is of cardinal impor-
tance. To become ourselves is the one thing to be done; but the true
ourselves is that which is within us, and to exceed our outer self of body,
life and mind is the condition for this highest being, which is our true
and divine being, to become self-revealed and active. It is only by grow-
ing within and living within that we can find it; once that is done, to
create from there the spiritual or divine mind, life, body and through
this instrumentation to arrive at the creation of a world which shall be
the true environment of a divine living, — this is the final object that
Force of Nature has set before us. This then is the first necessity, that
the individual, each individual, shall discover the spirit, the divine re-
ality within him and express that in all his being and living. A divine
life must be first and foremost an irmer life; for since the outward must
be the expression of what is within, there can be no divinity in the outer
existence if there is not the divinisation of the inner being. The Divinity
in man dwells veiled in his spiritual centre; there can be no such thing
as self-exceeding for man or a higher issue for his existence if there is
not in him the reality of an eternal self and spirit.

To be and to be fully is Nature's aim in us; but to be fully is to
be wholly conscious of one's being: unconsciousness, half consciousness
or deficient consciousness is a state of being not in possession of itself;

908 THE LIFE DIVINE

it is existence, but not fullness of being. To be aware wholly and inte-
grally of oneself and of all the truth of one's being is the necessary con-
dition of true possession of existence. This self-awareness is what is
meant by spiritual knowledge: the essence of spiritual knowledge is an
intrinsic self-existent consciousness; all its action of knowledge, indeed
all its action of any kind, must be that consciousness formulating itself.
All other knowledge is consciousness oblivious of itself and striving to
return to its own awareness of itself and its contents; it is self -ignorance
labouring to transform itself back into self-knowledge.

But also, since consciousness carries in itself the force of existence,
to be fully is to have the intrinsic and integral force of one's being; it
is to come into possession of all one's force of self and of all its use. To
be merely, without possessing the force of one's being or with a half-
force or deficient force of it, is a mutilated or diminished existence ; it is
to exist, but it is not fullness of being. It is possible, indeed, to exist only
in status, with the force of being self-gathered and immobile in the self;
but, even so, to be in deficient force of it, is a mutilated or diminished
existence; power of self is the sign of the divinity of self, — a powerlesT
spirit is no spirit. But, as the spiritual consciousness is intrinsic and self-
existent, so too this force of our spiritual being must be intrinsic, auto-
matic in action, self-existent and self-fulfilling. What instrumentality it
uses, must be part of itself; even any external instrumentality it uses
must be made part of itself and expressive o'f its being. Force of being
in conscious action is will; and whatever is the conscious will of the
spirit, its will of being and becoming, that all the existence must be able
harmonically to fulfil. Whatever action- or energy of action has not this
sovereignty or is not master of the machinery of action, carries in it by
that defect the sign of an imperfection of the force of being, of a division
or disabling segmentation of the consciousness, of an incompleteness in
the manifestation of the being.

Lastly, to be fully is to have the full delight of being. Being with-
out delight of being, without an entire delight of itself and all things is
something neutral or diminished; it is existence, but it is not fullness
of being. This delight too must be intrinsic, self-existent, automatic; it
cannot be dependent on things outside itself: whatever it delights in, it
makes part of itself, has the joy of it as part of its universality. All
undelight, all pain and suffering are a sign of imperfection, of incomplete-
ness; they arise from a division of being, an incompleteness of conscious-
ness of being, an incompleteness of the force of being. To become

THE DIVINE LIFE 9O9

complete in being, in consciousness of being, in force of being, in delight
of being and to live in this integrated completeness is the divine living.

But, again, to be fully is to be universally. To be in the limitations
of a small restricted ego is to exist, but it is an imperfect existence: in
its very nature it is to live in an incomplete consciousness, an incomplete
force and delight of existence. It is to be less than oneself and it brings
an inevitable subjection to ignorance, weakness and suffering: or even
if by some divine composition of the nature it could exclude these things,
it would be to live in a limited scope of existence, a limited consciousness
and power and joy of existence. All being is one and to be fully is to
be all that is. To be in the being of all and to include all in one's being,
to be conscious of the consciousness of all, to be integrated in force with
the universal force, to carry all action and experience in oneself and feel
it as one's own action and experience, to feel all selves as one's own self,
to feel all delight of being as one's own delight of being is a necessary
condition of the integral divine living.

But thus to be universally in the fullness and freedom of one's uni-
versality, one must be also transcendentally. The spiritual fullness of
the being is eternity; if one has not the consciousness of timeless eternal
being, if one is dependent on body or embodied mind or embodied life,
or dependent on this world or that world or on this condition of being
or that condition of being, that is not the reality of self, not the full-
ness of our spiritual existence. To live only as a self of body or be only
by the body is to be an ephemeral creature, subject to death and desire
and pain and suffering and decay and decadence. To transcend, to exceed
consciousness of body, not to be held in the body or by the body, to hold
the body only as an instrument, a minor outward formation of self, is a
first condition of divine living. Not to be a mind subject to ignorance and
restriction of consciousness, to transcend mind and handle it as an in-
strument, to control it as a surface formation of self, is a second condi-
tion. To be by the self and spirit, not to depend upon life, not to be
identified with it, to transcend it and control and use it as an expres-
sion and instrumentation of the self, is a third condition. Even the bodily
life does not possess its own full being in its own kind if the consciousness
does not exceed the body and feel its physical oneness with all material
existence ; the vital life does not possess its own full living in its own kind
if the consciousness does not exceed the restricted play of an individual
vitality and feel the universal life as its own and its oneness with all life.
The mentality is not a full conscious existence or activity in its own kind

910 THE LIFE DIVINE

if one does not exceed the individual mental limits and feel a oneness
with universal Mind and with all minds and enjoy one's integrality of
consciousness fulfilled in their wealth of difference. But one must tran-
scend not only the individual formula but the formula of the universe,
for only so can either the individual or the universal existence find its
own true being and a perfect harmonisation ; both are in their outer
formulation incomplete terms of the Transcendence, but they are that
in their essence, and it is only by becoming conscious of that essence that
individual consciousness or universal consciousness can come to its own
fullness and freedom of reality. Otherwise the individual may remain
subject to the cosmic movement and its reactions and limitations and
miss his entire spiritual freedom. He must enter into the supreme divine
Reality, feel his oneness with it, live in it, be its self -creation: all his
mind, life, physicality must be converted into terms of its Supe^rnature;
all his thought, feelings, actions must be determined by it and be it, its
self-formation. All this can become complete in him only when h0 has
evolved out of the Ignorance into the Knowledge and through the Krit>wl-
edge into the supreme Consciousness and its dynamis and supreme^
delight of existence; but some essentiality of these things and their
sufficient instrumentation can come with the first spiritual change and
culminate in the life of the gnostic supernature.

These things are impossible without an inward living; they can-
not be reached by remaining in an external consciousness turned always
outwards, active only or mainly on and from the surface. The individual
being has to find himself, his true existence; he can only do this by going
inward, by living within and from within: for the external or outer con-
sciousness or life separated from the inner spirit is the field of the Igno-
rance ; it can only exceed itself and exceed the Ignorance by opening into
the largeness of an inner self and life. If there is a being of the tran-
scendence in us, it must be there in our secret self; on the surface there
is only an ephemeral being of nature, made by limit and circumstance.
If there is a self in us capable of largeness and universality, able to enter
into a cosmic consciousness, that too must be within our inner being;
the outer consciousness is a physical consciousness bound to its individ-
ual limits by the triple cord of mind, life and body: any external attempt
at universality can only result either in an aggrandisement of the ego
or an effacement of the personality by its extinction in the mass or
subjugation to the mass. It is only by an inner growth, movement, action
that the individual can freely and effectively universalise and transcen-

THE DIVINE LIFE 9II

dentalise his being. There must be for the divine living a transference
of the centre and immediate source of dynamic effectuation of the being
from out inward; for there the soul is seated, but it is veiled or half
veiled and our immediate being and source of action is for the present
on the surface. In men, says the Upanishad, the Self-Existent has cut
the doors of consciousness outward, but a few turn the eye inward and
it is these who see and know the Spirit and develop the spiritual being.
Thus to look into ourselves and see and enter into ourselves and live
within is the first necessity for transformation of nature and for the
divine life.

This movement of going inward and living inward is a difficult
task to lay upon the normal consciousness of the human being; yet there
is no other way of self-finding. The materialistic thinker, erecting an
opposition between the extrovert and the introvert, holds up the extro-
vert attitude for acceptance as the only safety: to go inward is to enter
into darkness or emptiness or to lose the balance of the consciousness
and become morbid; it is from outside that such inner life as one can
construct is created, and its health is assured only by a strict reliance on
its wholesome and nourishing outer sources, — the balance of the personal
mind and life can only be secured by a firm support on external reality,
for the material world is the sole fundamental reality. This may be true
for the physical man, the born extrovert, who feels himself to be a crea-
ture of outward Nature; made by her and dependent on her, he would
lose himself if he went inward: for him there is no inner being, no inner
living. But the introvert of this distinction also has not the inner life;
he is not a seer of the true inner self and of inner things, but the small
mental man who looks superficially inside himself and sees there not
his spiritual self but his life-ego, his mind-ego and becomes unhealthily
preoccupied with the movements of this little pitiful dwarf creature. The
idea or experience of an inner darkness when looking inwards is the
first reaction of a mentality which has lived always on the surface and
has no realised inner existence ; it has only a constructed internal experi-
ence which depends on the outside world for the materials of its being.
But to those into whose composition there has entered the power of a
more inner living, the movement of going within and living within brings
not a darkness or dull emptiness but an enlargement, a rush of new ex-
perience, a greater vision, a larger capacity, an extended life infinitely
more real and various than the first pettiness of the life constructed for
itself by our normal physical humanity, a joy of being which is larger

912 THE LIFE DIVINE

and richer than any delight in existence that the outer vital man or the
surface mental man can gain by their dynamic vital force and activity
or subtlety and expansion of the mental existence. A silence, an entry
into a wide or even immense or infinite emptiness is part of the inner
spiritual experience; of this silence and void the physical mind has a
certain fear, the small superficially active thinking or vital mind a shrink-
ing from it or dislike, — for it confuses the silence with mental and vital
incapacity and the void with cessation or non-existence: but this silence
is the silence of the spirit which is the condition of a greater knowledge,
power and bliss, and this emptiness is the emptying of the cup of our
matural being, a liberation of it from its turbid contents so that it may
be filled with the wine of God; it is the passage not into non-existence
but to a greater existence. Even when the being turns towards cessation,
it is a cessation not in non-existence but into some vast ineffable of
spiritual being or the plunge into the incommunicable superconscience
of the Absolute. I

In fact, this inward turning and movement is not an imprisoninent
in personal self, it is the first step towards a true universality; it brin^gs^
to us the truth of our external as well as the truth of our internal exist-
ence. For this inner living can extend itself and embrace the universal
life, it can contact, penetrate, englobe the life of all with a much greater
reality and dynamic force than is in our surface consciousness at all
possible. Our utmost universalisation on the surface is a poor and limp-
ing endeavour, — it is a construction, a make-believe and not the real
thing: for in our surface consciousness we are bound to separation of
consciousness from others and wear the fetters of the ego. There our very
selflessness becomes more often than not a subtle form of selfishness
or turns into a larger affirmation of our ego; content with our pose of
altruism, we do not see that it is a veil for the imposition of our individ-
ual self, our ideas, our mental and vital personality, our need of ego-
enlargement upon the others whom we take up into our expanded orbit.
So far as we really succeed in living for others, it is done by an inner
spiritual force of love and sympathy; but the power and field of effectu-
ality of this force in us are small, the psychic movement that prompts
it is incomplete, its action often ignorant because there is contact of
mind and heart but our being does not embrace the being of others as
ourselves. An external unity with others must always be an outward
joining and association of external lives with a minor inner result; the
mind and heart attach their movements to this common life and the

THE DIVINE LIFE 913

beings whom we meet there; but the common external life remains
the foundation, — the inward constructed unity, or so much of it as can
persist in spite of mutual ignorance and discordant egoisms, conflict of
minds, conflict of hearts, conflict of vital temperaments, conflict of in-
terests, is a partial and insecure superstructure. The spiritual conscious-
ness, the spiritual life reverses this principle of building; it bases its
action in the collective life upon an inner experience and inclusion of
others in our own being, an inner sense and reality of oneness. The spir-
itual individual acts out of that sense of oneness which gives him im-
mediate and direct perception of the demand of self on other self, the
need of the life, the good, the work of love and sympathy that can truly
be done. A realisation of spiritual unity, a dynamisation of the intimate
consciousness of one-being, of one self in all beings, can alone found and
govern by its truth the action of the divine life.

In the gnostic or divine being, in the gnostic life, there will be a
close and complete consciousness of the self of others, a consciousness
of their mind, life, physical being which are felt as if they were one's
own. The gnostic being will act, not out of a surface sentiment of love
and sympathy or any similar feeling, but out of this close mutual con-
sciousness, this intimate oneness. All his action in the world will be
enlightened by a truth of vision of what has to be done, a sense of the
will of the Divine Reality in him which is also the Divine Reality in
others, and it will be done for the Divine in all, for the effectuation of the
truth of purpose of the All as seen in the light of the highest Conscious-
ness and in the way and by the steps through which it must be effectuated
in the power of the Supernature. The gnostic being finds himself not
only in his own fulfilment, which is the fulfilment of the Divine Being
and Will in him, but in the fulfilment of others; his universal individu-
ality effectuates itself in the movement of the All in all beings towards
its greater becoming. He sees a divine working everywhere; what goes
out from him into the sum of that divine working, from the inner Light,
Will, Force that works in him, is his action. There is no separative ego
in him to initiate anything; it is the Transcendent and Universal that
moves out through his universalised individuality into the action of the
universe. As he does not live for a separate ego, so too he does not live
for the purpose of any collective ego; he lives in and for the Divine in
himself, in and for the Divine in the collectivity, in and for the Divine
in all beings. This universality in action, organised by the all-seeing Will
in the sense of the realised oneness of all, is the law of his divine living.

914 THE LIFE DIVINE

It is, then, this spiritual fulfilment of the urge to individual per-
fection and an inner completeness of being that we mean first when we
speak of a divine life. It is the first essential condition of a perfected life
on earth, and we are therefore right in making tTie utmost possible in-
dividual perfection our first supreme business. The perfection of the
spiritual and pragmatic relation of the individual with all around him is
our second preoccupation; the solution of this second desideratum lies in
a complete universality and oneness with all life upon earth which is
the other concomitant result of an evolution into the gnostic conscious-
ness and nature. But there still remains the third desideratum, a new
world, a change in the total life of humanity or, at the least, a new per-
fected collective life in the earth-nature. This calls for the appearance
not only of isolated evolved individuals acting in the unevolv^d mass,
but of many gnostic individuals forming a new kind of beings and a new
common life superior to the present individual and common existence. A
collective life of this kind must obviously constitute itself on the j^ame
principle as the life of the gnostic individual. In our present humaQ^
existence there is a physical collectivity held together by the common
physical life-fact and all that arises from it, community of interests, a
common civilisation and culture, a common social law, an aggregate men-
tality, an economic association, the ideals, emotions, endeavours of the
collective ego with the strand of individual ties and connections running
through the whole and helping to keep it together. Or, where there is a
difference in these things, opposition, conflict, a practical accommodation
or an organised compromise is enforced by the necessity of living to-
gether; there is erected a natural or a constructed order. This would not
be the gnostic divine way of collective living; for there what would bind
and hold all together would be, not the fact of life creating a* sufficiently
united social consciousness, but a common consciousness consolidating a
common life. All will be united by the evolution of the Truth-conscious-
ness in them ; in the changed way of being which this consciousness would
bring about in them, they will feel themselves to be embodiments of a
single self, souls of a single Reality; illumined and motived by a funda-
mental unity of knowledge, actuated by a fundamental unified will and
feeling, a life expressing the spiritual Truth would find through them its
own natural forms of becoming. An order there would be, for truth of
oneness creates its own order: a law or laws of living there might be,
but these would be self-determined ; they would be an expression of the
truth of a spiritually united being and the truth of a spiritually united

THE DIVINE LIFE 915

life. The whole formation of the common existence would be a self-
building of the spiritual forces that must work themselves out spontane-
ously in such a life: these forces would be received inwardly by the inner
being and expressed or self-expressed in a native harmony of idea and
action and purpose.

An increasing mechanisation, a standardisation, a fixing of all into
a common mould in order to ensure harmony is the mental method, but
that would not be the law of this living. There would be a considerable
free diversity between different gnostic communities; each would create
its own body of the life of the spirit: there would be, too, a considerable
free diversity in the self-expression of the individuals of a single com-
munity. But this free diversity would not be a chaos or create any dis-
cord; for a diversity of one Truth of knowledge and one Truth of li^e
would be a correlation and not an opposition. In a gnostic consciousness
there would be no ego-insistence on personal idea and no push or clamour
of personal will and interest: there would be instead the unifying sense
of a common Truth in many forms, a common self in many conscious-
nesses and bodies; there would be a universality and plasticity which
saw and expressed the One in many figures of itself and worked out one-
ness in all diversities as the inherent law of the Truth-consciousness and
its truth of nature. A single Consciousness-Force, of which all would be
aware and see themselves as its instruments, would act through all and
harmonise their action together. The gnostic being would feel a single
consonant Force of supernature acting in all: he would accept its forma-
tion in himself and obey or use the knowledge and power it gave him
for the divine work, but he would be under no urge or compulsion to
set the power and knowledge in him against the power and knowledge
of others or affirm himself as an ego striving against other egos. For the
spiritual self has its own inalienable joy and plenitude inviolable in all
conditions, its own infinity of truth of being: that it feels always in-full-
ness whatever may be the outward formulation. The truth of the spirit
within would not depend on a particular formation; it would have no
need, therefore, to struggle for any particular outward formulation and
self-affirmation: forms would arise of themselves plastically, in suitable
relation to other formulations and each in its own place in the whole
formulation. Truth of gnostic consciousness and being establishing itself
can find its harmony with all other truth of being around it. A spiritual
or gnostic being would feel his harmony with the whole gnostic life
around him, whatever his position in the whole. According to his place

91 6 THE LIFE DIVINE

in it he would know how to lead or to rule, but also how to subordinate
himself; both would be to him an equal delight: for the spirit's free-
dom, because it is eternal, self-existent and inalienable, can be felt as
much in service and willing subordination and adjustment with other
selves as in power and rule. An inner spiritual freedom can accept its
place in the truth of an inner spiritual hierarchy as well as in the truth,
not incompatible with it, of a fundamental spiritual equality. It is this
self-arrangement of Truth, a natural order of the spirit, that would
exist in a common life of different degrees and stages of the evolving
gnostic being. Unity is the basis of the gnostic consciousness, mutuality
the natural result of its direct awareness of oneness in diversity, har-
mony the inevitable power of the working of its force. Unity, mutuality
and harmony must therefore be the inescapable law of a common or
collective gnostic life. What forms it might take would depend upon
the will of evolutionary manifestation of the Supernature, but this
would be its general character and principle. ^

This is the whole sense and the inherent law and necessity of the^
passage from the purely mental and material being and life to the spir-
itual and supramental being and life, that the liberation, perfection, self-
fulfilment for which the being in the Ignorance is seeking can only be
reached by passing out of his present nature of Ignorance into a nature
of spiritual self-knowledge and world-knowledge. This greater nature
we speak of as Supernature because it is beyond his actual level of con-
sciousness and capacity; but in fact it is his own true nature, the height
and completeness of it, to which he must arrive if he is to find his real
self and whole possibility of being. Whatever happens in Nature must
be the result of Nature, the effectuation of what is implied or inherent
in it, its inevitable fruit and consequence. If our nature is a fundamen-
tal Inconscience and Ignorance arriving with difficulty at an imperfect
knowledge, an imperfect formulation of consciousness and being, the
results in our being, life and action and creation must be, as they now
are, a constant imperfection and insecure half result, an imperfect men-
tality, an imperfect life, an imperfect physical existence. We seek to con-
struct systems of knowledge and systems of life by which we can arrive
at some perfection of our existence, some order of right relations, right
use of mind, right use and happiness and beauty of life, right use of
the body. But what we achieve is a constructed half-rightness mixed
with much that is wrong and unlovely and unhappy; our successive con-
structions, because of the vice in them and because mind and life can-

THE DIVINE LIFE 917

not rest permanently anywhere in their seeking, are exposed to destruc-
tion, decadence, disruption of their order, and we pass from them to
others which are not more finally successful or enduring, even if on one
side or another they may be richer and fuller or more rationally plau-
sible. It cannot be otherwise, because we can construct nothing which
goes beyond our nature; imperfect, we cannot construct perfection, how-
ever wonderful may seem to us the machinery our mental ingenuity in-
vents, however externally effective. Ignorant, we cannot construct a sys-
tem of entirely true and fruitful self-knowledge or world-knowledge:
our science itself is a construction, a mass, of formulas and devices;
masterful in knowledge of processes and in the creation of apt machinery,
but ignorant of the foundations of our being and of world-being, it can-
not perfect our nature and therefore cannot perfect our life.

Our nature, our consciousness is that of beings ignorant of each
other, separated from each other, rooted in a divided ego, who must
strive to establish some kind of relation between their embodied igno-
rances; for the urge to union and forces making for union are there in
Nature. Individual and group harmonies of a comparative and qualified
completeness are created, a social cohesion is accomplished; but in the
mass the relations formed are constantly marred by imperfect sympathy,
imperfect understanding, gross misunderstandings, strife, discord, un-
happiness. It cannot be otherwise so long as there is no true union of
consciousness founded upon a nature of self-knowledge, inner mutual
knowledge, inner realisation of unity, concord of our inner forces of
being and inner forces of life. In our social building we labour to estab-
lish some approach to unity, mutuality, harmony, because without these
things there can be no perfect social living; but what we build is a con-
structed unity, an association of interests and egos enforced by law and
custom and imposing an artificial constructed order in which the inter-
ests of some prevail over the interests of others and only a half accepted
half enforced, half natural half artificial accommodation keeps the social
whole in being. Between community and community there is a still worse
accommodation with a constant recurrence of the strife of collective
ego with collective ego. This is the best that we can do and all our per-
sistence readjustments of the social order can bring us nothing better
than an imperfect structure of life.

It is only if our nature develops beyond itself, if it becomes a na-
ture of self-knowledge, mutual understanding, unity, a nature of true
being and true life that the result can be a perfection of ourselves and

9l8 THE LIFE DIVINE

our existence, a life of true being, a life of unity, mutuality, harmony,
a life of true happiness, a harmonious and beautiful life. If our nature
is fixed in what it is, what it has already become, then no perfection,
no real and enduring happiness is possible in earthly life ; we must seek
it not at all and do the best we can with our imperfections, or we must
seek it elsewhere, in a supraterrestrial hereafter, or we must go beyond
all such seeking and transcend life by an extinction of nature and ego
in some Absolute from which this strange and unsatisfactory being of
ours has come into existence. But if in us there is a spiritual being which
is emerging and our present state is only an imperfection or half-emer-
gence, if the Inconscient is a starting-point containing in itself the potency
of a superconscience and supernature which has to evolve, a veil of ap-
parent Nature in which that greater consciousness is concealed and from
which it has to unfold itself, if an evolution of being is the law, then
what we are seeking for is not only possible but part of the eventual
necessity of things. It is our spiritual destiny to manifest and become
that supernature, — for it is the nature of our true self, our still occult,
because unevolved, whole being. A nature of unity will then bring
inevitably its life-result of unity, mutuality, harmony. An inner life
awakened to a full consciousness and to a full power of consciousness will
bear its inevitable fruit in all who have it, self-knowledge, a perfected
existence, the joy of a satisfied being, the happiness of a fulfilled nature.
An innate character of the gnostic consciousness and the instru-
mentation of supernature is a wholeness of sight and action, a unity
of knowledge with knowledge, a reconciliation of all that seems con-
trary in our mental seeing and knowing, an identity of Knowledge and
Will acting as a single power in perfect unison with the truth of things ;
this inborn character of supernature is the foundation of the perfect
unity, mutuality, harmony of its action. In the mental being there is a
discord of its constructed knowledge with the real or the whole truth
of things, so that even what is true in it is often or is eventually ineffec-
tive or only partially effective. Our discoveries of truth are overthrown,
our passionate effectuations of truth are frustrated; often the result of
our action becomes part of a scheme we did not intend for a purpose
whose legitimacy we would not acknowledge, or the truth of the idea is
deceived by the actual outcome of its pragmatic success. Even if there
is a successful realisation of the idea, yet because the idea is incomplete,
an isolated construction of the mind separate from the one and whole
truth of things, its success must sooner or later end in disillusionment

THE DIVINE LIFE 919

and a new endeavour. The discordance of our seeing and our notions with
the true truth and the whole truth of things, the partiaHty and super-
ficiality of our mind's deceptive constructions, is the cause of our frus-
tration. But there is also not only a discord of knowledge with knowledge
but of will with will and of knowledge with will in the same being, a di-
vision and disharmony between them, so that where the knowledge is
ripe or sufficient, some will in the being opposes it or the will fails it;
where the will is powerful, vehement or firmly or forcefully effective,
knowledge guiding it to its right use is lacking. All kinds of disparity
and maladjustment and incompleteness of our knowledge, will, capacity,
executive force and dealing intervene constantly in our action, our work-
ing out of life, and are an abundant source of imperfection or ineffec-
tivity. These disorders, defects and disharmonies are normal to a status
and energy of Ignorance and can only be dissolved by a greater light
than that of mind nature or life nature. An identity and authenticity and
a harmony of truth with truth are the native character of all gnostic see-
ing and action; as the mind grows into the gnosis, our mental seeing and
action lifted into the gnostic light or visited and ruled by it would begin
to partake of this character and, even if still restricted and within limits,
must become much more perfect and within these limits effective: the
causes of our incapacity and frustration would begin to diminish and
disappear. But also the larger existence will invade the mind with the
potencies of a greater consciousness and a greater force, a bringing out
of new powers of the being. Knowledge is power and act of conscious-
ness. Will is conscious power and conscious act of force of being; both
in the gnostic being will reach greater magnitudes than any we now
know, a higher degree of themselves, a richer instrumentation: for
wherever there is an increase of consciousness, there is an increase of the
potential force and the actual power of the existence.

In the terrestrial formulation of Knowledge and Power, this cor-
relation is not altogether apparent because there consciousness itself
is concealed in an original Inconscience and the natural strength and
rhythm of its powers in their emergence are diminished and disturbed by
the discordances and the veils of the Ignorance. The Inconscient there
is the original, potent and automatically effective Force, the conscious
mind is only a small labouring agent; but that is because the conscious
mind in us has a limited individual action and the Inconscient is an im-
mense action of a universal concealed Consciousness: the cosmic Force,
masked as a material Energy, hides from our view by its insistent

920 THE LIFE DIVINE

materiality of process the occult fact that the working of the Inconscient
is really the expression of a vast universal Life, a veiled universal Mind,
a hooded Gnosis, and without these origins of itself it could have no
power of action, no organising coherence. Life-Force also in the material
world seems to be more dynamic and effective than Mind; our Mind
is free and fully powerful in idea and cognition only: its force of action,
its power of effectuation outside this mental field is obliged to work with
life and matter as instruments and, under the conditions imposed on it
by life and matter, our mind is hampered and half effective. But even
so we see that Nature-force in the mental being is much more powerful
to deal with himself and with life and matter than Nature-force in the
animal; it is the greater force of consciousness and knowledge, the
greater emerged force of being and will that constitute this superiority.
In human life itself the vital man seems to have a stronger dynamis
of action than the mental man because of his superiority in kinetic life-
force: the intellectual tends to be effective in thought but ineffective in
power over the world, while the kinetic vital man of action dominates
life. But it is his use of mind that enables him to arrive at a full exploi-
tation of this superiority, and in the end the mental man by his power
of knowledge, his science, is able to extend the mastery of existence far
beyond what life in matter could accomplish by its own agencies or what
the vital man could accomplish with his life-force and life-instinct with-
out that increase of effective knowledge. An immensely greater power
over existence and over Nature must come when a still greater conscious-
ness emerges and replaces the hampered operations of the mental Energy
in our too individualised and restricted force of existence.

A certain fundamental subjection of mind to life and matter and
an acceptance of this subjection, an inability to make the law of Mind
directly dominant and modify by its powers the blinder law and opera-
tions of these inferior forces of being, remains even in the midst of our
greatest mental mastery over self and things; but this limitation is not
insuperable. It is the interest of occult knowledge that it shows us — ^and
a dynamic force of spiritual knowledge brings us the same evidence —
that this subjection of Mind to Matter, of the spirit to a lesser law of
life is not what it at first appears to be, a fundamental condition of things,
an inviolable and unalterable rule of Nature. The greatest, most momen-
tous natural discovery that man can make is this that mind, and still more
the force of the spirit, can in many tried and yet untried ways and in all
directions — by its own nature and direct power and not only by devices

THE DIVINE LIFE 92 I

and contrivances such as the superior material instrumentation dis-
covered by physical Science — overcome and control life and matter. In
the evolution of the gnostic supernature this direct power of conscious-
ness, this direct action of the force of the being, its free mastery and
control of life and matter, would be consummated and reach their acme.
For the greater knowledge of the gnostic being would not be in the main
an outwardly acquired or learned knowledge, but the result of an evolu-
tion of consciousness and of the force of consciousness, a new dynamisa-
tion of the being. As a consequence, he would awake to and possess many
things, a clear and complete knowledge of self, a direct knowledge of
others, a direct knowledge of hidden forces, a direct knowledge of the
occult mechanism of mind and life and matter, which are beyond our
present attainment. This new knowledge and action of knowledge would
be based on an immediate intuitive consciousness of things and an im-
mediate intuitive control of things; an operative insight, now supernor-
mal to us, would be the normal functioning of this consciousness, and an
integral assured effectivity both in the mass of action and in its detail
would be the outcome of the change. For the gnostic being would be in
unison and communion with the Consciousness-Force that is at the root
of everything: his vision and his will would be the channel of the
supramental Real-Idea, the self-effective Truth- Force; his action would
be a free manifestation of the power and workings of the root Force of
existence, the force of an all-determining conscious spirit whose formula-
tions of consciousness work out inevitably in mind, life and matter. Act-
ing in the light and power of the supramental knowledge, the evolving
gnostic being would be more and more master of himself, master of the
forces of consciousness, master of the energies of Nature, master of his
instrumentation of life and matter. In the lesser status, the intermediate
stages or formations of the evolving gnostic nature this power would not
be present in its fullness: but in some degree of its activities it would be
there; incipient and increasing with the ascent of the scale, it would
be a natural concomitant of the growth of consciousness and knowledge.
A new power and powers of consciousness would be, then, an inevi-
table consequence of an evolution of Consciousness-Force passing beyond
mind to a superior cognitive and dynamic principle. In their essential
nature these new powers must have the character of a control of mind
over life and matter, of the conscious life- will and life-force over matter,
of the spirit over mind, life and matter ; they would have the character
also of a breaking down of the barriers between soul and soul, mind and

922 THE LIFE DIVINE

mind, life and life: such a change would be indispensable for the instru-
mentation of the gnostic life. For a total gnostic or divine living would
include not only the individual life of the being but the life of others
made one with the individual in a common uniting consciousness. Such a
life must have for its main constituting power a spontaneous and innate,
not a constructed, unity and harmony; this can only come by a greater
identity of being and consciousness between individual and individual
unified in their spiritual substance, feeling themselves to be self and self
of one self-existence, acting in a greater unitarian force of knowledge,
a greater power of the being. There must be an inner and direct mutual
knowledge based upon a consciousness of oneness and identity, a con-
sciousness of each other's being, thought, feeling, inner and outer move-
ments, a conscious communication of mind with mind, of heart with
heart, a conscious impact of life upon life, a consciotis interchange of
forces of being with forces of being; in any absence or deficiency of
these powers and their intimate light there could not be a real or com-
plete unity or a real and complete natural fitting of each individual's
being, thought, feeling, inner and outer movements with those of the in-
dividuals around him. A growing basis and structure of conscious unan-
imism, we might say, would be the character of this more evolved life.
Harmony is the natural rule of the spirit, it is the inherent law and
spontaneous consequence of unity in multiplicity, of unity in diversity,
of a various manifestation of oneness. In a pure and blank unity there
could be indeed no place for harmony, for there is nothing to harmonise;
in a complete or a governing diversity there must be either discord or a
fitting together of differences, a constructed harmony. But in a gnostic
unity in multiplicity the harmony would be there as a spontaneous ex-
pression of the unity, and this spontaneous expression presupposes a mu-
tuality of consciousness aware of other consciousness by a direct inner
contact and interchange. In infrarational life harmony is secured by an
instinctive oneness of nature and oneness of the action of the nature, an
instinctive communication, an instinctive or direct vital-intuitional sense-
understanding by which the individuals of an animal or insect community
are able to co-operate. In human life this is replaced by understanding
through sense-knowledge and mental perception and communication of
ideas by speech, but the means that have to be used are imperfect and
the harmony and co-operation incomplete. In a gnostic life, a life of
superreason and supernature, a self-aware spiritual unity of being and
a spiritual conscious community and interchange of nature would be

THE DIVINE LIFE 923

the deep and ample root of understanding: this greater life would have
evolved new and superior means and powers of uniting consciousness
inwardly with consciousness; intimacy of consciousness communicating
inwardly and directly with consciousness, thought with thought, vision
with vision, sense with sense, life with life, body-awareness with body-
awareness, would be its natural basic instrumentation. All these new
powers taking up the old outward instruments and using them as a sub-
ordinate means with a far greater power and to more purpose would be
put to the service of the self-expression of the spirit in a profound one-
ness of being and life.

An evolution of innate and latent but as yet unevolved powers of
consciousness is not considered admissible by the modern mind, because
these exceed our present formulation of Nature and, to our ignorant pre-
conceptions founded on a limited experience, they seem to belong to the
supernatural, to the miraculous and occult; for they surpass the known
action of material Energy which is now ordinarily accepted as the sole
cause and mode of things and the sole instrumentation of the World-
Force. A human working of marvels, by the conscious being discovering
and developing an instrumentation of material forces overpassing any-
thing that Nature has herself organised, is accepted as a natural fact
and an almost unlimited prospect of our existence ; an awakening, a dis-
covery, an instrumentation of powers of consciousness and of spiritual,
mental and life forces overpassing anything that Nature or man has
yet organised is not admitted as possible. But there would be nothing
supernatural or miraculous in such an evolution, except in so far as it
would be a supernature or superior nature to ours just as human nature
is a supernature or superior nature to that of animal or plant or material
objects. Our mind and its powers, our use of reason, our mental intuition
and insight, speech, possibilities of philosophical, scientific, aesthetic
discovery of the truths and potencies of being and a control of its forces
are an evolution that has taken place: yet it would seem impossible if we
took our stand on the limited animal consciousness and its capacities;
for there is nothing there to warrant so prodigious a progression. But
still there are vague initial manifestations, rudimentary elements or ar-
rested possibilities in the animal to which our reason and intelligence with
their extraordinary developments stand as an unimaginable journey from
a poor and unpromising point of departure. The rudiments of spiritual
powers belonging to the gnostic supernature are similarly there even in
our ordinary composition, but only occasionally and sparsely active. It

924 THE LIFE DIVINE

is not irrational to suppose that at this much higher stage of the evolu-
tion a similar but greater progression starting from these rudimentary
beginnings might lead to another immense development and departure.
In mystic experience, — ^when there is an opening of the inner cen-
tres, or in other ways, spontaneously or by will or endeavour or in the
very course of the spiritual growth, — ^new powers of consciousness have
been known to develop; they present themselves as if an automatic con-
sequence of some inner opening or in answer to a call in the being, so
much so that it has been found necessary to recommend to the seeker
not to hunt after these powers, not to accept or use them. This rejection
is logical for those who seek to withdraw from life; for all acceptance
of greater power would bind to life or be a burden on the bare and pure
urge towards liberation. An indifference to all other aims and issues is
natural for the God-lover who seeks God for His own sake and not for
power or any other inferior attraction ; the pursuit of these alluring but
often dangerous forces would be a deviation from his purpose. A similar
rejection is a necessary self-restraint and a spiritual discipline for the
immature seeker, since such powers may be a great, even a deadly peril ;
for their supernormality may easily feed in him an abnormal exaggera-
tion of the ego. Power in itself may be dreaded as a temptation by the
aspirant to perfection, because power can abase as well as elevate; noth-
ing is more liable to misuse. But when new capacities come as an inevi-
table result of the growth into a greater consciousness and a greater life
and that growth is part of the very aim of the spiritual being within us,
this bar does not operate ; for a growth of the being into supernature and
its life in supernature cannot take place or cannot be complete without
bringing with it a greater power of consciousness and a greater power
of life and the spontaneous development of an instrumentation of knowl-
edge and force normal to that supernature. There is nothing in this
future evolution of the being which could be regarded as irrational or
incredible; there is nothing in it abnormal or miraculous: it would be
the necessary course of the evolution of consciousness and its forces in
the passage from the mental to the gnostic or supramental formulation of
our existence. This action of the forces of supernature would be a natural,
normal and spontaneously simple working of the new higher or greater
consciousness into which the being enters in the course of his self-evolu-
tion; the gnostic being accepting the gnostic life would develop and use
the powers of this greater consciousness, even as man develops and uses
the powers of his mental nature.

THE DIVINE LIFE 925

It is evident that such an increase of the power or powers of con-
sciousness would be not only normal but indispensable to a greater and
more perfect life. Human life with its partial harmony, in so far as that
is not maintained by the imposition of a settled law and order on the
constituent individuals through a partly willing, partly induced, partly
forced or unavoidable acceptance, reposes on the agreement of the en-
lightened or interested elements in their mind, heart, life-sense, an assent
to a composite body of common ideas, desires, vital satisfactions, aims of
existence. But there is in the mass of constituting individuals an imper-
fect understanding and knowledge of the ideas, life-aims, life-motives
which they have accepted, an imperfect power in their execution, an im-
perfect will to maintain them always unimpaired, to carry them out
fully or to bring the life to a greater perfection: there is an element of
struggle and discord, a mass of repressed or unfulfilled desires and frus-
trated wills, a simmering suppressed unsatisfaction or an awakened or
eruptive discontent of unequally satisfied interests; there are new ideas,
life-motives that break in and cannot be correlated without upheaval and
disturbance ; there are life-forces at work in human beings and their en-
vironment that are at variance with the harmony that has been con-
structed, and there is not the full power to overcome the discord and
dislocations created by a clashing diversity of mind and life and by the
attack of disrupting forces in universal Nature. What is lacking is a spiri-
tual knowledge and spiritual power, a power over self, a power born of
inner unification with others, a power over the surrounding or invading
world-forces, a full-visioned and fully equipped power of effectuation of
knowledge ; it is these capacities missing or defective in us that belong to
the very substance of gnostic being, for they are inherent in the light and
dynamis of the gnostic nature.

But, in addition to the imperfect accommodation of the minds,
hearts, lives of the constituting individuals in a human society, the
mind and the life of the individual himself are actuated by forces that
are not in accord with each other ; our attempts to accord them are im-
perfect, and still more imperfect is our force to put any one of them into
integral or satisfying execution in life. Thus the law of love and sym-
pathy is natural to our consciousness; as we grow in spirit, its demand
on us increases: but there is also the demand of the intellect, the push of
the vital force and its impulses in us, the claim and pressure of many
other elements that do not coincide with the law of love and s\Tnpathy,
nor do we know how to fit them all into the whole law of existence or to

926 THE LIFE DIVINE

render any or all of them either justly and entirely effective or impera-
tive. In order to make them concordant and actively fruitful in the whole
being and whole life, we have to grow into a more complete spiritual
nature; we have, by that growth, to live in the light and force of a higher
and larger and more integral consciousness of which knowledge and
power, love and sympathy and play of life-will are all natural and ever-
present accorded elements; we have to move and act in a light of Truth
which sees intuitively and spontaneously the thing to be done and the
way to do it and intuitively and spontaneously fulfils itself in the act,
and the force, — taking up into that intuitive Spontaneity of their truth,
into its simple spiritual and supreme normality, the complexity of our
forces of being and suffusing with their harmonised realities all the
steps of Nature.

It should be evident that no rationalised piecing together or in-
genuity of mental construction can accord or harmonise this complexity;
it is only the intuition and self-knowledge of an awakened spirit that can
do it. That would be the nature of the evolved supramental being and
his existence; his spiritual sight and sense would take up all the forces
of the being in a unifying consciousness and bring them into a nor-
mality of accorded action: for this accord and concord are the true nor-
mality of the spirit; the discord, the disharmony of our life and nature
is abnormal to it although it is normal to the life of the Ignorance. It is
indeed because it is not normal to the spirit that a knowledge within us
is dissatisfied and strives towards a greater harmony in our existence.
This accord and concord of the whole being, which is natural to the gnos-
tic individual, would be equally natural to a community of gnostic be-
ings; for it would rest on a union of self with self in the light of a
common and mutual self-awareness. It is true that in the total terrestrial
existence of which the gnostic life would be a part, there would be still
continuing within it a life belonging to a less evolved order ; the intuitive
and gnostic life would have to fit into this total existence and carry
into it as much of its own law of unity and harmony as may be possible.
Here the law of spontaneous harmony might seem' a part, there would be
still continuing within it a life with the ignorant life around it would not
be founded on a mutuality of self-knowledge and a sense of one being
and common consciousness; it would be a relation of action of knowledge
to action of ignorance. But this difficulty need not be so great as it
seems now to us; for the gnostic knowledge would carry in it a perfect
understanding of the consciousness of the Ignorance, and it would not

THE DIVINE LIFE 927

be impossible, therefore, for an assured gnostic life to harmonise its
existence with that of all the less developed life co-existent with it in the
earth-nature.

If this is our evolutionary destiny, it remains for us to see where we
stand at this juncture in the evolutionary progression, — a progression
which has been cyclic or spiral rather than in a straight line or has at
least journeyed in a very zigzag swinging curve of advance, — and what
prospect there is of any turn towards a decisive step in the near or meas-
urable future. In our human aspiration towards a personal perfection
and the perfection of the life of the race the elements of the future evo-
lution are foreshadowed and striven after, but in a confusion of half-
enlightened knowledge; there is a discord between the necessary ele-
ments, an opposing emphasis, a profusion of rudimentary unsatisfying
and ill-accorded solutions. These sway between the three principal pre-
occupations of our idealism, — the complete single development of the
human being in himself, the perfectibility of the individual, a full de-
velopment of the collective being, the perfectibility of society, and, more
pragmatically restricted, the perfect or best possible relations of indi-
vidual with individual and society and of community with community.
An exclusive or dominant emphasis is laid sometimes on the individual,
sometimes on the collectivity or society, sometimes on a right and bal-
anced relation between the individual and the collective human whole.
One idea holds up the growing life, freedom or perfection of the human
individual as the true object of our existence, — whether the ideal be
merely a free self-expression of the personal being or a self-governed
whole of complete mind, fine and ample life and perfect body, or a spiri-
tual perfection and liberation. In this view society is there only as a field
of activity and growth for the individual man and serves best its func-
tion when it gives as far as possible a wide room, ample means, a suffi-
cient freedom or guidance of development to his thought, his action, his
growth, his possibility of fullness of being. An opposite idea gives the
collective life the first or the sole importance; the existence, the growth
of the race is all: the individual has to live for the society or for mankind,
or, even, he is only a cell of the society, he has no other use or purpose of
birth, no other meaning of his presence in Nature, no other function. Or
it is held that the nation, the society, the community is a collective being,
revealing its soul in its culture, power of life, ideals, institutions, all its
ways of self-expression ; the individual life has to cast itself in that mould
of culture, serve that power of life, consent only to exist as an instru-

928 THE LIFE DIVINE

ment for the maintenance and efficiency of the collective existence. In an-
other idea the perfection of man lies in his ethical and social relations
with other men; he is a social being and has to live for society, for others,
for his utility to the race: the society also is there for the service of all,
to give them their right relation, education, training, economic oppor-
tunity, right frame of life. In the ancient cultures the greatest emphasis
was laid on the community and the fitting of the individual into the com-
munity, but also there grew up an idea qf the perfected individual ; in an-
cient India it was the idea of the spiritual individual that was dominant,
but the society was of extreme importance because in it and under its
moulding influence the individual had to pass first through the social
status of the physical, vital, mental being with his satisfaction of in-
terest, desire, pursuit of knowledge and right living before he could reach
fitness for a truer self-realisation and a free spiritual existence. In recent
times the whole stress has passed to the life of the race, to a search for the
perfect society, and latterly to a concentration on the right organisation
and scientific mechanisation of the life of mankind as a whole; the in-
dividual now tends more to be regarded only as a member of the col-
lectivity, a unit of the race whose existence must be subordinated to the
common aims and total interest of the organised society, and much less
or not at all as a mental or spiritual being with his own right and power
of existence. This tendency has not yet reached its acme everywhere, but
everywhere it is rapidly increasing and heading towards dominance.

Thus, in the vicissitudes of human thought, on one side the indi-
vidual is moved or invited to discover and pursue his own self-affirmation,
his own development of mind and life and body, his own spiritual per-
fection; on the other he is called on to efface and subordinate himself
and to accept the ideas, ideals, will, instincts, interests of the community
as his own. He is moved by Nature to live for himself and by something
deep within him to affirm his individuality; he is called upon by society
and by a certain mental idealism to live for humanity or for the greater
good of the community. The principle of self and its interest is met and
opposed by the principle of altruism. The State erects its godhead and
demands his obedience, submission, subordination, self-immolation; the
individual has to affirm against this exorbitant claim the rights of his
ideals, his ideas, his personality, his conscience. It is evident that all this
conflict of standards is a groping of the mental Ignorance of man seek-
ing to find its way and grasping different sides of the truth but unable by
its want of integrality in knowledge to harmonise them together. A unify-

THE DIVINE LIFE 929

ing and harmonising knowledge can alone find the way, but that knowl-
edge belongs to a deeper principle of our being to which oneness and
integrality are native. It is only by finding that in ourselves that we can
solve the problem of our existence and with it the problem of the true
way of individual and communal living.

There is a Reality, a truth of all existence which is greater and more
abiding than all its formations and manifestations; to find that truth
and Reality and live in it, achieve the most perfect manifestation and
formation possible of it, must be the secret of perfection whether of
individual or communal being. This Reality is there within each thing and
gives to each of its formations its power of being and value of being.
The universe is a manifestation of the Reality, and there is a truth of the
universal existence, a Power of cosmic being, an all-self or world-spirit.
Humanity is a formation or manifestation of the Reality in the universe
and there is a truth and self of humanity, a human spirit, a destiny of
human life. The community is a formation of the Reality, a manifesta-
tion of the spirit of man, and there is a truth, a self, a power of the col-
lective being. The individual is a formation of the Reality, and there is a
truth of the individual, an individual self, soul or spirit that expresses
itself through the individual mind, life and body and can express itself
too in something that goes beyond mind, life and body, something even
that goes beyond humanity. For our humanity is not the whole of the
Reality or its best possible self- formation or self-expression, — the Reality
has assumed before man existed an infrahuman formation and self-crea-
tion and can assume after him or in him a suprahuman formation and
self -creation. The individual as spirit or being is not confined within his
humanity; he has been less than human, he can become more than
human. The universe finds itself through him even as he finds himself in
the universe, but he is capable of becoming more than the universe, since
he can surpass it and enter into something in himself and in it and be-
yond it that is absolute. He is not confined within the community; al-
though his mind and life are, in a way, part of the communal mind and
life, there is something in him that can go beyond them. The community
exists by the individual, for its mind and life and body are constituted by
the mind and life and body of its composing individuals; if that were
abolished or disaggregated, its own existence would be abolished or disag-
gregated, though some spirit or powder of it might form again in other
individuals: but the individual is not a mere cell of the collective exist-
ence; he would not cease to exist if separated or expelled from the col-

93© THE LIFE DIVINE

lective mass. For the collectivity, the community is not even the whole
of humanity and it is not the world: the individual can exist and find
himself elsewhere in humanity or by himself in the world. If the com-
munity has a life dominating that of the individuals which constitute it,
still it does not constitute their whole life. If it has its being which it seeks
to affirm by the life of the individuals, the individual also has a being
of his own which he seeks to affirm in the life of the community. But he is
not tied to that, he can affirm himself in another communal life, or, if he is
strong enough, in a nomad existence or' in an eremite solitude where, if
he cannot pursue or achieve a complete material living, he can spiritually
exist and find his own reality and indwelling self of being.

The individual is indeed the key of the evolutionary movement; for
it is the individual who finds himself, who becomes conscious of the
Reality. The movement of the collectivity is a largely subconscious mass
movement; it has to formulate and express itself through the individuals
to become conscious: its general mass consciousness is always less
evolved than the consciousness of its most developed individuals, and it
progresses in so far as it accepts their impress or develops what they
develop. The individual does not owe his ultimate allegiance either to the
State which is a machine or to the community which is a part of life and
not the whole of life: his allegiance must be to the Truth, the Self, the
Spirit, the Divine which is in him and in all; not to subordinate or lose
himself in the mass, but to find and express that truth of being in him-
self and help the community and humanity in its seeking for its own
truth and fullness of being must be his real object of existence. But the
extent to which the power of the individual life or the spiritual Reality
within it becomes operative, depends on his own development: so long as
he is undeveloped, he has to subordinate in many ways his undeveloped
self to whatever is greater than it. As he develops, he moves towards a
spiritual freedom, but this freedom is not something entirely separate
from all-existence; it has a solidarity with it because that too is the self,
the same spirit. As he moves towards spiritual freedom, he moves also
towards spiritual oneness. The spiritually realised, the liberated man is
preoccupied, says the Gita, with the good of all beings ; Buddha discover-
ing the way of Nirvana must turn back to open that way to those who
are still under the delusion of their constructive instead of their real be-
ing— or non-being; Vivekananda, drawn by the Absolute, feels also the
call of the disguised Godhead in humanity and most the call of the fallen
and the suffering, the call of the self to the self in the obscure body of

THE DIVINE LIFE 93 1

the universe. For the awakened individual the realisation of his truth
of being and his inner liberation and perfection must be his primary
seeking, — first, because that is the call of the Spirit within him, but also
because it is only by liberation and perfection and realisation of the
truth of being that man can arrive at truth of living. A perfected com-
munity also can exist only by the perfection of its individuals, and per-
fection can come only by the discovery and affirmation in life by each
of his own spiritual being and the discovery by all of their spiritual
unity and a resultant life unity. There can be no real perfection for us
except by our inner self and truth of spiritual existence taking up all
truth of the instrumental existence into itself and giving to it oneness,
integration, harmony. As our only real freedom is the discovery and
disengagement of the spiritual Reality within us, so our only means of
true perfection is the sovereignty and self-effectuation of the spiritual
Reality in all the elements of our nature.

Our nature is complex and we have to find a key to some perfect
unity and fullness of its complexity. Its first evolutionary basis is the
material life: Nature began with that and man also has to begin with
it ; he has first to affirm his material and vital existence. But if he stops
there, there can be for him no evolution ; his next and greater preoccupa-
tion must be to find himself as a mental being in a material life — both
individual and social — as perfected as possible. This was the direction
which the Hellenic idea gave to European civilisation, and the Roman
reinforced — or weakened — it with the ideal of organised power: the
cult of reason, the interpretation of life by an intellectual thought criti-
cal, utilitarian, organising and constructive, the government of life by
Science are the last outcome of this inspiration. But in ancient times
the higher creative and dynamic element was the pursuit of an ideal
truth, good and beauty and the moulding of mind, life and body into
perfection and harmony by this ideal. Beyond and above this preoccupa-
tion, as soon as mind is sufficiently developed, there awakes in man the
spiritual preoccupation, the discovery of a self and inmost truth of be-
ing and the release of man's mind and life into the truth of the Spirit, its
perfection by the power of the Spirit, the solidarity, unity, mutuality of
all beings in the Spirit. This was the Eastern ideal carried by Buddhism
and other ancient disciplines to the coasts of Asia and Eg\pt and from
there poured by Christianity into Europe. But these motives, burning
for a time like dim torchlights in the confusion and darkness created by
the barbaric flood that had submerged the old civilisations, have been

932 THE LIFE DIVINE

abandoned by the modern spirit which has found another light, the light
of Science. What the modern spirit has sought for is the economic
social ultimate, — an ideal material organisation of civilisation and com-
fort, the use of reason and science and education for the generalisation
of a utilitarian rationaHty which will make the individual a perfected
social being in a perfected economic society. What remained from the
spiritual ideal was — for a time — a mentalised and moralised humani-
tarianism relieved of all religious colouring and a social ethicism which
was deemed all-sufficient to take th^ place of a religious and individual
ethic. It was so far that the race had reached when it found itself hurried
forward by its own momentum into a subjective chaos and a chaos of its
life in which all received values were overthrown and all firm ground
seemed to disappear from its social organisation, its conduct and its cul-
ture.

For this ideal, this conscious stress on the material and economic
life was in fact a civilised reversion to the first state of man, his early
barbaric state and its preoccupation with life and matter, a spiritual
retrogression with the resources of the mind of a developed humanity
and a fully evolved Science at its disposal. As an element in the total
complexity of human life this stress on a perfected economic and material
existence has its place in the whole: as a sole or predominant stress it is
for humanity itself, for the evolution itself full of danger. The first
danger is a resurgence of the old vital and material primitive barbarian
in a civilised form; the means Science has put at our disposal eliminates
the peril of the subversion and destruction of an effete civilisation by
stronger primitive peoples, but it is the resurgence of the barbarian in
ourselves, in civilised man, that is the peril, and this we see all around
us. For that is bound to come if there is no high and strenuous mental
and moral ideal controlling and uplifting the vital and physical man
in us and no spiritual ideal liberating him from himself into his inner
being. Even if this relapse is escaped, there is another danger, — for a
cessation of the evolutionary urge, a crystallisation into a stable com-
fortable mechanised social living without ideal or outlook is another
possible outcome. Reason by itself cannot long maintain the race in its
progress ; it can do so only if it is a mediator between the life and body
and something higher and greater within him ; for it is the inner spiritual
necessity, the push from what is there yet unrealised within him that
maintains in him, once he has attained to mind, the evolutionary stress,
the spiritual nisus. That renounced, he must either relapse and begin all

THE DIVINE LIFE 933

over again or disappear like other forms of life before him as an evolu-
tionary failure, through incapacity to maintain or to serve the evolu-
tionary urge. At the best he will remain arrested in some kind of mediary
typal perfection, like other animal kinds, while Nature pursues her way
beyond him to a greater creation.

At present mankind is undergoing an evolutionary crisis in which is
concealed a choice of its destiny; for a stage has been reached in which
the human mind has achieved in certain directions an enormous de-
velopment while in others it stands arrested and bewildered and can no
longer find its way. A structure of the external life has been raised
up by man's ever-active mind and life-will, a structure of an unmanage-
able hugeness and complexity, for the service of his mental, vital, physi-
cal claims and urges, a complex political, social, administrative, eco-
nomic, cultural machinery, an organised collective means for his intel-
lectual, sensational, aesthetic and material satisfaction. Man has created
a system of civilisation which has become too big for his limited mental
capacity and understanding and his still more limited spiritual and moral
capacity to utilise and manage, a too dangerous servant of his blundering
ego and its appetites. For no greater seeing mind, no intuitive soul of
knowledge has yet come to his surface of consciousness which could
make this basic fullness of life a condition for the free growth of some-
thing that exceeded it. This new fullness of the means of life might be, by
its power for a release from the incessant unsatisfied stress of his eco-
nomic and physical needs, an opportunity for the full pursuit of other
and greater aims surpassing the material existence, for the discovery
of a higher truth and good and beauty, for the discovery of a greater and
diviner spirit which would intervene and use life for a higher perfection
of the being: but it is being used instead for the multiplication of new
wants and an aggressive expansion of the collective ego. At the same
time Science has put at his disposal many potencies of the universal
Force and has made the life of humanity materially one ; but what uses
this universal Force is a little human individual or communal ego with
nothing universal in its light of knowledge or its movements, no inner
sense or power which would create in this physical drawing together of
the human world a true life unity, a mental unity or a spiritual oneness.
All that is there is a chaos of clashing mental ideas, urges of individual
and collective physical want and need, vital claims and desires, impulses
of an ignorant life-push, hungers and calls for life satisfaction of indi-
viduals, classes, nations, a rich fungus of political and social and economic

934 THE LIFE DIVINE

nostrums and notions, a hustling medley of slogans and panaceas for
which men are ready to oppress and be oppressed, to kill and be killed,
to impose them somehow or other by the immense and too formidable
means placed at his disposal, in the belief that this is his way out to
something ideal. The evolution of human mind and life must necessarily
lead towards an increasing universality; but on a basis of ego and
segmenting and dividing mind this opening to the universal can only
create a vast pullulation of unaccorded ideas and impulses, a surge of
enormous powers and desires, a chaotic mass of unassimilated and inter-
mixed mental, vital and physical material of a larger existence which, be-
cause it is not taken up by a creative harmonising light of the spirit,
must welter in a universalised confusion and discord out of which it is
impossible to build a greater harmonic life. Man has harmonised life
in the past by organised ideation and limitation ; he has created societies
based on fixed ideas or fixed customs, a fixed cultural system or an or-
ganic life-system, each with its own order; the throwing of all these into
the melting-pot of a more and more intermingling life and a pouring in
of ever new ideas and motives and facts and possibilities call for a new,
a greater consciousness to meet and master the increasing potentialities
of existence and harmonise them. Reason and Science can only help
by standardising, by fixing everything into an artificially arranged and
mechanised unity of material life. A greater whole-being, whole-knowl-
edge, whole-power is needed to weld all into a greater unity of whole-
life.

A life of unity, mutuality and harmony born of a deeper and wider
truth of our being is the only truth of life that can successfully replace
the imperfect mental constructions of the past which were a combina-
tion of association and regulated conflict, an accommodation of egos
and interests grouped or dovetailed into each other to form a society,
a consolidation by common general life-motives, a unification by need
and the pressure of struggle with outside forces. It is such a change and
such a reshaping of life for which humanity is blindly beginning to seek,
now more and more with a sense that its very existence depends upon
finding the way. The evolution of mind working upon life has de-
veloped an organisation of the activity of mind and use of Matter which
can no longer be supported by human capacity without an inner change.
An accommodation of the egocentric human individuality, separative
even in association, to a system of living which demands unity, perfect
mutuality, harmony, is imperative. But because the burden which is

THE DIVINE LIFE 935

being laid on mankind is too great for the present littleness of the hu-
man personality and its petty mind and small life-instincts, because it
cannot operate the needed change, because it is using this new appara-
tus and organisation to serve the old infraspiritual and infrarational life-
self of humanity, the destiny of the race seems to be heading danger-
ously, as if impatiently and in spite of itself, under the drive of the vital
ego seized by colossal forces which are on the same scale as the huge
mechanical organisation of life and scientific knowledge which it has
evolved, a scale too large for its reason and will to handle, into a pro-
longed confusion and perilous crisis and darkness of violent shifting in-
certitude. Even if this turns out to be a passing phase or appearance
and a tolerable structural accommodation is found which will enable
mankind to proceed less catastrophically on its uncertain journey, this
can only be a respite. For the problem is fundamental and in putting it
evolutionary Nature in man is confronting herself with a critical choice
which must one day be solved in the true sense if the race is to arrive or
even to survive. The evolutionary nisus is pushing towards a develop-
ment of the cosmic Force in terrestrial life which needs a larger mental
and vital being to support it, a wider mind, a greater wider more con-
scious unanimised Life-Soul, Anima, and that again needs an unveiling
of the supporting Soul and spiritual Self within to maintain it.

A rational and scientific formula of the vitalistic and materialistic
human being and his life, a search for a perfected economic society and
the democratic cultus of the average man are all that the modern mind
presents us in this crisis as a light for its solution. Whatever the truth
supporting these ideas, this is clearly not enough to meet the need of a
humanity which is missioned to evolve beyond itself or, at any rate, if
it is to live, must evolve far beyond anything that it at present is. A life-
instinct in the race and in the average man himself has felt the inade-
quacy and has been driving towards a reversal of values or a discovery
of new values and a transfer of life to a new foundation. This has taken
the form of an attempt to find a simple and ready-made basis of unity,
mutuality, harmony for the common life, to enforce it by a suppression
of the competitive clash of egos and so to arrive at a life of identity
for the community in place of a life of difference. But to realise these
desirable ends the means adopted have been the forcible and successful
materialisation of a few restricted ideas or slogans enthroned to the ex-
clusion of all other thought, the suppression of the mind of the indi-
vidual, a mechanised compression of the elements of life, a mechanised

936 TH|: LIFE DIVINE

unity and drive of the life-force, a coercion of man by the State, the
substitution of the communal for the individual ego. The communal ego
is idealised as the soul of the nation, the race, the community; but this
is a colossal and may turn out to be a fatal error. A forced and imposed
unanimity of mind, life, action raised to their highest tension under the
drive of something which is thought to be greater, the collective soul, the
collective life, is the formula found. But this obscure collective being
is not the soul or self of the community; it is a life-force that rises from
the subconscient and, if denied the light of guidance by the reason, can
be driven only by dark massive forces which are powerful but dangerous
for the race because they are alien to the conscious evolution of which
man is the trustee and bearer. It is not in this direction that evolutionary
Nature has pointed mankind; this is a reversion towards something that
she had left behind her.

Another solution that is attempted reposes still on the materialistic
reason and a unified organisation of the economic life of the race; but
the method that is being employed is the same, a forced compression and
imposed unanimity of mind and life and a mechanical organisation of
the communal existence. A unanimity of this kind can only be main-
tained by a compression of all freedom of thought and life, and that
must bring about either the efficient stability of a termite civilisation
or a drying up of the springs of life and a swift or slow decadence. It is
through the growth of consciousness that the collective soul and its life
can become aware of itself and develop ; the free play of mind and life is
essential for the growth of consciousness: for mind and life are the
soul's only instrumentation until a higher instrumentation develops;
they must not be inhibited in their action or rendered rigid, unplastic
and unprogressive. The difficulties or disorders engendered by the growth
of the individual mind and life cannot be healthily removed by the sup-
pression of the individual ; the true cure can only be achieved by his pro-
gression to a greater consciousness in which he is fulfilled and perfected.

An alternative solution is the development of an enlightened reason
and will of the normal man consenting to a new socialised life in which
he will subordinate his ego for the sake of the right arrangement of the
life of the community. If we inquire how this radical change is to be
brought about, two agencies seem to be suggested, the agency of a greater
and better mental knowledge, right ideas, right information, right train-
ing of the social and civic individual and the agency of a new social
machinery which will solve everything by the magic of the social ma-

THE DIVINE LIFE 937

chine cutting humanity into a better pattern. But it has not been found
in experience, whatever might have once been hoped, that education
and intellectual training by itself can change man ; it only provides the
human individual and collective ego with better information and a more
efficient machinery for its self-affirmation, but leaves it the same un-
changed human ego. Nor can human mind and life be cut into perfec-
tion— even into what is thought to be perfection, a constructed substi-
tute,— by any kind of social machinery; matter can be so cut, thought
can be so cut, but in our human existence matter and thought are only
instruments for the soul and the life-force. Machinery cannot form the
soul and life-force into standardised shapes; it can at best coerce them,
make soul and mind inert and stationary and regulate the life's out-
ward action; but if this is to be effectively done, coercion and compres-
sion of the mind and life are indispensable and that again spells either
unprogressive stability or decadence. The reasoning mind with its logical
practicality has no other way of getting the better of Nature's am-
biguous and complex movements than a regulation and mechanisation of
mind and life. If that is done, the soul of humanity will either have to
recover its freedom and growth by a revolt and a destruction of the
machine into whose grip it has been cast or escape by a withdrawal into
itself and a rejection of life. Man's true way out is to discover his soul
and its self-force and instrumentation and replace by it both the mech-
anisation of mind and the ignorance and disorder of life-nature. But
there would be little room and freedom for such a movement of self-
discovery and self-effectuation in a closely regulated and mechanised
social existence.

There is the possibility that in the swing back from a mechanistic
idea of life and society the human mind may seek refuge in a return
to the religious idea and a society governed or sanctioned by religion.
But organised religion, though it can provide a means of inner uplift
for the individual and preserve in it or behind it a way for his opening
to spiritual experience, has not changed human life and society ; it could
not do so because, in governing society, it had to compromise with the
lower parts of life and could not insist on the inner change of the whole
being ; it could insist only on a credal adherence, a formal acceptance of
its ethical standards and a conformity to institution, ceremony and ritual.
Religion so conceived can give a religio-ethical colour or surface tinge, —
sometimes, if it maintains a strong kernel of inner experience, it can
generalise to some extent an incomplete spiritual tendency; but it does

938 theNlife divine

not transform the race, it cannot create a new principle of the human
existence. A total spiritual direction given to the whole life and the whole
nature can alone lift humanity beyond itself. Another possible concep-
tion akin to the religious solution is the guidance of society by men of
spiritual attainment, the brotherhood or unity of all in the faith or in the
discipline, the spiritualisation of life and society by the taking up of the
old machinery of life into such a unification or inventing a new ma-
chinery. This too has been attempted before without success; it was the
original founding idea of more than one religion: but the human ego
and vital nature were too strong for a religious idea working on the
mind and by the mind to overcome its resistance. It is only the full
emergence of the soul, the full descent of the native light and power of
the Spirit and the consequent replacement or transformation and up-
lifting of our insufficient mental and vital nature by a spiritual and
supramental supernature that can effect this evolutionary miracle.

At first sight this insistence on a radical change of nature might
seem to put off all the hope of humanity to a distant evolutionary future ;
for the transcendence of our normal human nature, a transcendence of
our mental, vital and physical being, has the appearance of an endeavour
too high and difficult and at present, for man as he is, impossible. Even
if it were so, it would still remain the sole possibility for the transmuta-
tion of life; for to hope for a true change of human life without a change
of human nature is an irrational and unspiritual proposition ; it is to ask
for something unnatural and unreal, an impossible miracle. But what
is demanded by this change is not something altogether distant, alien
to our existence and radically impossible; for what has to be developed
is there in our being and not something outside it: what evolutionary
Nature presses for, is an awakening to the knowledge of self, the dis-
covery of self, the manifestation of the self and spirit within us and
the release of its self-knowledge, its self-power, its native self-instru-
mentation. It is, besides, a step for which the whole of evolution has
been a preparation and which is brought closer at each crisis of human
destiny when the mental and vital evolution of the being touches a point
where intellect and vital force reach some acme of tension and there is
a need either for them to collapse, to sink back into a torpor of defeat or
a repose of unprogressive quiescence or to rend their way through the
veil against which they are straining. What is necessary is that there
should be a turn in humanity felt by some or many towards the vision
of this change, a feeling of its imperative need, the sense of its possibil-

THE DIVINE LIFE 939

ity, the will to make it possible in themselves and to find the way. That
trend is not absent and it must increase with the tension of the crisis
in human world-destiny; the need of an escape or a solution, the feeling
that there is no other solution than the spiritual cannot but grow and
become more imperative under the urgency of critical circumstance. To
that call in the being there must always be some answer in the Divine
Reality and in Nature.

The answer might, indeed, be only individual; it might result in a
multiplication of spiritualised individuals or even, conceivably though
not probably, a gnostic individual or individuals isolated in the unspirit-
ualised mass of humanity. Such isolated realised beings must either with-
draw into their secret divine kingdom and guard themselves in a spiritual
solitude or act from their inner light on mankind for what little can be
prepared in such conditions for a happier future. The inner change can
begin to take shape in a collective form only if the gnostic individual
finds others who have the same kind of inner life as himself and can
form with them a group with its own autonomous existence or else a
separate community or order of beings with its own inner law of life. It
is this need of a separate life with its own rule of living adapted to the
inner power or motive force of the spiritual existence and creating for
it its native atmosphere that has expressed itself in the past in the
formation of the monastic life or in attempts of various kinds at a new
separate collective living self-governed and other in its spiritual prin-
ciple than the ordinary human life. The monastic life is in its nature an
association of other-worldly seekers, men whose whole attempt is to
find and realise in themselves the spiritual reality and who form their
common existence by rules of living which help them in that endeavour.
It is not usually an effort to create a new life-formation which will exceed
the ordinary human society and create a new world-order. A religion
may hold that eventual prospect before it or attempt some first approach
to it, or a mental idealism may make the same endeavour. But these
attempts have always been overcome by the persistent inconscience and
ignorance of our human vital nature; for that nature is an obstacle
which no mere idealism or incomplete spiritual aspiration can change
in its recalcitrant mass or permanently dominate. Either the endeavour
fails by its own imperfection or it is invaded by the imperfection of the
outside world and sinks from the shining height of its aspiration to some-
thing mixed and inferior on the ordinary human level. A common spirit-
ual life meant to express the spiritual and not the mental, vital and

940 THE LIFE DIVINE

physical being must found and maintain itself on greater values than
the mental, vital, physical values of the ordinary human society ; if it is
not so founded, it will be merely the normal human society with a differ-
ence. An entirely new consciousness in many individuals transforming
their whole being, transforming their mental, vital and physical nature-
self, is needed for the new life to appear ; only such a transformation of
the general mind, life, body nature can bring into being a new worth-
while collective existence. The evolutionary nisus must tend not merely
to create a new type of mental beings but another order of beings who
have raised their whole existence from our present mentalised animality
to a greater spiritual level of the earth-nature.

Any such complete transformation of the earth-life in a number of
human beings could not establish itself altogether at once; even when
the turning-point has been reached, the decisive line crossed, the new
life in its beginnings would have to pass through a period of ordeal and
arduous development. A general change from the old consciousness tak-
ing up the whole life into the spiritual principle would be the necessary
first step ; the preparation for this might be long and the transformation
itself once begun proceed by stages. In the individual it might after a
certain point be rapid and even effect itself by a bound, an evolutionary
saltus; but an individual transformation would not be the creation of a
new type of beings or a new collective life. One might conceive of a
number of individuals thus evolving separately in the midst of the old
life and then joining together to establish the nucleus of the new exist-
ence. But it is not likely that Nature would operate in this fashion, and
it would be difficult for the individual to arrive at a complete change
while still enclosed in the life of the lower nature. At a certain stage it
might be necessary to follow the age-long device of the separate com-
munity, but with a double purpose, first to provide a secure atmosphere,
a place and life apart, in which the consciousness of the individual might
concentrate on its evolution in surroundings where all was turned and
centred towards the one endeavour and, next, when things were ready,
to formulate and develop the new life in those surroundings and in this
prepared spiritual atmosphere. It might be that, in such a concentration
of effort, all the difficulties of the change would present themselves with
a concentrated force; for each seeker, carrying in himself the possibili-
ties but also the imperfections of a world that has to be transformed,
would bring in not only his capacities but his difficulties and the oppo-
sitions of the old nature and, mixed together in the restricted circle of

THE DIVINE LIFE 94 1

a small and close common life, these might assume a considerably en-
hanced force of obstruction which would tend to counterbalance the
enhanced power and concentration of the forces making for the evolu-
tion. This is a difficulty that has broken in the past all the efforts of
mental man to evolve something better and more true and harmonious
than the ordinary mental and vital life. But if Nature is ready and has
taken her evolutionary decision or if the power of the Spirit descending
from the higher planes is sufficiently strong, the difficulty would be over-
come and a first evolutionary formation or formations would be possible.
But if an entire reliance upon the guiding Light and Will and a
luminous expression of the truth of the Spirit in life are to be the law,
that would seem to presuppose a gnostic world, a world in which the
consciousness of all its beings was founded on this basis; there it can
be understood that the life-interchange of gnostic individuals in a gnostic
community or communities would be by its very nature an understand-
ing and harmonious process. But here, actually, there would be a life
of gnostic beings proceeding within or side by side with a life of beings
in the ignorance, attempting to emerge in it or out of it, and yet the
law of the two lives would seem to be contrary and to offend against
each other. A complete seclusion or separation of the life of a spiritual
community from the life of the Ignorance would then seem to impose
itself: for otherwise a compromise between the two lives would be nec-
essary and with the compromise a danger of contamination or incom-
pleteness of the greater existence; two different and incompatible prin-
ciples of existence would be in contact and, even though the greater
would influence the lesser, the smaller life would also have its effect
on the greater, since such mutual impact is the law of all contiguity and
interchange. It might even be questioned whether conflict and collision
would not be the first rule of their relation, since in the life of the Igno-
rance there is present and active the formidable influence of those forces
of Darkness, supporters of evil and violence, whose interest it is to
contaminate or destroy all higher Light that enters into the human
existence. An opposition and intolerance or even a persecution of all
that is new or tries to rise above or break away from the established
order of the human Ignorance, or if it is victorious, an intrusion of the
lower forces into it, an acceptance by the world more dangerous than
its opposition, and in the end an extinction, a lowering or a contamina-
tion of the new principle of life, have been a frequent phenomenon of
the past; that opposition might be still more violent and a frustration

942 THE LIFE DIVINE

might be still more likely if a radically new light or new power were to
claim the earth for its heritage; But it is to be supposed that the new
and completer light would bring also a new and completer power. It
might not be necessary for it to be entirely separate; it might establish
itself in so many islets and from there spread through the old life, throw-
ing out upon it its own influences and filtrations, gaining upon it, bring-
ing to it a help and illumination which a new aspiration in mankind
might after a time begin to understand and welcome.

But these are evidently problems of the transition, of the evolution
before the full and victorious reversal of the manifesting Force has
taken place and the life of the gnostic being becomes as much as that
of the mental being an established part of the terrestrial world-order.
If we suppose the gnostic consciousness to be established in the earth-
life, the power and knowledge at its disposal would be much greater
than the power and knowledge of mental man, and the life of a com-
munity of gnostic beings, supposing it to be separate, would be as safe
against attack as the organised life of man against any attack by a
lower species. But as this knowledge and the very principle of the
gnostic nature would ensure a luminous unity in the common life of
gnostic beings, so also it would be sufficient to ensure a dominating
harmony and reconciliation between the two types of life. The influence
of the supramental principle on earth would fall upon the life of the
Ignorance and impose harmony on it within its limits. It is conceivable
that the gnostic life would be separate, but it would surely admit within
its borders as much of human life as was turned towards spirituality and
in progress towards the heights; the rest might organise itself mainly
on the mental principle and on the old foundations, but, helped and
influenced by a recognisable greater knowledge, it would be likely to do
so on lines of a completer harmonisation of which the human collec-
tivity is not yet capable. Here also, however, the mind can only fore-
cast probabilities and possibilities; the supramental principle in Super-
nature would itself determine according to the truth of things the
balance of a new world-order.

A gnostic Supernature transcends all the values of our normal igno-
rant Nature; our standards and values are created by ignorance and
therefore cannot determine the life of Supernature. At the same time
our present nature is a derivation from Supernature and is not a pure
ignorance but a half -knowledge; it is therefore reasonable to suppose
that whatever spiritual truth there is in or behind its standards and

THE DIVINE LIFE 943

values will reappear in the higher life, not as standards, but as elements
transformed, uplifted out of the ignorance and raised into the true har-
mony of a more luminous existence. As the universalised spiritual indi-
vidual sheds the limited personality, the ego, as he rises beyond mind
to a completer knowledge in Supernature, the conflicting ideals of the
mind must fall away from him, but what is true behind them will remain
in the life of Supernature. The gnostic consciousness is a consciousness
in which all contradictions are cancelled or fused into each other in a
higher light of seeing and being, in a unified self-knowledge and world-
knowledge. The gnostic being will not accept the mind's ideals and
standards; he will not be moved to live for himself, for his ego, or for
humanity or for others or for the community or for the State; for he
will be aware of something greater than these half-truths, of the Divine
Reality, and it is for that he will live, for its will in himself and in all,
in a spirit of large universality, in the light of the will of the Transcend-
ence. For the same reason there can be no conflict between self-affirma-
tion and altruism in the gnostic life, for the self of the gnostic being is
one with the self of all, — no conflict between the ideal of individualism
and the collective ideal, for both are terms of a greater Reality and only
in so far as either expresses the Reality or their fulfilment serves the
will of the Reality, can they have a value for his spirit. But at the same
time what is true in the mental ideals and dimly figured in them will be
fulfilled in his existence; for while his consciousness exceeds the human
values so that he cannot substitute mankind or the community or the
State or others or himself for God, the affirmation of the Divine in him-
self and a sense of the Divine in others and the sense of oneness with
humanity, with all other beings, with all the world because of the Divine
in them and a lead towards a greater and better affirmation of the grow-
ing Reality in them will be part of his life action. But what he shall do
will be decided by the Truth of the Knowledge and Will in him, a total
and infinite Truth that is not bound by any single mental law or stand-
ard but acts with freedom in the whole reality, with respect for each
truth in its place and with a clear knowledge of the forces at work and
the intention in the manifesting Divine Nisus at each step of cosmic
evolution and in each event and circumstance.

All life for the achieved spiritual or gnostic consciousness must be
the manifestation of the realised truth of spirit; only what can trans-
form itself and find its own spiritual self in that greater Truth and fuse
itself into its harmony can be accorded a life-acceptance. What will so

944 THE LIFE DIVINE

survive the mind cannot determine, for the supramental gnosis will itself
bring down its own truth and that truth will take up whatever of itself
has been put forth in our ideals and realisations of mind and life and
body. The forms it has taken there may not survive, for they are not
likely to be suitable without change or replacement in the new existence;
but what is real and abiding in them or even in their forms will undergo
the transformation necessary for survival. Much that is normal to
human life would disappear. In the light of gnosis the many mental
idols, constructed principles and systems, conflicting ideals which man
has created in all domains of his mind and life, could command no ac-
ceptance or reverence; only the truth, if any, which these specious
images conceal, could have a chance of entry as elements of a harmony
founded on a much wider basis. It is evident that in a life governed by
the gnostic consciousness war with its spirit of antagonism and enmity,
its brutality, destruction and ignorant violence, political strife with its
perpetual conflict, frequent oppression, dishonesties, turpitudes, selfish
interests, its ignorance, ineptitude and muddle could have no ground for
existence. The arts and the crafts would exist, not for any inferior men-
tal or vital amusement, entertainment of leisure and relieving excite-
ment or pleasure, but as expressions and means of the truth of the spirit
and the beauty and delight of existence. Life and the body would be no
longer tyrannous masters demanding nine tenths of existence for their
satisfaction, but means and powers for the expression of the spirit. At
the same time, since the matter and the body are accepted, the control
and the right use of physical things would be a part of the realised life
of the spirit in the manifestation in earth-nature.

It is almost universally supposed that spiritual life must necessarily
be a life of ascetic spareness, a pushing away of all that is not absolutely
needed for the bare maintenance of the body; and this is valid for a
spiritual life which is in its nature and intention a life of withdrawal
from life. Even apart from that ideal, it might be thought that the
spiritual turn must always make for an extreme simplicity, because all
else would be a life of vital desire and physical self-indulgence. But from
a wider standpoint this is a mental standard based on the law of the
Ignorance of which desire is the motive ; to overcome the Ignorance, to
delete the ego, a total rejection not only of desire but of all the things
that can satisfy desire may intervene as a valid principle. But this stand-
ard or any mental standard cannot be absolute nor can it be binding as
a law on the consciousness that has arisen above desire; a complete

THE DIVINE LIFE 945

purity and self-mastery would be in the very grain of its nature and
that would remain the same in poverty or in riches: for if it could be
shaken or sullied by either, it would not be real or would not be com-
plete. The one rule of the gnostic life would be the self-expression of
the Spirit, the will of the Divine Being; that will, that self-expression
could manifest through extreme simplicity or through extreme complex-
ity and opulence or in their natural balance, — for beauty and plenitude,
a hidden sweetness and laughter in things, a sunshine and gladness of
life are also powers and expressions of the Spirit. In all directions the
Spirit within determining the law of the nature would determine the
frame of the life and its detail and circumstance. In all there would be
the same plastic principle ; a rigid standardisation, however necessary for
the mind's arrangement of things, could not be the law of the spiritual
life. A great diversity and liberty of self-expression based on an under-
lying unity might well become manifest; but everywhere there would
be harmony and truth of order.

A life of gnostic beings carrying the evolution to a higher supra-
mental status might fitly be characterised as a divine life; for it would
be a life in the Divine, a life of the beginnings of a spiritual divine light
and power and joy manifested in material Nature. That might be de-
scribed, since it surpasses the mental human level, as a life of spiritual
and supramental supermanhood. But this must not be confused with
past and present ideas of supermanhood; for supermanhood in the
mental idea consists of an overtopping of the normal human level, not
in kind but in degree of the same kind, by an enlarged personality, a
magnified and exaggerated ego, an increased power of mind, an in-
creased power of vital force, a refined or dense and massive exaggeration
of the forces of the human Ignorance; it carries also, commonly implied
in it, the idea of a forceful domination over humanity by the superman.
That would mean a supermanhood of the Nietzschean type ; it might be
at its worst the reign of the "blonde beast" or the dark beast or of any
and every beast, a return to barbaric strength and ruthlessness and
force: but this would be no evolution, it would be a reversion to an old
strenuous barbarism. Or it might signify the emergence of the Rakshasa
or Asura out of a tense effort of humanity to surpass and transcend
itself, but in the wrong direction. A violent and turbulent exaggerated
vital ego satisfying itself with a supreme tyrannous or anarchic strength
of self- fulfilment would be the type of a Rakshasic supermanhood: but
the giant, the ogre or devourer of the world, the Rakshasa, though he

946 THE LIFE DIVINE

still survives, belongs in spirit toUhe past; a larger emergence of that
type would be also a retrograde evolution. A mighty exhibition of an
overpowering force, a self-possessed, self-held, even, it may be, an
ascetically self-restrained mind-capacity and life-power, strong, calm
or cold or formidable in collected vehemence, subtle, dominating, a sub-
limation at once of the mental and vital ego, is the type of the Asura.
But earth has had enough of this kind in her past and its repetition can
only prolong the old lines ; she can get no true profit for her future, no
power of self-exceeding, from the Titan, the Asura: even a great or
supernormal power in it could only carry her on larger circles of her old
orbit. But what has to emerge is something much more difficult and
much more simple; it is a self-realised being, a building of the spiritual
self, an intensity and urge of the soul and the deliverance and sover-
eignty of its light and power and beauty, — ^not an egoistic supermanhood
seizing on a mental and vital domination over humanity, but the sov-
ereignty of the Spirit over its own instruments, its possession of itself
and its possession of life in the power of the spirit, a new consciousness
in which humanity itself shall find its own self-exceeding and self-fulfil-
ment by the revelation of the divinity that is striving for birth within it.
This is the sole true supermanhood and the one real possibility of a step
forward in evolutionary Nature.

This new status would indeed be a reversal of the present law of
human consciousness and life, for it would reverse the whole principle
of the life of the Ignorance. It is for the taste of the Ignorance, its sur-
prise and adventure, one might say, that the soul has descended into the
Inconscience and assumed the disguise of Matter, for the adventure and
the joy of creation and discovery, an adventure of the spirit, an adven-
ture of the mind and life and the hazardous surprises of their working
in Matter, for the discovery and conquest of the new and the unknown;
all this constitutes the enterprise of life and all this, it might seem,
would cease with the cessation of the Ignorance. Man's life is made up
of the light and the darkness, the gains and losses, the difficulties and
dangers, the pleasures and pains of the Ignorance, a play of colours
moving on a soil of the general neutrality of Matter which has as its
basis the nescience and insensibility of the Inconscient. To the normal
life-being an existence without the reactions of success and frustration,
vital joy and grief, peril and passion, pleasure and pain, the vicissitudes
and uncertainties of fate and struggle and battle and endeavour, a joy
of novelty and surprise and creation projecting itself into the unknown,

THE DIVINE LIFE 947

might seem to be void of variety and therefore void of vital savour. Any-
life surpassing these things tends to appear to it as something featureless
and empty or cast in the figure of an immutable sameness; the human
mind's picture of heaven is the incessant repetition of an eternal mono-
tone. But this is a misconception; for an entry into the gnostic con-
sciousness would be an entry into the Infinite. It would be a self-creation
bringing out the Infinite infinitely into form of being, and the interest
of the Infinite is much greater and multitudinous as well as more imper-
ishably delightful than the interest of the finite. The evolution in the
Knowledge would be a more beautiful and glorious manifestation with
more vistas ever unfolding themselves and more intensive in all ways
than any evolution could be in the Ignorance. The delight of the Spirit
is ever new, the forms of beauty it takes innumerable, its godhead ever
young and the taste of delight, rasa, of the Infinite eternal and inex-
haustible. The gnostic manifestation of life would be more full and
fruitful and its interest more vivid than the creative interest of the
Ignorance; it would be a greater and happier constant miracle.

If there is an evolution in material Nature and if it is an evolution
of being with consciousness and life as its two key-terms and powers, this
fullness of being, fullness of consciousness, fullness of life must be the
goal of development towards which we are tending and which will mani-
fest at an early or later stage of our destiny. The self, the spirit, the
reality that is disclosing itself out of the first inconscience of life and
matter, would evolve its complete truth of being and consciousness in
that life and matter. It would return to itself — or, if its end as an indi-
vidual is to return into its Absolute, it could make that return also, —
not through a frustration of life but through a spiritual completeness of
itself in life. Our evolution in the Ignorance with its chequered joy and
pain of self-discovery and world-discovery, its half fulfilments, its con-
stant finding and missing, is only our first state. It must lead inevitably
towards an evolution in the Knowledge, a self-finding and self-unfolding
of the Spirit, a self-revelation of the Divinity in things in that true
power of itself in Nature which is to us still a Supernature.

The End

INDEX

INDEX

(Chapter numbers in the index appear in serial order front
I to LVI. Thus Chapter numbers in the index, from
XXIX to LVI are to be read as Chapters I to XXVIII
respectively in the text of Book Two.)

Absolute, the, 30, 36, 72, 74,
117, 141-144. 245, 282-
291. 29s, 301-305, 313,
314, 318, 32s, 338, 342,
360, 367, 400, 407, 416,
419, 422, 446, 505, 507,
508, S14, 519, 532, 535,
566, 567, 570, 583, 584,
587, 588, 595-596, 605,
613, 621-623, 660, 683,
743, 752, 802, 886, 930,
947; see also Brahman;
Infinite; Reality.
Absolute, as the ineffable sole
Reality, not the whole of
supreme spiritual experi-
ence, 566, 567
Being and Becoming as two
terms of the manifesta-
tion of the, 587-588
can be approached through
negation as well as affir-
mation of existence, 426,
427
complementary aspects of
oneness and multiplicity
of the, 303, 304; see also
One and the Many
comprehensive affirmation
in the ancient Vedanta of
the, 566-588
conception of its aloofness
from the universe really
an imputatation of an in-
capacity of the relative
human consciousness, 569-
570
dynamics of the, 410, 428
existence of the individual
not an error in some self
of the, 348, 349
extinction in it a possible
solution if our nature is
fixed in what it is, 918
false logical view of the,

338, 340, 341
featureless, 434
first affrmation of, 587-588

illogicality of the theory of
the purely indeterminable
nature of the, 283, 284

incommunicable supercon-
science of the, 912

indeterminability an element
in our conception of the,
287

indeterminable and undif-
ferentiated, 392

individuality, commonalty
and essentiality the three
terms of its developed
self-existence, 344, 345

inseparability of all persis-
tent realities of existence
in the all-view of the, 347,
348

its affirmation by itself to
the exclusion of the in-
dividual and the cosmos
is not a satisfying fulfil-
ment for the conscious-
ness of man, 614-615

its primary relations cannot
be explained by Time,
346, 347

man's need for an, 613, 614

meaning of the, 339, 342,

343
indeterminability of the,
283, 284

meaning of the reality of
the, 568-569

no reason to suppose that
its power can do nothing
but create illusions, 410

not limited by formlessness
or form, unity or multi-
plicity, immobile status or
dynamic mobility, 425,
426

not limited by putting forth
in itself a cosmos of re-
lations, 524-530

not bound by our law of
contradictions, 342-348

not describable by an all-
exclusive negation, 341

949

not in itself a thing of mag-
nitude, 539
positives and negatives of

the, 341-343
present behind all relativ-
ities, 345, 346
primary relations of the,

338, 342, 347
problem of evol in relation

to the, see Evil

reason for regarding it as

non-existent by so many

acture thinkers, 341

relationless, 21, 109, no, 395

right way of approach to

the, 342
second affirmation of the.,

588-589
superconscient, 446, 756
supracosmic, 588
the essential and dynamic of
its nature complementary,
301, 302
the unmanifest and manifes-
tation both reality of the.
427
transcendent and immu-
table, 377
triune, 286

truth aspect of the, 321
truth of the, see under Be-
ing, truth of the
utterness of the, 420, 421
vacant, — is no Absolute, 569
Absolute: its views and their

consequences, 568-569
Absolute and Eternal, 374
Absolute and the relative, the.
72
mental \iew of the, 338, 339
Absolute Brahman, 569
of the Adwaita, 29 f
Absolute e\'il, etc, 345, 346
Reality ; nature of its funda-
mental aspects and its
manifested powers and
figures, 587-58S
Absolutism, spiritual, see Spir-
itual absolutism

950

Absolutist view of reality, con-
sciousness and knowledge,
566-568
Absoluteness, condition of, 539
Accord and concord of the
whole being, natural to
the gnostic individual as
well as to the community
of gnostic beings, 926
acitti, 437 f

and citti, 437 f
Action, 718; see Buddhist
theory, 396
cosmic, 690
is a resultant of the energy

of the being, 721-722
its importance as the test
of man's values of being,
719
its want of mastery over its
machinery the sign of an
imperfection of the force
of being, 908-909
not binding on the true be-
ing, see Universe, 411-413
the view that it cannot pro-
ceed without the Witness,
20; see also. Nihil of the
Buddhists
Activity, 9, 29
and the passivity, nature
and interrelation in Brah-
man of the, 510-515
Actor, the poet, the soldier, —
man's absorption in each
of these parts illustrates
the power of exclusive
concentration, 524
Adam, 50
ddevi may a, 437 f
adhikara, 776
adhyaksa, 314
adhyaropa, 569
Adversary, 813
Adverse and evil, see Evil and

Suffering, etc.
Adwaita, 384
Mayavada, see also Maya-

vada
of the Mayavada and Bud-
dhism, view of rebirth in,
669, 670
the, 29 f
the true, 31, 143
Vedantism starting from the
Upanishads; place of re-
birth in, 670, 671
Vedantism starting from the

INDEX

Upanishads, reality of the
individual only temporal
in, 670

Adwaitic Mayavada, view of
Self in, see Adwaita of the
Mayavada and Buddhism

Adwaitins, the pure Self of the,
23

Adya Shakti, 78

Affirmation, 196

and negation, reason for the
constant movement of hu-
man thought between,
37i» 372
status nearest to the Abso-
lute in the path of, 426,
427

After-death contact with dis-
carded phantasms, a
source of confused notions
about the soul, 797
continuance of a modified
earth-life, explanation of
the experience of, 698-
699
experience of a supraphysi-
cal prolongation of earth
condition, 696
passage, last normal stage

of, 713-714
sojourn in worlds beyond us,
popular notions of, 716-
717

After-life, early Greek and
some other traditions
about, 796-797
purpose of, 715-716

Agni, Vedic description and
function of, 144-145

Agnosticism, 3 73 > 374
idealistic, — and the objection

to it, 507
materialistic, 11-12, 13

Ahankara, 77

Ahriman, 358

Aim of Life and Theories of
Existence Ch. XLIV

Air, in the ancient, symbolism,
is the principle of life and
therefore of the mid-
worlds, 539

Akshara, see Kshara and the
Akshara, 506, 507

All, 886, 887, 891, 89s, 913
and the One, 621
the, 29, 31, 32, 45, 57, 69,
70, 104, 129, 152, 180, 194,

199, 345, 519, 589, 605,
613-614
the subconscient, 62, 199
the superconscient, 62, 199

All-beautiful, 803
the, 318

All-Being, 309, 686

All-Beloved, the, 318

All-Bliss, 97, 102

All-blissful, 803

All-blissful, the, 318

All-conscient, the, 525, 527,
529

All-consciousness, 97, 431, 532,
683, 686
Ignorance a frontal power
of, 362-364

All-Delight, 90, 364, 365, 431,
527

All-existence, 123, 285, 306,
350, 405, 431, 487, 589,
680, 693
divine, 202, 213

All-existent, the, 219, 241

All-Force, 177

All-Good, 88, 803

All-Knowledge, see also Om-
niscience, 297, 309, 363,
364, 405, 445» 616

All-Life, 179, 887

All-Lover, 318

All-Person, 318, 319, 590

All-Power, 364

All-powerful, the, 321

All-ruler, 294, 321

All-Soul, 680, 685, 686, 695

All-Teacher, 532

All- Will, 177, 431, 683, 686
in the gnostic being, 886-
887

All-Wisdom, 368, 532

All- Wise, the, 532

Almighty, the, 319

Altruism, 620, 893, 928, 943
an enlargement of ego of
the surface mental indi-
viduality, 495
a potent instrument for cor-
rection of the narrower
ego but does not abolish
or transform it into the
true self, 509
often a veil for the imposi-
tion of our individual self
upon others, 912

Altruistic self-effacement, su-
pramental being will have
no need of, 866

Alwar, his vision of the de-
scent of Vishnu and the
Gods upon earth, 434
American gangster, 679
Ananda, 48, 95, 102, 137, 145,
181, 212, 228, 243, 294,
353, 365, 444, 539, 543,
589, 660, 744, 828, 871,
878-880; see also BHss;
Delight; Delight of exist-
ence; Ecstasy
dormant, 263

in the gnostic being, 878-879
not possible to hold its de-
scent if there is too much
sexual impurity, 813
of the Self, 527
Anandamaya, 98
Ananke of the Inconscience,

blind, 855
Anchorite, 24
Ancient cultures, see Cultures,

ancient
Angels, 392, 532
Anger etc., inner emotion of
Mentality ; see Memory,
460, 461, 462-464
and other passions, nature
and extent of self-forget-
fulness of the normal man
as illustrated in, 524
and other passions and
thought, 470, 471
Anima, 935

cosmic vital, 713
Animal, see Plant

and human consciousness,
see Human consciousness,

357

and man, difference between,
see Evolutionary transi-
tion, 632, 633

and plant, difference be-
tween, 632, 633

basis, its modification and
upliftment by the addition
of human intelligence,
546, 547

being, has nothing con-
sciously to do with the
upward gaze of the secret
spirit within it, 638

being, individual, — has to
rely on intuition and sur-
face contact with the
world outside it, 545, 546

being, mentalised sense- view
of, 637

INDEX

being, nature of the evolu-
tionary transition to the
conscious Ufe of, 635

being, nature of the evolu-
tion of humanity out of
the, 746, 747.

being. Nature works out an
order by the compulsion
of habit and instinct in
the, 798

consciousness, 923

evolution, the question of its
priority to human evolu-
tion, 745, 746

forms, see also under Hu-
man birth, 667

forms, primitive, — our hfe
and body have even such
an awareness as they may
have, 499

has already some of the cor-
responding quaUties of
man on a limited scale —
but their working is dif-
ferent, 746, 747

imperfect nature of mental-
ity attained in the con-
scious, 735

life-scale, nature of growing
surface structure of, 546

life; in it the Force begins
to become slowly con-
scious on the surface, and
the nature of action of
this Force, 820-821

life, principle of, 273

life, the fact of evil is there
but the sense of moral evil
is absent, 541

lower, see Plant or lower
animal

lowest, — sense of ego in the,
464

lower forms of, 363

mind, cannot detach itself
from its life movements,
760

reversion, see Human birth,
678, 679

secret psychical entity in
the, 748

soul, 668

species, nature of the de-
velopment of, 739, 740

the idea of its priority over
man in the time succession
in the sense of the modern
evolutionary conception

found already in ancient
and mediaeval thought in
India, 745, 746

Animalculae, 537, 739

Animism, 623, 772

anirvacaniya, 283, 403, 416

anlsa, 315

anrtasya bhureh, 432

Anthropomorphic view of the
divine government of the
world, 9, 93, 320, 321

Anthropomorphism, 623

anumantd, 720

Apache of Paris, 679

Aparardha, 243 f

Ape mind, 54
of the Darwinian theory,
S2>

Ape-kind, its development into
man not yet really estab-
lished, 738
significance of the appear-
ance in animal being of,
749

Apocalypse, 434

Appearance, true truth behind
every, 431

Approach made by the soul to
the direct contact with the
spiritual Reality, see Soul,
803-804
of the mind to the direct
contact with the spiritual
Reality, see Soul, 801-803

Approaches, three, — of the
mind, of the vnW and of
the heart, — to the direct
contact with the spiritual
Reahty, see Soul, 804
apraketam salilam, 432 f, 437 f

Art, 207

and Poetry, loi
ethics, science etc., — true
sense of, 612

Arts and crafts; purpose of
their existence in gnostic
life, 944

Artist, supreme, 44

Aryan forefathers, significance
of the dawn worshipped
by, 42
past, need for the right pres-
ervation of the legacy of,

25
world, 23
asandya nirtyuh, 179
.\sat, 29, 35, 36, 47; see Sat

and Asat, 427, 568; set

952

also under Non-Being ;
Non-Existence
what was evidently meant in
the Taittiriya Upanishad
by, 507
Ascending gradations, double
purpose of, 697
series of substance, the, Ch.
XXVI
Ascension, lower grades of, —
the integration into a
higher principle of con-
sciousness remains incom-
plete in them to wholly
mentalise life and matter,
830-831
of the mind to heights
above, first consequences
and later effects of, 810-
811
Ascensions, previous, — nature
of the effectuation of, 819
Ascent and integration, Chap-
ter XL VI, see Human
development, 636, 637;
Spirit, secret, 637, 638
from one status to the next
higher, conditions under
which it is secure, 848-849
its first two stages of Higher
Mind and Illumined Mind
can get their own united
completeness only by a
reference to its third level
— ^the Intuition, 841
its lines not the same for
all, but scrutiny of a
given line may be ex-
pected to throw light on
the principle of all ascend-
ing possibilities, 833
of life, the, Ch. XXI
towards Supermind, Ch.

XXVI, 833-834
widening and integration,
see Man, 658-659; Self-
transcendence, 657; Im-
mortality, 657-659
Ascetic, refusal of the, Ch. Ill
spareness, is a mental stand-
ard and cannot be binding
as a law on the gnostic
life, 944-945
spirit, value of, 24
the standard-bearer of the
spirit, 764
Asceticism, 25
fllusionism, otherworldliness,

INDEX

impediment of vital and
physical Nature to pure
spirituality a compelling
reason for these, 764-765

Ashwattha-tree of the uni-
verse, 433

Asia, 931

Asiatic peasant, 679

Askesis, higher, — aim of, 648
inmost aim and meaning of,

637
Aspect, 313

Aspect (s), an independent ac-
tion given by Overmind
to each, 256, 259
Aspiration, human, Ch, I
Astrology, see Indian Astrol-
ogy
Asura, 537, 906

type of, 945-946
Avidya, 35, 39, 41, 49, 131,
137, 152, ISS, IS7, 176,
438, 439, 442, 443, 446 f,
452, 596
function of, 154
avidydydm antare, 159, 572
avidydydm antare vartamd-
ndh . . . jahghanyamdndh
pariyanti mudhdh andhe-
naiva niyamdndh yathdn-
dhdh, 453 f
Awareness, eternal, 519
original self-existent, — grad-
ual emergence of all the
powers inherent in the,
493
unorganised, 492
Atharva Veda, tran. from, 249,

586
Atheism, 13
naturalistic, — reason for the
short-Uved ages of, 614
Atma-Shakti, 313
Atman, 62, 67, 207, 286, 293,
295, 313; see also Self
silent, 9
dtmasakti, 529, 554
Atom, as an eternal somnam-
bulist, 634
the mental, the plant, — pres-
ence of a secret soul in
the, 524
Atomic existence, nature of,

219
Attachment and bondage ; rea-
son for their disappear-
ance in the gnostic being,
1050

B

bdlavat, 211 f.
Beatitude, 46, 48
Beauty, 24 f, 207, 208, 286,
352, 426, 543, 624, 801,
802, 811
Becoming, 41, 73, 74, 97, 210,
290, 397, 439, 568, 570,
572, 576, 585, S87-589,
592, 595, 596, 597, 598,
605, 608, 658, 665, 671,
672, 680; see also Mani-
festation
Becoming, eternal, 341

theory of, 664
Becoming, reason why it is
called phenomenon, 461
vital, 665, 668
Becoming and Being, see Being
and Becoming
the Non-Becoming, 439, 568
Becoming, in Time, immortal-
ity of our real, 502
of Brahman, 596
Being, 6, 17, 23, 28-29, 32, 48,
74, 78, 79, 80, 85, 88, 95,
97, 114, 121, 123, 129, 130,
132, 134, 143, 149, 153,
166 f, 172, 175, 179, 194,
196, 210, 211, 216, 217-
219, 220, 229, 236, 241,
244, 246, 249, 250, 259,
275, 295, 296, 302, 303,
309, 313, 314, 316, 317,
318,319,321-322,347,361,
391, 395, 396, 398, 401,
403-405,410-411,413,427,
428, 429, 430, 432, 439,
441, 444, 449, 455, 467,
487, 492, 505, 513, 532,
567, 568, 570-572, 573-
575, 576-577, 578, 584,
590, 591, 592, 593, 596,
603, 608, 614, 624, 625,
665, 683-686, 693, 719,
720, 742-743, 767, 797,
862, 881, 882, 890, 892,
895, 901, 902, 903; see
also consciousness, 440-
441
absolute, 505, 530, 570
all its energies at their high-
est seek their absolute
which they find in the
supreme Self and its
power of supramental
gnosis, 886
Being and Becoming, as two

terms of the manifestation
of the Absolute, 587-588

Consciousness, suppositions
based on Sankhya and
Vedanta on the dual real-
ity of, 574-575

its Consciousness — Force,
unity of, 320-323

existence, 427

Nature, divine, 894

Power, supramental, 898
Being, at first presents itself to
man through diversity
and the three principal
categories which sum up
for him all its diversity,
612-613

conscious, — its simultaneous
seeing of its immobile be-
ing and its real phenom-
enon of becoming, 461

cosmic, 281, 484, 485, 590,
624, 673, 68s, 686, 766,
767,777-778,823,824

divine, 600

entire, — its unification a
necessary condition for
the supramental change,
827-828

essential, 360
three aspects of, 94-95

eternal, 411

eternal unmodifiable, — cre-
ating by Maya an illusion
of individual soul-life, 664

evolving, 902

hidden, 501

immanent, 358

immutable, 27

implications of its complete
surrender in every part
and every movement to
the higher Truth, 826-827

inconscient, 593

integral, 535

greater fulfilment of, 513-
S14

involved, 902

its manifestation in our uni-
verse takes the shape of
an involution which is the
starting-point of an evolu-
tion, and there can be dis-
tinguished seven grada-
tions of the manifesting
Consciousness in its des-
cent into Involution, 590-
591

manner of its growth

INDEX

compared with the growth
of a tree, 729

nature of its obstinate diffi-
culties and the reason for
them, 825

nature of its oneness and
its three poises, 589

nature of the assumption
and new integration of
the existence by a su-
perior power of, 830

lower parts of, see Lower
parts of the being

orginial and transcendent,
519

secret conscious, 525

subliminal, see Subliminal
being

supracosmic, 309

supreme, 724, 725, 766, 767

surface, see Surface being

sevenfold chord of Ch.
XXVII

three different states of its
consciousness with regard
to its own eternity, 327-

329

three elements in the totality
of our, 500-501

transcendent, 339, 823, 865,
881

true, — immortality of, 562

truth of, 27

truth of, — as man's highest
God-conception sees it,
624

truth of, — to which man's
entire knowledge of him-
self in God and in Nature
rises and widens, 625

truth of, — to which man's
knowledge of Nature and
cosmos is leading him,
624-625

uncreated, 427

universal, 636, 638

various gradations and types
of, see Gradation and
types of being
Being: its consciousness and
will still more important
factors than fate, 720

its graded powers overtop-
ping our normal mind
make the immense ascen-
sion possible, 829

need to take its every part
in its own nature and
character with all the

953

moulds of the past still
there in for Nature's diffi-
cult process of spiritual
transformation, 813

Being in Nature, integral trans-
formation the integral aim
of, 648-649
in the Ignorance, way of
liberation, etc. of the, 916-
917

Being of Bliss, 317
body, rule of, see Physical

man, 799
Knowledge, 317
life, rule of, 799-800
mind, rule of, 800-801

Beings, 691

Beings of the universe, master,
766

Beings or part selves of the
self in us, not limited by
their temporary expres-
sion, see Psychic being,
796-798

Belief; its nature as a mental

construction, 689-690

.Beloved, Eternal, 210

jBeloved, the, 286, 603, 604

Beyond, 18, 23, 36, 46

Beyond-Mind, no

Bhakta, 803

bhaydnaka, loi f

Bhrigu, son of Varuna, — first
formula of the eternal
Brahman arrived at by,
662

bhuri aspasta kartvam, 792

blbhatsa, loi f

Birth, 658

Birth, as the only means for
the development of self
and the play of relations
between the individual
and the universal and all
other individuals in a
world of separative forms
of Matter, 674
human, see Human birth
is a necessity of the mani-
festation of the Purusha
on the physical plane but
not a sudden excursion of
a soul into physicality
without any preparing
past to it or any fulfilling
hereafter, 675-676
nature of its before and the
hereafter in the material-
ist \new and the insuffi-

/

954

ciency of its obvious
solution, 662-663
solution of its problem ac-
cording to the old religi-
ous myth and dogmatic
mystery of a God who
hourly creates immortal
souls out of his being
lacks justification, 663,
664
solution of the problem of
its before and the here-
after is beyond the data
of physical consciousness
and memory, 661-662
Birth and death, as intermedi-
ary stages in the occult
processes of Hfe, 661
two spiritual mysteries of
the physical universe, 661
Bliss, 3, 5, 24 f, 32, 43, 48, 54,
56, 102, 118, 130, 132,
133, 146, 149, 181, 201,
202, 208, 236, 240, 241,
242, 243, 244, 246, 285,
701, 793, 802
Bliss- Existence- Consciousness,

43
Bliss-Self, 158

Bliss of existence, secret, 294
Bliss of Being, 878
the Brahman, 879
"Blonde beast" reign of, 945
Body, no, 112, 150, 176, 197,
214, 234, 247
at a certain stage in the
gnostic evolution a spirit-
ual Ananda can flow into
it and bring about a total
transformation of the ad-
verse sensibilities of the
physical Nature, 877-878
being of, see Physical man
by the supramental emer-
gence will become a fit
and responsive instrument
of the Spirit, 874-875
conditions for the survival
of, 731-733; see Survival
of mind, life and body
demand for its survival
testified to by the dogma
of resurrection, — root also
of the agelong effort of
man to discover the ex-
ILxir of immortality, 731
even in the realised higher
mind, intuitive and over-
mind being, will have be-

INDEX

come sufficiently con-
scious to respond to the
influence of the Idea and
the Will-Force, 874-875

importance and difficulties

of, 213-215
grades of, 238

its before and after accord-
ing to materialistic view,
662-663

its change a necessary con-
dition for a change of
consciousness in the pre-
vious stages — but in man
a reversal is possible, 751-
752

its new relation with the
spirit in the supramental
being makes possible a
free acceptance of the
whole material Nature in
place of a rejection, 875-
876

its transcendence the first
condition of divine living,
909

man's identification with,
156

nature and functionings of
the, 277-279, 297

need for its awaking to the
workings of the supra-
mental Force, 855

need for the assumption of,
see Universe, phenomenal,
674

physical and vital opera-
tions of, 498-499

physical causes of its death
not the sole or true cause
— the true reason being
the spiritual necessity for
evolution of a new being,
732 f

result of the working by the
Higher Mind through
idea-force on, 836

source of the law of, 874-
875

sources from which come
the opposites of what it
craves for — health, power,
etc., 876

self of, see Self of body

the lowest basis of the ap-
parent division, 516

type or pattern of con-
sciousness and being in
the, see Type or pattern |

of consciousness and be-
ing in the body
Body-consciousness, 878

a patient servant of the
spirit and its demand for
health etc., can be es-
tablished when the gnostic
Force can act in it, 876-
877
Body ego, 619
Body and mind, human, see

Human mind and body
Bodily life not possessing its
own full being in its own
kind if the consciousness
does not exceed the body,
909
Brahman, 8, 10, 23, 24, 27, 28,
30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 38,
39, 41, 45, 56, 62, 65, 69,
78, 80, 86, 87, 117, 120,
122, 129, 141, 210, 220,
222, 258, 283, 295, 296,
301, 309, 313-314, 318,
329, 339, 340, 341, 353,
354, 377, 385, 386, 387,
396-404, 405, 407-410,
411, 413, 414, 415, 417-
419, 421, 425, 428, 435,
436, 439, 442, 443, 446 f,
506, 532, 566-568, 571-
572, 589, 596, 620, 662,
671 f, 676, 678, 872, 876,
878

aspects of Space and Time
of, see Space and Time

description in the Upani-
shad of, 294

description by the ancient
sages of, 341

exceeds both the unity and
the multiplicity, 516-517

im^i^obile passive, 513

impersonal, 282

indeterminable, 442

integral, 518

integral knowledge of, 572

integral view of the unity
of, 37-41

invalidity of the distinction
between its consciousness
and being, 398-400

in the essentiality of its uni-
versal being and in its
reality, 518

is one not only in a feature-
less oneness beyond all re-
lation, but in the very

multiplicity of the cosmic
existence, 572, 573

its passive and its active
consciousness are not two
different things but the
same energy, 511-512

Maya of, 308

mobile active, 513

must be aware both of the
passivity and the activity
and regard them not as
his absolute being, but as
opposite yet mutually sat-
isfying terms of his uni-
versality, 514-515

neither an eternal passivity
nor an eternal activity the
sole absolute truth of its
reality, 513-514

Nirguna, 258

passive supporter of all ac-
tivities, 27, 28

possesses both the passivity
and the activity simul-
taneously and does not
pass alternately from one
to the other, 514-515

Purusha, Ishwara, Maya,
Prakriti, Shakti, Ch. XXX

Sad, 64, 67

Saguna, 258

the Absolute, 566

there is not a passive and
an active but one Brah-
man, 512-513

Tapas is the character of
both the active and the
passive consciousness of,
510-511

triple aspect of the power
of consciousness of, 295

truth of, 624
Brahman and Maya; if the
one is a sole existence the
other can be nothing but
his power, 506; see also
Maya
Brahman as both the knowl-
edge and the Ignorance,
meaning of the descrip-
tion in the Upanishad of,
452-453

as Self, fourfold status of,
403
Brahman the Reality, 318, 397,
414, 442

triple aspect of, 293-295,
313

INDEX

view of the double con-
sciousness of, 360
Brahman with infinite quali-
ties, 282
Brahman-consciousness, 396,
398-399, 40.1, 415
double status of, 397, 398
its poise in the world and
its poise beyond it, 511
Brahman-existence, question
of the intervention of
illusion in, 397
Brahmaloka, 24, 236
Brahmavidya, 13
Breath, 10

of life, 165
brhat, 109 f

Brihadaranyaka Upanishad,
translation from, 13, 371,
405 f, 469, 494, 531, 531 f,
586, 706, 734; see also
Yajnavalkya
Buddha, 29, 89, 930
gist of his teaching, 30
legend of, 40
possible sense of Nirvana of

the, 507
refused to consider the
metaphysical problem of
ignorance on the ground
that the way of liberation
alone matters, 435 f
Buddha ; his view of the world
and his way of release,
415
Buddha and Shankara, see

World-negation, 374
Buddhigrdhyam atlndrayam,

62
Buddhism, 23, 35, 48, 669, 931
vitalistic, see vitalistic the-
ory, 668, 669
its mind did not remain sat-
isfied with the evasion of
the problem of ignorance,
436
Buddhists, refused reality to
the Self, 418
their ideal of self-extinction
is in \^edantic thought
self-finding, 596
Void or Zero of the, 29 f
Buddhist affirmation of a
Non-Being, Void or Nihil,
396
compassion, 375
elevation of universal com-
passion to be the highest
principle of action, indi-

955

cates the dynamic side of
spiritual being, 786 f

illustration, the flame of the,
73

Nihilists, 458

reason why he comes to re-
gard even the eternal self
as an illusion proceeds
from a consideration of
the nature of mind, 454

schools. Nihil of, 28, 71

theory of a Nihil or Nirv-
ana, denial of self or soul
in the, 664

theory, rebirth in, 666 f

way of liberation, 354
Buddhistic ethical insistence,
purpose of, 543

theory of the Chain of
Karma, 24

view of rebirth, 666 f, 668,
669 ; see also under Ad-
waita of the Mayavada
and Buddhism

Calm, 28, 30

Causality, 124, 133, 294, 452,
455

Causality, meaning of, 459

Cause, the, 613, 614

Caribbee, 679

Celestial life, sick ascetic long-
ing for, see under Supra-
terrestrial, 601-602

Central being, 799, 801 ; see
also Soul and under Psyi
chic entity

Centre, real, 246

Chaitya Purusha, character of,
207

Chance, 901
existence a wandering spiral

of, 900
inconscient, 276, 294
unsatisfactorj' nature of the
theor>' of, 273-274, 275

Chaos, 92

Chhandog>-a Upanishad, trans-
lation from, 68, 44S, 609

Change, complete and radical,
— the means by which it
can be brought about, S31
intermediate, — could be only
partial or insecure till the
establishment of the su-

956

pramental principle in the
earth-existence, 855
spiritual means by which it
can be brought about,
829-830
Change, see also under
Transformation ; Psychic
change; Spiritual change,
etc.
larger, see Will, 803; also
Soul, 803-804
Change of nature, radical, see

Humanity, 938-939
Chimeras, 392
Chit, 48, 75, 217, 233, 509 I

Indian conception of, 83
Chit-Shakti, 171, 314, 322
Chit-Taps, 171
Christianity, 931
Christian emphasis on love,
indicates the dynamic side
of the spiritual being,
786 f
love, 375

thought-structures, later,
782
Chromosome, 662
Chromosomes, see Genes
Circumconscient, the, 584
and intraconscient, see In-
traconscient and circum-
conscient
being, 520

being; two ways by which
the spiritual inner con-
sciousness has to deal with
the world influences re-
ceived through it, and the
difficult nature of this
spiritual perfection, 852-
853
consciousness, 852
ranges, 653

subliminal a secret, 500
citti, SEE acitti

Classifications and distinc-
tions, truth and limits of
343-345; see also Distinc-
tions
Clairvoyance, see Supernormal

faculties, 479
Collective being, see Society;
Community ; etc.
loses its evolutionary move-
ment when the individual
becomes only a cell of the
mass body, 619
obscure, — nature of, 936

INDEX

subliminal, see Mass con-
sciousness
Collective consciousness, see
Mass consciousness

ego, 913, 917, 933, 936

existence, 940

existence, new, — condition
for the appearance of, see
also New Life

life, see under Communal;
Society; etc.

living, gnostic divine way
of, see Gnostic divine way
of collective living

soul and its life, 936

spiritual life; its possibility
and the risks of a pre-
mature attempt at it, 786-
787
Collectivity and the individ-
ual, see Individual and
the collectivity

its influence on the individ-
ual and his need for a
separate self-affirmation,
618-619

its perfection can only come
by the perfection of the
individuals who consti-
tute it, 620

largely a subconscious mass
movement which has to
express itself through the
individuals to become
conscious, 929-930

physical, see Physical col-
lectivity ; also, Society ;
Community; etc.
Companion, eternal, 210
Common experience, see Per-
sonal average mind Obs-
curantism, 579-580

mentality, see Personal
average mind
Communal being or individ-
ual, secret of the perfec-
tion of, see Individual or
communal being

ego, 933, 936
Community, 929, 930, 943 ; see
also Society; etc.

existing by the individual
but the individual is not
a mere cell of the col-
lective existence, 929-930

its perfection possible only
by the perfection of its
individuals, 931

truth of the collective being
of the, 929
Concentration, exclusive, see
Exclusive concetration
four states or powers of,

519-520

in the sense of self-held

dwelling in itself or on

itself as object, may be

said to belong to the very

nature of conscious being,

519-520

one of the greatest powers

of human mentality, 363

Consecration of the will, see

Will p. 803
Constitutional ignorance, see
Ignorance, constitutional;
Ignorance, sevenfold
self-ignorance, 621
Conflict in our members,
causes of, — ^and its co-
ordination by reason and
will a half measure, 798
Conscience, nature of, 542

true original, 208
Conscient, the, 467
and the Inconscient, 434
of the Upanishad, the, 524
Contradictions, law of, 338,
343, 345-346 ; see also Ab-
solute, 343-348
Control, 784

Courage, as a quality, 303
Conscious, the, 294, 318
Being, 27, 39, 57, 95, 96, 107,
120, 123, 124, 17s, 194,
216, 235, 250, 278, 286,
294, 295, 313, 314, 3i7i
319, 322, 524, 590; see
also Purusha
becoming subconscious and
vice versa, result, 169-170
Being, Secret, 742
Being, see Being, conscious;
being, an eternal ; also Eter-
nal conscious being
Conscious-being, belief in the
eternity of the, see Eter-
nity of the conscious be-
ing
Conscious being, in practical
fact there are two poles
of it between which the
evolving process works,

548-549
nature of, see Concentration,
519-520
Conscious Energy, 23, 740

Conscious-Energy of the orig-
inal Existence, 396
Conscious-Existence, 230, 259
Conscious Force, 94, 106, 107,
109, 119, 124, 130, 133,
13s, 172, 173, 176, 191,

193, 202, 216, 217, 230,
233, 23s, 243, 244, 258,
262, Ch X, 504, 517, 716,
789, 822; see also under
Tapas

of being; its working in us
after the removal of the
veil of Ignorance, 528-529
secret, 545
universal, 616
Conscious in inconscient
things, one, 624
in unconscious things, the

one, 492
mind in us, nature of, 919-
920
Conscious-Life, 236
Conscious-Power, 236, 313
Conscious-Self, 136
Conscious-Soul, 77, 78, 81,

136, 256
Consciousness, 5, 16, 20, 22,
73, 79, 80, 81, 96, 107,
115, 118, 122, 123, 124,
125, 132, 133, 134, 135,
^S5, 163, 175, 182, 191-

194, 198, 213, 216, 217,
221, 223, 227, 241, 244-
246, 257, 261, 263, 264,
271, 274-275, 276, 278,
279, 280, 285, 287, 288,
294, 299, 313, 315, 318,
319, 321, 361, 388, 395,
400, 401, 410, 413, 420,
435, 440, 444-446, 448,

■ 467, 491, 418, 420, 508,
S09, 532, 534, 535, 540,
574, 576, 582, 586, 591,
594, 606, 609-611, 629,
630, 631, 673, 685, 693,
695, 720, 736, 742, 744,
824, 861, 867, 879, 880,

913

as a flux of perception or
as the sole reality con-
structing merely struc-
tures: views of the uni-
verse based on these con-
ceptions, 573-574

absolute — fundamental de-
terminates of the, 286

as creator of this world out

INDEX

of an apparent original
Inconscience, 275-279

cosmic, 14, 18, 22, 23, 26,

27, 31, 38, 128, 191, 209,

407, 422, 425, 426; see

also Cosmic Consciousness

effect of, 22, 23

reconciliation in, 26, 27

concealed, — presence in
things of, 544-545

condition for the manifesta-
tion of the higher spiritual
grades of, 949-95°

creative — its assumption in
Matter, in animal life and
in Mind: but the Mind is
not its last evolution and
a greater and more in-
timate intuition possible
to it resulting in a real
participation by the in-
dividual in the working
of the universal Con-
sciousness-Force, 820-822

divine, — its power of the
putting forth of a seem-
ingly exclusive working of
limited knowledge ap-
pearing as Ignorance, 363-
364

difference between the dyn-
amisms of human and
Sachchidananda, 509

description in the Upanishad
of, 911

double aspect of, 269; see
Double consciousness.

evolving, — see Evolution ;
destiny of, 902

evolving supramental, —
holding back part of its
contents of self-awareness
not as a step of Ignor-
ance but as a deliberate
movement, 873-874

evolution of, see Evolution
of Matter, of conscious-
ness; Evolution, etc.

free play of mind and life
essential for the growth
of, 936

gods as powers of, — in the
thought of the Upani-
shads, 745

human, 428, 430; see also
Human Consciousness

infinite, 299; see also In-
finite Consciousness

infinite — character of, 285

957

infinite, — Mind in relation
to, 389

in the theory of materialis-
tic evolutionary Panthe-
ism, 687

in the theory of the sole
reality of Matter, 395

is intrinsic in being, 487

its nature in the higher
states, 825

its secret not discoverable
by an examination of
Matter, Life and Mind,
278-280

its two movements leading
to superior gradations,
253, 254

Knowledge and Ignorance
as two powers of, see
Mind, 451-452

manifesting, — seven grada-
tions of the, see Involu-
tion, 590

mind, 366

meaning of, 83

mode of emergence, 224

nature of its emergence in
mind, 80-82, 191-192

need to shift its centre from
the surface to the inner
being, 804

new, see Inner being, 804

omnipotent and omniscient,
410

original, 394-395, 430, 44i;
see also Reality

original and ultimate, 423,
425

original and ultimate, — its
nature and its regard
on the world process, 424-

425
original occult, 279
power and status of, 334-

335
passive and active, see

Tapas, 509-511
result of its total change

and reversal, S74-S75
reason why Mind cannot be

its ultimate possibility,

901-903
reason why it is incomplete

in its working in us, 902
result of the increase of, see

Knowledge and Power,

919-920
secret, 566, 747, 750, 753,

S60

958

significance of the evolu-
tion of, 544-545

stages of the emergence of,
see also Evolution, 609-
610

Supramental, 793

supreme, 910

surface, see Surface Con-
sciousness

the growing separative, — all
the powers inherent in
the original self-existent
spiritual Awareness are
brought out in, 492-493

transcendental, 31

two aspects of, 241

triple aspect of, 295

universal concealed, — the
Inconscient an immense
action of a, 919

universal, — meaning, 92

viewed as the real creative
Power and the notion of
the Supraphysical planes
of being on this basis, 695
Consciousness: as we descend
the scale it becomes more
and more diminished and
diluted — but, as we as-
cend, a greater luminosity
and potent stuff of con-
sciousness emerges, 934-
935

different statuses taken by
it with regard to the one
Eternity, 327-329

its different states each with
its own realities, 378

it is only by looking deeply
into it that we can dis-
cover and determine the
character and relations of
the Knowledge and the
Ignorance or of the Illu-
sion, if it exists, and the
Reality, 440-441

its descent into the lower
levels necessary, but still
to work out the full
power of the higher prin-
ciple is difficult, because it
is modified and dimin-
ished by the lower levels,
814-815

its method of acquiring
knowledge and the reason
why human knowledge is
always imperfect, 549-550

stages of its emergence from

INDEX

involution to its evolved
appearance understood
more clearly in the knowl-
edge of the Inconscience,
492-493

three poises of its power —
and the necessity to dis-
cover their origin and ex-
act relation, 445-446

its various statuses and the
possibility of our entering
into them, 312-313
Consciousness and Being, iden-
tity of, 22-23

secret, — Matter seems likely
to turn out to be the ac-
tion of a, 592
Consciousness and eternal Wis-
dom, infinite, — ^Veiled lu-
minous Sphinx of the, 611
Consciousness and Force, diffi-
culties arising from the im-
perfect poise of, 195-198

interdependence of, 193, 194

progressive relation between,
194
Consciousness and Knowledge,
evolution of, 544-546

and Knowledge, involved,
52s

and life, the destiny of their
evolution must be towards
a divine life of a per-
fected consciousness in a
supramental or gnostic
power of spiritual being,
901-903

and power, original, — dual
possibility of, 392-393

and Power, gnostic, — its
result when established on
earth, 859-860

and Power, mental, 859

and Will, secret, 720-721

as Force, action of, 191-192

behind mind, stable, — the
condition in which we can
become aware of it and its
nature, 454-455

in Matter, indwelling, 653

of Being, 444

of the Infinite, 826

supposed to work in Void,
396
Consciousness-Force, 175, 243,
249, 254, 257, 261, 262,
263, 269, 277, 286, 287,
353, 428, 449, 519, 520,
532, 548, 575, 623, 660,

693, 725-726, 735, 737,
739, 744, 751, 753, 792,
810, 820, 822, 824, 827,
834, 861, 877, 889, 915,
921

a new power and powers of
consciousness would be an
inevitable consequence of
its evolution passing be-
yond mind to a superior
cognitive and dynamic
principle, 921-922

creative, — has to lead for-
ward a double evolution
in our earth-existence, 763

evolving, 820

emergent, 746

infinite, 330

its partial movement not im-
plying any real division of
its integrality, 528-529

in Nature, reason for the
slow and difficult emer-
gence of, 813-815; see
also under Spiritual trans-
formation

supramental, see Supramen-
tal Consciousness-Force

Supramental, 820, 824, 855
Consciousness-Force and the
Ignorance, exclusive con-
centration of Ch. XLI

and Self- Existence, see Self-
Existence and the dynam-
ics of the eternal Con-
sciousness-Force
Cosmic action, 888

being, 281, 290, 335, 338,
416, 419, 561, 619, 685,
929

being, not a phantasy — ^but
the Divine itself is the key
of its enigma, see Integral
view, 605-606

consciousness, 386, 407, 425,
426, 566, 580, 621, 659,
784, 807, 809, 844, 865,
869, 910

consciousness, founded upon
knowledge by identity,

485
consciousness, result of the

subliminal being's entry

into the, 484-486
consciousness, secret, — ^sur-

face organization of, 617
consciousness; only by an

opening into it can the

overmind ascent and de-

scent be made wholly pos-
sible, 844

cycle, object of, see Igno-
rance, 526-527

Determinations Ch. XXIX,
310

dream, 394, 670

existence, 236, 237, 436, 440,
680; see also under Cos-
mos ; Universe, etc.
Cosmic existence, character of,
726-727

determined by the truth of
the dependence of the
Many upon the One, 685-
686

explanation of, 569

first aspect of, 270-274

higher Trinity as the source
and basis of 244, 245

illusion of, see World-nega-
tion

its various possible origina-
tions including the theory
of an abrupt descent of
the Soul into the Igno-
rance that imply a pre-
mier importance and orig-
inating power of mind or
of the individual being,
683-685

origin of, 404

reality and meaning of, 319
Cosmic energy, 475

energies, nature of their
massive action, 485-486

evolution, 943

existing by dependence on
the supracosmic, 409

experience, 404

force, 390, 534, 888

forces, invisible, 537

game, 368

hallucination, 394

illusion, 393, 396, 670; see
also Illusion, Cosmic; and
also under Reality and the
Illusion; Maya; Universe,
etc.

Illusion; Mind, Dream and
Hallucination Ch.XXXIU

Illusion, original, 408

Illusion, inapplicability of
various analogies in the
theory of, see under
Dream analogy; Halluci-
nation, 385-388; also Hu-
man mind and Maya;
Dreams, Visions, etc. ; Mi-

INDEX

rage ; Mother-of-pearl and
silver ; Optical illusion ;
Rope and snake

ignorance, 429; see also
Ignorance, cosmic; Igno-
rance, sevenfold

individuality, 865

joy, 866

kinesis, 451

manifestation, 417

manifestation, reveals itself
as a play of the eternal
One in the being of Sach-
chidananda with the eter-
nal Many, 673-674

movement, 910

Nature, 724

order, 358

order, evolutionary, 276

paradox, 271

Power, 725

phenomenon, 388, 389

principle, double nature of,
203

purpose, 299, 358

reality, 410

Self, 294, 309, 501, 766, 880

self-determination, 311

self-finding, 476

Spirit, 532, 617, 686, 820,
822

state of being and conscious-
ness, 281

sympathy, 866

system, 394
Cosmic, the, 303

the egoistic, the original
ignorance, 621

terrestrial, see also under
Terrestrial

— terrestrial view of exist-
ence and its correspond-
ing mental attitudes and
ideals and their limitation,
596-598

trance-sleep, 289

truth, 281

universality, 295

and the individual, 335-336

and the Transcendent, see
Transcendent and the
Cosmic
Cosmos, 15, 18, 78, 247, 395,
420, 590, 624-625; see also
Cosmic Existence

integral view of, 684

must be either impersonal or
multipersonal or the crea-

959

tion of a universal or in-
finite Being, 683

partial view of a sole affir-
mation regarding the in-
dividual as the by-prod-
uct of, 589-590

typal non-evolving, 526

viewed as an evolution out
of the inconscient either
with the material universe
as its only place or with an
ascending scale of worlds,
684
Cosmos: its denial makes it a
painful and miserable par-
adox with false shows of
wonder and beauty and
delight, 615

not sufficient to itself nor
does it explain itself even
by its unseen material
forces, 613-614

and Nature, what constitute
the, 621-622
Created forms, foundation of,
— as described in the Rig
Veda, 216
Creation, 360

Creation, aesthetic or dynamic,
— what to the gnostic be-
ing will be the nature of,
874

basis, meaning and complete
process of, 284-285, 290

ideal, — and the creation of
which we have present ex-
perience, 433

last and supreme state of the
epiphany of, 862

meaning of, 301-302

meaning of the Sanskrit
word for, 303 f

statement of the \dew that
it has no teleological ele-
ment in it, 736-742

terrestrial, — its meaning ex-
posed to challenge at
every point, 736

three views of, 281-282
Creator, 123, 153, 278, 318,
322, 501, 599, 602, 624,
663, 766, 868, 900

arbitrary, 376

extra-cosmic, 275

Power, 264

supracosmic, 900

truth-creation of the, 432
Creatrix, 322
Creature-Mind, 176

960

Curing-power of a drug as its
property, 303

Cultures, ancient, — the place
of the community and the
individual in, 927-928

Daemon, 207, 752
Dangers of a sole stress on the
economic and material ex-
istence, 832

of new powers of conscious-
ness, 923, 924

of a premature attempt at
collective spiritual life,
786-788

of a premature entry into
the inner being without
purification of the outer
nature, 905

of a premature pulling down
of the higher Forces, 813

of a rending of the upper
velamen brought about
by a premature pressure
from below, 809-810; see
also Psychic change, 808-
810

of entry into the subliminal
with vital ego-motives,
477, 478^

of pausing in the No-man's-
land between the sublimi-
nal and the surface, 500

of regarding the obscure col-
lective being as the soul
of the community, 936

of the system of civilisation
built up by man's mind
and life-will, 932-934

of universality which can no
longer be supported by
human capacity without
and inner change, 934-935

for the existence of the hu-
man race, 778-779
Darkness, Forces of, 263, 941

and Division, sons of, 537

and Falsehood and Evil, un-
divine principle of, 537

and sorrows and pain
and suffering, clinging to
them by the lower parts
of us possible, 831-832
Darwinian, 83, 184
Death, 48, 51, 177, 179, 180,
182, 270, 733

INDEX

law of, 179

necessity of, 177, 178-180

sons of, 610

Desire and Incapacity, Ch.

XX
and life, opposition between,
— an error of mentality,
164
Deity, 89, 120, 123, 192, 195,
199, 257, 624
extra-cosmic, 276, 358
faineant, 359
Delight, 57, 94, 103, 107, 132,
I33» 143, 146, 163, 193,
194 202, 204, 212, 240,
245, 259, 263, 286-287,
318, 349, 352, 611
cosmic, 341
of Being, 444, 590, 792, 832,

908-909
of Being, divine, 376
of being, nature of, 92
of Existence, 106, 257, 263,
285, 592, 609, 685, 879,
909 ; see also Ananda, Ec-
stasy
of Existence: the Problem,
Ch. XI
the Solution, Ch. XII
of existence, supreme and
total, demand for it se-
cretly present in the whole
make of our being and
the supporting presence of
this original Delight in the
Supermind, 878-879
Deliverance of others, 366
Demiurge, 358, 635

mind as a, 388
Demon, 294, 537
Demon-worship, 623
Denial, 196, 214
Departure from the evolution,
its law once made possible
— not or need not be the
same as the law of the
evolutionary transforma-
tion, 829-830
Desire, 177, 180, 182, 236, 684-
686, 944-945
function of, 180-181
necessity and fulfillment of,

180, 181
sense of, 179
Desire-self, 648
Desire-soul, 203-208, 242
Desire, a movement of life in
mind, 684
a result of incompleteness

and not the creative prin-
ciple of material existence,
686
and Incapacity, Ch. XX

Descent of the Being, seven
principles of the, 590-592
of consciousness into the
lower levels, see Con-
sciousness, 814-815
of the higher into the lower
nature, is the third motion
of the spiritual transfor-
mation essential for bring-
ing the permanent ascen-
sion 811-812

Destiny; its view in Indian
astrology and its complex
character, 720-721
secret causes of its caprices
partly in the hidden past,
722-723

Detachment, result of, 470

Determinant or determinants,
the original, 285

Determinates, 276

Deva, 906

devdndm adabdha vratdni,
438 f

Devil, 32

Devotee, 803

lives in the spiritual aspira-
tion of the heart, 784

Dharma, 855, 889

Dialectical intellect, see Intel-
lect, dialectical

Difference, in the gnostic life
is a spontaneous natural
adaptation, 896-897

Distinctions, their knowledge
arrives at its greatest truth
when we arrive at the
deeper knowledge of that
which reconciles them in
the unity behind all vari-
ations, 343, 344; see also
classifications

Divergences, see Difference

Divine, the, 13, 16, 24, 25, 27,
41, 44, 46, 50, 52, 57, 97,
123, 138, 140, 144, 146,
147, 150, 175, 176, i77>
180, 181, 192, 207-210,
215, 230, 244, 286, 303,
305, 331, 334, 335, 338,
348, 349, 353, 355, 356,
357, 361, 364, 367, 420,
438, 467, 511, 561, 604,
605, 613, 614, 615, 616,

6i9, 624, 658, 660, 679,
69s, 736, 737, 77S, 776,
808, 830, 840, 861, 863,
866, 869, 874, 876, 882,
886, 892, 904, 913, 930,
.943, 945

Divine, Absolute, 335

at once absolute, universal
and individual, 882

Divine cosmic, 179

fourfold principle of, 202
nature of, 241

Divine Individual, 137, 143,
144
individual and universal

136-137

meaning of the failures of
the, 181

mode of descent of the, 243

superconscient, 696

universal, 146

not bound by laws and proc-
esses, but the reason why
he still acts through them,
320

limitation of His omniscient
power a greatest possible
proof of an absolute om-
nipotence, 364

omnipresent, 359

the mystery of the universe
must have a divine sense
to the, 416

his action in himself and in
his other selves, 334; see
also Individual, 334

and the undivine, Ch.
XXXII, 353-354

and the undivine existence,
350-351, 354-356, 356-358

and Eternal, the, 410

and Eternal, 607

and the universe, 589

Absolute, 285

Ananda, 212

Beauty, 874
Divine Being, 122, 123, 293,
295, 304, 305, 322, 344,
368, 432, 533, 572, 589,
593, 595, 600, 602, 616,
765, 803, 807, 810 812,
889, 905, 913, 945; see
also Self and Gnostic be-
ing

and the individual, 323, 324

as the Ishwara, 317, 318,
319, 320

is at once personal and im-
personal, S90

INDEX

or His Messengers or Pow-
ers and Godheads of the
Light, beings and voices
and influences of a quite
different character may
appear to the inner sense
as the, 805

through surrender of our
soul and nature to Him
can we attain to our high-
est self and supreme Real-
ity, 324

to know Him is the third
step of self-realisation,
561-562

transcendental, — cosmos and
individual consciousness
both depend upon and ex-
ist by the, 590
Divine Consciousness, 132, 134,
135, 136, 162, 208, 453,
590-591, 616

and Essence, our soul a por-
tion of, 350

and the divine life, two con-
ditions of, 658-659

reason and justification of
imperfection in its crea-
tion here, 366-367

seven principles of existence
the seven colours of the
light of the, 431
Divine Delight, 616, 874

of existence, 591

of Existence, fundamental
determinates of the, 286
Divine Energy, 590, 593
Divine Existence, 141, 358,
535, 562, 588, 590, 591,
593, 609, 611, 616, 624,
736

Consciousness and Delight
of Being, 588

results of division or rup-
ture in the unity of, 352,
353

spiritual truth of differen-
tiation in the, 334, 335

the view that imperfection,
ignorance, etc. of this
world are not supported
by, 358, 359, 367, 368
Divine Force, 892

government of the universe,
361

Gnosis, 833
Divine Infinite, 139, 432, 624

Infinity, transcendent, 362

Image, 693

961

Immanence, 351

Impersonality, 256

Inhabitant, 359

Knowledge, 616, 737, 892
Divine Law, 133

character of, 660
Divine Life, 351, 625, 658; Ch.
LVI; see also Gnostic
. Life, 945

life, a realisation of spiritual
unity can alone found and
govern by its truth the
action of, 912-913

life, arrival of the individual
— not in one but in all —
at it the sole conceivable
object of the movement
of divine self-manifesta-

^ tion, 348-349

life, basis of, 336

life, basis of conception of
the possibility in material
Nature of, 330

life, first and foremost an
inner life, 907

life, not possible in a too
externalised consciousness,
904, 906

life, three desiderata of, 914-
915

life, two preoccupations to-
ward the growth of, 908

life in humanity, condition
and significance of, 243-

244

living, first necessity of, 910-
911

living, integral, — necessary
condition of, 908-909

living, law of, 913

living, meaning of, 908-909

living, to transcend body,
mind and life are the
three conditions of, 909-
910

Light, 616, 874

Lord of being, 623

Love, 874
Divine manifestation, 353

Maya, see Maya Di\-ine, 141

Mother, 31 8, 322

Mother-Energy as the uni-
versal creatrLx, 322

Nature, 352, 357, 369, 566,
590

Nature of unity and in-
divisible being, apparent
division and their separate

962

workings no denial of the,
361-362

Nisus, 943
oestrus, 433

One, 323

Perfection, 365

Person, 210, 418

Personality, 256

Play, 660

play, see Lila

Presence, 320, 359, 367

Presence, 874

Power, 616, 825, 874

Puissance, acts according to
the permanent yet plastic
truth of things, 561

Purusha, 369
Divine Reality, 256, 314, 359,
362, 532, 566, 567, 734,
769, 784, 809, 839, 913,
93 9> 943 ; see also Reality,
divine. Divine Reality,
and world Reality, third
affirmation about them,
see God and the World

Self, 323, 893

Self and Master, 590

Shakti, 322, 807, 824

Soul, Ch. XVII

its relations with God and
its other selves, 144-146
nature of, 141-144
two terms of its simul-
taneous way of living,
142-143
use of mind by the 153-
154
Divine Spirit, 368
Divine Supermind, 132
Divine Totality, 864

Transcendence, 318

Truth, 769

union, 336, 421

Unity, S91

While, 210, 356

Will, 369, 607, 859, 864, 891-
892, 913

Wisdom, 726, 891
Divinity, 67, 207, 323, 358,
368, 369, 527, 542, 555,
561, 585, 620, 624, 792,
809, 903

cosmic, 567

concealed, — action in us of,
357, 358

extra-cosmic, 275

immanent, 361

inner, 362

omnipresent, — second affir- 1

INDEX

mation as a consequence
of the first postulate of,
see God of the world

secret, 389

silent, 354

whole, 355

and Reality, omnipresent,
first affirmation of, see
Good and the world

in man, 907
Division, see Separative differ-
ence

a limited movement of the
Ignorance, 463

apparent, — stages in the
gradual disappearance of,
S16

attachment to its experience
prevents the excision of
pain and grief, wrong-do-
ing, evil, etc., 353

inevitable practical, effect
of, 352-353

law of, 180

of our being from the being
of others, can only be
healed by removing the
divorce of our nature
from the inner soul-real-
ity, 561-562

results of the principle of,
228

self-limiting, — not inherent
in the multiplicity of
souls, 516-517

source of, 155

the last one to be removed
is the scission between
this Nature and the
Super-Nature: 561-562

three stages in the origin of,

153-154
Double consciousness in Yoga,
312
personality, importance of
memory in the phenome-
non of, 465, 466
Dragon, 392
Dream, see also Sleep
cosmic, 30
deeper subconscient, see

Subconscient in Sleep
sleep and walking states,

383-384
subconscious character of,

see subconscious as a

dream builder
subliminal character of, see

Subliminal as a greater

dream builder
visions, the imagination of
the artist or poet, — anal-
ogy of, 387-388
and Hallucination, 377
analogy, 377, 378, 379, 384-

386
consciousness, 377, 379
experience, see Sleep life,

378, 379, 382
life and waking life, see
Dream Analogy
Dream Self, subliminal being
described by the Upani-

shad as the, 384
its description and its
meaning in the Upani-
shads, 403, 404, 405 ; see
also Sleep state and
dream state
Time, 327
Dreamless Sleep, see Sleep,

dreamless
Dualities, Ch. VII
Duality of good and evil, hap-
piness and suffering etc.,
see Evil and suffering,
351-352
Dynamis, 210

Dynamis, see Status and dy-
namis
Dynamic principle, new, see
Higher dynamic principle
Dynamis, three modes of, 322

E

Early humanity, spiritual as-
piration and experience of
the mystics was the
heart's core of religion in
the mind of an, 774

Early man; method of evolu-
tionary Nature in her first
awakening of him to a
rudimentary spiritual con-
sciousness, 769-771

Earth, 13, 48, 214, 232; see
also Rig Veda, 694 f ; and
, under Terrestrial
and the pot, analogy of, see

Universe, 409-410
wider root sense of, 695 f

Earth-evolution, decisive part
played by the higher
planes in, 714

Earth-existence, nature of the
play of, 858

Earth-life, 904, 942
Earth-life, evolutionary pos-
sibility and purpose of, 606
reason for the limitation of
the working of overmind
in, 846-847
transformation of, see
Transformation of earth-
life
Earth-line ; a supramental
change in it alone would
not mean any complete
elimination of the univer-
sal inconscience, 899
Earth-Mother, 234
Earth-nature, 610, 680, 819,
899, 903, 904, 926, 940,
944
seekings and fundamental
intention of, 607
Earth-Power, 235, 573
Earth-principle, 174
Earth-principle, forms of, 273
East and West, different meth-
ods of the philosophies of
the, 781-782
meeting together in later
Christian or Neo-pagan
thought structures, 782
East, psychology of, 22; also
see under occultism in the
East
Eastern ideal of the spiritual
preoccupation of man,
carried by Buddhism into
the coasts of Asia and
Egypt and thence poured
into Europe by Christian-
ity, but its rejection by
the modern spirit has
resulted in a chaos of the
life of the race, 931-932
Economic and physical needs,
freedom from, see Fullness
of the means of life
Ecstasy, 420, 810

in the highest ascents of the

spiritual bliss, is founded

on al beatific tranquility

of eternal peace, 879-880

Education and intellectual

training, by itself cannot

change man, 937

limited achievement of, 906

Ego, 324, 332, 335-337, 496,

670, 674, 685-686, 762,

80s, 808, 867, 880, 881,

891-892, 897, 910, 912,

913, 915, 918, 924, 933,

INDEX

938, 943, 944, 945; see
also Life-ego ; Vital being,
etc.
affirmation of, 616-617
dividing nature and various

forms of, 558-559
has no separate existence,

362
individual, — because it acts
as a separate ego life-dis-
cord and disharmony

arise, 555-556
is a pragmatic and effec-
tive fiction, 555
its disappearance not a de-
struction of the true in-
dividuality, 679
magnified, — may be the un-
toward result if the egois-
tic mind or vital tries to
seize the descending
power for its own use, 813
mental, 551
mental and vital, 619
only a minor and superficial
formulation of the self-
consciousness and self-ex-
perience of the subliminal,
498
only an outward false sub-
stitute for the psychic en-
tity, 468
physical, vital and mental,

544, 550
process of its elimination in

works, 803
reason for the Nature's in-
vention of, 618-619
result of the disappearance

of, 659
results of the dissolution of,

211-212
to be in its limitations is to
live in a limited consci-
ousness and power and
joy of existence, 908-909
what form the life of the,
503-504
Ego-building, outer, 475-476
Ego-centric attitude, 579-580
Ego-centricism, 211
Ego-consciousness, 362, 566
Ego-formation, 77
Ego-idea, 495
Ego -insistence, 915
Ego-life, 897
Ego-memory, 464, 465
Ego-nature, 897
Ego-personality, 881

963

Ego-sense, 503
a pragmatic contrivance of
a secret co-ordinating
power, 465
constitution of, 332
finally abolished when the

overmind descends, 844
its contribution to the

world-workings, 526
memory does not alone

constitute the, 460
only a first basis for the
development of real self-
knowledge in the mental
being, 466
runs continually through the

three times, 522,
three reasons for the imper-
fect nature of self-knowl-
edge based on it alone,
466-467
Ego-Sense; one of the de\-ices
of mental Ignorance by
which the mental being
becomes aware of himself
and is not a result of
memory, 464-465
and ego-idea, function and
utility, 494-495
Ego-will, 803

Ego and Self-experience,
Memory, Ch. XXXVII
and the Dualities, Ch. VII
and the self, to get beyond
the ego is imperative but
one cannot get beyond
the self, 620-621
enlargement, 912
Egoism and other dominating
weaknesses in the nature,
their presence in a high
degree likely to mislead
the seeker into false paths,
805
Egoistic ignorance, see Cos-
mic, the egoistic, the orig-
inal ignorance ; also Ig-
norance, egoistic
individuality, not the true
spiritual individual, 619
Eg>Tt, 93 ; see also occultism

in Egypt
Eidolon, 123

ekdtmya-pratyaya-saram, 420
eko vast sarvabhUtdntardtmd,

616 f
Electricity, not a product of
water and cloud matter

964

but, on the contrary elec-
tric energy their founda-
tion, 759
Electron and atom, are eternal

somnambulists, 634
Elephant and the blind men,
story of, 300

and the disciple, story of,
301
Emergence, luminous, 42
Emptiness and silence, see

Silence
Energies, 538

Energy, 9, 15, 69, 70, 73, 78,
134, 149, 164, 167, 171,
172, 184, 186, 191, 216,
217, 236, 250, 258, 270,
271, 274, 27s, 277, 278,
315, 316, 326, 411, 449,
461, 484, 491, 492, 532,
540, 574, 575, 577, 580,
582, 592, 594, 597, 609-
611, 615, 629, 632, 634,
643, 661, 665, 666, 673,
687-701, 724, 746, 748,
756, 820, 823, 886, 900,
902

absorbed, 528

cosmic, 389, 486, 534, 541,
589, 590, 616, 778

conscious, 746

electric, — forms of, 273

evolutionary, 590, 758, 797

frontal, 276

inconscient, 275, 318, 375,
609, 742, 756

infinite conscious, 389

its manifold nature not to
be set aside in favour of a
single principle in deter-
mining the nature of its
result, 721-722

material, 276, 623, 628, 629,
747, 748, 779, 829, 919,
923

mental, 280, 920

original, 274

original indeterminate, 273

physical, 577

reason why it appears to be
itself inconscient and yet
does the works of a vast
occult IntelHgence, 735

triple formation, 15

universal, 281, 510, 822, 877
Energy; its lines of action in-
dependent but their acting
together and upon each
other possible though not

INDEX

in any rigidly fixed law
of correspondence, 724-
725
Energy-substance, 277, 278
Energy as the sole Reality,

view of, 395-396
Epicurean systems, 782
Ephemeral being of nature,

910
Epicurius, gods of, 359
Equality and peace, inner, 366
Error, see under Conscious-
ness, 549, 550; Evil;
Good and evil
by itself would not amount
to falsehood but can at
any moment be the cause
of a falsification of
knowledge, 550-SS2
double source of, 548-549
falsehood, wrong and evil,

SSo-555
is an indispensable stage in
this slow evolution, 550-
552
mental, — its origin a mis-
application of elements of
experience and knowl-
edge, 392
mental, — outcome of inter-
mediate Ignorance, 388

Errors, utility of, 508

Esoteric and exoteric, see Re-
Ugion, 773-775

Essence and phenomenon of
the essence, not Contra-
dictory, 274

Essentiality, commonalty and
individuality are the true
and eternal powers of, see
Existence, 344-346

Enjoyed, the, 130, 286

Enjoyer, 130, 311, 149, 286,
318

Enjoyment, 130

"Enthousiasmos," luminous,
839

Entity, 32, 401

Entity, divine, 760

Entity, psychic, 317; see Psy-
chic Entity

Eternal, 868, 879, 882, 892

Eternal, the, 104, 132, 151,
163, 210, 223, 247, 258,
284, 286, 288, 290, 304,
309, 318, 324-325, 327,
328, 332, 337, 338, 339,

345, 354, 398, 400, 401,
403, 408, 410, 412, 413,
417, 419, 425, 440, 444,
454, 455, 515, 557, 57i,
588, 597, 614, 662, 670,
672-673, 784, 791, 812

action does not bind or
limit the, 412

cosmic, — Space and Time a
dual aspect of one and
the same self-extension of
the, 324

idea of the world as a dream
in the, 377

the timeless, 420

the uncreated, 427

timeless, 290, 566

two truths of the, 283
Eternal and Absolute, the, 421

and Absolute ; timeless
eternity and time eternity
are its two aspects, 427

and Infinite, 617

and Infinite, the, 408

and Infinite, the unmani-
fest, 738

and the All, man by himself
not the, 613-614

and the individual, the, Ch.
XXXI

Beauty, 874

Being, 31, 210

conscious being, 455

Existence regarded as a
vital Becoming or an im-
mutable spiritual Being
or a formless Non-being,
conception of soul as a
temporary existence in
the theories, 664-666

Force, 874

Infinite, 293

Light, 874

of the Vedanta, 451

Reality, 874
Eternity, 283, 328, 802, 870

its timeless self-knowledge
beyond mind, 450, 451

mind's concept of, 451

Time and Timeless status
of, 324-325

timeless, 410, 427

triple status of, 328
Eternity of the conscious be-
ing, various explanations
of the mind's beUef in, 450
Ether, 219
Ethical instinct, human, —

truth behind the enforce-
ment of, 542

motive, value, and human
limitation of, 557

standard, true character of,
723-724

reason ; Infinite conscious-
ness and Will need not act
in subjection to it, 299
Ethicism, social, 932
Ethics, 90-92

inmost aim and meaning of,

637

reason why it cannot be the
sole preoccupation of the
cosmic Law, 721-723

religious, see Religious
ethics

true sense of, 612
Ethics; its laws have to be
imposed on us now, but in
the liberation attained by
the gnostic evolution there
can be no need of any
laws, 884-885
Europe, 10, 11, 931

opposition to scientific dis-
covery by religious ob-
scurantism in, 580
European civilisation, gift of
the Hellenic idea to, 93

thought, the Absolute in,

339

vitalistic, 679
Eve, 50

Evil, 532, 537; see also under
Error; falsehood; Good
and evil; Wrong, etc.

absolute, — idea of, 446

a wrong consciousness gov-
erned by the Ufe-ego is a
source of, 552-554

human, see Human evil

is the fruit of a spiritual
ignorance and will dis-
appear only by the light
of spiritual knowledge,
561-562

its problem in relation to
the absolutes of Truth
and Good, 532-543

its problem may be taken
up from three points of
view, 532-533

need for an examination of
the problem of, 532

origin and remedy of false-
hood, error, wrong, Ch.
XLII

INDEX

the effective figure of, 365
Evil; a second point of ques-
tioning in regard to its
problem, 539-54°

the first thing to note of im-
portance to its problem is
that the Forces of good
and evil in their action
seem often to surpass the
measures of human rela-
tivity,— but this is not a
sign of absoluteness, 538-

539
Evil and falsehood ; the process
by which they come into
being is to be found in
the surface emergence of
mental and vital con-
sciousness from the In-
conscience, 544

and suffering, 351-352, 365-
366
Evolution, 4, 5, 16, 27, 464

an inverse action to the in-
volution, 759

cause of, see Absolute, sec-
ond affirmation of the,
588-589

conscious, — an integral

knowledge the aim of the,
467

departure from, see Depar-
ture from the evolution

double, — and evolution of
our outward nature and
of our inner being — our
occult subliminal and
spiritual nature, 763

double, — imposes a difficult
and slow spiritual ad-
vance, 763-764

egoistic phase, 616-617

first factor of, 549-550

first starting-point and
gradual development and
goal of, 609-610

future, — its elements and
how they can be har-
monised together, 927-
929

goal of, 243-244

highest, see Highest evolu-
tion

human, see Integral knowl-
edge, 581-582

in its nature an ascent out
of the sevenfold ignorance
into the integral knowl-
edge, 649

integral, 814

is in essence a heighten-
ing of the force of con-
sciousness in the manifest
being so that it may be
raised into the greater in-
tensity of what is stiU un-
manifest, 647-648

its new process of trans-
formation conscious and
no longer subconscious,

585

its theory open to challenge
on various grounds be-
cause it is still half-way
on its journey, 736

Man and the,

method of its previous
stages and its reversal in
man, 751

must proceed at first by a
slow unfolding, 767-768

nature of, 217-218

nature of the teleology of,
743, 744

nature of, see Divine and
the undivine, 350

Nature's way of bringing
about a new stage in, 749

new, see New evolution;
Spiritual evolution, etc.

next product of, see Spiri-
tual evolution, 734-735

not following a clearly de-
termined and firmly ar-
ranged course, 849-850

upward, — first indispensable
step in an, 656
Evolution; a change in the
functionings of its process
inevitable in the evolution
of the spiritual status of
consciousness, 645

its beginning and its emer-
gence into a greater spon-
taneous harmony founded
on the spiritual Truth of
things, 824-825

nature of Its procedure in
the past, 859-860

no rigid separation from one
series of steps to another
and the character of its
past, present and future
state, 630

statement of the view which
regards man as its last
stage making possible the
rejection of terrestrial life

966

and an escape into some
heaven or Nirvana as the
true end of the cycle, 742
Evolution and rebirth, not
needed in states where
there is the eternal enjoy-
ment of the play of the
being of Sachchidananda,
674

here, vi^ould no longer be
through strife but
through harmony as a
result of the reproduc-
tion of the upper hem-
isphere in the lower trip-
licity, 899

human, — what would have
been possible if the psy-
chic entity would have
been unveiled from the
beginning, 793

in Matter; its integral ex-
planation and the im-
portance of the individual
and of rebirth in it, 672-
673 ; also Cosmic mani-
festation, 673-674

in the Ignorance, leading
inevitably towards an
evolution in the Knowl-
edge, 947

in the knowledge, character
of, 871

of being, psychic activities
but not consciousness of
soul in the early material
and vital stages of, 794

of consciousness, man not
the last term of, 754

of consciousness ; proceeds
by an awakening of the
involved consciousness
and force and its ascent
from grade to grade till
fullness is reached by the
awakening of supermind,
629-630

of consciousness, seems a
miracle of metamorphosis
rather than a natural pre-
dictable development,
631-632

of gnostic supernature, see
Gnostic supernature, evo-
lution of

of innate and latent but as
yet undeveloped powers
of consciousness, 923-924,
924-925

INDEX

of material Nature, goal of
development of, 947

of the spiritual being, four
main lines of, 765-766

of the spiritual being; in
considering its achieved
course we have to regard
it from two sides, — a con-
sideration of the lines of
development utilised by
Nature and a view of the
actual results achieved by
it in the human individ-
ual, 765-787

of the spiritual being, see
also Evolution of the spir-
itual man, etc.
Evolution of the spiritual man
— Ch. LII, see also under
Spiritual man. Spirituality,
etc.

of the spiritual man, foun-
dation of the pure spirit-
ual consciousness the first
object in the, 764-765

of the spiritual man, having
many stages and in each
stage a great variety
of individual formations,
789-790

of the spiritual man. Na-
ture's work not accom-
plished in the, 791-792

of the spiritual man, pos-
sible only as a part of the
mental evolution and in-
capable of an independent
emergence or a supramen-
tal future according to
the superficial view, 758-
759

of the spiritual status of
consciousness, in the func-
tioning of its process the
physical foundation no
longer the foundation of
consciousness: the new
spiritual status above or
the unveiled soul status
within us to be its foun-
dation, 645

of the whole conscious-
ness, two comparisons,
849-850

outer aspects of the theory
of, 744-745

principle of the process of,
645

reason for its subconscious

character up till the ad-
vent of man, 750-751

retrograde, 946

scientific objection to the
teleological element in it
not valid, 742-743

second factor of, 550-551,
554

significance of the plan and
order of, 591-592

spiritual, see Spiritual evo-
lution

spiritual, see Spiritual evo-
lution ; New evolution
etc.

terrestrial, — is at the same
time an evolution of all
the powers of the Spirit,
695

the view that a constant
creation of types is no
indubitable proof of, see
Gradations and types of
being, various, 738-740

the whole radical change in
it can only come by the
intervention of the supra-
mental Power, 815-816

transitions in, 250
Evolutionary basis, first, 931

being, the question of the
limit of self-effectuation
in its self-becoming by
self -exceeding, 639-646

constitution; reason for its
militating against the as-
sent of all parts of our
being to the action of
supernature, 825-826

course, see Evolutionary
Force, 828-829
crisis of mankind, present,
its character and the Na-
ture of various solutions
attempted, but only the
full emergence of the soul
can lift humanity beyond
itself, 932-938

crisis of mankind, present,
— its solution by an in-
sistence on a radical
change of nature might
seem to put off the hope
of humanity to a distant
future but what is de-
manded by this change is
not some thing altogether
alien to our existence,
938-940

culmination of evolved hu-
man beings, see Human
race, 750

destiny of man, a divine
life would be the, 900-926

development, course of, 587

development, universal and
individual aspects of, see
Spirit in things involved
in the Nescience, 676-677

emergence, two basic facts
of, 544

emergence, its initiation
from the Inconscient
works out by two forces,
617

Force, its first obscure
material movement is
marked by an aeonic
graduality, its movement
of Ufe is concentrated
into the figure of millen-
niums, mind makes long
paces of the centuries, but
when conscious spirit in-
tervenes a supremely con-
centrated pace of evolu-
tionary swiftness becomes
possible, 828-829

intention in Nature, acts
through the evil as
through the good, 555

intention in Nature to ar-
rive beyond this duality
of good and evil at an
eternal Good, 556-558;
see also Ignorance and
Inconscience, 558-559

manifestation, see also un-
der Manifestation, 368-
369

movement, individual as the
key of, 929-931

movement, its connection
and intercommunication
with other worlds implied
in the gradations of the
involution which precede
the evolution and make
it possible, 682-683

Nature, see Nature, evolu-
tionary

nisus, 935, 940

oestrus, is there in man's
parts of mind and life,
751

Power, see Power, evolu-
tionary

INDEX

principle and process, a
logical consequence of,
820-821

principle, to preserve the
pristine wholeness of its
movement towards spirit-
uality while pressing on
to a greater synthesis of
the principle of concen-
tration and the principle
of diffusion possible as in
the rehgions of India,
775-777

process, a development of a
triple character in the,
626

Process — Ascent and Inte-
gration, Ch. XLVI

process, culminating emer-
gence of, see Supramental
Consciousness-Force, 628-
629

process, developing, — two
possibilities here of man's
origin and first appear-
ance, see Man, 746-748

process; its basic principle
modifying and modified
by new emergent deriva-
tive principle according
to the latter's essential
potency, 627-628

process, its working between
two poles of the conscious
being, 548-549

process, law and method of
the triple stages of, 626-
627

process; Mind and Life
not the original creative
Power but, like Matter,
its successive and seried
instruments, 627-628

progression, character of,
927

saltus, 634, 940

status, present, — and an
evolution beyond it, see
Subliminal self, 655-656

supramental, existence, see
Supramental existence,
evolutionary

synthesis, see Synthesis,
evolutionary

terrestrial existence, view of
its affirmation by Science
as not reliable because of
the instability of scien-

967

tific generalisations, 737-
739

transition, from material
values in the atom and
electron to life-values in
the plant, 634-635

transition, from vital mind
in the animal to reflecting
and thinking mind in
man, 635-636

transition; in its psycho-
logical aspect the differ-
ence between one grade
and another consists in
the rise of consciousness
to another principle of
being, 633-634

transition; its gulfs appear
deeper, but less wide, as
we rise higher in the
scale of Nature, 632-633

transitions, their ascent does
not carry with it the
abandonment of the lower
grades, 633-634

transition, to the mind and
sense that appear in the
animal being, 635-636

urge, condition for the full
and perfect fulfillment of,
903-904

urge, danger of the cessa-
tion of, 933

working of Nature, double
process of, 735-736
Evolving being; because of
the secret presence in it
of the greater powers of
consciousness, the mani-
festation of those powers
inevitable, 752-753

being; mental and spiritual-
mental planes are the
highest normally he can
internatally inhabit, 713

consciousness, see Consci-
ousness evolving

gnostic nature, see Gnostic
nature, evolving
Evolutive supermind, 895
Exclusive concentration, 529

concentration, first state in
mental man, 520-531

concentration ; its greatest
extreme possible power is
reached in the incon-
science of material Na-
ture, 524-525

concentration, its minor

968

pragmatic use on the sur-
face gives us an indica-
tion of its nature, 522-
524
concentration; its nature in
mental man, 520-524

concentration, its power not
confined to absorption
but extends to a complete
self-forgetfulness in a par-
ticular action in which we
happen at the moment to
be engaged, 523-524

concentration of Conscious-
ness-Force and the Igno-
rance, Ck. XLI

concentration on one move-
ment of Existence, util-
ity of, 582

concentration, second state
in mental man of, 521
Existence, 24, 28, 29, 30, 32,
43, 56, 57, 65, 70, 71, 72,
74, 78, 79, 85, 86, 95,
96, 106, 107, 118, 119,
127, 130, 132, 133, 148,
162, 191, 192, 193, 202,
210, 217, 241, 244, 245,
246, 249, 257-258, 259,
263, 269, 270, 277, 285,
286, 295, 309, 321, 388,
395, 398, 414, 417, 451,
458, 475, 506, 510, 512,
S13, 568, 570, 574, 582,
588, 589, 590, 592, 594,
596, 609, 611, 743, 753,
792, 802, 810, 884; see
also Fullness of Being

absolute, 359

absolute, fundamental de-
terminates of the, 286

all views of it that stop
short of the Transcendent
must be incomplete ac-
counts of the truth of
being, 589-590

an approach from the mate-
rial end of, see Nature
and her procedure

cosmic, — first aspect of, 270

cosmic spiritual, — original
Reality might be a, 396

Delight of, 205, 257
The Problem, Ch. XI
The Solution, Ch. XII

divine, 30, 153, 222, 243,
334

— ^higher worlds of the, 526

INDEX

dualistic and theistic views
of, 590

eight principles of, 243,
244

— essentiality, commonalty
and individuality the
three eternal terms of,
344

eternal, 879

four theories of, Ch. XLIV,
594-595; see also Cosmic
terrestrial. Integral, Supra-
Cosmic and Supraterres-
trial views

highest, — ^summit rule of,
889

impulse of, 179

inevitability of the manifes-
tation of the higher pow-
ers of, 752-753

infinite, 527

infinite, — consciousness and
logic of, 341

infinite or indeterminate, —
the manner in which it re-
veals itself to our Science,
271-272

inner, 643

integrality of, 908

necessary condition of the
true possession of, 908

one, 387

one, — three aspects of, 144

original, 370, 396, 436

original, — and its relation to
Mind, see under Mind,

388-393
pantheistic view of, see

Existence, 589-590
pure, 64, 74, 86, 210, 317,

395, 412, 615
pure and featureless, 377,

385

realities of, see Realities of
existence

root principle of, 611

self-aware infinite, — knowl-
edge in the infinite con-
sciousness of a, 269

seven principles of, 431-432

sole, 396

spiritual, 504

superconscious, 624

— supracosmic, cosmic ter-
restrial and supraterres-
trial views of, 589

supreme aim of, see Being
and Becoming, 588

supreme timeless, see Time-
less Existence

surface, 205

surface, see Surface exist-
ence

terrestrial, see Terrestrial
existence

the three mysteries of, see
Mysteries of existence

three terms of one, 340

unity of the three aspects of,
322

world-being and individual-
ising consciousness as two
terms of, 332-333
Existence ; if there is a Reality
of existence that is unroll-
ing itself in Time, then to
become that is its signifi-
cance, 900-901

possible to take other than

the teleological view of its

spiritual significance, 736-

737

Existence - Consciousness-Bliss,

87, 89, 103
Existence - Consciousness -De-
light, 899
Existence-in-iiseM, 71

-substance, 277

and being, see Being and
Existence

as a structure of Conscious-
ness, see Consciousness,

573-574
Existent, 458

the, 65, 123, 285, 319

Pure, Ch. IX

sole, 386
Experience, psychological na-
ture of, 59
External Ufe; nature of its
structure raised by man's
mind and life-will and
its dangers, 933-934

conscious being, factors in
the creation of, 904

consciousness, can only ex-
ceed itself and the Igno-
rance by opening into the
largeness of an inner self
and life, 910-91 1

things, entirely separative
basis in the cognition of,
472-473 ; see also World-
Knowledge, 473-474

unity with others, reason
why it is reversed by
spiritual living, 912-913

Externalised surface existence,
see Surface existence, ex-
ternalised

Extra-cosmic Divinity as the
origin of things, see Mate-
rial universe, 275, 276

Extrovert and the introvert,
distinction between, see
Materialistic thinker, 911-
912

Eye and Will, universal, 158

Faith, character and necessity
of, 768

value of, 33
False or evil, in the life
worlds, see Life-worlds,
697-698
Falsehood, 31, 137, 138; see
also under Error; Evil;
Good and evil; Sin and
evil; Truth and false-
hood; Wrong and evil,
etc., 532, 537
Falsehood and evil; no au-
thentic inevitable cosmic-
ity of, 535-563

non-existence in Matter of,
S40-541

their existence also in the
worlds beyond us was for
a long time held by the
human mind as a tradi-
tional knowledge, 536-537

though real in their own
field, are not essential but
only contributory to the
manifestation, 587-588

theory of the traditional
knowledge of their ex-
istence in supraphysical
planes is perfectly rational
and verifiable by inner
experience and imposes it-
self if we admit the su-
praphysical and not the
material as the only re-
ality, 536-538

description in the Briha-
daranyaka Upanishad of,
532, 531 f
Falsehood, error, wrong and

evil, — origin and remedy
of, Ch. XLII

their origin, best understood

INDEX

as an outcome of the
Inconscience, 540

Falsehood, surface mental
individuality a fruitful
seed-plot of, 550-552

Father and Creator, 624

Father, Heaven the, 214

Fate, see Destiny; Fortune;
Luck

Fetishism, 772

Finality, sole, — an experience
of absolute authenticity in
the realisation or experi-
ence is not an unanswer-
able proof of, 418-419

Finite, the, 297, 310

conception of it as a self-
existent object in the In-
finite can be described as
an unreal reality, see also
Separateness, 417
a frontal aspect and a self-
determination of the In-
finite, 306
and infinite, the two terms

of, 571
and the Infinite, see Infinite
and the finite

Finites, are in their spiritual
essence the Infinite, 416

Fire, 306, 314
eternal, — psychic being is a
flame growing into the,
S61
one, divine Purusha de-
scribed in the Upanishads
as the, 353

"First laws," meaning of the
Vedic expression, 126 f

First transformation, see Psy-
chic transformation

Force, 9, 15, 32, 74-8o, 83-85,
86, 87, 96, 97, 100, 102-
103, 107, 108, 109, 112,
116, 130-131, 132, 133,
134, 143, 146, 150, 153,
155, i6i, 163-165, 166 f,
168,170,171,173-175,177,
181, 183, 191-195, 198,
212, 216, 217, 219, 224,
225, 227, 233, 234, 242,
244, 249, 257, 259, 263,
270, 275, 277, 286, 294,
295, 309, 313, 314, 317,
416, 426, 445, 461, 509,
510, 517, 524, 537, 538,
540, 536, 573, 597, 614,
622, 628, 633, 638, 684,
701, 739, 744, 793» 803,

969

823, 824, 828, 839, 845,

892, 915, 921, 942
Force, any, its nature and

claim to survive as long

as possible, 837
as creator of the universe,

509
basic, 307

blind mechanic, 433
blind universal, 821
Conscious, Ch. X
cosmic, 406, 537, 555, 556,
686, 766, 919, 935

love and courage imper-
sonal and universal
formulations of, 881
divine, 534
evolutionary, 299, 887, 828,

838 ; see also Evolutionary

Force
greater, 839
ignorant, 42
inconscient, 274, 700
inner, 913
integral, 529
intelligence secret in the

works of, 622
mechanical, 360
material, 162, 163
material, — elementary state

and modifications of, 76-

mode of its working in
Matter, in animal life and
in human mind, 820-821

of a Void, 573
Force of Being, 180, 305, 388,
612

conscious, 529

evolutionary, 631
Force of creation, its first
form and slow movement
ending in man delivering
the secret consciousness
out of the inconscient by
a passage from the evo-
lution in the Ignorance
to a greater evolution in
the Knowledge, 734-735

of Existence, 83-244

of Nature, 256, 321
final object of, 907

of spiritual being, must be
self-existent and self-ful-
filling, 90S
Force, primal miscreating, 3 88

supramental, — acting indi-
rectly with overmind or
intuition in front or

970

through some modifica-
tion of itself till Nature
is ready, 828
can entirely overcome the
difficulty of the funda-
mental Nescience, 854-
855
supraphysical, 748
undivine, 813

universal, — its use by a little
human individual or com-
munal ego with no inner
sense of true unity cre-
ates a chaos of conflict-
ing mental ideas, 933-934
unthinking, 508
Force and Consciousness, fun-
damental division be-
tween, 198
division in the evolutionary
existence between, 197-
198
Force and its concentration,
role in immobile status of,
509-513; see also under
Tapas
aspect of Consciousness, 509
Force-Consciousness, 153
Force-Nature, 294
Force-Soul, 136, 153
Forces, 537, 538, 690, 691, 838;
see also under Beings, and
Higher forces
adverse, 832

Complex nexus of, see In-
finite, 298-299
cosmic, 537, 778
higher, — possible conse-

quences of a premature
pulling down of, 813-814
impersonal mask of, 318
invisible, — if their action
upon our lower vital na-
ture is accepted, it may be
they have their existence
corresponding to the same
plane in Life — Nature,
724-725
same, — acting in different
ways according to cir-
cumstances, 725
Forces bound up with evil,

537-538
Forces of Darkness, 263
the Darkness, 537
darkness and evil, 361
Forces of Light, 537

that live by the Falsehood,
537

INDEX

of the lower nature, spir-
itual illumination con-
stantly opposed by, 832
of Truth, 537

Food, the act of taking of, see
Gita, 876

Fortune, caprices of, 722

Four Theories of Existence Ch.
XLIV, see under Existence

Fourfold order of knowledge,
see Knowledge, fourfold
order of

Fullness of being, is to be
wholly conscious and to
have the intrinsic and in-
tegral force and full de-
light on one's being and
also it is to be universally
and transcendentally, 907-
910; impossible without
an inward living, 910-91 1
and mere existence, differ-
ence between, 908

Fullness of the means of life,
new, see New Fullness of
the means of life

Future evolution, see Evolu-
tion, future

Freedom and order, funda-
mentally one in the super-
mind consciousness, 890

Free-will; its power in a
higher range of conscious-
ness might be extraordi-
narily effective in its con-
trol on outer nature, 823-
824
nature of the dual line in
the ascent of the indi-
vidual will towards Su-
pernature, 823
our notion of it apt to as-
sume the figure of an in-
dependent will acting on
its own isolated account
ignoring the fact that our
natural being is a part of
cosmic Nature and our
spiritual being exists only
by the supreme Trans-
cendence, 823

Free-will; its character in the
beginning when the inner
psychic comes more to the
front, 823

Freedom, 3, 5, 46

Frontal formation of the su-

pramental gnostic being
with all the rest behind it,
would be an act of self-
knowledge — not an act of
Ignorance, 895-896
Form, 95, 112, 143, 246, 263
and the Formless, the two
terms of, 571 ; see Infinite,
305-306
Form, nature of, 517
Form of being, 202
Form, significance of, 306
Forms, explanation of the
temporary character of
their appearance on the
surface, 47
Formless, 38
and Imperishable, 409
the, 390, 489
significance of the, 305-306

Gene, 662, 735

Genes and chromosomes, 272,

277
Genesis, 50

Genius, phenomena of, 252
Ghost, what we mean by, 797
Giant, 537; also see Rakshasic
and Asuric Superman-
hood, 945
Gita, 52, 62 f, 68, 126 f, 209 f,
318 f, 440 f, 786 f
act of taking of food spoken
of as a material sacrament
in the, 876
its philosophy an intellectual
account of what has been
found by inner realisation,
782, 782 f
liberated man of the, see

Liberated man
function of the liberated
man as described in the,
930
supreme Soul, Self and

Being of the, 454-455
the Supreme as declared

in the, 514
translation from, 62, 132,
148, 191, 269, 292, 306,
330, 350, 371, 394, 469,
531, 565, 609, 661, 755,
786 f, 889, 791, 904
Global consciousness, 529
Gnosis, 242, 245, 630, 638, 642,

672, 820, 824, 858, 863,
897, 903, 944

consciousness of, 902

hooded, 920

its description applicable to
all consciousness that is
based upon Truth of be-
ing, §60

occult, 629

results of the mind's growth
into it, 919

supramental, see Supra-
mental gnosis
Gnostic, the, 643
Gnostic being, 838

the Ch. LV, 860, 862, 868,
876, 880, 893, 924, 92s,
942

all the character of his life
and action would arise
self-determined out of his
nature and there could be
in it no separate problem
of an ethical content, 884-
885

and life, would be the
spirit's seeing and reach-
ing of the aims of all the
paths in the Ignorance
but in the greater way of
its own revealed and con-
scious truth of being,
872

community of, see Gnostic
community

evolving, 921

finds himself not only in his
own fulfilment but in the
fulfilment of others, 913

has the will of action but
also the knowledge of
what is to be willed and
the power to effectuate its
knowledge, 867

his freedom from law — in-
cluding the moral law —
is founded on the fact
that the Divine Knowl-
edge and Force would act
through him with his full
participation, 892-893

his inmost existence is a
transcendence aspect of
the spiritual life, but at
the same time the peace
of God within will be
extended into a universal
calm of equality not
merely passive but dy-

INDEX

namic imposing its law of
peace on the world, 868-
869

lower grades of, 864-865

nature of his experience of
cosmic existence, 869-870

nature of his liberty of
knowledge and his Uberty
of action, 890

nature of the knowledge of,
867-868

nature of his action in the
world arises out of his
innate oneness with the
self of others, 913-914

nature and result of the
greater knowledge of, 921

no conflict between self-
affirmation and altruism
in the hfe of, 942-944

self of, 872

starts from the spiritual
man and takes up our
ignorant becoming and
turns it into a luminous
becoming of knowledge
and a realised power of
being, 871

supramental, see Supra-
mental gnostic being

there could be no conflict in
him between self-affirma-
tion of the ego and a con-
trol by super-ego, 891-892

the principle of freedom and
order being fundamen-
tally one in the, 890

truth consciousness of the
Infinite and Universal
would determine for him
and in him all his indi-
vidual seeing and action
and the nature of his life,
890-891

what will be the sense of
life to the, 873-874

what would be the nature
of the knowledge and ac-
tion of, 887

will appear as the sign of an
evolution from the con-
sciousness of the Igno-
rance into the conscious-
ness of Sachchidananda,
870-871

will create his own self-man-
ifestation as an individual
but will do so as a centre
of a larger universality

971

and at the same time a
centre of the transcend-
ence, 888-889
would feel his harmony
with the whole gnostic
life around him, 915-916

Gnostic beings, 860, 862, 903,
926, 942
life of, see Gnostic life

Gnostic change, a radical re-
versal of consciousness,

857
reason for its assuming a
primary importance from
the point of view of the
spiritual evolution, 903-
904
will act not by the discovery
of the unknown but by
the bringing out of the
known, 872-873

Gnostic collectivity, 891
what would be the nature
of, 896-897

Gnostic community, life-inter-
change of gnostic individ-
uals in, 941
its Hfe would be safe against
attack and sufficient to
ensure a dominating har-
mony between itself and
the hfe of the mental
man, 942

Gnostic communities, not only
a considerable free diver-
sity between different
communities but also in
the self-expression of the
individuals of a single
community would be their
law of living, and the rea-
son why this would not
create any discord, 915-
916

Gnostic consciousness, 629,
862, 879, 882, 892, 896,
915, 942
achieved, — what of our
ideals and realisations of
mind, life and body can
transform itself and find
its spiritual self in that
greater Truth can be ac-
corded a life-acceptance
in it and the possible na-
ture of this survival, 943-

944
and existence, 895
and nature, 860

972

and Power, see Conscious-
ness and Power, gnostic

and sense, can view all the
operations of Spirit with
Matter as a material sac-
rament, 876

and will, must assure a
symphonic movement in
the action of the whole
and at the same time a
unity and symphonic con-
cord of all the powers and
movements of the being
in the individual, 886-887

at any stage in it spiritual
conscious delight of exist-
ence would be present in
the whole depth of the
being but also all move-
ments of Nature would be
pervaded by it, 879

established in the earth-life,
probable results of, 942-
943

innate character of, see Su-
pernature, 918-919

its evolution brings with it
a transformation of our
world-consciousness and
world-action, and the na-
ture of this change, 867-
868

nature of, 943

no ego -insistence but the
unifying sense of a com-
mon Truth present in,
914-91S

significance of the entry
into, 946-947
Gnostic creation, 897

divine way of collective liv-
ing would not be the con-
structed order of a physi-
cal collectivity but a self-
building of the spiritual
forces working themselves
out spontaneously, 914-
91S,

evolution, 899

evolution; in it there would
be a great diversity in the
poise, status, harmonised
operations of conscious-
ness and force and de-
light of existence, 895-
896

evolution, lower degrees of,
896

evolution, problems of the

INDEX

transition discussed, 938-
942

evolution, will effectuate the
spiritualisation, perfection
and fulfilment of the
physical being, 876

evolution, will fulfil the
claim of the body for its
deliverance from suffer-
ing and build in it a
power for the total de-
light of existence, 878

existence, 857, 894

its embodiment would have
as its consequences an
embodiment of a beatific
existence, 878-879

individual, 926; also see In-
dividual Gnostic; Gnostic
being

individual or individuals,
isolated, possible function
of their appearance in the
unspiritualised mass of
humanity, 939

individual, possible nature of
his being life and action,
863-896

individual, supramental, see
Supramental gnostic indi-
vidual

individuals, principle of the
collective life of, 914

knowledge, 926
Gnostic life, 897, 866, 873-874,
868-869, 887, 922, 924

a self-aware spiritual unity
of being and a spiritual
conscious community and
interchange of nature
would be the deep and
ample root of understand-
ing in, 922-923

common, 868

its whole foundation must
be inward and not out-
ward, and reason for this,
904-906

might be characterised as a
divine life which can be
described as a life of spir-
itual and supramental su-
permanhood and this
must not be confused
with the past or present
ideas of it, 945-946

on earth, 895

possible nature of its rela-

tion with the ignorant life
around it, 926

proceeding within or side by
side with a life of beings
in the ignorance, 941-
942

self-expression of the Spirit
would be its one rule, and
this could manifest either
through extreme simplic-
ity or through complexity
and opulence or in their
natural balance, 945
Gnostic light, 919

and power, 860, 876, 896
Gnostic living, total, — would
include not only the indi-
vidual life of the being
but the life of others made
one with it, 921-922

manifestation, by the very
fact of the evolution here
would be a circumstance,
though decisive, in the
whole, 897-899

manifestation of life, would
be more full and fruitful
that the creative interest
of the Ignorance, 946-947

movement of knowledge
and action of knowledge,
what will be the character
of each, 872-874

nature, 866, 868, 879, 897,
925, 942, 943; evolving,—
intermediate stages of,
921

Person, see Person, gnostic

power, 896, 898, 903

principle, 631, 862, 897

race of beings, see Supra-
mental race of beings

reversal, possible results of,
899

seeing and action, 919

self, 890

supernature, 887 ; see Super-
nature, gnostic

thought, 894

truth, 888

truth-consciousness, 891

unity in multiplicity, nature
of harmony in, 922-923

vision, 894

way of being, and living, in
it the spirit must directly
control and determine the
movements and law of
the body, 874-875

way of dynamic living, 904

world, 941

tod, 3, 4-6, 9, 16, 27, 31,
35-37, 41, 44-47, So, 52,
54, 57, 64, 74, 79, 88-89,
93, 107, 108, 118, 122,
123, 129, 132, 134, 136,
141, 145, 146, ISO, 176,
223, 227, 230, 276, 293,
295, 296, 323, 331, 335,
336, 338-340, 345, 348,
349, 356, 357, 362, 366,
367, 368, 419, 467, 501,
542, 543, 557, 590, 597,
603, 6n, 614, 615-616,
619, 621-625, 632, 643,
659-660, 664, 674, 753,
777, 803, 812, 868, 882,
925, 943

and the Soul, eternal real
existence of, 590

and the world, opposition
between, 434

and the World, 359-361

and the world, three propo-
sitions about, 358-360

as a myth of man's con-
sciousness, 692

extracosmic, 503

endless variety in the human
approach to its possession
and the reason why there
is a unity behind all this
variety and discord, 623-
624

jod is in me and I am in
God," meaning of, 338

od, kingdom of, 434; see
Religionist

od, Man and Nature, Ch.
XLV

growing self-awareness of
the individual moving to-
wards their unity as well
as their integrality, 614-
615

their relation and the differ-
ent ways in which man
can offer his being to the
Divine Existence and how
he can best do it, 615-616

three principal categories of
man's first search for
knowledge which sum up
for him all its diversity,
612-613

od, man's quest for, 622-623

meaning of manifestation in
matter of, 2

INDEX

not created by man, 695
of Might, 88

or the Gods, on the lower
levels of religious develop-
ment, 616
personal, — of popular reli-
gions, 318
the individual and the cos-
mos, 338-339
the servant of, 784
wine of, 912

what man means by this
third and unknown — this
tertium quid, 613
what we mean by, 622
God-lover, 44, 146, 206, 643,

925
God-conception, 624
God-consciousness, 348
God-ecstasy, 803
God-enjoyment, 146
God-given work, 784
God-knowledge, 625, 788
God-seeker, 44

Gods, 116, 257, 259; see also
Alwar, 434
conception in the Upani-

shads of the, 745
Names of the, 306
two, 358

Vedic conception of, 257
Godhead, 3, 89, 199, 200, 207,
237, 256, 257, 264, 282,
358, 360, 433, 676, 696,
752, 757, 930
dual, 360
Godward effort, justification
by the Vedic seers of
man's, 433
Goloka, 24 f, 236
Good, 56, 57, 88, 208, 299,
352, 532, 537, 543, 544,
556, 557, 801, 802
Good and Evil, see also under
Error ; Evil ; Falsehood ;
Wrong, etc.
choice of, 726
etc., duality of, see Evil and

suffering, 351-352
Forces of, see Forces of

Good and evil
fundamental truth of, 541-

542
human, — relative nature of,

555, 556, 557-558
liberation from their duality
possible only in the spirit-
ual consciousness, 557-562
morality not a solution of

973

the problem of, 556-567
Nature's first equal accept-
ance and later insistence
in man on the sense of,
556
no artificial escape but a
radical transformation of
our nature the only true
solution of the problem
of, 557-559, 561-562
no conflict in the gnostic in-
dividuality of, 884-885
powers of, 537
provisional standards for
the solution of their prob-
lem given us as a tem-
porary guidance, 558-559
the element in the human
being that originates the
sense of, 542-544
their problem not solved by
human ideals or by reli-
gion, and this was recog-
nised in ancient Indian
spiritual thought, 556-558
their true solution can in-
tervene only when by our
spiritual gro%vth we can
become one self with all
beings, 559-56o
Good, supreme, 724
Grades, higher, see Higher

grades
Gradation, determining factor
of, 834-835
justification of its principle
from our knowledge and
experience of other worlds
and its utmost practical
importance, 699-700
Gradations; see also under
Types
and types of being, various
— the view that their
coming into existence
need not mean their de-
velopment in an evolu-
tionary series, 73S-740
Greek and other traditions
about the after-life, early,
— mistaken notions of
soul in, 797
saying on the Di\'ine, 356
thinkers, see Mentalised
perception of life, 651-652
Griffins, 392

Group-being, individual as the
indispensable means for
the growth of, 617

974

Guide, 207
a strict obedience to his
wise and intuitive leading
normal and necessary for
all but a few especially
gifted seekers, 807

Guidance, see Will and Guid-

H

Habit, nature of subjection of
some parts of our being
to the lower automatism
of, 825-826

Hallucination, 31, 385, 438,
439, 450, 670
analogy of, 385-388
illustrations of, see Mirage;
Mother-of-pearl and sil-
ver; Rope and the snake,
etc.

Hamlet, 272

Happiness, see Man, 649-651
and success bringing happi-
ness; their superficial as-
pects not the main object
of existence, 725-726
in earthly Ufe, real, — part of
the eventual necessity of
things if the human na-
ture is not fixed in what
it is, 917-918

Harmonisation of our being
and our life, can be ef-
fected only partially by
the physical, vital and
mental beings in us — but
really and truly by the
coming forward of the
soul personality and its
taking up the reins of
government as the central
being, 799-801

Harmony, 27, 208

and cosmic Anarchy, cos-
mic, 536
its character as a natural
rule of the spirit and its
expression in infrarational
life, in human life and in
a gnostic life, 922-923
its general character and
principle in a common life
of diiferent degrees and
stages of the evolving
gnostic being, 914-916
partial character in human

INDEX

life of, 915, 919-921; see
also Human life, 925-926;
Unity, mutuality, har-
mony ; External unity ;
etc.
Harmony of being, 365
Hathayogins, 238
Hearing, 116

Heart, a second contact
through the, see Soul, 803
Heaven, 48, 54, 64, 214

and Earth, opposition be-
tween, 434

human mind's picture of,
947
Hebrew Genesis, 50
Hellenic idea, the ideal of a
mental being as perfect as
possible was the direction
given by it to the Euro-
pean civilisation, 931

life and culture, reason for
so great a fascination of,
651
Heraclitus, 261
Heredity, 663, 664

its function in the physical
evolution, 735

the view that its tendency
is conservative rather than
evolutionary, 738
Higher consciousness ; effects
of its descent into the
lower, 849

dynamic principle native to
the spiritual conscious-
ness, its intervention and
its imposition on the
lower members may take
long to succeed, 831-832

evolution of the ascending
powers of the Spirit, the
difficulty of, 852-853

evolution of the ascending
powers of the Spirit, the
essential difficulty of, 849-
853.

evolution of the ascending
powers of the Spirit, na-
ture of its three complexi-
ties, 849-853

forces, not immediately all-
powerful in their descent
as in their own plane of
action and in their own
medium, 837-991; see
Forces, higher

grades, in their descent upon
us they change and repair

the diminished and inca-
pable substance of oui
mind, life and body con-
verting them to its owe
higher and stronger dy-
namics of spirit and in-
trinsic form and force ol
reality, 834-835

Idea, see Idea, higher

intermediate change, set
Change, intermediate, 855

intermediate consciousness,
its experience needed be-
fore the movements of
supermind can be under-
stood, 817-818

intermediate consciousness ; ;
what can be said about it
must perforce be inade-
quate, but for two reasons
certain abstract generali-
sation can be hazarded
and serve for an initial
light of guidance, 818-819

Mind, 254, 833, 836, 839,
840, 841 ; greater Thought
as its dominant character,
means and potency of
knowledge in its aspect
of cognition and its as-
pect of will, and the na-
ture of action of its idea-
force modified by its de-
scent into the inferior
medium of mind, hfe and
body, 834-839

power; even in its normal
working when it takes up
the being part by part in
the natural order of de-
scent it is not able to
bring about a total oc-
cupation and transforma-
tion of each before it goes
farther, 850-851

powers; when they enter
into the substance of the
inconscience they are sub-
jected to its circumscrib-
ing and diminishing law
which only the Supermind
can overcome when it en-
ters into it, 854-855

powers; working already in
the human unspiritualised
mind but indirectly, 832-

833
planes, decisive part in earth
evolution of the, 714

planes and the material
plane, reason for the ex-
istence of a veil between,
693-694
planes and the worlds, see

Higher worlds
powers and principles; their
secret continuous action
from their own planes
upon terrestrial being and
nature through the sub-
liminal self must have an
effect and a significance,
704-705
principle, difficulty in work-
ing out the full power of
the, see Spiritual transfor-
mation, 814-815
states, see Planes of exist-
ence, superior
worlds, at least co-existent
and coeval with the phys-
ical universe, 703-704
worlds ; see also under Other
worlds
ligher worlds; improbability
of the theory of their
creation subsequent to the
material world, 694-695
in their original creation
not subsequent in order
to the physical universe
but prior to it, 703-704
their reality and charac-
ter and their relation
with our own plane of
being and its conse-
quences, 701-703
theory of their subsequent
creation to the material
cosmos, 694-695
3igher-Mental being, 894
3igher-Mind being, 898
Eligher Will; opposition be-
tween self-effort and obe-
dience to it does not arise
in the gnostic individual,
892
Highest, 41
Highest, the, 605, 611, 805,

826
irdya samudra, 57
Human aspiration towards
personal perfection and
the perfection of the life
of the race, see Evolution,
future
Human being, see Man
as he grows in evolution

INDEX

he grows in sensibility
needing to call in his
mental powers to control
his nervous being, 877-
_ 878
liberated, see Liberated

self-experience
spiritual destiny of, 918
the highest power of the
third term, the individual,

348
beings, phenomenal nature

of, 135
Human birth, as the critical
stage in earth-nature, 609-
611

on its spiritual side a com-
plex of two elements
— a spiritual Person and
a soul of personality, 675-
676

purpose of, see Individual
soul, 677-678

its recurrence is the very
necessity of the spirit-
ual evolution, for the soul
has to develop humanity
into its higher possibilities,
679-680

normal law of its recur-
rence in new human
forms for a soul that has
once become capable of
humanity and the modi-
cum of truth behind the
old popular theories of
transmigration which sup-
posed animal reversion to
be an ordinary movement,
678-679

possibility of its recurrence
becomes a certitude if
intellect is not the high-
est principle of mind, if
mind itself has other pow-
ers as yet only imper-
fectly possessed by the
highest types of the hu-
man individual, 679-680
Human body, possibilities of
the appearance of, 747-
748
Human consciousness, 356-
357; also see Conscious-
ness, human

is the point in the devel-
opment of light and
power out of the Incon-

975

science at which liberation
becomes possible, 696

its heightening into its spir-
itual principle, see Man,
658-659
Human destiny, crisis of, 938

development, two particu-
larities of, 636-637

of the supramental being,
non-evolutionary view of,
740-741

effort, view of the illusion
of all, 374-376

endeavour, 433-435

evil, practical sense of, 884-
885

evolution, see Man, 745,
746-748

ignorance, see Ignorance,
human

individual, see Human soul,
675-676

individual, not limited by
his form but capable of
passing on to a higher
scale of Nature, 677

even at his lowest is still
a soul acting through
a distinct mental being,
710

intelligence, normal charac-
ter of, 821

intelligence, modifications of
the animal basis by the
addition of, 546-547

knowledge, imperfect char-
acter of, 550

life, a higher instrumen-
tal dynamis than mind
needed to change the
principle and persistent
character of, 788

life, only a term in a
graded series, see Birth,
674-676

life, partial nature of its
harmony which can only
be harmonized by the in-
tuition and self-knowl-
edge of an awakened
_ spirit, 925-926

limitation, 434

living, four legitimate mo-
tives of, as attempted in
the ancient Indian cul-
ture, see Synthesis, evo-
lutionary

mentality; its capacity to
press towards a higher

976

plane of consciousness and
its embodiment in the be-
ing, 7 SO
Human mind, the action of
Force in it resulting for
the first time in the ap-
pearance of an observing
intelligence but still lim-
ited and superficial, 821

its capacity to aid Nature
in the evolution of new
types of plant and ani-
mal, 751-752

nature of its faculty of
imagination, see Imagi-
nations

reason for its recoil from
life, 373-374

stands between a supercon-
science and an incon-
science and receives from
both these opposite pow-
ers, 388-389

and body, are not the cre-
ators of but are created
by the spirit, 676-677

and body, significance of
their appearance on earth,
750-751

and Maya in the Illusion
theory, inapplicability of
the analogy of, 389-391
Human nature, a supemature
to that of animal or plant
or material object, 923

all the earth-past is there
in it, 677-678

condition under which its
transformation can be
achieved, 854

possibility of real happiness
in, see Happiness in earthly
life

reason for the imperfection
of, 916-918
Human personality, see Per-
sonality, human

vitalistic theories of the
survival of, 667-668

acceptance of its survival
after death as presaged
by certain modern re-
searches impUes the ad-
mission of a subtle body
in which it persists, 666-
667

view of its evolution through
animal births, 667-668

INDEX

Human progress, no justifica-
tion for the denial of,
748-749

the view that the idea
itself is an illusion, 741
Human race, can also have the
hope to rise nearer, even
if it cannot absolutely
reach, to a divine man-
hood or supermanhood,
638-639

race, still dominated by the
physical intelligence, falls
back before the too tense
demand of the spiritual
effort, 644-645

race, true sense of its labour
in the series of its cycles,
526-528

soul, conditions under which
its reversion to animal
forms at all possible, 678-
679

soul not a free wanderer ca-
priciously hastening from
field to field according to
its unfettered choice, 675-
676

thought and human endeav-
our, history of, see Man,
372-373

type, impulse towards self-
exceeding part of the law
of, see Man, 748-750

world and a greater world
beyond ; see under World,
431-433

world-destiny, crisis in, 939
Humanitarianism, mentalised

and moralised, 932
Humanity, 930, 943 ; also see
Early Humanity ; Early
man; Primitive man

deepest instinct of, 31-32

in its untransformed part
there might arise a new
and greater order of men-
tal human beings which
might even exist as a
formed race of higher hu-
manity in the gnostic ev-
olution, 898

present crisis of, see Evolu-
tionary crisis of mankind,
present

great evolutionary periods
of, 618

not the best self-expression
of the Reality, 929

its need for normal develop-
ment, 600-601

its sense of something be-
yond its first terrestrial
nature and its ways of
satisfying it, 601-602

the question of its status
after the evolutionary
production of spiritual
and supramental being,
7SO

to grow out of the limita-
tion of the wholeness of
the spirit the first neces-
sity of, 649
Hunger, 179-180

justification of, 180

mental transformation of,
180
Hypnosis, meaning of the phe-
nomena of, 6i, 100

phenomenon of, 465
Hypnotism, significance of the
modern admission of, 778

"I" of the moment; circum-
stances in which alone
it can merit survival,
see Immortality of the
soul, 730-731 ; Survival of
mind, life and body, 731-
732

"I am He," meaning of, 625
this experience doubly ig-
norant if there is no real-
ity in the universe, 419

"I am that," is an ignorant
conception in the un-
compromising theory of
Illusion, for there is no I,
only That, 419

Idea, 10, II, 44, 109, no, 113,
120-121, 122, 123, 162,
245, 259, 374, 684, 739.
835, 875
higher, — nature of the diffi-
culty it has to encounter
even when descending
into the developed mental
intelligence, 837
mental, — cause of the frus-
tration of, 918-919
occult, 540
and Will, divine, 364

Idea-Force, 257, 260

Idea- Will, 122

Ideas, nature of, 837

Ideal, no
aim and meaning of, 150

Ideals, human, — selective and
relative nature of, 557

Idealism, human, — three prin-
cipal preoccupations of,
927-928

Idealism, mental, — reason for
the failure of its attempt
to create a new world-or-
der, 939-949

Idealist, absolute, see Hu-
man endeavour, 433-435

Identical, 30, 141
the, 387, 672, 867, 872
and Infinite, the, 416
meaning of the immutabil-
ity of the, 308
mutable and immutable as-
pects of the, 307-309
spiritual, 489

Identity, 14, 16, 385, 387, 892
manifold Lila of the, 674
our dependence on the Di-
vine Being not contra-
dictory but itself the door
to the realisation of, 324

Identity-consciousness, in the
overmind and in the su-
pramental gnosis, 894-895

Identity-knowledge, 894

Identity-will, 894

Ignorance, 35, 36, 48, 49, 131,
147, 152, 158, 161, 176,
207, 208, 2n, 212, 217,
223, 224, 225, 242, 250,
251, 252, 253, 254, 25s,
258, 260-264, 269, 281,
288, 330, 346, 348, 351,
354, 375, 376, 387, 389,
391, 392, 394, 397, 399,
400, 408, 409, 428-430,
432, 434-439, 440, 441-
442, 443, 444-447, 448,
451-453, 455, 464, 466,
467, 475, 479, 482, 494,
503, 504, 505, 506, 508,
509, 519, 521, 525, 533,
537, 538, 542-544, 548,
557, 558, 560, 566-568,
570-571, 575, 581, 583,
584, 589, 591, 593, 596,
605, 607, 6io, 611, 617,
623, 627, 629, 643, 649,
650, 653, 660, 682-684,
685-686, 693, 717, 720,
722, 724, 732, 735, 736,

INDEX

737, 742, 752, 767, 775,
783, 788, 791-792, 796,
813, 816, 819, 820, 825,
826, 828, 832, 833, 835,
837, 838, 839, 846, 847,
848, 852, 856, 858, 859-
862, 865-867, 869, 871,
878, 885, 888, 889, 890,
891, 893, 896, 897-898,
910, 916, 919, 926, 941,
942, 944, 945-947

as a power of the highest
Reality, 442-443

a double wall of self-im-
prisonment in the bounds
of a surface ego is the
cause of, 474-475

and Inconscience, Fakehood
etc. are creations of the,
532

an indivisible all-conscious-
ness behind the, 363-364

as the process of an evo-
lutionary manifestation,
375-376

attraction of, 369-370

basis of, 249-250

becomes complete with the
entire separation of being
from being, 491

beings of the, — would be-
come influenced by the
light of the gnosis — con-
scious and responsive, 898

boundaries of, XXXIX

character of, 807

considered as a power of
manifoldly self-absorbed
and self-limiting concen-
tration of the conscious
being, is a natural ca-
pacity of variation in his
self-conscious knowledge,
530

constitutional, — nature of,
583-584

constitutional and psycho-
logical,— their elimination
without an actual ascent
into our superconscient
planes possible to a cer-
tain extent only, 656-657

constitutional, — possibility
of its change into a true
knowledge of our being
and becoming by the evo-
lution of the spiritual
principle, 651-653

977

constitutional, — special
stamp of, 649-650

cosmic, 446, 568, 866

cosmic, — nature of, 503-504,
583-584

cosmic, — results of the dis-
solution of, 659-660

darker forces of, 868

disorders etc. normal to its
status can only be dis-
solved by a greater Ught
than that of mind-nature
or life-nature, 918-919

division of experience and
substance in the observing
consciousness a result of,
463

ego-sense as one of the
devices of the, 463-465

egoistic, 502-503

egoistic, — nature of, 583-584

egoistic, — nature and result
of the disappearance of,
659-660

error, etc. in the world, —
need not by itself be a
denial of the divine, 361-
362

exclusive concentration of
Consciousness-Force and
the Ch. XLI

exclusiveness the very soul
of, 434-435

extreme method of, see Ab-
solute, 345-346

first foundation of the liber-
ation of the soul from,
878-879

human, — character of, 649

human, — nature of, 428-429

human, — saving factor of,
504

individuals in the, see In-
dividuals in the Ignorance

intermediate, — mental er-
rors the outcome of, 388

its consequences also a just
limitation of an omni-
scient power by the free
will of that Power, 364-
365

its first origin beyond us as
mental beings, 437

its mystery — is a fiction of
the dividing intellect, 529-
530

its place in the world-mani-
festation and its character

978

in its higher and lower
origin, 752-753

its nature to resist and ob-
struct the working of
higher powers, 851

its limitation and its restric-
tive force affecting the
full harmonious working
and control of the intui-
tive mental intelligence,
821-822

Knowledge and the, XXXV

limping action of reason a
movement of, 835-836

many-sided forms of, 501-

504

meaning of, 158

Memory Self-consciousness
and the, Ch. XXXVI

nature of, 531, 534

nature of the frontal power
of, 362-369

nature of the life of, 941-942

normal state of our, 315

not inherent in the multi-
plicity of souls, 516-517

nature of this separative
knowledge in human
mentality labouring to-
wards identical knowl-
edge and the function of
ego in it, 494-495

nature of the imperative of
existence in the half-light
and half-power of, 893

only a provisional device,
475-476

origin and culmination of,
516-517

origin, nature and bound-
aries of, 565

origin of its existence not
in absolute Brahman but
belongs to a partial action
of the being, 515-516

origin of the Ch. XL

(original) ; by its dissolu-
tion we can approach the
Absolute as the source of
all relations, 659-660

original, 792

original, — nature of, 583

original, — sign of, 69-70

original cosmic, — result of,
435

out of it a wrong con-
sciousness is created
which gives a wrong dy-
namic reaction to the con-

INDEX

tact of persons, things,
happenings, 552-554

our best organised knowl-
edge-powers of, 835

our consciousness in it con-
trasted with the supra-
mental consciousness, 867

our first or capital, 501-502

powers of, 838

powers of consciousness in
their emergence dimin-
ished by the veils of,
920

problem of, 435; see also
Buddha, 435 f, 436-437;
also Unreality, 429-430

problem of the, 505-506,
506-507, 507-508, 508-509

psychological, — nature of,
583-584

practical, — nature of, 583-

584

psychological, — its nature
and the result of its con-
quest by entering into our
inner and higher parts
and bringing back their
powers to the surface,
652-653

practical, — when our self-
knowledge is complete its
imperfect values will re-
cede before the divine
values of the true Con-
sciousness — Force and
Ananda, 660

purpose and aim of our be-
ing in the, 870-871

secret sense of our world
of, 861

sevenfold, 583-584

sevenfold, — constitutional
ignorance the crux of, 649

— its abolition necessary for
progressive self-knowl-
edge, 621-622

see under Ignorance, con-
stitutional, etc., 660

towards the sevenfold
knowledge out of the,
Ch. XL VII

source of, 159, 249

the answer to the questions
that arise of the why, the
where and the how of this
movement of, 526-529

the principle of being where
it finds its opportunity

and starting point and its
culmination, 527-529

the purpose for which it is
necessary, 526-528

the sense it acquired in the
phenomenon of a total
supramental cognition of
cosmic being, 290-291

the sense in which we have
to use the world "real" in
regard to it, and the root
nature of, 525-526

the stage when exclusive
concentration can develop
a principle of self-limiting
knowledge which may re-
sult in separative knowl-
edge and culminate in,
519-520

the manner in which all is
achieved in the world of,

837

temporal,— nature of, 583-
S84

temporal, — its nature and
the result of its rejection
by Uving in the conscious-
ness of our immortality,
656-658

temporal, 502-503

various possibiUties of its
origin and the reason why
the last hypothesis is
adopted, 518-519

Vedantic conception of, see
Knowledge and the Ig-
norance, 438-439

Vedic conception of, 437,

438-439

without it the object of the
manifestation of our
world would be impos-
sible, 525-526

world of, 868, 869

world of, — its inherent prin-
ciple of self-exceeding a
justification for human
endeavour after perfec-
tion, 433-435
Illusion, 38, 377, 393, 440-441,
670

cosmic, see also Cosmic Illu-
sion, etc., 360, 374, 376,
384, 385, 387, 388, 390,
392, 394, 395, 396, 401-
402, 406, 428, 440
Illusion, cosmic — envisaged as
an unreal subjective expe-
rience, 376-377

necessity for a consideration
of the possibility of, 422

unsatisfactory nature of the
theory of, 406
Illusion and the Reality, see
Reality and the Illusion

of Maya, 394

optical, see Optical Illusion

original, 438

theory of, — cuts the knot
of the world-problem,
419-420

see Cosmic Illusion, etc.

uncompromising theory of,
418-419

world of, see World of Ig-
norance, see also under
Maya ; Cosmic Illusion ;
etc., 394-395, 396, 397,
401, 402, 403, 407, 418-
419, 428, 430
Illusion-power, 196
Illusion-consciousness, subjec-
tive, 403
Illumined being, 898

gnostic being, 894

Mind, 25s, 833

Mind; working of the
greater force of vision of
this Mind of spiritual
light compared with the
comparatively slow and
deliberate process of the
Higher Mind working by
idea-force ; its achieve-
ments and its limitations,
838-841
Illusionism, iii
Illusionism, classical theory of,
— nature of Maya in the,
396-401

classical theory of, 396

place of universe in, 394 .

spiritual, — illogicality of
417-419

the view of the absolute un-
reality of Maya in cer-
tain formulations of, 401-
403

theory of, 420-422

truth of, 588

universal, 374
Illusionist, the, 13, 38, 78, 404
Illusive Power, 389
Image-making power of the

human mind, 712
Imagination, 398

character, functions and
powers of our mental

INDEX

faculty of, 390-391

cosmic, 282, 283, 398

meaning of, 462-463
Imaginations, represent possi-
bilities, 391

not purely and radically il-
lusory, 391-393
Immanence, 361
Immanent, the, 567
Immensity, 293
Immortal, the, 93
Immortality, children of, 610

its fundamental sense and
secondary meaning and
the nature and result of
the realisation of its two
aspects as side and other
side of the same truth,
658-659

Karma, the soul and, Ch.
L

meaning of the possession
of, 568

triple, see Survival of mind,
life and body

of the soul, need to modify
current ideas about it and
the condition in which
alone the "I" of the mo-
ment can merit survival,

730-731
self-evident necessity of a

belief in, 657
what the ancient seers of
the Veda meant by, 612-
613

Immutable, an, 271

Immutable the, 72, 296, 307,
624

Imperative of existence, seeks
to be fulfilled in all ac-
tion, 893

Imperfection, nature and re-
sult of, 351-353
becomes a necessary term
in a progressive divine
manifestation, 368-370
not a binding law of life but
a transitional state in hu-
man consciousness, 356-

357

suffering and evil, problem
of, see Divine Govern-
ment of the Universe

law of, see Manifestation,
356-358, 360-367

and limitation, a result of
the veiUng of inner Divin-
ity, 362

979

Impersonal, 210, 258

and the personal truth of
things, as one truth, 322

Divine, 258
Impersonal-personal being,
315, 317

the, 287, 296, 348
Impersonality, 258

and the Person, no incom-
patibility of a co-exist-
ence between, 881-882

its pressure seeks to mould
the whole mind into a
form of itself, 802

description of, 880-881

and personality, see Person-
ality and impersonahty

and personality, their mean-
ing and the nature of
their interrelation, 881-
882
Immortality, 3, 5, 46, 64, 180,
198, 236, 439, 450, 452,
621, 662, 663, 664, 665,
672 ; see also under Sur-
vival
Incapacity, 177, Ch. XX,
Incarnation, 57

Inconscience, 172, 195, 196,
224, 250, 251, 25s, 258,
261, 262-264, 269, 275,
276, 277, 289-290, 330,
366, 370, 380, 381, 383,
388, 430, 432, 433, 437,
441, 443, 444, 445, 446,
448, 464, 482, 486, 470,
500, 502, 508, 519, 528,
529, 532, 536, 537, 538,
540, 543-545, 546, 551,
555, 558, 566, 570, 573,
587, 589, 593, 607, 617,
619, 626, 627, 628-629,
683-684, 686, 687, 693,
694, 696, 703, 704, 705,
732, 734, 735, 736, 746,
750, 751, 753, 757, 767,
796, 819, 820, 822, 825,
826, 828, 832, 833, 834,
837, 844, 847, 852, 853,
855, 859, 861, 875, 890,
897-899, 902, 916, 919,
939, 946, 947

and Ignorance, 558

as a power of the Infinite,

311

basic, 361

because its obscure intima-
tions seem to be the start-
ing-point of consciousness

98o

itself and the source of
all life-impulse it is taken
by a certain line of en-
quiry as the real origin
and creator, 593-594
blind opposing Necessity of
this nescient substance
and the occult truth be-
hind its negations which
only the Supermind with
its luminous imperative
Necessity can take up and
discover the pragmatic
solution of the enigma,

854-8SS

blind Ananke of the, 855

dark Sphinx of the, 611

diminution of power the
mark of a consciousness
emerging from the insen-
sible neutral monotone of
the, 352-353

formidable foundation of
the Adverse Forces on the
black rock of, 832

gradual evolution out of
the, see Evolution, 591-
592

is an inverse reproduction
of the supreme super-
conscience, 491-492

its nature to invade or even
to swallow up into its
oblivious darkness all that
enters into it compelling
the descending light to
compromise with the les-
ser light it enters and the
reason for this till it is
transformed into a sub-
stance of superconscience,
853-854

nature of, 848

nature of material and other
existence emerging from,
491

nature of the world born
out of, 262-263

of material Nature, 524-526

original, 279, 351, 432, 433,
see Cosmic manifestation,
673-674; Evolution in
Matter, 672-673

original, — nature of its con-
trol over man's conscious
evolution, 735

purpose of the soul's descent
into, 527

INDEX

swoon of the, see Exclusive
concentration, 523-525

the result of its hold on
Matter, 548

the divine Knowledge works
with a sovereign security
within the operations of
the, 445
Inconscient, 194-196, 205 f,
229, 235, 236

the, 274, 275, 277, 311, 316,
318, 380, 382, 432, 433,
434, 446, 465, 467, 492,
499, 500, 501, 539, 540,
571, 576, 609, 616, 617,
621, 623, 624, 645, 651,
655, 665, 672, 682-684,
695, 704, 725, 756, 757,
800, 825, 827, 830, 838,
902, 918, 946

a status of involved con-
sciousness, 428

black dragon of the, 593-

594

can well be conceived as an
involved Being or Power,
901-902

character of the, 499-500

condition of the disappear-
ance of the rule of the,
861

cosmic, — ^theory of its crea-
tion of a temporary soul,
664

Darkness, 433

divine nature concealed but
present in the, 369

foundation, 851

Infinity, 326

is the original potent and
automatically effective
Force in the terrestrial
formulation and the con-
scious mind only a small
labouring agent, 919-920

mental consciousness a mid-
dle power still leaning on
the, 369

nature and urge of the in-
herent necessity in the,

742-743

Ocean, 261

Sea, 437

secret of the power of action
of the, 920

the sombre flowers of false-
hood and suffering and
evil have their root in the
black soil of the, 533

the All-Knowledge behind
what seems to us the ac-
tion of the, 363

transformation in the gnos-
tic being of the, 875

vastness of sphere in our
total existence of the, 496
Indefinable, 24 f, 38
Indefinable, the, 616

and Illimitable, the Infinite
as a self-existent, 306
Indeterminable, pure, 385

the, 271, 283-284, 295, Ch.
XXIX
Indeterminate, 332, 346

general, 273

the, 271
Indeterminates, Cosmic De-
terminations and the In-
determinable, Ch. XXIX

generic, 273, 280, 288

or indeterminables, original,
271
India, 11, 67, 165 f, 238

ancient, — place of the spir-
itual individual and so-
ciety in, 927-928

religion in, see Religion in
India

the philosophy of world-
negation in, 374
Indian ascetics, motive behind
the austerities practised
by, 509 f

astrology; considers Karma
as mostly predetermined,
yet admits that energy of
the being has the power
to cancel all but its most
powerful bindings, 720-
721

culture, ancient, — its at-
tempt at an evolutionary
synthesis, see Synthesis,
evolutionary

disciplines, supreme object
of, 658

idea of rebirth, 742 ; see Soul,
667-668

philosophy, dual status of
Brahman one of the most
important distinctions in,

5"
physicist, old, 76
physicist, researches of, 166
scientist, vital consciousness

in plants demonstrated by

an, 82
spiritual thought, ancient, —

the problem of good and
evil as viewed by, 556-
558

terms for expressing the
three fundamental aspects
of Self-Existence, 293, 295

thought, ancient, — what was
meant by knowledge in,
611

thought, Brahman in, 339

thought. Dr. Schweitzer's
book on, 671 f

view of world as a garden
of the divine Lila, 600

word for the principle of
inertia of consciousness
and force, Tamas is the,
745
Indifference, nature of, 241
Individual, the, iii, 296, 331-
332, 334-335, 348-349,
685, 686

a reality of the Transcend-
ent, 415

a self-expression of the uni-
versal and the transcend-
ent, not a contradiction,

425

a total liberation of soul,
mind, heart and action
the highest achieved spir-
itual evolution of the, 784

because of the Divinity in
him his liberation has to
be individual and not col-
lective, 620-621

complete, — meaning of, 864

condition for the fullness of
the spiritual freedom of
the, 909-910

condition in which he can
see himself aright and use
his world divinely, 607

divine, 882

dual importance of the, 617-
6ig

Destiny of the, Ch. V

emerging in a world of Mat-
ter, might be real if there
is a Conscious-Energy of
the original Existence,
395-396

existence, difficulty of reason
in the knowledge of, 331-
332

existence of the, 335

gnostic, — would be an in-
ner Person unveiled and

INDEX

occupying both the depths
and the surface in a uni-
fied self-awareness, 883-
884

first view of his illusory or
temporary existence and
the nature of the cosmic
manifestation on the basis
of his persistent reahty,
673-674

formless and limitless, 620

has to universalise himself
and at the same time be-
come aware of the tran-
scendence, 589

his conflict between the
ideal of self-perfection
and the ideal of self-ef-
facement is a groping of
the mental Ignorance: the
true harmonisation can
only be done by a deeper
spiritual principle, 928-
929

his divine culmination as
described in the Veda,
611-613

his experience and actions
are of considerable impor-
tance in the vitalistic view
of things, 670

his first necessity is to dis-
cover the spirit within
him and express that in
all his being and living,
907

his place in the supracosmic,
cosmic-terrestrial, supra-
terrestrial and integral
views of existence, see un-
der Supracosmic, etc.

his place in evolutionary
development, 676-677

his reahty in the older Ad-
waita Vedantism, see Ad-
waita Vedantism starting
from the Upanishads

his spiritual freedom not
something entirely sepa-
rate from all-existence,
930

his need to assume a body
as the only means of
gro\\1:h by a progressive
development towards

unity with God and all in
God in a phenomenal uni-
verse created on the basis

981

of a separative difference.

674-675

human, see Human individ-
ual

human ideal of his perfecti-
bility, and the function of
society in this view, 927-
928

in the Mayavada theory, see
under Mayavada theory,
676-677

in the Mayavada theory, see
under Adwaita ; Maya-
vada theory

its importance in the inte-
gral explanation of the
evolution in Matter, 672-

673

mental, 685

must sufficiently universalise
himself before he can be
capable of a change Hfting
him beyond the lower
hemisphere of universahty
into a consciousness be-
longing to its spiritual
upper hemisphere, 827-
828

must be preoccupied with
his own problem of
changing his mind and
life into conformity with
the truth of the spirit
till Nature has confirmed
the intensive evolution
through him, 787

nature of his demands from
rehgion, 777

not owing his ultimate alle-
giance either to the State
or the community but to
the Self or the Divine,
930-931

only means of the true per-
fection of, 951

reason for the complexity
of the evolution of the,
848-849

spiritual, see Spiritual in-
dividual

supramental transformation
of the, see Supramental
transformation, S55

the key of the evolutionary-
movement and the reason
for this, 929-931

true fulfilment of the, 605-
606

982

true, — character of, 336-337

truth of, 929

various experiences of one-
self possible in Overmind,
843-845

various ways by which he
can enter into the Abso-
lute, 426-427

what we normally mean by
the, 336-337

and communal being; their
secret of perfection must
be to find the Reality
greater than all their
manifestations, and the
truth of the universe, hu-
manity, the community
and the individual as
formations of this Real-
ity, 928-931

and its desire, must have
been awake before the
world at all existed, 685

and its desire, world not
created for the, see Cos-
mic existence, 684-685

and the collective human
whole, human ideals of
the right relation be-
tween, 927-928

and the collectivity, even
the growth of the mind
and soul of the collectiv-
ity depends on the in-
dividual, 618-619

and the cosmos, mutual in-
clusion of, 335-336

and the Divine Being, see
One and the Many

and the universal, as terms
of the Transcendence,
909-910

and the universal, see Uni-
versal and the individual
Individual being and nature,
included in the universal
Being and Nature and de-
pendent on the all-over-
ruling Transcendence, 823

loomed enormously large in
the past trend of human
thought, 685

results of the experience of
negating absolutes of the,
288-289

theories of cosmic existence
implying a premier im-
portance of, 684-685

INDEX

Individual consciousness, triple
status of, 309
existence, not abolished but
transformed by an inte-
gral spiritual conscious-
ness, 566
existence, reality and mean-
ing of, 319
in the Ignorance, his nature
and the result of his stand
on the consciousness of
a separate individuality,
886-887
soul, the view of its birth
from form to form until it
reaches the human level
which is its instrument
for rising to yet higher
levels is justified by what
we see of Nature and of
human nature, 677-678
soul, an isolated assumption
of life in the human body
could not be the rule of
its existence in a world
of involution and evolu-
tion of conscious being
through life and mind to
spirit, 674-675

Individual's evolution, sign of
a very advanced stage of,
727-728

Individual-universal, Brahman
as the, 313

Individualisation, 332-333

Individuality, in the conscious-
ness of the Infinite, 888-
889
reason for its becoming
more and more effective
in proportion as it real-
ised itself as a centre and
formation of the universal
transcendent Being and
Nature, 824-825
use of the dynamo of, 486
and individualisation, truth
of, see Purusha, 333-334

Indivisible, an, 271

Indivisible, the, 35, 124, 129,
249, 298, 306, 360
problem of division in the,

505
Ineffable, 34, 115

the, 287, 293, 318, 340, 530
Inert, the, 194
Inertia, 224, 735

original, 854
Infinite, 29, 35, 51, 63, 80,

106, 107, 136, 151, 152,
154, 180, 209, 212, 216,
219, 227, 229, 230, 245,
260, 264, 270-271, 276,
277, 284, 285, 286-287,
291, 377, 385, 389, 390,
391, 591, 607, 824, 845,
857, 861, 867, 868, 872,
879, 884, 888, 896

the, 293, 297, 298, 300-302,
303, 304-311, 313, 318,
324, 327, 328, 347, 361,
395, 416, 417, 421, 422,
424-426, 443, 529, 530,
533, 557, 566, 571, 572,
614, 620, 623, 674, 717,
732, 737, 738, 770, 812

an enigmatic zero of the,
507

and Eternal, 443, 557, 588,
614
Infinite and the finite, 306-307

the finite, co-existence of,

341, 347

the Universal, truth-consci-
ousness a power of the,
890-891

Universal, the, 742
Infinite, aspects of silence and
movement of the, see
Spirit, 304-305
Infinite Being, 737

Consciousness, no, 299, 310,
311, 317; see also Maya,
etc.

consciousness, three powers
possible to the dynamics
of, 308-312

consciousness of the, 417; —
the Timeless and Time as
seen by the, 427
Infinite ; complementary as-
pects of its freedom from
qualities and capacity to
manifest qualities, 301-303
Infinite Consciousness, static
and dynamic aspects of,

312-313

dynamic logic of the finite
workings of the, 716

Energy, 379

Existence, 284

form and the formless as-
pects of the, 305-306

forces behind happenings
not invisible to the spirit-
ual vision of the, 298-295

a fundamental double status
possible to the, 31 1-3 12

incoercible unity in all di-
visions the mathematics
of the, 307

individuality in the consci-
ousness of the, 888-889

inseparable unity of the
triple aspect of the, 300-
301

its interest greater than that
of the finite, 946-947

is not limited by building
in itself an infinite series
of interplaying finite phe-
nomena, 530

its power in silence of status
as in creation must also
be infinite, 511 -51 2

logic of the, 293, 298-302,
303, 304, 307, 308-310,
313, 320, 324, 328-329,
341 ; — its sequences are
not the steps of thought
but the steps of existence,
425

meaning of the, 306

namelessness of the, 305-306

occult, 613

oneness of the knowledge
and action of the, 300-301

One and the Many aspects
of the, 303-305, 309, 323-
324

of Being, 284

of Power, 284

power of self-determination
of the, 309, 310

Person, 210

self-existent, — luminous im-
perative Necessity the
original and final self-de-
termining truth-force of
the, 854-855

Self-Power of the, 321

seven rays of the, 431

spaceless, 420

spiritual truth of the, 788

supermind as the truth-con-
sciousness of the, 858-859

supramental, law of the,
896-897

the formless, 802

the play of all the move-
ments of the spiritual
consciousness would be
present in the supramen-
tal gnosis for the joy of
the powers of the, 894

Timeless and Time statuses
can be taken in a simul-

INDEX

taneous vision or experi-
ence by the being of the,
328-329

transmundane, 685

Will of the, 299
Infinity, 46, 613, ,802, 810

ego a power of, 362
Infinitesimals, 271, 272, 297
Influences, 690, 692
Infrarational, the, 296, 298,
306 ; see also Life

being, 889

life, working of harmony in,
924
Infrahuman formation, as-
sumed by the Reality be-
fore man existed, 929
Infra-Mind, 444
Inhabitant, cosmic, 736

divine, 659

mental, 278

occult, 630

of the Upanishads, the uni-
versal, 634

the, 215, 318
Inmost being, see Psychic be-
ing
Inner, see also under Inward;
Subliminal

and the outer being, 496-498

and outer being, contrast be-
tween the states of, 490-
491
Inner being, 529, 934; see also
Inner self, etc.

and its centres of action;
their opening up an in-
dispensable step towards
overcoming the difficulty
of transforming the lower
parts of our being, but
even this large mentalisa-
tion and vitalisation from
within can lessen but does
not get rid of the Igno-
rance and the Incon-
science, 831-832

for a larger change to ar-
rive at its widest totality
the consciousness has to
shift its centre and its
static and dynamic posi-
tion from the surface to
the, 804-805

four main lines followed by
Nature in her attempt to
open it up, 765-766

its knowledge in essence has
the same elements as the

983

outer mind's surface
knowledge, but with a
greater clarity of con-
sciousness and vision, 478-
479

nature of, 253

possible to break down the
wall screening it from our
outer awareness by a
strong force of call and
aspiration even before the
tranquillising purification
of the outer nature has
been effected — but its
serious dangers and the
way to surmount them,
804-806

result of entry into, 493
Inner change, condition in
which it can begin to take
shape in a collective form,

938-939
darkness when looking in-
wards, explanation of the
idea or experience of, 911

Inner life, 918

and seeking; various ways
of being misled from its
true way to false paths,
the means devised by a
past spiritual experience
to meet its dangers and
the conditions by which
they can be fully sur-
mounted, 804-806
of the spirit, becomes of
first importance in the
turn towards spiritual life,
904-906

Inner mental and vital being;
some experiences can
come by an opening of
them within us, without
any full emergence of the
soul, since there too there
is a power of direct con-
tact of consciousness but
the experiences might
then be of a mixed char-
acter, 808-809
being, occult, — its coming to
the front results in a
strengthened power of
choice — a beginning of
authentic free-will, 823
Being, S20; nature of, 477

Inner mind, 844

Person, see Inner being

984

realities, 476

self; separation of the Pur-
usha from the Prakriti
one effective way of en-
try into it and its results,
805-807

spiritual life, possible with-
out depending on any
outer manifestation but,
from the point of view of
a spiritual evolution, the
appearance of a new or-
der of beings and a new
earth-life must be envis-
aged in our idea of the
total consummation, 903-
904

subtle-physical being, 477

vital being, 477
Insensibility, see Sensibility,

877-878
instinct, see Intuition and In-
stinct

and intuition, see Intuition
and instinct
Integral consciousness, 529
■ ntegral knowledge, 295, 575,
626, 766; see also Knowl-
edge, integral

admits the valid truths of
all views of existence but
seeks to reconcile them
in a larger truth, S92-594

and integral liberation of
both soul and nature, re-
sult of, 514-515

and the Aim of Life; Four
Theories of Existence, Ch.
XLIV

can only come by an evolu-
tion of our being and our
nature, 585

character of, 582-583

demands an exploration of
all the possible domains
of consciousness and ex-
perience, 581-582

nature of, 568

of Brahman, 572

Reality and the, Ch. XLIII

theory of, 586-587

will mean the cancelling of
the sevenfold ignorance
by the discovery of what
it misses and ignores, 584-

585
Integral self-knowledge, 363
what, is needed to reach it.

INDEX

see Superconscience, 656-

657

Integral spiritual consciousness,
links the highest to the
lowest through all the
mediating terms of being,
565-566
Integral transformation, 558;
see also Being in Nature,
648-649 ; Subconscient,
654-655

its demand for so steeping
the circumconscient being
in the spiritual light and
substance that nothing
can enter into it without
undergoing a transforma-
tion, and the character of
this difficult perfection,
832-833
Integral view of existence, im-
portance of spiritual evo-
lution in the, 607

in the ancient Indian cul-
ture, see Synthesis, evolu-
tionary

its synthesis of the other
three views in relation to
the significance of the
spiritual evolution here,
693-607

spiritual evolution regarded
as a critical turning-point
in the, 603-605, see Spirit-
ual consciousness

the soul of the individual
must awake to universal-
ity and to transcendence
in the: 605-606

the truth of the terrestrial
being and the need to
bring a wider meaning
into our human life and
manifest in it the much
more that we secretly are:
606-607

the truth of the suprater-
restrial and the place of
the earth-life in the, 605-
606

three stages of the cycle of
the spirit's self-expression
in life as the basis for
the, 607
Intellect, limitation of, 10

and Intuition, see Intuition
and intellect

a ray of gnosis seized by the

sense mentality and trans-
formed by it into some-
thing other than its
source, 628, 638

dialectical, — nature and lim-
its of, 441

its control over spiritual ex-
perience can be hampering
— but this too is necessary,
see Spiritual experience,
781-783

its denial of spirituality and
religion ends in a drying
up of the secret springs of
vitality and a decadence,

775

must also be enlightened in
any total advance of the
spirit, 780-781

mainly concerned with the
mental consequences of
the spiritual theorem of
existence, seeks to exercise
a critical control also,
780-781

primary, secondary and j&nal
action of, 781

spiritual truth not a truth of
the, see Truth, 787-789
788-789
Intellectual knowledge and
practical action, as devices
of Nature, 611-613

presentation of the Truth,
see Truth, 322-323

seeking, its replacement by
supramental identity and
gnostic intuition of the
contents of the identity,

872-874
Intellectualising tendency ;
when it becomes too
strong it disrupts the first
amalgam of religion, oc-
cultism and mystic expe-
rience, but begins again to
inquire into the deeper
secrets of the mind and
the life force, 770-772
Intelligence, 31, 32, 42, 63, 127,
162, 163, 172, 260, 275,
720, 902

all-wise, see also Yajna-
valkya, 405

causal, 404

cosmic, 423, 723

function of, 163

human, see Human Intel-
ligence, 828, 833

involved, 902

mental, see Mental intelli-
gence

occult, 735

omnipotent, 404
Interchange, law of, 941
Internal movements ; knowl-
edge of them is of a
double nature, separation
and direct contact, 471-
472
Internatal intervals, dynamic
probability of, 709-714

intervals, essential necessity
of, 714-715

resort, its complex stages
necessitated by the evolu-
tionary object and its
process, 715-716

resort, necessity and conse-
quences of, 714-716
Interspace where the mental
and the divine life have
their intermingled exist-
ence, 903
Intraconscient assimilation,

729

the, 584

being, 520

and circumconscient, the
subliminal a secret, 500

and circumconscient; range
and nature of this veiled
element and its influence
on the formation of our
surface being, 655-656
Intraconscient ranges, 653
Introvert, see Extrovert and

the introvert
Intuition, 6, 63 f, 64, 65, 66,
69, 70, 73-75, 78, 255, 298,
300, 841-843, 872, 897

action in human mind of,
252-253, 263-364

function of, 64-66

its fourfold power which
enables it to preform all
the action of reason but
by its own superior proc-
ess, 842-843

in the human mind also a
truth remembrance but
subject to an invading
mixture or a mental coat-
ing and therefore the need
to rely on reason and this
largely discounts the util-
ity of the intuition, 843-
844

its original or native charac-
ter and the modifications

INDEX

it undergoes when it be-
gins to descend into us,
840-841

nature of this power of con-
sciousness more intimate
to the original knowledge
by identity and the condi-
tion under which it leaps
out, 840-841

reason for its limitation in
the human mind, 550

root of, see Indian terms

sense-mind, vital and per-
ceptive mind, — their value
in forming a right idea of
the object, 472-473

what would be the forma-
tion of instinct and intel-
ligence on the surface if
that were always open to
its action and the reason
why that is not possible,
547-548
Intuition and instinct, faculty
of, — its need and charac-
ter in early man, 770

and instinct, — see Animal
being, 545-546, Animal
basis, 487-488

and intellect, difference be-
tween, 299
Intuition and Reason, 66

their functions in our expe-
rience of the physical uni-
verse through a structure
of sense images, 384-385
Intuitive being, 898

consciousness, 921

consciousness, nature of the
working of, 821-822

consciousness, planes of, 642

control, 921

discrimination, 811

functioning, 826

gnosis, 862

gnostic being, 894

intelHgence, nature of the
action of, 822

instinctive and subliminal
formations, the first nec-
essary,— overlaid with
structures erected by
growing force of reason
and mental intelligence,
770-771

mental intelligence, a har-
monious other-world in
which its control would
be the rule conceivable

985

but in our plane of being
such a rule and control
not likely to be complete
and final owing to the
mixture with the inferior
stuff of consciousness al-
ready evolved, although
an increased mastery and
knowledge and an open-
ing to a higher being and
a higher nature would be
the result, 822-823
Intuitional being, 841

knowledge, its meaning and
action on the subconscient
and super-conscient, 63
Invisible, the, 770
Involuntary action, 510
Involution, gradations of the,
see Evolutionary move-
ment, 682-683
of the unity of Sachchida-
nanda into the dividing
Mind, the result of, 674-

675
seven principles of the man-
ifested being in the de-
scent into, 590-592

Involved, the, 902

Inward going and living, the
only way of self -finding,
911-912

Inward living, importance of,
907-908; see Immortality,
658-659; Man, 652-653;
Subliminal, 655-656.
reason why fullness of be-
ing impossible without it,
910-911

Inward turning and move-
ment, a first step towards
a true universality, 912-

913

Iron Age, 214

Isha Upanishad, 126 f, 162 f
its insistence on the unity
and reality of all the
manifestations of the Ab-
solute, 567-568
translation from, 34, 140,
201, 245 f, 249, 330, 350

Ishwara Ch. XXX, 56, 132,
286, 293-295, 300, 318,
319, 321, 322-324, 329»
413-415, 720, 762, 804,
807, 845, 886, SSS, 892

Ishwara, supreme, — status of
the, 428

Isvara, 315

986

Ishwara-Shakti, 322

Isolation, its necessity for first
knowledge, see also Dis-
tinctions

iti Hi, 292

jadavat, 211 f

Jivatman, 136, SoS-So7, Si 7.

669
John Smith, no purpose served

by his remaining the same

in his new life as in his

last avatar, 727
Joy, 207, 286
jugupsd, 100, loi, 102

Kali, 74, 78

Karma, 24, 71, 89, 374, 396,
435 i, 449, 542, 665, 666 f,
668, 742, 888
a partial truth of fact may
be admitted for the doc-
trine that there is an
equation between moral
good and evil and vital-
physical good and evil,
724-725
first proposition of, 718-719
its law an outward machin-
ery and not the sole de-
terminant of the life
workings of the cosmos,
719-720
popular idea of, 718
popular notions of, 716-717;
its law offer no foothold
to the philosophic reason
but elevation of this solu-
tion to a higher level of
reasoning so as to give it
the colour of a cosmic
principle is possible, 718-
719
selection of two values —
moral good and evil and
vital physical good and
evil — out of the many
created by Nature and a
supposed collocation be-
tween them evidently
made from the view-point
of man's common vital
physical desire, 723-725

INDEX

statement of its Law errs by
an over-simplification and
the arbitrary selection of
a limited principle of the
duality of ethical good
and evil, 721-723

the idea of its retribution
as a compensation for the
injustice of life and Na-
ture is a feeble basis for
the theory of, 722-723

the Soul and Immortality
Ch. L

the spirit within not an au-
tomaton in its hands and
it cannot be accepted as
the whole machinery of
rebirth and our future
evolution, 720-721

true rationale of, see Man,
521
Karma: two riders to its first
proposition and reason for
regarding them as less gen-
eral and authentic, 719-727

put forward as the whole
law of, 719
Karma: view in a verse of the
Brihadaranyaka Upani-
shad of, 706

Indian astrology of, 720-721
Karmic impulsion, 659

Law, popular view of, 716-
717
karuna, loi f, 786 f
Katha Upanishad, 540 f

quotation from, 616 f

translation from, 58, 76, 201,
269, 350, 469, 494, 682,

734, 791

kavir mam SI paribhuh sdsva-
tlbhyah samdbhyah, 162 f

Kena Upanishad, translation
from, 13, 14, 94, 350

King, 211
secluded, — psychic entity as
a, 793

Knowledge, 11, 12-15, 16-18,
37, 39, 54, 66, 67, no,
112-114, 116, 128, 130,
134-135, 145, 146, 152
162, 206-208, 211, 212,
217, 227, 229, 241, 242,
245, 249, 250, 255, 259,
263, 286, 330, 348, 352,
376, 389, 392, 393, 409,
426, 430, 436, 437-439,
440, 441, 442, 443, 444-
447, 448, 451-453, 458,
479, 508, 525, 527, 529,

538, 545, 566-568, 570-

572, 573, 583, 584, 614,

617, 627, 643, 735, 736,

742, 752, 753, 778, 791-

793, 811, 816, 828, 832,

838, 839, 843, 848, 858,

859, 862, 871, 890, 910,

919, 943, 947
Knowledge, a true basis of it
can only be acquired
when we have seen both
our self and our nature as
a whole, in the depths as
well as on the surface,
467-468
Knowledge, an acceptance of
the unity of the three cat-
egories— God, Man, and
Nature — is essential to,
614-615

divine, 445

evolution in the, 947

fourfold order of, 469-470

highest mark of, 420

its nature in the beginning,
269-271

integral, 504, 565, 783; see
Integral Knowledge

its nature in the Higher
Mind, 836

its seeking by the mind not
an impersonal process, 550

metaphysical, see Metaphys-
ical Knowledge

only a useful instrument in
the illusion of Maya, 395

our limitation and imper-
fection of, 474-475

progress to: God, Man and
Nature, Ch. XLV

sevenfold, — towards the Ch.
XLVII, 660-661; see un-
der Ignorance, sevenfold,
etc.

sign and character of the
inner turn towards, 565-
566

subjective and objective
conceptions of the nature
of, see Under Reality of,
573-574; Reality and
Knowledge, 577-578

supraphysical, 13

supreme self-possessing, 361

surface mind's idea of, 6n

superconscient, 452

thought, action, — cannot be
the essence of life, 906-907

ultimate aim of, 611

Vedic meaning of, see

Knowledge and the Ig-
norance, 436-438
what the ancient seers of
the Veda meant by, 611-
613

Knowledge and Ignorance, 532,
565, 568; problem of, 422
Ch. VII, Bk. I, 434, 436,
437

Knowledge and the Ignorance,
as two separate powers
of consciousness and as
light and shadow of the
same consciousness, — dif-
ferent conclusions result-
ing from the views of,

445-447

as two powers of conscious-
ness, 451-452

from the Absolutist view of
Reality, 566-567

meaning in the Upanishad
of, 452-453

integral view of the nature
of, 439-441

not two irreconcilable prin-
ciples, but two coexistent
powers, 444-445

the distinction between them
in Rig Veda, and the
sense of this idea of the
Vedic mystics translated
into a more metaphysical
thought and language,
436-438

the original Vedic terms for
them replaced by the an-
tinomy of Vidya and
Avidya in the Vedantic
thought of the Upanishad,
438-439

their definition on the sup-
posed fixed opposition be-
tween two terms of our
being — One and Many,
finite and infinite etc. and
the consequent ultimate
of life, 570-571

to determine their charac-
ter and relations the first
necessity is to examine the
fundamental movements
of Mind, 441-442
Knowledge and Power, an im-
mensely greater power
over existence and Na-
ture must come when a
greater consciousness than

INDEX

mind emerges, 919-920
Will, identity of, 918; their
discord in the mental be-
ing and the means by
which it can be dissolved,
918-919
Knowledge by direct contact,
is the main character of
the highest supraphysical
mental planes of con-
sciousness, 490-491
first origin of separative

knowledge as, 489-490
main character of the sub-
liminal, 477-484
Knowledge by indirect con-
tact, see under Separative
Knowledge
Knowledge by identity, 533,
573; see also Spirit, 486-
487 ; Spiritual awareness,
487-488; Spiritual knowl-
edge, 488-489 ; and Sepa-
rative knowledge, Ch.
XXXVIII
as illustrated in the surface

mind, 469-471
belongs to the higher hemi-
sphere of existence, 490
cosmic consciousness found-
ed upon, 481-485, 487-488
involved, 492-493
its essential character and
what it would mean if
applied to cosmic exist-
ence, 487-488
Knowledge-Ignorance, 249,
255, 399, 479, SOI, 556-
562, 643, 833, 837, 843
key to the world of, 349
Knowledge-Force, 120
Knowledge-Will, 133, 175, 258,

444-445, 501, 623
Knower, 130, 149, 218, 458
the, 286

Knowledge and the Known,
oneness of, 127
Known, 130

the, 286, 458
Kshara and Akshara, true
meaning of, 513

Law, 107, 112, 124, 133, 134,
162, 194, 224, 225, 24s,
717, 719-721, 725; see also
under Order

987

Law cosmic, 726

— good or bad fortune as a
result of virtuous or sin-
ful action in a past hfe
not the true sense of, 722-
723

— its statement errs by an
oversimplification of the
complex nature of energy
and arbitrary selection of
a limited principle of the
duality of ethical good
and evil, 721-723

— object of the vital being
in erecting it on the basis
of rewards and punish-
ments which is a fall from
the true ethical standard,
723-724
Law, established and inexora-
ble,— of the Inconscience,
854

limited achievement of, 9c5

nature of, — in the world,
162-163

true character of, 885-886
Law; absence of an imposed
construction of it does noL
lead to any chaos of cc .1-
flict in the life of the
gnostic being, 891-892
Law and process, not the whole
of cosmos but only a ma-
chinery used by the Spirit
in things in fundamen-
tally determining its ov.n
evolution, 719-720

their mechanical power over
body and matter becomes
gradually more complex
and less rigid with the
intervention of life and
mind, 720
Law foundation of the free-
dom from, 892-893

of living of gnostic com-
munities, see Gnostia
communities

or standard, necessity of the
imposition of, 885
Legislator and Judge, dixine,

726
Liberated man, character of
the, 784-785, 784 f

description in the Gita of,
930
Liberated self-experience, see
Cosmic and the indi\-idual,
335-336

988

spirit, seeing of the, 568
Liberation, incomplete, — na-
ture of, 366

bare and pure urge towards,
— all powers a burden on
the, 924

reason for its being Indi-
vidual and not collective,
620-621

Vedantic idea and the sig-
nificance of, 885
Liberty, 41
Lid, 25s

Lid of mind, if the rift in it
is made, what happens is
an opening of vision to
something above us or a
rising up towards it or a
descent of its powers into
our being, 810-811

opens and disappears un-
der the pressure of psy-
cho-spiritual change: the
conditions under which
its opening becomes pos-
sible without the full psy-
chic emergence and the
dangers attendant on it
by a premature pressure
from below, 809-810
Life, 4-5, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 15,
16, 18, 22, 24-27, 37, 44,
45, 47, SI, 57, 62, 63, 82,
91, 93, no, 130, 150, 152,
155, 163, 16s f, 166, 168,
171-177, 179, 180, 181,
182-185, 187, 189, 191,
192, 194, 197, 201, 202,
213-215, 217, 219, 220,
223, 224-226, 229, 232,
235, 242, 246, 249, 250,
253, 258, 262, 264, 270,
271, 279, 294, 311, 341,
431, 435, 501, 503, 504,
526, 537, 538, 540, 541,
571, 582, 591-593, 597,
622, 626 f, 628-629, 631,
655, 667-669, 672, 675,
676, 678, 684, 687, 694,
696, 698, 700, 701, 727,
738, 753, 757, 758, 766,
777, 820, 846, 855, 868,
906

all-pervading aspect of, 164,
172

ascent of, Ch. XXI

as Divine energy, 175

as form of one cosmic En-
ergy, 164, 191, 246

INDEX

Life, being of, see Being of
life

condition for the survival
of, see Survival of mind,
life and body

cosmic, 204, 484, 625

description in Upanishad of,
179

description of, 181, 212, 217

divine, see also Divine Life,
330

difficulty of our intellectual
reason to deal with it be-
cause of its infrarational
character, 298

its first view and the real
nature and conditions of
its appearance, 661-662

first law of, — status and
terms of the, 182, 183,
185, 189, 201, 226

four statuses of, 201-202

fourth status of, 190

function in intermediate op-
eration of, 172, 173, 175-
176, 242

illusion of, see Man, 374-375

involution in Matter, 172

its impulse to seek for de-
light, 201-202

mentalised perception of, see
Mentalised perception of
life

mind appears when life is
sufficiently organised to
receive it but life itself
receives its full organisa-
tion only after mind can
act upon it, 849-850

mind and spirit, — reason
for their development
here by the cooperation
of an upward-tending
force from below and
an upward-drawing and
downward pressing force
from above, 703-704

nature of its seeking, 873-
874

nature of the overtly con-
scious, 492

nature of the primary forms
of, 492

new fullness of the means
of, see New fullness of
the means of life

new principle of, see New
principle of life

nodus of, 37

problem of, Ch. XXII

second status or terms of,
183-184, 186, 188, 189,
201

self of, see Self of life

Spirit's self-expression in,
607

spiritual, see Spiritual life

third status or terms of, 181,
185, 187-190, 193, 201

though not the original Re-
ality, is yet a power of it
which is missioned here
as a creative urge in Mat-
ter, 592-593

the effective power of being
in Matter, 902

— to seek for the truth of
things in it clearly hope-
less, 279

to transcend and control
and use it as an instru-
mentation of the self is
the third condition of di-
vine living, 909-910

ultimate aim and meaning
of our, 611

ultimate of, — on the basis
of a supposed opposition
between the two terms of
our being — One and the
Many, etc., 57o-57i

universal, 666, 667, 668, 920

universal, — its two possible
ways of evolving the soul
on earth and suppositions
on the power of the soul
to survive in other states
of existence based on
them, 667-668

universal, 666, 667, 668
Life-being, 372, 382
Life-ego, 6ig, 911; see also
Vital being, etc.

significance of the emer-
gence of, 555
Life-Energy, 10, 167, 172, 738,
823

veiled, 748
Life-Force, 167, 173, 217, 229,
235, 258, 593, 623, 664,
668, 701, 738, 868

creative, 629

in the material world, 920
Life-forces, 691, 925
Life-form, separated, — double
affirmation of, see Evil
and falsehood, 543-544

Life-mind, 832; see also Vital
mind
action and limitation of,

156-157
character and importance
of, 640-641
Life-nature, 317, 724
Life-plane, 172
Life-principle, 164, 180, 182,

593

forms of, 273
Life-self, 797; see also Vital
being

of humanity, infraspiritual
and infrarational, 935
Life-soul, nature of, 640

unanimised, 935
Life-Spirit, 46, 53
Life- world, 172

its pressure evolves life here
and drives it to aspire in
us to a greater revelation
of itself, 695-696
Life-worlds, explanation of its
formulations resembling
the inferior movements of
earth-existence, 696-697

their natural completeness
and harmony for good or
for evil in their own
greater principles of being
impossible here where all
is mingled in the com-
plex interaction necessary
to a many-sided evolution
leading towards a final in-
tegration, 696-698, 701
Life and the body, would no
longer be tyrannous mas-
ters in gnostic life but
means for the expression
of the spirit, 944

consciousness, see Con-
sciousness and life

Matter, an outer world of,
867

Matter, preoccupation with,
see Physical existence

mind, see Mind and life
Life Consciousness, 629

reason for its inability to
effectuate the greatness
and felicity of its mighty
or beautiful impulses in
the material existence,
814-815
Life constructions of man, not
capable of taking him be-
yond his present self, 786

INDEX

Life divine, 172-173, 183-184,
191-192
essential condition of, 146-

147
Life Divine, foundation of,
568

in Matter, 744

in men and life in plants,
their distinction not an
essential difference, 169-
171

in the Ignorance, what con-
stitutes the enterprise of,
946-947

in the mental ignorance and
life in the gnostic being
and nature, dynamic dif-
ference between, 885-886,
891-892

in other worlds, possibility
of its being counteracted
for a time by the greater
pull of the earth, 709-710

of gnostic beings, see Gnos-
tic life
Light, 3, 5, 40, 62, 63, 107,
108, 116, 126, 146, 150,
199, 211, 212, 255, 264,
306, 351, 426, 432, 436,
449, 453, 683, 792, 793,
803, 805, 810, 813, 828,
832, 837-839, 843, 844,
84s, 854, 941

gnostic, 848, 896

hidden, 860

higher, 543

inner, 913
Light, not primarily a material
creation but a spiritual
manifestation of the
Divine Reality — material
light being a subsequent
representation or conver-
sion of it into Matter, 839

recedes if there is an at-
tachment to any form of
the Ignorance and has to
work in darkness or semi
darkness on the regions in
us that are still in the
Night, 813-814

secret, 703

superconscient, 433
Light and Knowledge, powers
of, 838

Darkness, Powers of, 537

Shadow, as illustrating the
relation of truth to false

989

hood, of good to evil,
534-535
Truth and Good, divine,

537
Lila, 96, 309, 672, 674, 743
ceases to be a cruel paradox
if the human soul is a
portion of the Divinity,
368-370
crude statement of the doc-
trine of, 368
different views of, 368-369
divine, — the world as a gar-
den of the, see Suprater-
restrial view, 598-600
place of the individual in
and the ultimate signifi-
cance of, 348-349
Limitation, see Imperfection
Living, nature of our present
way of, — and the nature
of living in the gnostic
being, 867-868
Logic of the Infinite and
mental reason, difference
between, 424-425
Logic of the Infinite, see In-
finite, logic of the
finite, see under Reason
Logical intellect, see under
Reason
reasoning, 330-332
Logos, 258

Lord, 22, 32, 48, 57, 98, 104,
123, 126, 130, 131, 132,
149, 196, 210, 286, 288,
296, 361, 364, 418, 419,
SOI, 517, 622
Lord of Air, 294

Beings, description of, 294
Immortahty, 240
Life, 294
Nature, 622, 624
the will, 286
Love, 30, 46, 88, 146, 181,
182, 188 f, •201-202, 208,
210, 286, 318, 426, 624,
811, 882
Love, as the governing prin-
ciple in the third status
of life, 187-1S9
its first action and true na-
ture, 1S8-1S9
w^hat to the gnostic being
will be the nature of, S74
Love and sympathy, 925-926
as a law of life, can be ren-
dered ineffective or be

990

forced to circumscribe its
range of cosmic applica-
tion by the general nes-
cience, 853-854

or any other strong prin-
ciple of the nature, in the
Ignorance and in the
gnostic person, 892-893
Lover, 210

the, 286, 624
Lower consciousness, result of
its ascent into the higher,
848-849

existence, gnostic power
would impose by its in-
fluence a greater har-
mony on the, 895, 896

existence, order of, see Or-
der, 8S8-890

parts of the being; condi-
tion under which they can
be transformed and the
reason why it is difficult
to bring this about, 831-
832

parts of the being, the open-
ing up of the inner being
and its centres of action
an indispensible step to-
wards overcoming the
difficulty of transforming
them but their complete
mutation possible only by
the turning of the spirit-
ual towards supramental
transformation, 831-833
Luck or fortune, see Karma,
722-723

M

Machinery, cannot form soul
and hfe force into stand-
ardised shapes but can at
best coerce them, 937
Mage, the, 783

the supreme, 437
Magic, 771, 772, 779

and magical formulae, see

Occultism, 779-780
and occultism, origin of the
creation of the early
forms of, 770-771
Magician, 296
cosmic, 273
the divine, 437
Mahat, 77

INDEX

mahatl vinastih, 722
Mahopanishad, trans, from,

457, 647
Maitri Upanishad, translation

from, 448, 531
Maker, 663

Man, 5, 16, 46, 54, 123, 196,
337, 624, 679

a divine life would be the
evolutionary destiny of,
900-927

aim on the earth, 6

an embodied soul through
whose action cosmic Na-
ture is seeking to fulfil
itself, 537-538

a reversal of the Nature's
method of evolution in
her previous stages pos-
sible in, 751

as he discovers the secrets
and processes of physical
Nature he moves more
and more away from his
early recourse to occult-
ism and magic, see Reli-
gion, 770-772

as one conscious existence
with a double phase of
consciousness, 452

a unique Person in his self
but also a multiperson in
his manifestation of self
and therefore his mastery
of himself possible only
by finding the inmost
truth of his central being
or soul by going within
and only imperfectly by
his surface mental will
and reason, 798-799

being of, see Being of mind

can become aware of his
mental operations as dis-
tinct from his life opera-
tions, 759-760

can in certain states project
his conscious being into
other planes partly in life
and with a full complete-
ness after the dissolution
of the body, 707

can only create reflex images
of the higher worlds or
a kind of subjective an-
nexe to them, 703-704

carries along with him even
at his highest elevation
the control of an incon-

scient material Nature
over his conscious evolu-
tion, 734-735

complexity of the being of,
711-712

consequences of the self-as-
sertive vital egoism of,
724-725

contrast between his inner
and his outer being, 496-
498

could not have appeared if
Matter and Life had not
already been ensouled,
678

divine, 610, 624

dynamically in his super-
ficial consciousness a man
of the moment — not a
man of the past or the
future though indivisible
in the infinite course of
Time, 520-522

early, see Early man ; Prim-
itive man; Early human-
ity

even in him the psychic en-
tity is held back from
coming to the front, 752

four necessities of the self-
expansion of, 766-767

goal of, 679-680

has to work in the Igno-
rance and develop the
faculties which enable
him to overstep it, 437

his conflicting ideals as ele-
ments of a harmony in
the new existence: only
the truth, if any, which
they conceal, could have
a chance of entry, 943-944

his egoistic ignorance, 502-

503

his ignorance of himself in
space except the small
span of which he is
mentally and sensation-
ally conscious, 503-504

his ignorance of his becom-
ing in Time, 502

his ignorance of his super-
conscient self, 501-502

his ignorance of the world
in which he presently
lives, 502-503

his imperfect knowledge re-
sulting from his separa-
tion of his mind, life and

body from the universal,
196-197

his need to actualise the
complex terms of his na-
ture to the highest pos-
sible values, 61 1-6 1 2

his oblivion of his real self,
520-521

his origin and appearance
to be viewed against the
background of a develop-
ing evolutionary process
and two possibilities here
— the sudden appearance
of a human body and
consciousness in the earth
nature or else an evolu-
tion of humanity out of
animal being, 746-748

his past and present activ-
ities determining his fu-
ture birth and its happen-
ings as explained by the
law and chain of Karma,
718

his preoccupation in the
preliminary stage of spir-
ituality, see Spirituality,

783-785
his priority among animal
species — born of the sense
of his supremacy — is an
ancient conception but
not universal and is con-
trary to evolutionary fact,

745

his quest of God begins with
his first vague question-
ings of Nature and a sense
of something unseen both
in himself and her, 622-
623

his urge towards self-ex-
ceeding not likely ever to
die out totally in the
race, 750

his use of life-values from
the plane of will and in-
telligence, 637-638

his waking mind and ego
only a superimposition
upon his submerged self.
496

influence of the life-worlds
on him and the reason
for his attachment to his
own imperfections, 698

in him not only the down
ward gaze of the univer

INDEX

sal Being in the evolution
has become conscious, but
its conscious upward and
inward gaze also develops,
638-639

in the Universe, Ch. VI

innate character of the spir-
itual aspiration in, 750

limitation of the physical
mind of, 579

lowest, — and highest ani-
mal,— difference between,
632

mental, 820

mental, see Mental man;
Mind-plane of pure
thought and intelligence,
etc.

multipersonality of, 796-799

nature of, 344-345

Nature's aim in, 907-908

nature of his eternal being
and of his cosmic and
mutable being, 675-676

nature of his material of
self-expression and experi-
ence of things and their
co-ordination, 494-495

new principle of his con-
scious mentality and its
difference from the animal
mind, 635-636

necessity for his assumption
of manifold ignorance,
525-526

no greater pleasure for him
than a victory over diffi-
culties, 370

non-evolutionary views of,
737-738, 739-741

not the creator of God or
the gods or the higher
planes but the intermedi-
ary by which they re-
veal themselves under the
conditions of the material
plane, 695-696

not the real ultimate sum-
mit of evolution, 630

not an impossibility that he
should aid Nature con-
sciously also in his own
spiritual and physical
evolution and transforma-
tion, 751

normal status of, 448

object of the creation of, see
Man, 609-611

991

only way of his true self-
exceeding is to Uve within
in the inner being and
make it the direct ruler
of Hfe or to station him-
self on the spiritual and
intuitive planes of being
and from there and by
their power transmute his
nature, 643

physical, see Physical man

possibility of his being de-
tained on his internatal
journey in true vital
worlds according to the
vital character of the
earthly existence, 713

real life of, 195

regarded as the last stage of
evolution, 741-742

remaining as he was even
by the most drastic
changes attempted by
political, social or other
mechanical remedies to
cure the ills of life, 786

results of his inward
growth, 705

seven steps for the progres-
sion of his higher self-
knowledge, 621

spiritual, see Spiritual man

superficial, — nature of the
separative movement of
his Tapas and the condi-
tion in which he can go
back to the real man
within him, 522-524

the conscious unity of God,
soul and Nature in his
own consciousness the
foundation of his perfec-
tion, 624-625

the hypothesis of his sudden
appearance presents con-
siderable difficulties, 747-
748

the Individual, 103

the knowledge of the uni-
verse, by \-irtue of its
unity with himself and
God, must lead him to the
realisation of Supema-
ture, 622-623

the mental being, — reason
for the imperfect life of,
902-903

the mental bemg, see Men-
tal Being

992

the mental being, — discov-
erer of his true self and
highest nature, 758

the outer apparent man has
to become the inner real,
609-611

the sense in which we say
that he has no soul, 795

the theory of his evolution
out of an animal being
offers no difficulty, 746-

747

the substitution of a con-
scious for a subconscious
evolution has become
conceivable and practi-
cable in, 750-751

the very nature of his lim-
ited mentality imposes
the necessity of his slow
movement in evolution
and the three principal
categories of his search
for knowledge, 612-613

three elements in the total-
ity of his being with the
superconscient sustaining
and exceeding them, 500-

501

three terms and goal of,
46-48

truth and fulfilment of, see
Integral view, 606-607

true aim of the agelong
effort of, 612

universal, 679

universal, — function in hu-
manity of, 676-677

utterances favouring the
priority of animal over
him we find already in
ancient and mediaeval
thought in India, 745-746

vital, see Vital man

way of his harmonised life
in the past, 934

what he suffers most from,
864-865

what we ordinarily mean
by and what he really is,
520-521
Man; cannot really affirm the
Absolute by itself to the
exclusion of himself and
the cosmos, 614-615

conscious utilisation of his
self-experience for hfe as
small part even of his

INDEX

waking consciousness,
495-496

discovers step by step the
unity of himself, God and
Nature, 621-622

heightening of his consci-
ousness into its spiritual
principle is effected by
an ascent and a stepping
back inward out of the
transient into the eternal
life and the result of this
heightening, 658-659

his call must be to live on
a new height in all his
being, 648-649

his denial of himself, cosmos
or God is due to his need
of arriving at a unity of
these three terms even by
suppressing two of them
and its unsatisfying na-
ture, 613-614

his denial of the Beyond
and a deification of mate-
rial Nature, 614

his gain in becoming a more
perfect mental being, 650-
651

his need for an Absolute,
613-614

his labour of mind and
struggle of life cannot
come to any solution until
he has gone beyond them
and learned to utilise his
natural instruments by
the force and for the joy
of the spirit, 651-653

his life made up of the dual-
ities of the Ignorance and
the neutrality of Matter
and the nescience and in-
sensibility of the Incon-
scient as its basis, 946

his need for normal devel-
lopment imposed by the
very character of terres-
trial being, 600-601

his necessity to enlarge
knowledge of himself, of
the world and of God un-
til in their totality he be-
comes aware of their mu-
tual indwelling and one-
ness, 614-615

his plunges into a barbaric
natural materialism only

temporary phenomena,
749

his physical intelligence eas-
ily satisfied by a denial of
the, 614

his perception that there is
something which is supra-
cosmic and the highest re-
mote origin of his exbt-
ence, 601-602

his preoccupation with his
physical existence is only
a first step, and if he
stops there he has made
no real progress, 649-650

his seeking for the explana-
tion of his existence really
an individual seeking af-
ter individual perfection
and the justification for
this, 619-620

his urge towards spirituality
is the inner driving of the
spirit within him towards
emergence and the two
sides of this urge, 753-754

if a spiritual unfolding on
earth is the hidden truth
of our birth into Matter,
then man as he is cannot
be its last term, 753-754

if he is fixed in his imper-
fections then humanity
cannot be fulfilled in di-
vinity, 366-368

may linger for a time in one
of those annexes of the
other worlds created by
his habit jal beliefs or by
the type of his aspiration
in the mortal body, 712-

713

means of a conscious transi-
tion provided for among
his spiritual powers and
his possession of the ca-
pacity of self-exceeding a
part of the plan on which
the creative energy has
built him, 748-75°

nature of his physical mind,
his vital mentality and
his thinking mind, 372-

373
necessity of accepting the
ancient idea of his hav-
ing within him not only
the physical but formula-
tions of being up to the

supreme spiritual, con-
cealed or latent, their
development determining
the soul's internatal re-
sort, 715-716

need for his self-knowledge
and his double line of
search and finding, 619-
620

place, period and character
of his temporary dwelling
in the supraphysical de-
termined by his relation
with higher planes of ex-
istence developed by him
in his evolution on earth,
711-712

possibility of his projection
into other planes partly
in life and with a full
completeness after the
dissolution of the body,
702-703

reason for his final resort to
his psychic habitation, ar-
riving at it beyond the
vital level according to
his development in life,
after discarding his vital
and mental sheaths on his
internatal journey and re-
taining only the essence
of past experiences in
memory, 713-714

reason for regarding action
as the chief determinant
of his being and his fu-
ture, 719

riddle of the true nature of
his being and the ulti-
mate meaning of his life
here, 611

to affirm himself in the uni-
verse is his first business,
but also to evolve and
finally to exceed himself,
609-611

the condition in which a
complete solution of the
oppositions of his nature
can be arrived at, 603-
605

the view that all his aims
are in the end transitory
and futile, 374-376

the sense in which only he
creates the Divine Im-
age, the forms of the
gods and new planes and

INDEX

worlds within him and
the nature and results of
this creation, 693-694
the system of civilisation
built by him too big for
his hmited mental and
still more limited spiritual
and moral capacity, 933-
934
three preoccupations in his
search for some unity and
fullness of the complexity
of his nature: but what
the modern spirit has
sought for is the economic
social ultimate, a per-
fected social being in a
perfected economic so-
ciety, 931-932
to search for and find the
spiritual key of things is
the law of his being, 357
various ways in which he
can offer his being to
the Divine Existence and
their results, 615-616
Man and the animal, difference
between, see also Evolu-
tionary transition, 635-
636
Evolution, Ch. LI
Man, his early preparatory
business in the evolution-
ary steps of Nature is
principally to occupy him-
self with his own ego,
616-617
the mental being, definition
of the consciousness, 504
Manas, 59, 61
Mandukya Upanishad, 665 f
quotation from, 477 f
translation from, 18, 123,
269, 494
Maniac; his illusions founded
on an extravagant mis-
fitting of actuals, 392
Manichean double principle of

good and evil, 446
Manicheanism, 89
Manifestation, 421, 430, 446 f
ascending and descending,

288-289
cosmic, see Cosmic Manifes-
tation
depends upon being, but
also upon consciousness
and its power or degree,
427-428

993

diversity in oneness the law
of, 790

divine, 377

imperfection in the, — not
binding law of life but a
transitional state in hu-
man consciousness, 356-

. 358

its character in its original
supramental movement,
870

its meaninglessness if all
things are regarded as
fixed in their statutory
law of being, 366-368

lower and upper hemi-
spheres of, 591-592

meaning of, 569

nature and purpose of the
law of imperfection in,
360-367

progressive, 368-369, 369-
370

various possibilities of, see
Reality, infinite, 700-701
Manifested, 39

universe, see Universe

Mankind, life of, — in recent

times the whole stress

has passed to a scientific

mechanisation of the, 928

present evolutionary crisis
of, see Evolutionary crisis
of mankind, present
manomaya, 98

Purusha, 46, 157 f
manomayah prdnasanranetd,

477 f

Mantra, rationale of the In-
dian use of, 836 f

Manu, 46

Many, 882

Many, the, 35, 36, 40, 57,
114, 117, i3S» 136-138,
142, 143, 194, 229, 256,
288, 304, 307, 309» 3io»
323, 336, 347, 348, 434,
438-439, 443, 453, 518,
519, 530, 566, 570» 572,
589, 673, 683, 6S5
their dependence on the One
or the All-Soul, 6S5-6S6

Many-in-One, 117

Many in the One, eternity of
the, 303-305
need to suppose an original
immanence of the, 685

Mara, 32

Marvels, 923

994

Mass consciousness, its charac-
ter and its relation to the
individual, 617-618
mind, subconscious, — even
if we give credit to it for
creating religion it must
be the occult or mystic
element in it that did it
and it must have found
individuals through

whom it could emerge,

773
Master, 282, 288, 561, 624
Master-consciousness, 158, 177
Material and economic life;
modern conscious stress
on it was a spiritual re-
trogression and the dan-
gers of this, 932-933
Material existence, as affected
by the ascending series,
237-238
double term of, 607
Material interpretation of ex-
istence, origin and utility
of, 582
object, 492

nature of its outer absorbed
form-consciousness, see
under Evolutionary tran-
sition, 634-635
objects, the condition in
which alone they can ex-
ercise powers and influ-
ence that can be called
good or evil, 540-541
things, not hmited by their

manifestation, 426
universe, 269-271, 275, 276
universe, see Cosmic exist-
ence Universe, etc., 685-
686
universe, nature of, 174,

232-233
nature of the seeming mys-
tery of, 224
world, formula of, 177
world, nature of, 743
Materialism, 12, 14, 21, 25, 81
Materialism, rationalistic, 12
Materialism, reason why its
gospel proves always in
the end a vain and help-
less creed, 650
Materialist, 9, 10-12, 18, 20,

23
Materialist, consistent, — seeks
a partial and short-lived
power, etc. as much as the

INDEX

inexorable mechanism of
the laws of Nature will
tolerate, 434
Denial the, 11

impossible for him to prove
that our consciousness
ends with the death: no
convincing proof either
that it survives or that it
does not outlast the
physical dissolution, 450
Materialistic thinker; his dis-
tinction between the ex-
trovert and the introvert
and the view holding
the extrovert attitude for
acceptance as the only
safety are based on false
conceptions, 911-912
view of spiritual evolution,
see Spiritual evolution,
materialistic view of
Mathematical finite unit, 304
Matter, 4, 5-6, 8-10, 11-12,
14-15, 17-20, 21, 22, 23,
24, 26, 27, 31, 46, 47, 57,
64, 76, 77, 78, 82-83, 84,
93, 94, 100, loi, 103, 107,
119, 120, 124, 130, 136,
141, 150, 152, 161, 163,
164, 166 f, 166, 168, 170-
17s, 177, 179, 184, 185,
186, 188, 190, 192, 193,
197, 201-203, 212, 214-
217, 219-223, 224-228,
229-233, 234, 235-236,
237, 238, 243, 246, 249-
251, 252, 258, 259, 261,
263, 264, 271, 276-278,
279, 294, 301, 310, 315,
316, 319, 326, 341, 344,
377, 395-396, 423, 435,
461, 501, 503, 504, 527,
538, 540-542, 544, 571,
582, 583, 589, 591-593,
597, 599, 600, 607, 609,
610, 622, 626 f, 626, 628-
630, 631, 635, 640, 643,
645, 649, 655, 661-663,
664, 666, 672, 674, 676,
678, 683, 686-688, 693,
694, 700-701, 703, 704,
705, 707, 713, 714, 717,
733, 734-736, 737, 738-
740, 742, 743, 744, 746,
747-748, 750, 753, 754,
755-757, 759, 760, 777,
780, 785, 815, 820, 825,
827, 836 f, 837, 839, 846,

850, 855, 868, 870, 876,
900-901, 902, 920, 934,
946, Ch. LII

a status of being of Spirit
made an object of sense,
431

also can be seen to be the
Brahman and a sacramen-
tal attitude in all dealings
with it possible, 876

body of, 838

consciousness, 83

could not exist if it were
not a substance and
power of the spirit, 678

description of, 44, 217, 232-
233, 242

evolution in, see Evolution
in Matter

falsehood and evil cannot
exist in, 540-541

inconscient, 508, 837

inconscient, — man not a
seed of, 538

justification for the rejec-
tion of, 223

justification of the creation
of, 573

Knot of, Ch. LIII

life and mind begin to ap-
pear when its organisation
is sufficient to admit
them, but its perfect or-
ganisation comes with the
evolution of life and
mind, 850

living, 735, 738, 745, 748,
756

nature of, 317

nature of the indwelling
secret consciousness in,
540

reason for the limited na-
ture of the power of re-
ception of the forms of,
634-635

secret character of the in-
dwelling Consciousness in,
653

space of, 326

the first formula arrived at
by Bhrigu, 662

the phenomenon of an in-
conscient physical indi-
vidualisation is the first
result of the mask of in-
conscience assumed by the
Cosmic Spirit in it, 821

theory of the sole reality of,

395
three fundamental opposi-
tions to Spirit, 223-229
truth of, 215-216, 220
Matter; it alone appears in the
primal works of Nature as
the sole dumb and stark
cosmic reality, 755-756
not fundamentally real and
can no longer be taken as
the sole reality, 582

not the original reality, but
a form of Spirit, 592-593
Matter-energy, 395, 823
Matter-forces, 655
Matter and Spirit, see Spirit
and Matter

oneness of, 221-222, 223

cosmic, 204, 484, 625
Maya, 9, 21, 29, 31, 32, 39-40,
49, 78, 79-80, 95-96, lOI,
102, 109, 126, 130, 132,
146, 163, 196, 283, 340,
348, 373, 374, 387-388,
390, 392, 394, 395, 436,
439, 440, 442-443, 445,
S05-507, 515, 568, 570,
575, 613, 664-666, 669,
670, 674; Ch. XXX; see
also Consciousness-Force ;
Infinite Consciousness, 295,
296, 313, 320, 321, 322,
323, 328, 329

see also under Shankara;
Cosmic Illusion; Illusion;
Universe ; Manifestation,
etc.

a theory of it in the sense
of illusion creates more
difficulties than it solves,
417-419

all solutions on the illusion-
ist basis fail to satisfy be-
cause they do not estab-
lish the inevitability of
the illusionist hypothesis,
406-408

as an absolute unreality,
401-403

as an original creator, 389,
390

divine, 141, 148, 152, 196,
611, Ch. XIII

if the world is a manifesta-
tion of a divine Possibility
there would be no need

INDEX

to bring in a phantasy of,
376
inapplicability of analogies
offered as explanations for
the operation of, 387-388
in certain formulations of

Illusionisra, 402-403
in the classical theory of

Illusionism, 396-401
its nature in the Eternal,

515-516
lower, 196, 199
lower and the higher, 108-

109, 196
meaning of, 95
original, 260-261
original and later meanings

of, 437-438
Overmind, see Overmind

Maya
Shankara view of the quali-
fied reality of, 407-409
spiritual justification for a
world created by, see
World created by Maya
supreme, 152
triple aspect of, 309-310,

313-314
undivine, 149
undivine, — Vedic meaning

of, 437-438
Vedic meaning, 108
works of, 296
Maya-force, 398
Maya-nature, 399
Maya and the human mind,
analogy of, see under Hu-
man mind and Maya
as a quahfied reahty, 403-

409
of Brahman, character of,

308
of Ignorance, 261
of knowledge, 261
of the universe, 308
Mayavada theory, universe
and individual life in the
extreme view of, 670-671
Mayavadin, 80
Mayavadins, philosophies of

the, 377
Mayic creation of the Ishwara,

world as the, 414
Mayic universe, 416
Mayic world-consciousness,

415
Mechanical Necessity, see Ne-
cessity I

995

remedies, see Non-spiritual
methods
Mechanism, theory of, 320
Medicine, can kill or harm as
well as cure or benefit,
540
Medicine man as priest, 772
Memory, no, 494-496, 498,

502, 521, 522
Memory, a poverty-stricken
substitute for an integral
direct consciousness, 453-
454
as one of the devices of
mental consciousness, 462-
464
Ego and self-experience

Ch. XXXVII
great stress laid upon its
action in a certain line
of thought, 448-449

its device brought in by the
succession of experiences
and the fact of an indirect
action of the experiencing
consciousness under the
conditions of our dividing
mentality, 461-463

its importance in our sur-
face self-experience, and
its limitations, 459-460

limit and function of, 463-
465

nature and limits of, 449-
450

not the essence of persistent
experience even in the
succession of Time, and
would not be necessarv- if
our consciousness were of
an undivided movement,
462

physical, 657, 662

self-consciousness and the
Ignorance, Ch. XXXVI

subconscious, — in Nature,
see Nature, 463

surface, see Surface memory

two applications which the
mind makes of, 449-450

its place in the phenomenon
of double personality,
465-466

of past lives; a serious ob-
stacle if a constant de-
velopment of being by a
developing cosmic experi-
ence is the meaning and
the building of a new per-

996

sonality in a new birth is
the method of rebirth, 729
of past Uves; its denial a
great injustice if rebirth
were governed by a sys-
tem of rewards and pun-
ishments, 728-729

of past lives, reason for the
inevitability of its absence
from the surface mind
and the possibility of its
emergence from the sub-
liminal at a certain stage
of development, 729-730
Men who have no strong cen-
tralising Person in their
depths, nature of the ac-
tion of, 882-883
Mental and material being
and life to the spiritual
and supramental being
and life, the whole sense
of the passage from, 916

and the divine life, inter-
space of, see Interspace

and the plant, difference be-
tween, 631-633

and vital being, inner, see
Inner mental and vital be-
ing

and vital being, outer, — cir-
cumstances in which their
survival in the subtle
body possible, aud the re-
sult of this survival, 731-
733

and vital planes, their full
powers possessed by the
gnostic being, 870
Mental being, 459, 460, 525,
526, 650, 859; see also
under Man; ]\^ind, etc.

as the nodus of the per-
sistent individual and ag-
gregate hfe, 187

even the presence of cosmic
consciousness in it and
an awareness of tran-
scendent Reality might
not of themselves bring
about a dynamic solution
which is possible to the
supramental being, 865-
866

in^ material life, Hellenic
idea of, — and its effects
on European civilisation,
931 I

INDEX

its direct self-consciousness
goes behind mentality to
the Timelessness of an
eternal present, 457

its discord would begin to
diminish and disappear as
the mind grows into the
gnosis, 919-921

nature and limitation of, 99,
192-193, 227, 250-251

nature of, 280-281
Mental cognition, three ele-
ments of, 395

consciousness, its state when
passing beyond its limits,
see Absolute, 569-570

control, is an expedient, not
a solution of the problem
of good and evil, 556-557)
558

entity, surface, see Surface
mental entity

individuality ; its ego-centric
nature on the surface is a
fruitful seedplot for false-
hood, 550-551

individuality ; its three types
in terms of Sankhya psy-
chology, see also under
Sattwic, Rajasic and Ta-
masic intelligence, 551-552

intelligence, is a necessary
stage of transition, see
Surface consciousness,
547-548

intelligence and its power of
reason, not able to change
the ptinciple and persist-
ent character of human
life, 787

man, has not been Nature's
last effort or highest
reach, 642-643

man, his character and the
reason for the limited
type of harmony arrived
at by him, 800-801

Man: perfected, — is the rar-
est and highest of Na-
ture's normal human crea-
tures ; to go farther he has
to make active in mind,
life and body the spiritual
principle, 642

Man: religion, occultism and
spiritual philosophy by
themselves cannot create
in him the spiritual being,
unless and until they open

the door to spiritual ex-
perience, 782-783

Nature and Supramental
Nature, see Supramental
Nature and Mental Na-
ture

or spiritual mental planes;
condition in which it is
possible for the soul to
live consciously there dur-
ing its internatal journey,
713

personality, 459, 859

standards and values, pos-
sible nature of the reap-
pearance of whatever
spiritual truth is behind
them on a higher life, 942

statement of things, is not
truth bodied, pure and
nude, but a draped figure,
533

— vital, physical activities
in the worlds, — nature of
the operation, 820-821

vital, physical existence, —
their place in divine or
spiritual Hfe, 648-649
Mentalised perception of life,
its stress by the Greek
thinkers and the causes of
its ultimate failure and
its result, 651-652
Mentality, 18

corporeal, — action, 156-157

division by Time primary
condition of, 461-462

four elements in all func-
tionings of, 460-461

greater, — a conscious com-
munication and guidance
from it possible, 656

human, — its character and
the function of ego in it,
494-495

human, — reason why it re-
gards all as the not-self
except its one self, 504

its dominant modern trend
eager for human hfe ful-
filment regards the spir-
itual tendency in human-
ity as having come to
very little, 785

life, — action of, 156-157

not a full conscious activity
in its own kind if one
does not exceed the in-

dividual mental limits,
909
pure, — action of, 157-158
three degrees of, 639-641

Mermaid, 392

Metaphysics, defects of, 66-67

Metaphysical distinction, val-
ue and weakness of, 347-
348
knowledge, should naturally
be the determinant of our
whole conception of life
and attitude to it, 594
thought, see Reality omni-
present, 292-293 ; that
general and ultimate solu-
tion which includes and
accounts for all likely to
be the best in, 419

Might, 16, 94

Mind, 5, 7, 8, 9, 14, 15, 17, 22,
26-28, 34, 42, 44, 46, 57,
84, 93, 95, 100, loi, 109-
112, 114, 115, 117, 118-
120, 121, 124, 128, 130,
131, 134, 146, 149, 150,
152, 154-1SS, 157-159,
161-163, 171, 172-176,
182, 183, 185, 187, 188,
190, 191, 192, 194, 195,

197, 198, 202, 210, 212,

214-220, 222-224, 225,

229, 235, 236, 242, 246,

249-251, 254, 255, 259,

260-262, Ch. XXVIII,
273, 275-276, 278, 279,
280-281, 288-289, 292,
293, 294, 310, 319, 327,
341, 366, 387, 388, 394,
395, 406, 421, 423, 428,
431, 439, 441-444, 449,
463, 464, 466, 479, 501,
503, 504, 506, 528, 537,
538, 571, 575, 582-583,
591, 592, 593, 597, 610,
626 f, 628-629, 631, 655,
662, 664, 672, 674, 676,
678, 684, 687, 694, 696,
698, 700-701, 735, 737,
738, 748, 750, 753, 766,
777, 820, 846, 847, 855,
874, 890, 901, 902, 903,
906

a dark figure of supermind,
183

all existence as the subjec-
tive creation of: conse-
quences of this conception
and it invalidity, 573-576

INDEX

an intermediate power of
consciousness with lower
levels before it and higher
levels to which it is aris-
ing, 901-902

as a "barren mother" and
Maya or Avidya as a
grandmother of the uni-
verse, 442

ascending, — can dwell with
satisfaction in the large
aspects of truth that come
into view as in a struc-
ture but these structures
can constantly expand
into a larger structure re-
sulting in a great totahty
of truth capable of in-
finite enlargement, 835-
836

can only be a secondary
power of existence, 575-
576

can only have the direct
consciousness of self in
the moment of its present
being, 453-454

character and functions of,
iio-iii, 118-119, 150-152,
154-155, 161-162, 216,
217, 218

characteristic power of, 527-
528

cosmic, 203, 252, 253, 255,
256, 262, 484, 624, 625

divided between various
possibilities, is led in three
different directions in its
search for what must be
to any of which it may
give an exclusive pref-
erence, and the nature
and significance of these
directions, 904-906

Divine, — meaning of, 151-
152, 218

Dream and Hallucination
Ch. XXXIII

effects of an entire passivity,

513

even spiritualised, — can only
exercise an influence on
the earthUfe — but not
bring about a transforma-
tion of that fife, 787

function in Truth, 158-159,
161, 175, 246-247, 249-
250

fundamental error of, 158

997

greater, see Higher Mind

human, see Human nund

higher parts of, 656

higher ranges of, 829

human, — and Maya, see un-
der Human mind and
Maya

human, — even when stand-
ing back from it we see
only its process and not
any original source of our
mental determination,
279-280

human, — ways of self-ex-
ceeding of, 251-253

if there is a power of self-
knowledge beyond it
which is timeless in es-
sence, then we have two
powers of consciousness —
Knowledge and Igno-
rance, 451-452

Ignorant nature of, 451

intermediate term in crea-
tion, 109, 242

its ascent taking place for
many in trance but per-
fectly possible also in a
waking consciousness,
810-811

its conceptions of unreality,
see Unreality, 429-430

its imperfect nature and the
need to evolve the spir-
itual principle, 651-653

its Umiting standardisation
cannot take up into itself
the whole of life, 887-888

its power to create unreal-
ity, see unreality, 42 8

its power to make effective
formations but not orig-
inal creation in the void,

693

its way of preparmg for a
spiritual life, see Human
development Spirit, se-
cret, 637-638

knows things by their signs,
forms properties, etc. and
not in their occult self-
being and essence, 436

lid of, see Lid of Mind

life and body, — objects of
their seeking and the
means by which they can
arrive at their full pleni-
tude, see Spiritual con-
sciousness, 604-605

998

life and body, war be-
tween, 197-198

Life and Matter, — assigning
a sole reality to any one
principle a half-truth, 592

Life and Matter, lower
hemisphere of, 591-592

life and physical being;
their presence within us as
powers of the Spirit and
their nature and influence
on the surface being and
the means of harmonising
these multifarious ele-
ments, 797-799

modern, see Modern mind

nature and function of, 435,
436

nature, its method for the
evolutionary production
of the Spiritual and Su-
pramental being, 749-750

nature of, 181, 210, 229, 250,
280-281, 285

nature of its seeking for
knowledge, 872-873

new-born, — seemed only a
servant of life to an en-
lightened Witness of crea-
tion, 756-757

nodus of Ignorance, 152

not an original constructor
of the universe but an
intermediary power, 577

not quite distinct from its
own life-matter in the
animal but becoming sep-
arate in man, 759-760

personal, — its relation with
the universal Mind, 281

physical, see Physical Mind

purpose behind the errors
of, 508

reason for its inability to
achieve Supermind merely
by its own effort, 819

reason of mistaking for its
own activities the intima-
tions of the psyche rising
to the surface and there-
fore following them or
not according to its own
turn at the moment, 793-
794

regarded as a flux or the
sole reality creating sub-
jective structures, 573-574

self of, see Self of mind

INDEX

separative nature of, 516-
517

separative tendency of, 128-
129

spiritualised, see Spiritual-
ised mind

subconscious, 82, 163, 169,
170

subconscious, working in
Matter and Force of, 161,
270

subjection to life and matter
of, see Occult knowledge,
920-921

subliminal, see Subliminal

the stage in which its par-
ticularising tendency be-
comes Ignorance, 435

theories of cosmic existence
that imply a premier im-
portance of, 684-685

thinking, see Thinking mind

to transcend it is the second
condition of divine living,
909

unable at first to retain its
power of conscious dis-
cernment and defining ex-
perience when it rises to
a higher state supercon-
scient to it but possibility
of this power to develop
and act and its conse-
quences, 810-81 I

universal, 280, 281, 575-576,
837, 910

universal, — there are in it
ranges above our mental-
ity which are instruments
of the cosmic truth-cog-
nition, 753

veiled universal, 920

vital, see Vital mind
Mind; giving up all its forma-
tions, judgments etc., nec-
essary in order to be re-
placed first by an intuitive
and then by an overmind
or supramental function-
ing, 826-827

inexplicability of the things
in the views that regard
the nature of the original
Consciousness in things to
be of the nature of mind,
441-442

its concept of eternity comes
only to a continuous suc-
cession of moments of be-

ing in an Eternal Time,
451

its labouring effort to seek
knowledge contrasted

with the comprehending
movement of knowledge
by indentity of the gnos-
tic consciousness, 872-874

its nature and relation to
original Existence, 388-
393

nature of its faculty of
memory, see under Mem-
ory

not the true reality and the
creator even of existence,
but an outcome of Over-
mind, 593

real world cannot be known
if we consider it alone,
443-444

reason for its difficulty in
going beyond itself and
spiritualising the nature
and the character of the
influence and preliminary
change established in
some parts of the nature
by calling in the spiritual
force, 830-831

reason why it cannot be
transformed at once and
the nature of action of
the higher transforming
power in its descent, 851

spiritual evolution begins
when man as mind is
capable of the movements
of spirituality mind itself
rising to its highest per-
fection by the growth of
the spirit, 850

subjective nature of the di-
vision of its mutable ex-
perience into two parts as
subjective and objective,

459
Mind-action, 441
Mind-ego, 911
Mind-Energy, 167, 262, 281,

623, 738, 823
Mind-forces, 691, 701
Mind-Life-Body, 163
Mind-Nature, 317, 441
Mind-plane of pure thought

and intelligence, character

of, 641-642
Mind-self, 796

Mind-types, 273
Mind-world, fullness of its
powers and principles in
its own greater existence
influencing our earth-be-
ing only partially, 698-
699, 701-702
its pressure evolves mind
here and helps us to find
a leverage for its expan-
sion, 696
Mind and body, human, see
Human mind and body
ego, 496

life and body, their retard-
ing influence on the
emerging spiritual forma-
tion the reason for their
total rejection, 764-765
life; evil consequences of
their regulation and mech
anisation by a forced
compression of their free-
dom, 936-937
life ; their dependence on the
first established evolu-
tionary principle of Mat-
ter is a sign that neither
of them is the original
creative Power, 628
life, their free play essential
for the growth of con-
sciousness, 936
life, they have to descend
into Matter and suit
themselves to its condi-
tions, but because they
cannot attain to their own
full force in these condi-
tions they need to call in
a higher power to liverate
and fulfil them: but
higher spiritual-mental
powers undergo the same
disability when descend-
ing to life and matter and
the change made is not
dynamically absolute,

814-81S
Life, universal, 536, 540
life, view of their origin
from Matter not tenable,
686-687
Supermind, Ch. XXVIII
Supermind, a veil between
them exists as said in
the Upanishad, 528-529
compared, 250

INDEX

the highest Reality, see 442-

443
the life-force, possibility of
bringing their potential
powers to bear upon ma-
terial things and happen-
ings, 778-779
the original Consciousness

and Power, 392
Will, divine, — as creating
the cosmos, 279
Mind Consciousness, 629
developing in life, first func-
tional aspect of, 279
ego, 619

evolving and original, differ-
ence between, 250
Energy, veiled, 748
Illusion, see Hallucination,

388
in life, 546, 547
in living Matter, evolution

of, 745
in man, order of, see Order,

888-890
in the universal world, ham-
pered and half-effective
nature of, 920
in us, conscious, nature of,

919-920
of Ignorance, 287
Space, 327
Mirage, analogy of, 386, 387
Missing links of evolution,
630; see under Evolution
of consciousness, 631-632
of Evolutionary transition,
631-632
Modern mind, — an evolution
of innate and latent but
as yet unevolved powers
of consciousness is not
considered admissable by
it — but there is nothing
miraculous in such an
evolution, 923-924
nature of the formula it pre-
sents us in this crisis of
humanity as a light for its
solution, and the inad-
equacy and dangers of
this formula, 935-936
Modern spirit; its abandon-
ment of the spiritual pre-
occupation of man for an
economic social ultimate
was in fact a civilised re-
version to the early bar-

999

baric state of man, 931-
932
Modern thought, denial of re-
birth in, see Rebirth, 666
irrationality of its disbelief
in supraphysical beings,
537-638
its docma of physical ex-
perience as the only truth,
702
Monastic life, reason for its
formation in the past and
its character, 939
Monism, 9, 15, 21, 31
spiritualised vital,— rebirth
possible but not inevitable
in the theory of, 668-669

Monistic, 38

thesis, extreme view and
consequence of, see Ma-
ya vada theory
Vedantic, 23

Moon, analogy of, see Optical
illusion

Moral evil or sensational suf-
fering, see Evil and suffer-
ing

Moral law, see Law, 892

Moral law ; this vast interplay
of cosmic Forces cannot
be determined in its re-
sults solely by this one
factor, 725-726

Morality, relative standards
of, see Good and evil,
556-557
a limiting and frustrating
ignorance is the cause of
our belief in, 502

Mother, 6, 96, 200, 214

Mother, universal, 624

Mother-of-pearl and silver;
the analogy of, 387

Movement, 68-70, 71, 74

Motion, 64

Multipersonality, confused ac-
tion of, 882-S83

Multipersonality of man, see
Psychic being, 796-798;
Surface Being, 798-799

Multiple, 217

Multiplicity, 27, 35, 40, 41?
439

Multiplicity of souls, unity of,
see Brahman, 516-517

Mundaka Upanishad, quota-
tion and translation from.

1000

INDEX

453 f; 13 f, 505, 531, 565,
682, 755

Mystery, original indetermina-
ble, 283

Mysteries, their profanation
by the invasion of the
lower elements of human
nature dreaded by the
early mystics and the
means adopted by them
to prevent it, 774
of existence, three, see Su-
pramental being, 863-865

Mystic, early, see Vedic seers,

432-433
Mystic, illumined, 841
"Mystic", infrarational, — often
inspired by communica-
tions on the vital level
from a dark and danger-
ous source, 842
Mystic, in the extreme ma-
terialistic view and in the
view of the modern mind
eager for human life ful-
filment, 785

philosophic, 434

reason for the ascetic or
otherwordly tendency of
the, 785-786

the, 783

was everywhere the creator
of religion and imposed
his secret discoveries in
the form of belief, myth
and practice on the mass
human mind, 773

and his knowledge, objec-
tion against his method of
the discovery of Truth
and against the Truth
that he discovers, 787-
788

and spiritual experience,
field of, 253

experience, a new attempt
at, 772

new powers of conscious-
ness developing in, see
Powers consciousness,

new

philosophy, 765
Mystics, 741

early, — reason why they
dreaded the profanation
of the mysteries by the
invasion of the spurious,

773-775
founded their endeavour on

a power of suprarational
knowledge and truth of
occult experience not pos-
sessed by men in the
mass, 774-775

Mysticism, 6, 9, 339

and occultism, see under
Occultism

Myth, 772, 773

N

Name, 46, 108, 143, 246, 247
deeper sense of, 306

Nameless, 246

Nara, 16 f

Narayana, 16

ndstyanto vistarasya me, 836

Nation, as a collective being,
927

Nature, 3-6, 9, 12, 14, 17, 42, 45
47, 48, 50, 54, 64, 69, 72,
77, 78, 83, 84, 90, 99, 100,
loi, 103, 116, 120, 126,
128, 129, 130, 140, 141,
150, 161, 163, 164, 165 f,
166, 170, 171, 185-186,
189, 190, 193, 194, 196,
204, 206, 207, 208, 209,
210, 211, 225, 233, 244,
246, 248, 251, 260, 263,
264, 269, 270, 272, 273-
274, 276, 277, 279, 280,
282, 288, 294-295, 296,
297, 301, 313-318, 320-
323, 330, 332, 351, 357,
360, 363, 364, 367, 377,
383, 389, 391, 399, 419,
425, 434, 449, 463, 46s,
467, 468, 471, 475, 478,
479, 484, 495, 496, 499,
506, 509 f, 510, 514, 516,
519, 524, 525, 526, 527,
529, 532, 534, 541-542,
544, 547, 548, 554, 555-
557, 562, 581, 582, 590,
592, 597, 601, 603, 604,
605, 606, 613, 614, 616-
620, 621-623, 624-625,
630, 632, 634, 635, 636,
637, 638, 639, 640, 642,
643-645, 648, 657, 664,
667, 675-677, 678, 679-
681, 684, 685, 699, 703,
708, 717, 718-720, 722-
727, 728, 729, 730, 731,
756, 760, 769-772, 777-
779, 784, 787, 790, 791- '

793, 794, 796, 798, 801,
806, 808, 813, 815, 819-
822, 823, 824, 825, 828,
830, 838, 850, 855, 860-
861, 863, 864, 877, 880,
881, 882, 883, 889, 890,
891, 899, 906, 916, 917,
918, 920, 921, 923, 926,
927, 928, 931, 932, 937,
939, 940, 941, 947

a secret universal seeking
for the whole divine pres-
ent in, 354

aim of the cycles of, 573

being of, — reason for its
double demand, 905-906

Being in, see Being in Na-
ture

begins slowly to manifest
our occult parts as the
evolution proceeds and
the psychic principle puts
forward and develops a
soul personality to repre-
sent it, 794-795

character of the action of
higher powers and the
difficulty in their task of
assumption and assimila-
tion of the difficult stuff
of, 851

chief function of religion in
the wider purpose of, 777

collective and communal as
well as individual and
egoistic, 897

complexities of her process
and the necessity of
working out the change
separately in each part of
our being make her task
of spiritual transforma-
tion difficult, 813-815

cannot be anything else but
a power of the self, 359,
360
Nature cosmic, 295, 309, 324,
384, 486, 617, 626, 635,
659, 724, 807, 823, 827,
838, 845, 848, 853, 861,
866

is the living ground of
a vast debate between
a darkness of Ignorance
and a light of knowledge,
538

life-ego a machinery of, 555
Nature, determinism in, 274

detailed memory of past

INDEX

lOOI

lives of minor importance
to her work, 730-731

divine, — double power of,
116

double process of the
terrestrial evolutionary
working of, 735-736

energy of, 274

evolutionary, 271, 633, 639,
641, 680, 696, 698, 769,
816, 847, 848, 856, 946

double principle of: the eso-
teric and the exoteric
forms of the spiritual ev-
olution, see Religion, 773-

775

dumb secrecy of her Incon-
science without revelation
of any significance or pur-
pose in the earliest stages
of, 755-756

expansive movement of re-
ligion was an inherent
necessity of the spiritual
urge in, see Religion, 773-
775

final aim of its mental ev-
olution in man, 643-644

has to give the right of per-
sistence to things once es-
tablished by her in order
to bring a sufficient
steadiness and solidity to
her steps, 837, 838

her critical choice in man,
935

hidden trend of, 588

human values of good and
evil one of the indispen-
sable steps in the process
of, 541-542, 555

in spite of the denial of re-
ligion, occultism and all
that is supraphysical by a
strong intellectualising
tendency, it still keeps
alive her ulterior inten-
tions in the minds of a
few and uses man's
greater mental evolution
to raise them to a higher
plane and deeper issues,
see Religion, 770-772

in her first awakening of
man to a rudimentary
spiritual consciousness
must begin with a vague
sense of the Infinite and
the Invisible surrounding

the physical being, see
Early man, 769-771
if its action ended in Over-
mind, the Overmind could
only go farther by an
opening of the gates of
the Spirit into the upper
hemisphere and a will to
enable the soul to depart
into the Transcendence,

847

is a totaUty of ascending
powers of being which ex-
ercise in their action on
each other a power of
mutual modification, 848

its first action in a type of
being and consciousness is
to develop it with utmost
capacity for a new stage
in the evolution

persistence of the original
intuition and total move-
ment seen in the religions
of India, see Religion in
India, 775-776

possible consequences in the
whole evolution by the
presence of the liberated
supramental light and
force at the head of, 860-
861

secret intention of, 903

the idealisation of the com-
munal ego and life-force
mistakenly regarded as
soul of the community is
a reversion towards some-
thing she had left behind
her, 936

the law of its gradation has
to be satisfied even in the
complexity of its process,
850
. the necessity of recovering
the triple aspect of reality
in the manifestation de-
termines the ultimate
trend of its process, 589

the principle of the emer-
gent activity existing
precedent to its present
field of action found to be
present throughout in,
759-760

triple stages of the journey
of, 626-627

what it presses for, 938
Nature : evolving, — integral

emergence the goal of,

609-610

for preparation of its re-
calcitrant parts Power has
to come at intervals and
work meanwhile behind
the veil, 813-814

four cognitive methods of,
470

fundamental method and
sense of the strivings of,
4-5

fulfilment of the ulterior
intention of, see Spiritual
being, 782-784

gods as powers of, 745

gnostic, 855

human, 916-918

her vigilance for her first
steps and for the main-
tenance of their mental
and material ground, 600-
601

ignorant, 942

infinitely variable funda-
mental oneness the very
principle of, 307-308

is the external proof of an
indivisible all-conscious-
ness behind the ignorance,

364

ignorance and inconscience
of, 361

inconscient, 360, 502, 554,
685

inferior, 600, 652

its intuitions received al-
ways by the individual,

773-774

intellectual approach to the
highest knowledge an in-
dispensable aid to its ev-
olution of spirit in the hu-
man being, 780-781

justice of her normal ar-
rangement that the energy
and capacity put forward
should have in its owm
kind its fitting response
from her, 721-722

lower, 838

mass experience, discovery
or expression not the first
method of, 773-774
Nature material, 330, 373, 528,
580-581, 628, 649, 663,
677, 683, 685, 699, 7",
714, 71S, 725, 732, 870,
877-878, 886, 904, 945

1002

INDEX

and vital, — non-ethicality
of, 90

character of the Incon-
science of, see Incon
science of material Nature

control of, 344

deification of, 614

evolution in, see Evolution
in material Nature

first and fundamental ap-
pearance of, 272-274

liberated and sovereign ac-
ceptance of it possible
only if there is a changed
communion of the Spirit
with Matter, 875-877

or physical, 44, 57

secret soul in, 524, 525, 527

laws of, 274
Nature, mental and life devel-
opments her first preoccu-
pation in man, 771

method of the evolution of,
547-48

mundane, 85'7

not reward or punishment
but rather an inherent
value of natural relations
and the lessons of experi-
ence the fundamental
value of the reactions of,
725-726

our normal ignorant, — a
derivation from superna-
ture, 942

occult process of, 907
Nature, outer, see Outer

nature
Nature, physical, 399, 429,
485, 517, 534, 538, 540,
771, 778, 785

mind does not see that her
exterior process is only a
secondary appearance

covering a greater secret
process, 907
Nature permits the good corn
and the tares and weeds
to grow together for a
long time because only so
is her own growth possi-
ble, 769-770

possibility of a limited cor-
respondence between vi-
tal-physical good and ill
and ethical good and ill
but no inseparable co-
herence between these
two values in the total

method of the return of,
724-725

present life of, see Surface
existence, externalised

process of the evolutionary
emergence of, 767-768

reversal or turn over of
consciousness a general
principle in its each radi-
cal transition and the
emergence of humanity
only a new application of
this principle

superior, 593

superior and inferior, 540

spiritual man is her supreme
supernormal effort of hu-
man creation, 642-643

spiritual change through the
mind not the complete di-
vine dynamisation of, 802-
803

supramental, 858, 873

supraphysical, 538, 691, 713
Nature, terrestrial, 855, 862

evolutionary goal of, 4

possible for it by a long ev-
olution to enter into a
close contact with the
higher planes and make
possible the appearance
of a race of mental beings
thinking and acting not
by the intellect but mainly
by an intuitive mentality
followed by overmental-
isation, and the possible
limitations of this toil-
some endeavour, 819-820

three steps of harmonised
formulation possible in
the ascent of the, see under
Physical man. Vital man
and Mental man
Nature, the law of its proce-
dure bringing in the ne-
cessity of a gradation in
the last transitional proc-
ess that leads us from the
spiritualised mind to su-
permind, 829-830

the view that its variation
is the sign of a varying
life-energy and psychol-
ogy

three principles of, 316

to be or become something
is the whole labour of her
force — to know, feel, do

are subordinate energies
that help the being to ex-
press what it is or has to
be and cannot be the es-
sence or object of life,
906-907

to be and to be fully is her
aim in us, 907-910

truth of, 622

undivine, 358

urge to union and forces
making for union present
in it, and the character of
the artificially constructed
order in us, 918

universal, 925

waste of material and un-
employment of resources
only its seeming but not
its real method, 496

witness silence of the Spirit
present in the workings
of, 305

workings in Ignorance of,
211
Nature; at each stage an
overtly significant prepa-
ration of her next step
visible, culminating in
man the mental being who
develops out of him the
spiritual man, 757-758

conclusions that can be ar-
rived at even from the
observation of the out-
ward phenomena of her
progression, 746-752

condition under which a
comparatively swift con-
scious change can take
place needing no longer
the slow evolution of the
past, 820

evolution of mind to its
greatest possible height,
range, subtlety is her
major preoccupation for a
long time, 763-764

four main lines followed in
her attempt to open up
the inner being, 765-766

her work in the evolution
of the spiritual man not
accomplished if her inten-
tion is an integral trans-
formation of Nature, 791-
792

its complex character and
the need to get into work-

ing order its every dis-
covered or discoverable
term and circumstance for
the one object — that is to
increase continually in our
actualised force and joy
of becoming, 611-613
reason why her workings
appear as a miracle to our
limited consciousness,

295-298

Mature-action, 318

Mature-automatism of a sub-
conscient construction,
dream-consciousness hav-
ing the, 379

Mature-being, is indeed a
product of the universal
Energy but is at the same
time a nature-personality
of the soul, 590

sTature-Energy, 471, 613, 718

'•Tature-force, 503, 665, 696,
778-780, 920

'Mature-forces, condition of a
freedom from the control
of a mechanical action of,
823

'Mature-knowledge, 625

Mature-mind, 400

Mature-power, 315

'Mature-process, 272, 710

Mature-Soul, 153

Mature-transcendence, 314

Mature- worship, 772

)fature and her procedure,
278-280
of Ignorance, 824

Mature's transformation, in-
deed wearing the appear-
ance of a miracle but a
miracle with a method,
829

Matural individual, truth of,
590

Mecessity, 288, 725, 901

Necessity blind, 900
imperative, — self-protective

law of, 853-854
opposing, — an established
and inexorable law of the
Inconscience, 854

Jecessity luminous imperative,

853, 854
mechanical, — explanation of,

276-277
mechanical, inadequacy of
this theory as an explana-

INDEX

tion of the evolution of

Nature, 274-275

purposeless, 527
Negation, 47, 373-375
Negations, the two, Ch. II &

III
Negation and affirmation, see

Affirmation and negation
Negative and positive, correla-
tion and interdependence
of, 341-342
Neo-pagan thought structures,

782
Nervous being, nature of, 99
Nescience, 270, 274, 393, 445,
453, 630, 673, 674, 676,
683, 686, 693, 694, 838,
859, 860, 898, 902 ; see
Spirit in things involved
in the Nescience

difficulty in the working of
the higher forces in the
strongly formed founda-
tion of, 837

evolution of the manifested
being of the triune Real-
ity out of, 672-673

material, 527

material, — higher planes
separated by the veil of,
694

phenomenal character and
real nature of, 674-675

in Nature, see Inconscience
of material Nature
neti neti, 34, 292, 341
New fullness of the means of
life used for an aggressive
expansion of the collective
ego, 933-934

height, its action of eleva-
tion and expansion in-
cludes the taking up of
that which is lower into
the higher, 648-649

life, would have to pass
through a period of ardu-
ous development in its be-
ginnings, 940-941

powers of consciousness, see
Powers of consciousness,
new

principle of life, an intrusion
of the lower forces into it
resulting in its extinction
has been a frequent phe-
nomenon of the past, 941-
942 ; see New height

(spiritual) evolution, the

1003

spiritual man is its sign
and it differs from the
past evolutionary process
in two respects, 643-644
spiritual evolution, double
opening of our subliminal
parts the secret of, 642-
643
status, see Gnostic manifes-
tation of life
world-order, 942
Nietzschean supermanhood,

643
Nietzschean type of superman-
hood, 954
Night, 46, 814

of inconscience, 289
Nihil, 28, 29, 71, 92, 234, 271,
396, 426, 458, 574, 664;
see also Viod of the In-
finite
eternal, 508
Nihilism, iii
Nihilist, 119

Nihilistic view of Non-exist-
ence, 507-508
Nirguna, 312, 318, 325, 387
see Saguna and Nirguna, 513
experience of the, 282
Brahman, 258, 287
Nirvana, 24, 29, 40, 48, 53,
254, 288, 354, 367, 378,
421, 422, 434, 516, 595.
620, 644, 809 f, 930
absolute, 573
not inconsistent with action,

30
of the Buddha, possible in-
most sense of the, 507
of the Httle ego, 833
Nisus, conscious or the incon-
scient, — its origin and the
teleological element in it,

742-743

Nivrtti, 513

No-man's-land between the
subliminal and the sur-
face, 5C0

No-Mind, 224

Non-Becoming, 439, 658

Non-Being, 21, 23, 2S-29, 30,
32, 35, 37, 40, 48, 287,
396, 421, 427, 665; see
also Void of the Infinite
apparent, 589
meaning of, 29, 40
of the nihilistic thinker, 507-
50S

Non-birth, 65S

1004

Non-Existence, 30, 47, 48, 263,

274, 284, 426, 430, 436,

491, 573

an infinite mystic Zero, 271

original, 374, 396

of the nihilistic thinker, 507-

S08
of the Taittiriya Upanishad,
meaning of, 507

Non-existent, the, 507

Non-Manifest Reality, 324

Non-Manifest and the mani-
festation, problem of the
opposition between the,
324-329

Non-spiritual methods, — po-
litical, social or other me-
chanical remedies ; — their
most drastic changes
change nothing, man re-
maining what he was —
an ignorant mental being,
786-787

Not-Brahman, 31, 506

Not-Self, 31, 179, 503, 580,
873, 902
need for our consciousness
to maintain some means
of communication with
what it excludes as the
not-self outside it, 474-
475

Nothing, 92, 284
meaning of, 28-29

Nothingness, absolute, 507

Numen, 46, 306, 307

Numens of the gods, 306

Objectivity, truth in, 576
and subjectivity, see under
Subjectivity and objectiv-
ity

Objective and physical, is only
one order of reality, 578-
579

Obscurantism, 6

positivist preconceived re-
fusal to inquire, as prej-
udical to the extension of
knowledge as religious ob-
scuratism, 579-581

Ocean, 144

Ochre robe of the ascetic, sig-
nificance of, 764

Occident, reason for the dry-
ing up of the religious in-

INDEX

stinct and the plunge into
a pure materialism and
secularism in the, 776

Occult, the, 923

Occult knowledge, shows us
that the subjection of
Mind to Matter, of spirit
to a lesser law of life, is
not an unalterable law of
Nature, 920-921

Occult mysticism, 783

Occult Science, essentially the
science of the subliminal,
779-780

Occultism, a systematised en-
deavour to know the var-
ious suggestions of all
kinds that come into us
from others or from the
universal Energy and to
master and use to protect
ourselves from the power
behind them is a small
part of one province of,

778-779

early forms of, see Early
man, 769-771

function of intellect in, see
Intellect, 781

highest function of, 779

is associated with magic and
magical formulae and a
supposed mechanisation of
the supernatural, — but
this is only one side, nor
is it altogether a super-
stition, 779-780

its elements in religion lose
their significance and di-
minish with the intellec-
tualising tendency, 771,

775

its place in national or tribal
religion, 773

method, aim and field of,
766

most important aim of, 779-
780

possible fields, processes and
aim of, 777-780

true, — means no more than
a research into supraphys-
ical realities, 581-582

the ground on which it was
finally set aside in modern
times, and the reasons
why it could be easily dis-
credited in the West, but
its greater and more com-

prehensive endeavour in
Egypt and the East, 778-
779
and magic, 771, 772, 773
in the East, see Occultism,

778-779
in Egypt, see Occultism,

778-779
in the West, see Occultism,
778-779
Occultist, incipient, see Mystic,

773
Ogre, 945

Omnipotence, 46, 361, 364
arbitrary, 376

indivisible, — executes its
purposes through many
limited workings, 364
Omnipotent, the, 16
Omnipresence, dynamic power

of, 330
Omnipresent Reality, see Re-
ality, omnipresent
Omniscience, 461, 506
invisible, 363-364
and Omnipotence, 392
and Omnipotence, divine,
361
Omnipotent, the, 16
One, 276, 288, 290, 294, 296,
303-305, 307, 308-310, 320,
323, 336, 338, 345» 347,
348, 915
One, the, 30, 34, 36, 40, 57, 90,
97, 104, 106, 114, 117, 119,
120, 123, 129, 135, 136,
138, 142-143, 144, 145,
153, 157, 158, 176, 194,
2c6, 229, 242, 256, 261,
387, 407, 418, 425, 435,
438-439, 443, 453, 503,
506, 507, 517, 518, 519,
566, 567, 570, 572, 589,
601, 620, 624, 666, 673,
674, 676, 685-687, 861,
864, 866, 874, 880, 891,
892
One and the All, 566; the, 621
One and the Many, 335-336
the, 434, 439, 518
relation between, 323-324
the two terms of, 570-571
One Being, 129, 309, 348, 404,

672, 864
One Consciousness, 257, 445,

575
One Divine, 898
One Energy, 575
One Existence, 212, 257, 287,

288, 384, 397, 40i, 4^0,
419, 421, 575
nature of the play of, 103-
104

One Existence-Consciousness-
Bliss, 257

One Reality, 329, 374, 434,
438, 606

One Self, 404

One Self and Spirt, mind's
difficulty in reconciling
many aspects of the, 322-

323

One Soul, 304

One, superconscient, 684

One Will, 685-686

One, dependence of the Many
on the, see Cosmic exist-
ence, 685-686

One, not limited by its capac-
ity for multiplicity, 530

One, triple affirmation of the,
see Cosmic manifestation,

673-674

One, triple status of the, 309

One-In-Many, 117

Oneness, 159, 261, 308, 388,
415, 425, 446 f, 570, 589,
614, 672, 861
cosmic, 687
infinite, — description of,

304-30S
infinite, multiplicity a power

of the, 362
integral, 505, 506
Knowledge of the, 35

Oneness; its mental rendering
and its expression in the
gnostic life, 896

Oneness and multiplicity, co-
existence of, 444

Oneness of the being, 572

Oneness with others, must be
fundamental, see Good
and evil, 559-561

Oneself, sense of the universe
in or as, — in the over-
mind, see Individual, 844-
845

Opening of vision to some-
thing above us, effects of,
810

Optical illusion dupUcating or
multiplying a single ob-
ject; inapplicability of its
analogy in the illusion
theory, 387

Order; in the lower existence
it is automatic, in man

INDEX

determined by rational
purpose, utility and con-
venience, in the passage
to the spiritual hfe the
ideal held up is not law,
but liberty in the spirit,
in the gnostic being the
order is replaced by the
spontaneity of a Truth
self-aware and self-action,
888-890
in the physical collectivity
constructed nature of, 914
of the worlds, the, Ch. XXI
of right relations, result of
our seeking to construct
it, 916-917
self-determined in the gnos-
tic being, 914

Origin of things, see Con-
sciousness as creator of
this world, 274-279

Original ignorance, see Cos-
mic, the egoistic, the orig-
inal ignorance

"Original sin," 147

Ormuzd, 358

Other-knowledge, not existent
in the absolute Brahman,
566

Other-Nature, 778

Other-reality, 873

Other-worldly, see Suprater-
restrial
beliefs and experiences of
the past, too constantly
confirmed by their action
and results to be flung
aside as mere superstition,
691-692
beliefs of the past, not a
sufficient basis for knowl-
edge— even though they
cannot be entirely re-
jected, 689-690
existence, nature of man's
traditional accounts of it
and the justification of
the principle of gradation,
698-700
urge, its power to break
through and away from
the terrestrial action pos-
sible at any point of the
nature, 763-764; see also
Higher worlds ; supra-
physical worlds ; Inter-
natal

Other Worlds, a practical ne-

toos

cessity for the life in, 709-

710

conditions in which their
pull would become opera-
tive, 710-71 1

explanation of the elements
in our subliminal experi-
ence of the which raise
a point of question against
their priority to the ma-
terial universe, 696-697

not evolutionary but typal
and the reason for their
existence, 698

rebirth and, Ch. L

the character of their larger
and freer ranges of con-
sciousness than that of
the material universe de-
feats all attempts to give
the premier importance
to our own plane of be-
ing, 695-696

their relation to the physical
and possibility of projec-
tion into them, 707

nature of their annexes, 712-
713

their existence and influence
are a fact of primary im-
portance for the possibiU-
ties of our evolution here,
699-700
Out of the sevenfold ignorance
towards the sevenfold
knowledge, Ch. XLVII
Outer, see under Surface
Outer and the inner being, see
Inner and the outer being;

consciousness, character of,
910

ego-building, see ego-build-
ing, outer

life, not the highest or last
term of our being, 618

nature, dangers of entry
into the inner being %\'ith-
out the tranquillising pu-
rification of the, S04-S06

nature; its purification nec-
essary in order to over-
come obstacles in it to
pass through to the depths
of our being, and the rea-
son for this, S04-S05

self, see Surface self, etc.

Vital being, see \'ital being,
outer

vital man, 911

ioo6

INDEX

Overmental, the, 261

and mental cognition, 285-
286

consciousness, Zx2

life in Matter, 713

state, see Supramental or
overmental state

status, 406
Overmind, 109, 216 f, 217!,
263, 282, 284, 289, 528,
593, 643, 695, 763, 809,
819, 826, 828, 833, 83s,
843-848, 850, 856, 858,
859, 862

Consciousness, 257, 259-
260

descent of, 261-262, 263-
264

Energy, 256

hampered movement of its
light and power working
in the obscurity of the
physical consciousness,
814-81S

nature, function and rela-
tion with Supermind of,
255-257, 259-260

nature of its global action
and what it can achieve
here, and its need to call
in a greater power — the
supramental force — to lib-
erate and fulfil it, 815-
816

would act from an under-
lying identity-conscious-
ness but the identity
itself would not be in the
front, 894
Overmind; lines of its work-
ings and what might be its
creation of knowledge in
the Ignorance contrasted
with the working of the
supramental gnostic be-
ing, 861-862

nature of this principle of
global knowledge carrying
in it a delegated light
from the supramental
gnosis: results of its de-
scent and their limitation
and the necessity of this
stage for the intervention
of a descent of Super-
mind to effectuate a com-
plete transformation of
the Ignorance, 843-848

and mind consciousness, dif-

ference between, 257-262

and spiritual Mind, inter-
vening powers of, —
would become in the
earth-existence — when the
supramental principle is
once established there —
a hierarchy of the states
of consciousness with
Mind and mental human-
ity remaining as one step
in the spiritual evolution
with possibility of climb-
ing into the gnosis, 855

and Supermind, having as
yet no organised forma-
tion either on our surface
or in our normal sublim-
inal parts, their descent
into us is a sine qua non
of the transition and
transformation, 819-820

being, 898

cognition, experience of
manifestation in, 422-423

cognition, justification of,
289

consciousness, admits both
Saguna and Nirguna as
supreme aspects of one
Reality, 282-283 ; the orig-
inal question of the phe-
nomena of the universe
not solved by the knowl-
edge of, 281-282

creation, 861

knowledge, 282

level; in it a power comes
to change the vibrations
of paine into vibrations of
Ananda, and the signifi-
cance of this, 877-878

Maya, Ch. XXVIII

principle, 862
Overruler, 318

Oversoul, 255, 501 ; see also
Spirit (or Oversoul)

papa, 885

padbhydm prthvt, 13 f
Pain; if it becomes immeas-
urable it ends itself or
ends that in which it
manifests or collapses into
insensibility or, in rare

circumstances, it may turn
into Ananda, 538-539
nature and utility of, 100-

lOI

vibrations changed into
those of Ananda in the
spiritual mind or over-
mind level, and the sig-
nificance of this, 877-879
Pain and suffering, cause of,

877
a sign of imperfection, 908

Pantheos, 318, 396
superconscient, 686

Pantheism, materialistic evo-
lutionary,— its view of
Mind and Life as prod-
ucts of Matter and its
ideas of a sole material
world not tenable, 686-
687

Pantheistic view of existence,
see Existence, 589-590

Para purusa, 454 f

Parabrahman, 283, 505, 569,
595
absolute, — two poles of the
manifestation of, 576

parabrahman, 454 f

Paradise, 356

paramdtman, 454 f

pardrdha, 243

par dt para, 141 f

Para-Prakriti, 317

Passivity, entire — effects of,

513
mechanical, 360
relative and absolute as-
pects of, 509-511
two results of, 5 10-51 1
Passivity and activity, ordi-
nary view of, 513-514
nature and interrelation in
Brahman of, 509-515; see
under Brahman
Past lives, memory of, see

Memory of past lives
Patanjali, Yoga philosophy of,

782, 782 f
Peace, 804
and Silence, 568
and ecstasy, become one in
the supermind, S79-880
Percept, 398
Perception, 398
Percipient, the, 398
Percipient, true consciousness
of the, 397
and the perception and the

percept, possible for the
mind to affirm or deny
any or all of them, 394-
395; see also Reality,
original, 395-396; Maya,
397-398, 401-403

Permanent, 614

Perfection, 614

Person, 46, 210, 258, 296, 319,
322, 417, 665, 673, 710,
798, 799, 824, 881-884,
889, 892 ; also see Psychic
being, 208, 209

Person and his world-material,
see individualisation 332-

333

Aspect, 322

divine, 803
Person, gnostic, — what would
be the nature and con-
sciousness of, 883-884

building a new personal
quantum suitable for its
new growth of being,
keeping only the essential
form of the past person-
ality in the background
as one element among its
many personalities in each
return to earth and its op-
ulent taking up of its past
not by a repetition of old
personalities but by a new
formation and a large
consummation, 727-728

infinite, 288, 319, 478, 731,
732, 804

is larger than his person-
ality, 883-884

meaning of, 318-319

mental, 282, 461

spiritual, 412, 620, 664, 669,
676, 882

supreme, 318, 319

supraphysical, 667

supramental, 866

true, — nature of the indi-
viduality of, 857

what we mean by his per-
sonality, and the expres-
sion of this personality in
the formed limited indi-
vidual and his formless
unlimited self, 881-882
Person-powers, 207
Personal average mind or
common experience, veri-
fication by, — is a false

INDEX

standard of reality and
of knowledge, 579-580
Being, supreme, 803

Personahty and character,
varying notions of, 882

Person and Personality, their
true conception modify-
ing our current ideas
about the immortality of
the soul, 730-733

Personality and impersonality
inseparable aspects of one
and the same reality, 881
and impersonality, reason
for the opposition created
by the mind between

318-319

double, see Double person-
ality

flux of nature and fixity of
nature are two aspects of
being and cannot be its
definition because of the
person behind of whom
personality is a self-ex-
pression, 882-883

human, — the rule of the
different selves in us is at
the root of its develop-
ment: their consideration
from the point of view
of the government of the
nature by the inner prin-
ciple, 779-801

its psychic part able to de-
velop in man with a much
greater rapidity than in
the inferior creation, 752

only a temporary formation
and not the self in its
abiding reality, 727-728

same, — condition in which
its repetition — normally
quite otiose — would be
helpful, 726-727

surface, — nature of, 412

surface, — need for its sepa-
ration from the subliminal
being, 730-731
Personalities and Powers, in-
visible, see Falsehood and
evil, 536-538
Pessimist theory of the world,

basis of, 228-229
Phenomenal reality, see Real-
ity, essential and phenom-
enal

universe, see Universe, Phe-
nomenal

1007

Phenomenon, meaning of, 461
Philosophic development of
spiritual thought, not en-
tirely indispensable but
necessary also for the full-
ness of our total inner
evolution, 782

reason, its two postulates
and the possible views of
the soul according to
them, 662-664
Philosophies, all have their
value from the point of
view of the Spirit's many-
sided Manifestation, 421

and religions, see Rehgions
and philosophies
Philosophy, 78

mutually destructive schools
of, 138

spiritual, see Spiritual phi-
losophy

in the East, see Spiritual
philosophy, 781-783

in the West, see Spiritual
philosophy, 781-783
Physical and vital being, sup-
posed and true conscious-
ness of our, 498-499
Physical being, 297, 319, 525,
806

all its movements known
and controlled by us in
both ways — ^by separation
and by direct contact, 472

circumstances in which its
endurance possible, see
Survival of mind, hfe and
body

its spiritualisation, perfec-
tion and fulfilment would
be effectuated by the
gnostic evolution, 876-877
Physical collectivity, con-
structed order of, 914

existence, formula of, 234

existence, importance of
birth in the, 674-676

only a first and preliminan.'
step which man has to
take to know and possess
it, 649-651

indi\-idualisation, incon-
scient, 821

man, 911

man, see Physical mind

man, his nature compared
with that of the \-ital

ioo8

man, see Vital man, 799-
800 ; — when the physical
Purusha dominates the
mind, will and action,
there is then created the,
799-800
Physical-mental, the, see Phys-
ical mind
Physical mind, character and
importance of, 639-640

its demand for a physically
valid proof of a supra-
physical fact irrational,
688-689

nature of, 372

why this also — at a certain
point — loses its conviction
of objective certitude, 373
Physical objective knowledge,
limited nature even of the
utmost widening of, 650

part; has to give up its
instincts, needs, etc., in
order to be replaced by a
new power establishing its
own greater law and
functioning in form and
force of Matter, 827

plane, its sub-planes and
their function, 711

self, 797

senses, imperfect nature of
the evidence of, 578-579

Space, see Space, physical

universe, see Universe, Phys-
ical, etc.

universe, nature of our ex-
perience of, see Intuition
and reason, 384-385
pisdcavat, 211 f
Pisacha, 537

Planes, higher, see Higher
worlds ; Other worlds ;
Supraphysical worlds

of existence, superior, — a
knowledge and experience
of them begins when
mind becomes by degrees
conscious in what was to
it superconscient, 810-81 1
Planets, other, — thinking and
living beings possible in,
597-598
Plant, animal, man, god; in
each the Eternal is there
containing and repressing
himself as it were in or-
der to make a certain

INDEX

statement of his being,

344
Plant, nature of its outer
form-consciousness, 634-

635

Plant and animal, capacity of
the human mind to aid
Nature in the evolution of
new types of, 751
and animal, the Individual
capable of assuming them
but not limited by the
forms of, 676-677
soul, nervous material view

of, 637
and the animal, difference

between, 632, 633-634

and the metal, difference

between, 631-632, 633

Plato, 272, 679

Pleasure, pain and indifference
no essential validity in
our standards of, 204-205

Pleasure and pain, nature of
the duality, 444

Pluralism, an error though
plurality not unreal, 304-
305

Poet, see under Actor

Poetry, loi

Poison, can cure as well as
kill, 540

Political remedies, see Non-
spiritual methods

Positive and the negative, 341-
342

Positivist, the, 624

Possibility, boundless, 274
divine, — the world as a
manifestation of a, 376

Pot, see Earth and the pot

Potencies, 770

Potentiality, unrealised, 507

Potentials, 259

Power, 16, 54, 78, 126, 134,
143, 145, 164, 172, 177,
190, 255-257, 258, 259,
261, 283, 284, 294, 295,
314, 315, 318, 321, 352,
359, 360, 361, 364, 392,
394, 400, 410, 449, 511,
568, 574, 606, 614, 622,
624, 762, 766, 770, 784,
791, 793, 803, 804, 810,
811, 814, 823, 824, 826,
828, 829, 832, 859, 871,
929
cosmic, 324, 685
creative, 739

descending, — its untoward
result it seized by the ego-
istic mind and vital, 813

has to come at intervals and
work meanwhile behind
the veil due to numerous
mistakes of reception, 814

illusive, 401

illusive, see Maya, 389

infinite, — character of, 284-
285

involved, 902

limitation of, see Divine,
364-365

magical, 296

original creative or evolu-
tionary, 628-630

reason for the absence of
right will in the use of,

474

secret spiritual, — acts upon
the being from higher
sources but in the early
stages its action occult
and not apparent, 829-830

supramental, 816

evolutionary, — volved the
spiritual man but not the
supramental being, 791-
792

in Nature, new, — conse-
quences of the appear-
ance of, 862

of being, one, — all are pow-
ers of, 434

of illusion, 569

of the Self, 314, 883

of the Self, conscious, —
Supernature as the, 623
Powers, 690, 691, 696, 766,
770, 783

and Godheads of the Light,
see Divine Being, 805

bound up with Good, 537

of consciousness, new, 923-
926

of consciousness, their in-
crease not only normal
but indispensable for a
greater life and would
belong to the very sub-
stance of gnostic being,

925

of cosmic Harmony and
cosmic Anarchy, 536

of darkness and evil, achiev-
ing immensity but no in-
finity, 539; see also Evil,
538-539

of Good and Evil, 536
of Ignorance, 537
of Knowledge, 537
of Light and Darkness, 536
"Powers of the Prince of Air,"

dark forces as the, 539
Practical ignorance, see Igno
ranee, practical
diminishes when man at-
tempts to cast his exist
ence into the mould of
enlarging self-knowledge
621
Pradhana, 15

Pragmatic truth, character of;
see Absolute, dynamics of
the, 410
Prajna, 405 f

of the Mandukya Upani-
shad, 665 f
Prajnana, action of, 131, 152-

153, 170
Prakriti, 9, 45, So, 75, 78, 80,
96, 102, 130, 153, 162,
163, 256, 280, 281, 282,
295,313, 314-317, Book I,
Ch. II, 369, 503, 518, 524,
527, 529, 568, 573, 575,
638, 683, 720, 752, 806,
820, 825; see also under
Purusha
gnostic, 855

its inconscience and the slow
awareness of Purusha
within with the emer-
gence of consciousness,

" 524-525

Sankhya idea of, 574
Prakriti and Purusha, see Pur-
usha and Prakriti
Prana, 173, 247
prdnamaya purusa, 156 f
Prasna Upanishad, trans, from,

371, 448, 457
pravrtti, 513

Presence, 126, 276, 354, 359,
364, 576, 804, 810, 811,
813
essential, 354, 355
recedes if the heart is im-
pure, 813
subliminal, 492
universal indwelling, — Sach-
chidananda as the, 590-
591
Priest, 783

Primitive man, comparative
insensibility found in,
877-878

INDEX

forms of his early religion
and low and small prov-
ince of his life-being cor-
respond on the occult
plane to an invisible na-
ture of a like character
whose occult powers can
be called into activity by
a knowledge and methods
possible to the lower vital
intuitions and instincts
but lost to our superior
development, see also
Early man, 772-773

Prince of Air, see Powers of
the Prince of Air

Principle, double, — in the San-
khya view, 399
of Existence, original, 628

Principles, cosmic, — mystery
of the masculine and fem-
inine, 321-322

Prithivi, 174, 695 f

Process, 720; see also Law and
process

Progress, downward curve of
the spiral of, 749
the view that all idea of it
reaching infinitely up-
ward or sidewise into the
Infinite is a delusion, 737-
738
to Knowledge — God, Man
and Nature, Ch. XLV

Prophet, 784

Prophets, 786

prthivt pdjasyam, 13 f

psyche, 480, 642

many elements in us can
be mistaken for the, 796-
798

Psychic being, 794, 795, 799;
see under Psychic entity

"Psychic" and "Occult" phe-
nomena, cause of, 238-
239

Psychic and the spiritual open-
ing, can lead away from
life or to a Nirvana, 809 f
and spiritual transformation,
beginning of, see spiritual
evolution, 760-762
and spiritual transformation,
must be as complete as
may be before there can
be any beginning of the
third and consummating
supramental change, 825-
8^7

1009

assimilative sleep, 714
Psychic being, 207-209, 212,
478, 502, 529, 640, 710,
713, 766, 784, 794, 795,
799, 820, 822; see aUo
Soul 725-727; Psychic en-
tity

a portion of the Divine Be-
ing, 560-562

does not emerge full-grown
and luminous but passes
through a slow develop-
ment and formation, 795-
797

description in Upanishad of,
210

its limited outer action and
its powerful occult char-
acter, and the possibility
of its becoming sovereign,
482-483

its secret memory seems to
have little effect on the
surface, 729

its slow development can be
aided by the mind's clear
perception and an effort
to know the nature of the
psyche — but at first this
knowledge is impeded by
the fact that there are
many elements in us
which can be mistaken for
it, 796-798

its turning towards Truth,
Good and jBeauty as
means for its growth, 543

manner of the growth of,
364-365

what happens when it takes
charge, 831-832
Psychic being; its consent nec-
essary for the formulation
of the results of past
Karma in the present life
and it is determined ac-
cording to its need for
self-expression and experi-
ence by a secret Will and
Guidance using but not
subject to mechanical
processes, 720-721, 726-
727

manner of its action on the
surface life and the signs
of its characteristic influ-
ence, 794-795
Psychic body, 663; see under

lOIO

INDEX

Rebirth; Soul, 666-667,
667-668
centre; various aids of
penetrating through all
the intervening vital stuff
to it, and the strongest
and most central way,
805-807
Psychic change, 829; see also
Psychic transformation

nature of, 792

needing to call in the spir-
itual to complete it, 816

if complete, makes the proc-
ess of spiritual transfor-
mation painless though
still long and scrupulous,
813

nature of its dynamic spir-
itual outcome and the
need for the intervention
— made possible by this
change — of a highest spir-
itual transformation to
complete the psychic
movement inward, 808-
810
Psychic condition, 804

consciousness, native pow-
ers of, 808

control, 838

definition of, 208 f

element, 482; in us; reason
for its turning always to-
wards whatever in phe-
nomenal Nature seems to
belong to a high Reality,
801

entity, 203, 204, 205-208,
242-243, 294, 317, 350,
412, 468, 477, 482, 500,
520, 552, 584, 665, 667,
726, 727, 731, 732, 736,
761, 796, 797, 801, 808,
827, 829
Psychic entity, a secret King
in a screened chamber to
support our natural evo-
lution, 793-795

at the beginning an entirely
veiled part of us, al-
though it is that by which
we exist and persist as in-
dividual beings in Na-
ture, 793-794

condition when its mani-
festation becomes possible
and the two results of its

governance from within
807-808

could change the nature of
the human evolution if it
had been from the be-
ginning unveiled, 793

double, 203

essential to get back inward
to it for an integral
change of nature, 806

its discovery the first step
of self-realisation, see
Self-realisation, 560-562

its pressure to develop a
true soul action one pre-
paratory movement of the
spiritual evolution, 761

itself free from stain but
what comes up from it
not protected by that im-
munity, 796

possibility of its emergence
in man and its demand
for a diviner life, 751-752

principle of its delight of
life, 543

no conclusive validity in the
reasoning that its demand
for a supramental trans-
formation is itself igno-
rant and must be replaced
by a merger of the soul
in the Absolute, 752-753

normal line taken by it in
the rebirth of the Person,
710

in Time, man the individual
as a, 597

nature of the intervening
space between it and the
surface being, 804
Psychic essence, 809

experiences, see Psychic en-
tity, 807-808

feeling, 796

impression, 801

individual, 544

individuahty, 561 ; the view
that its insufficient de-
velopment obliges it to
transfer at once its rudi-
mentary personality for
preservation to a new
body and the doubtful
character of this possi-
bility, 709-710
influence, 752 ; does not
come up to the surface
quite pure, 795-796

key, 807

kindling, its effect on the
human being, 750

light, 796, 804, 807

movement, 912

person, necessity and the
result of the individuation
of, 710-711
Psychic personality, 710, 803,
809, 829; see also Psychic
being

condition in which it reaches
its full stature, 806-807

its appearance the sign of a
soul-emergence in Nature
and its character depend-
ent on that emergence,
796

results of its growing
stronger, 796-797
Psychic phenomena, 480

explanation of, 688-689
Psychic pressure, half effects
of, 762, 763

prevision of a divine descent
upon earth, 753

principle, 794; nature of,
203

repose, plane of, 715

sense and tact, 782

sympathy, 808

transmutation, 803 ; see also
under Psychic change
Psychic transformation, a vast
change of our mental
human nature the result
of, 806-808

becomes possible only under
the conditions when a
quicker conscious method
of evolution intervenes,
797

its inadequacy for total
transformation, 209-212

its perfection already real-
ised though only by a
few, 817-818

two results of, see physic
entity, 806-808
Psychic will, 796

witness, value to it of the
sense of good and evil,
see Good and Evil, 542-

544
Psychical entity in the animal,

748
Psychictrans, two results of,

see Psychic, 808-809
Psycho-analysis, 380

INDEX

lOII

Psycho-spiritual, see under
Psychic

Psychological experience, dou-
ble action of, 60
ignorance, see Ignorance,
psychological ; — nature of,
see Ignorance, psychologi-
cal
self-ignorance, removal of
the, 621

Psychologists, view of the,
see Reality, 422-424

Psychology, 22

Punishment, lame foot of, 725

punya, 885

Puranas, priority of the ta-
masic animal creation to
the more developed hu-
man consciousness in the,

745
Pure and silent, the, 573
Purity, 793

Purusha, 9, 45, 46, 50, 56, 67,
78, 80, 81, 83, 96, 130,
153, 156, 161, 198, 218,
256, 280, 281, 282, 286,
293-295, 3i3> 314-316,
317-318, 319, 2>22—Ch.
XXX, 359, 369, 412, 478,
S09f, 529, 568, 572, 573,
620, 638, 640, 659, 664,
670, 673, 674, 680, 71S,
720, 727, 752, 760, 797,
804, 822, 82s, 863, 882,
883

consents to assumen the ap-
parent forms of itself
which Prakriti constructs
for it, but in all the forms
it remains still in reality
itself, 524

cosmic, see Man, universal,
676-677

divine,— description in the
Upanishads of, 3S3

gnostic, 855

his triple power of individ-
ualisation, oneness with
world-being and with the
Transcendence, 332-334

impersonal, 881

individual, 334, 369, 370,
685

mental, 731, 732, 797

mind, 748

physical, 799 ; see also Phys-
ical man

subtle-physical, 799

supreme, 318

vital, 732

witness, 806

without its sanction and at-
tachment to the experi-
ence of division cannot
endure, 353-354
Purusha-Prakriti, 310, 317-
318,638

nature of, 316

pragmatic value of the ex-
perience of, 314-315

Sankhya view of, 315 f
Purusha and Prakriti, 399

aspects, see Spirit and Na-
ture, 316-318

relation between, 153

the separation of the one
from the other will lead
to a spiritual realisation
and liberation, but will
not necessarily bring
about a transformation,
805-807

their antinomy would be re-
moved in the gnostic be-
ing, 889
Purusha aspect, see Conscious

Being, aspect of
Purushas, Sankhya view of,

574

Purushottama, 317

Pythagorean, Stoic and Epi-
curean systems, 782
transmigration, 668

Python, 594

Quality, meaning and illustra-
tions of, 302

Quanta, 270

Quiescence and action, see
Reality, 411-413

R

Race; reason why its destiny
seems to be heading dan-
gerously under the drive
of the vital ego into a
prolonged confusion and
perilous crisis, 935

Rajasic intelligence, has its
main seat in the vital
mind and is of two kinds,
551

Rakshasa, 537, 945

Maya also used for the de-
luding magic of the, 437-
438
Rakshasic and Asuric Super-
manhood, type of, 945
type and principle, their in-
dependent fulfilment in
their own province of be-
ing, 697-698
Rama, 523

rasa, loi, 204-206, 831
Rationalist, 5
Ravana, 523
Rays, seven, 243 f
Real, the, 97, no, 118, 151,
284, 354, 400, 404, 410,
412, 413, 414, 428, 430,
441
fundamental, — nature of

the, 583
immutable, 387
its creation or manifesta-
tion must itself be real,
410, 427
omnipotent, 388
original, 388
Real Existence, symbolic or
real nature of its figures
depending on their crea-
tion by Mind or a greater
Consciousness, 574-575
Real-Idea, 109, 120, 121, 134,
148, 149, 150, 152, 156,
158, 163, 175, 219, 241,
246, 257, 258, 277, 303,
684, 739, 867, 921
involved, 491

its character and action in
the evolved gnostic being,

874-875
Real-unreal, see Reason and
sense, 424
universe, 374
Realism, universal, 374
Reality, 13, 24, 27, 29, 32, 34-
35, 42, 43, 48, 64, 67, 71,
106, 107, 108, 109, no,
119, 140, 151, 191, 210,
250, 253-254, 255, 256,
259, 261, 281, 283, 284,
287, 289, 290, 292-296,
300, 301, 302, 305-307,
308, 313, 317, 318, 319,
320, 321, 322, 325, 329,
330, 348, 350, 360, 362,
371, 374, 376, 386-388,
389, 390, 396, 397-401.

I0I2

INDEX

403, 404, 406-409, 410-
415, 416, 417, 418, 419,
421, 423, 428, 568, 571,
573, 575, 576, 577, 578,
582, S83, 585, 587, 591,
593, 595, 596, 604, 60s,
609, 621, 623, 624, 669,
672, 673, 683, 684, 700,
761, 763, 765, 792, 801,
804, 812, 823, 864, 878,
882, 89s, 901-903, 904,
905, 910, 914, 929-930,
943

cosmic, 409

Divine Being as the third
aspect of, 318

divine, 282, 365

dynamic, 514

dual power of, see Non-
Manifest and the mani-
festation

dual status of the, 407

essential, 424

essential and phenomenal,
422-424

eternal, 393

greater, 943

higher, 801

highest, 444

highest, and an ignorant
Mind, 442-443

hidden, 357

infinite, 858

infinite, — consequences of
the view which regards
physical universe as its
only and whole field of
manifestation, 699-700

infinite, — various possibili-
ties of the manifestation
of, 700-702

integral, 421, 514, 515, 896

integral, 565, 566, 584

in the classical theory of
Illusionism, 396

invisible, 613

immanent, 371

immobile, 374

its different orders of which
the objective and physical
only one order, 579

its exclusive one-sided views
not a valid solution of the
truth of cosmic and in-
dividual existence, 5S2-
583

objective view of, 577-578

occult, 628

of love, spiritual, 803

of oneness manifesting itself
in a reality of numberless
forms and powers of its
being, see Maya, 387-388

Omnipresent, Ch. IV, Bk. I,
32, 34, 289, 292-294, 29s,
298, 358, 362, 444, 446,
562, 572

omnipresent, — triple aspect
and triple power of, 295-
296

One and the Many aspects
. of, 323

one, — dream-state, sleep-
state and waking state as
three different orders of,

384
opposition between its eter-
nal passivity and its eter-
nal activity true only in
relation to the activities
of its consciousness, 513-

514

original, 854

original, — its several views
and what might be its
nature, 395-396

our idea and sense of it
vary with our status and
movement of conscious-
ness, 566-567

not a rigid Indeterminable,
284

personal and impersonal as-
pects of, 318-319

phenomenal, see Reality, es-
sential and phenomenal

Powers of, 256

primal, 353

pure indeterminate, 340

quiescence and action not
opposing aspects of, 411-
413

sole existence of, 34

Space and Time our names
for the self-extension of
the one, 325

spiritual, 763, 766, 781, 930,
931

— direct contact in the sur-
face being with it a first
condition of the soul's
emergence, 801

subjective conceptions of
the nature of, 573-574

subjective view of, 575-576

subjectivity and objectivity
as two sides of, 578-579

superconscient, 404, 418

supreme, 283, 324, 532, 672,
673, 791, 860, 875, 889

description of, 292-293

highest, 501

supracosmic, 588, 589, 602

the, 441-444

the question of its nature
and the answer on behalf
of Illusionism, 394-395

the truth of the universe,
humanity, the community
and the individual as
formations of, 929-930

timeless, 324-325, 360
. transcendent, 281, 374, 409,
414, 419, 824, 866

Truth Conscious, 151

truth of, 323 ; also see Truth

truth of its simultaneous
eternal status and eternal
dynamis, 410-412

two sides of the, 568-569

ultimate, 439

whole, 284
Reality and knowledge, ob-
jective views of, — exam-
ined, 577-582

subjective views of, — ex-
amined, 573-577
Reality and the Cosmic Illu-
sion, Ch. XXXIV

Illusion, question of the re-
lation between, 394-395,
396, see Reality; Illusion-
ism

Integral Knowledge, Ch.
XV, Bk. II
Realities, 783

of existence, persistent, 347
Reason, 11, 12, 33, 65, 66,
67, 112, 113, 275, 323,
331-332, 465, 780-781, see
Individual Logical rea-
soning, see also Intellect
Reason and intuition, see In-
tuition and reason

logic; utility of, 308-309

sense, finite, 424, 425, 426

will; its attempt to control
the conflict in our mem-
bers difficult and only a
half-measure, 798-799
Reason, by itself not able long
to maintain the race in its
progress, 932

conflict between the normal
and the higher, 337-340

cuts the whole into seg-
ments and can select one
segment of the whole as
if it were the entire re-
ality, 422-424

detached, — truth of, 541

double action of, 58-59

finite, — not a measure of
the Infinite, 297-298

intellectual, — creates divid-
ing concepts of the Brah-
man, 415

inadequacy of its physical
symbols to express higher
psychological experience,
335-336

its methods different from
that of the intuition and
therefore not a * reliable
arbiter in this field, 842

limitations of mental, 296-
297, 299-300, 304, 305,
309, 313, 321, 322, 323,
328, 329

mediator between subcon-
scient and superconscient,
62, 63

nature of, 54-55

need for its development by
man, 473

pure, 71, 73, 74» 78, 323

supreme, 301

to enforce on it an utmost
plasticity necessary in a
consideration of the In-
finite, 300

triple error of, 338-339

two grounds for the inap-
plicability of its normal
experience to higher
truths, 336
;.ebirth, 496, 750; see also un-
der Internatal resort ;
other worlds etc.

and Karma, popular notions
of them can be elevated
to a higher level of rea-
son, 717-719, see Karma

and Karma; their popular
notions no answer to a
search for the true sig-
nificance of life, 717-718

and Other worlds; Karma,
the Soul and Immortality,
Ch. L
lebirth, absence of any mem-
ory of past existence

INDEX

wrongly taken as a dis-
proof of the actuality of,
729-731

a great injustice in denying
to the mind in its new
incarnation all memory of
its past births and actions
if a system of rewards
and punishments were the
governing principle of,
728-729

a machinery of an invisible
process of soul evolution
and an indispensable con-
dition for any long dura-
tion and evolution of the
individual being in earth
existence, 735-736

Buddhistic view of, 666 f,
668, 669

by it alone the ascent of
the individual soul-con-
sciousness in the body can
take place within the as-
cending order, 674-676

commonly supposed meta-
physical and moral as-
pects of, 716-717

consummation of a triple
immortality the crown of,

731-733

first conclusion on the sub-
ject leads to further prob-
lems and further results,
706-707

immediate transmigration
from one earthly body to
another as its first pos-
sibility and life in other
planes after death and
subsequent rebirth as its
eventual possibility by a
gradual progression, 707-
708

inconsistency of the popu-
lar ideas on it which de-
rive from the religions,
708-709

in material Nature, 682-683

it is an inevitable logical
conclusion if there exists
at the same time an evo-
lutionary principle in
earth-Nature and a real-
ity of the individual soul
born into evolutionary
Nature, 680-6S1

its importance in the inte-
gral explanation of the

IO13

evolution in Matter, 672-
673

its nature in case of the
physical universe being
the sole manifested or a
separate world, 707-708

its possibility but no in-
evitability as a result of
the developing vitalistic
theories, 666-669

Karma cannot be the whole
machinery of, 725-726

memory of past fives a seri-
ous obstacle if a constant
development of being by
a developing cosmic ex-
perience is the meaning
and a building of a new
personahty in a new birth
the method of, 728-729

necessary for a spiritual
Person to manifest its
stream of changing per-
sonality in the world of
birth and death, 664

not a constant reiteration
but a progression, 714-
716; see Internatal resort

not admitted by modern
thought which starts from
the physical body as the
basis of our existence and
recognises the reality of
the material universe
only, 666-667

not an absolute necessity of
the theories of a cosmic
Inconscient creating a
temporary soul or an
eternal Becoming mani-
festing in a cosmic Life-
force or the old theory oi
a sole existing Supercon-
scient creating Illusions 01
soul-forms by Maya or
the Buddhistic theor>- 01
Nirvana, 664-666

not an inevitable conse-
quence of the relation be-
tween individuaUty and
the purpose of the.maiii-
festation in the older Ad-
waita Vedanta view of
the Upanishads, 670-672

not an inevitable result of
the theories of Eternal
Existence regarded as a
vital Becoming or an im-
mutable spiritual Being or

I0I4

a formless Non-being,
665-666

not of any significance in
the Adwaita Vedantism
but is an indispensable
machinery for the work-
ing out of the spiritual
evolution, 672-681

object of the soul in enter-
ing into, 726-727

philosophy of, Ch. XL VIII

place of personality in, 727-
800

regarded as part of a cosmic
illusion in the Adwaita
Mayavada view, 663, 669-
670

several reasons for its un-
interrupted continuance in
human forms during a
period of rudimentary
humanity and the normal
law of rebirth in the hu-
man stage, 709-710

statement of the view that
to regard it as the poten-
tial means of a spiritual
evolution is not its sig-
nificance, 741-742

suppositions of the ancient
theories about, 741-742

the idea of the soul itself
as a limited personality
which survives unchanged
from one birth to another
is not acceptable since it
is an obvious error of the
physical mind, 726-727

the invisible factor in Na-
ture's evolution of being
and of consciousness, 751-
752

various theories of, 708-709
reductio ad absurdum, 118
Refusal, 23

Reincarnation, see Rebirth
Relativities, their being and
justification in the Abso-
lute, see Absolute, 345-
346, 347
Relativity, theory of, 423
Religion, 542

a change into a higher state
of being the whole aim
and process of, 648

and ethics and occult mys-
ticism in ancient times,
achievements and limita-
tion of, 782-783

INDEX

in India, the wide and sup-
ple method of evolution-
ary Nature providing the
amplest scope and pre-
serving the true intention
of the religious seeking of
the human being can be
recognised in the develop-
ment of, 769-770, 775-778

in India, soundness of the
principle of, 776-778

in India contained success-
fully within itself all the
elements that have grown
up in the course of the
evolution of religion, 775-
776
Religions and philosophies,
unity behind diversity and
discord the secret of the
variety of, 623-625
Religion in the West, 782-783 ;

see also Occident, 776
Religion, causes of the errors
of, 769-770

early, — at first very super-
ficial and external stage
of, 769-771

evidences of its natural evo-
lution from the past and
the three stages of its
growth, 772-778

has tended under the over-
weight of the intellect to
pass into a clear but bare
rational interspace, but it
must in the end rise more
fully at its summits in the
sphere of a suprarational
consciousness and knowl-
edge, 770-772

function and utility of, 777

its claim to determine and
impose the truth by di-
vine authority excessive
and premature, and the
reason for this imposition,
768-769

its first or primitive stage
and the place of occultism
in it, 772-773

its second stage national or
tribal and the place of
occultism and spiritual
philosophy iri it, 773-774

its third stage which tried
to liberate the secret
spiritual experience and
knowledge and put it at

the disposal of all, and
the consequences of this
expansive movement, 773-
775

its development — as a result
of the expansive move-
ment— has led farther to
a division into cathoHc
and protestant tendencies,
774-775 .

it is those in which spiritual
types of manhood came
into being that have en-
dured and given mankind
all its spiritual aspiration
and culture, 783-784

its first forms only embody
in primitive figures a
veiled intuition of the
secretly conscious spirit in
things, 622-623

its solution of the problem
of good and evil leaves
the problem where it was,
see Good and evil, 556-
558

occidental method of, 765

organised, — can provide a
means for the inner uplift
of the individual but can-
not change human nature,
937-938, 1167-1168

oriental method of, 765

method, aim and field of,
see Evolution of the spir-
itual being, 765-766 ; man,
766-767

reason for the failure of its
attempt to create a new
world-order, 939-940

the work done by it for
humanity cannot be prop-
erly appreciated if we
ignore the conditions of
its process and their ne-
cessity in its evolution in
the human mind, 768-769

true sense of, 612
Religionists, seeks his kingdom
of God in the other world
where love, etc. are unal-
loyed and eternal, 434
Religious development, place
of God or gods on the
lower levels of, 616
Religious ethics, its rules not
possible to follow truly
by any man living in his

ego, see Good and evil,
559-561

Religious instinct in man, true
work of, see Religion,
768-769

Righteousness, 624

Reward or punishment, not a
fundamental value of the
reactions of Nature but
a value of the lessons of
experience in the soul's
cosmic training, 725-727
too simple logic of its cor-
relation,— idea of this re-
tribution as a compensa-
tion for the injustice of
life and Nature not a true
foundation of the law of
Karma, 722-723

Repose, 9

Republic, 272

Restrainers (Vedic), 14

Reversal of consciousness, see
Nature, 747

Revelation, 66

Rewards and punishments,
their rule erected by man
as a social necessity but
not applicable to the in-
tricate workings of cosmic
Nature, 723-724
a system of, — debasing the
ethical values of good, 724

Rig Veda, 57, 93, 109 f, 200,
216 f, 261 f
translation from, 3, 14 f, 16 f,
105, 132, 174, 183, 221,
232, 241, 249, 330, 431-
432, 448, 457, 494, 518,
531, 586, 626, 647, 682,
720-721, 734, 755, 791,
817, 856, 900
description of Inconscience

in the, 491
the distinction between the
Knowledge and the Igno-
rance begins with the
hymns of the, 436-438
view of Earth as the foun-
dation of all the worlds
suggested by certain ex-
pressions in the, 694 f

Right, 143, 144, 147, 194, 208
consciousness, right action
and right being, condi-
tions of, 660
the, 432, 437, 818

Righteousness, 30, 542, 882

Rishi, 783

INDEX

Rishis, ancient, — results of
their guidance of human-
ity, 786

Rope and serpent, analogy of,
340
snake, inapplicability of this
analogy in ■ the Illusion
theory, 385-387

Roman ideal of organised
power, 931

rta-cit, 109 f

rtam, 109 f

rtam Jyotih, 866

rtam satyam brhat, 432 f

rtasya brhate, 432 f

Ruler, 24s, 318, 321
of all being, 762

rupam rupam pratirupo bab-
huva, 540

Sachchidananda, 35, 43, 47,
48, so, 51, 56, 58, 87-88,

89, 91-93,
106, 107,

133-134,
143, 146,

96, 102-104
109, 117, 118

135, 141
148-149,

142,

159,
191,

•213,
228,
247,
351,
510,
638,
679,
829,

163, 177, 181, 188,
192, 193, 194, 202,
215, 218, 220, 223,
235, 242, 244, 24s,
290, 329, 341, 349,
370, SOI, S07, 509,
530, 590-592, 611,
642, 673, 674, 676,
684, 686, 702, 703,
870

and human consciousness,
difference between the
dynamisms of, sio

has willed his involution in
the Nescience and pre-
sides secretly over its evo-
lution, 676

integral, — Ignorance cannot
have its origin in, siS-516

involution of its active self-
conscience in a phenom-
enal Nescience creates the
phenomenal universe, see
Universe, phenomenal,
674-675

its experience can be ac-
quired through the mind
or the heart or the life-
sense or even through the
physical consciousness be-

IO15

cause of the presence of
spirit in all things, 829
its total concentration is the
integral the supramental
concentration, 519
nature of the existence in,

291
reason for his descent imo
the material Nescience
and the assumption of
phenomenal ignorance as
a superficial mask, 527
stages of the manifestation
of the delight of, 103
Sacrifice, 42

and self-giving, see Good
and evil, 558-560
Sad Brahman, 64, 67
sadanam rtasya, 432 f
sddharmya, 356

mukti, 17 f
sddhunam rdjyam, 434
sddrsya, 356

Sage and seer, live in the spir-
itual mind, 784
(spiritual) and thinker,
would find his total and
dynamic fulfilment in the
transformation by the
Higher Mind, 841
spiritual, 783, 802
Sages, ancient, — teaching of,

36
Saguna, 312, 32S, 348, 387
and Nirguna, true sense of

the terms, 513
Brahman, 258, 288, 318
experience of the, 282
Saint, 783, 803, 804
is moved by the awakened
psychic being in the Inner
heart, 784
sdlokya mukti, 17 f
Salvation, reason why it has
to be individual and not
collective, 620-621
Samadhi, 170
Samam brahma, 68
samrajya, 17 f

Sankhya 9, 15, 77, 78, 256,
574-575, see Being and
Consciousness
dualism of soul and Nature,

283
philosophy, Purusha-Pra-
kriti view in, 315 f, 315-
317
psycholog>', three types of
mental individuality in

ioi6

INDEX

the terms of, SS1-SS2

Sankhya, affirms the plurality
of souls and their co-ex-
istence by the unity of
nature-force, 503
dualism of the double Prin
ciple of Soul and Nature
in, 399
many Purushas of the, 153

Sannyasin, 18, 25

Sanskrit poetic figure, see
"Stable lightnings"

Sat, 29, 35, 36, 48, 74, 86

Satan, 537

Sattwic intelligence, 551-552
part of our nature; its de-
velopment a stage and not
the goal of the growth of
our being, see Good and
evil, 558-560

satyam, 109 f

satyam rtani, 437

Scepticism, inadequacy of, 6

Schweitzer (Dr.), his assertion
that rebirth was a later
invention not tenable,
671 f

Science, 15-16, 25, 27, 52, 55,
65, 68, 78, 83, 150, 161,
165, 165 f, 166 f, 187, 207,
215, 419, 423, 473, 537,
581, 582, 623, 624, 631,
644, 741, 921, 932, 933,
934
cannot perfect our life, 917
experimental, — . possibilities
of changes of characteris-
tics in the type strikingly
worked out on a small
scale by, 746
if its endeavour to control
mind and life processes
by a knowledge of their
material instrumentation
succeeded, it might not be
without danger for the
existence of the human
race, 778-779
its isolating and analysing
knowledge is of practical
value but does not repre-
sent the whole or the real
truth of things, 342-344
physical, 372, 390, 738
physical, — can never achieve
happiness and fullness of
being for the human race,
650
physical, — cannot know

even the truth of physical
things entirely, 652
physical or occult, — any dis-
covery by it of the neces-
sary means for an indefi-
nite survival of the body
not sufficient to ensure
its survival, 732 f
supreme, 624

the view that its affirmation
of an evolutionary terres-
trial existence cannot be
accepted, 737-739
to detect the processes of
material things has been
possible to it, but it does
not know even the ra-
tionale of the original cos-
mic processes, 270-271
true sense of, 612

Scientist, physical, — view of
the, 422-424

Scripture, 28, 35, 65, 67, 107

Second sight, see Supernormal
faculties, 479, 688

Second transformation, see
Spiritual transformation

Seeing, luminous, — character
of, 821

Seed developing into a tree,
see under Tree

Seer, 35, 126, 152, 245, 248;
see also under Sage, 783
and Thinker, the, 567
finding his fulfilment in the
transformation by the Il-
lumined Mind, 841
his consciousness is a greater
power for knowledge than
that of the thinker, 840-
841
of the subtle and the Seer of
the gross material exist-
ence, 405

Seer- Will, 116, 120

Semetic opposition of God and
his angels on the one side
and Satan and his hosts
on the other, 537

Semetic Revelation, 107

Sense, 216, 232, 235

Sense-mind, 372, 633

Sense reality, its validity for
immediate practical pur-
poses, see Reality, 422-
424

Sensibility, its growing in-
crease in the evolutionary
ascent and an entire re-

versal of the ordinary rule
of the reacting conscious-
ness resulting in a deliv-
erance from suffering,
877-878
Separative difference, play of,
see Universe, phenomenal,

674-675
ignorance, first, 488-490
knowledge, entire basis of
our cognition of exter-
nal things, see External
things, 472-473 ; Igno-
rance, 474-475 ; Knowl-
edge, 475-476; Surface,
476-478; Surface state,

473-474
knowledge, its first origin
as knowledge by direct
contact, see Knowledge
by direct contact, 489-
490
Knowledge, Knowledge by
Identity and, Ch. XXX-
VIII

Separativeness, individual

sense of, 417

Servant of God, 784

Seven principles of the mani-
fested being, 590-592

Sevenfold ignorance, see Ig-
norance, sevenfold
ignorance towards the sev-
enfold knowledge, out of
the, Ch. XLVII
knowledge, see Knowledge,
sevenfold ; Ignorance, sev-
enfold, etc.

Seven Words of the ancient
sages, are the seven prin-
ciples of existence, 432

Sexual impurity; if there is
too much of it creating
degrading mixture the
Ananda descending can-
not be held, 813

Self, 13, 28, 30, 31-32, 38, 39,
45, 62, 65, 67, 74, 102,
106, 130, 131, 143, 144-
146, 149, 180, 207, 208,
209, 211, 286, 287, 294-
296, 301, 303, 308, 313-
315, 317, 318, 319, 321-
323, 326, 327, 330, 334,
335, 336, 353, 359, 360,
365, 383, 396, 398, 399,
400, 402, 414, 415, 418,
421, 435, 438, 439, 444,
449, 452, 454, 455, 467,

485, 488, 501, 5i4, Si9,
527, 529, 568, 571, 572,
582, 583, S84, 589, 590,
616, 620, 621-623, 624,
625, 659, 664, 665, 669,
669 f, 670, 673, 684, 720,
731, 745, 761, 762, 765,
784, 802, 804, 807, 808,
809, 810, 816, 824, 830,
865, 883, 886, 930,_ 935;
see also under Spirit

Self and Self-Power, biune as-
pect of, 321-323

Self and spirit, cosmic, 537

Self and Spirit in the material
universe, supramental and
spiritual being as the first
unveiled manifestation of
the truth of, 816
one, 359

transcendent and universal,
863

Self as the Conscious Being,
316-318, see Spirit and
Nature
capacity and nature of, 253-

254

character and meaning of
the realisation of, 314-315

character and triple aspect
of, 313-31S

condition in which we be-
come aware of its simul-
taneous immutable and
mutable aspects, 460-461

cosmic, 322, 567, 589, 673,
784, 804, 845

denial by the Buddhists of,
354

description in the Upani-
shads of its three lower
states, and their signifi-
cance, 403, 405, 405-407;
see also Sleep state and
Dream state

dynamic truth of, 281

fourfold status of, 403

in its true being universal
as well as individual in
its essence, 762

in the Buddhistic thought
and in the Adwaitic Ma-
yavada, see Adwaita of
the Mayavada and Bud-
dhism

in us, part selves of the,
see Beings, 797-798

incommunicable Self or One
Existence described by the

INDEX

Upanishad as the fourth
state of, 384

inner, 317

it is, immutably, to our di-
rect self-consciousness; it
manifests itself mutably
in various becomings to
the mind-sense and the
mental experience, 461

its experience as a status in
silence an essential but
not the total realisation,

313-314

its realisation is the second
step of self-realisation, see
Self-realisation, 560-562

observing inactive, 360

of hfe, method by which
one can realise oneself as,
806

of body, method by which
one can become aware of
it, 805-806

of mind, inner, — method by
which one can realise one-
self as, 806

of silence, 320

pure, 23

pure, — importance of the re-
alisation of, 288

relationless, 395

silent, 9, 27, 253

spiritual, 398

stable, — and surface con-
sciousness, 457-458

status in silence and status
in power of, 313-314

superconscient, 503

supreme, 318, 845, 886

supreme, — is one but its
souls many, 790

timeless, 624

transcendent, 561

unity is its being but cosmic
differentiation and multi-
ple individuality are the
powers of its being, 333-

335

Self-absorption of the Infinite,
power of, see under, In-
finite Consciousness
two extreme powers of, 530

Self-affirmation and self-nega-
tion, purpose of Nature
in, see Good and evil,
556-558
its tendency in us and its
nature in the supramental
being, 866

1017

Self-awareness, 107, 295
Self-becoming, 143
Self-being, 29, 96, 143, 625
we can pass into the su-
preme superconscience of
its highest state only
through the subUminal
and the superconscient
condition of conscious-
ness, 406
Self-consciousness and the Ig-
norance Memory, Ch.
XXXVI
Self-delight, 295
Self-determination of the In-
finite, see under Infinite
Consciousness
Self-exceeding, man's only

true way of, 642-643
Self-existence, 120, 295-297,
322, 323, 360, 399, 487,
539, 568, 870, 884
and the dynamics of
the Consciousness-Force,
complete view of the re-
lation between the eter-
nal, 320-322
phase or movement of, 330
reahty and meaning of, 319
silent, 320

superconscient truth of, 322
three terms of the essential
nature of, 293-294
Self-Existent, the, 152, 163,
196, 297, 321, 420, 439,
487, 535, 539, 568, 625,
911
Self-experience, Memory, Eso
and, Ch. XXX\-II
pure immobile, — realisation
of passing into a, see Ab-
solute, utterness of the,
420-421
Self -giving and surrender, 590
of all the being to the Su-
preme Being and the Su-
preme Nature, can be-
come total and absolute
only after a long and dif-
ficult stage of constant
effort and austerity of the
personal will and the pre-
liminan*-, mediate and
final stages of this self-
giving, S36-S37
Self-giving, see Surrender
entire, — condition in which
it becomes possible, se."
Soul, S03

ioi8

INDEX

Self-immolation, SS9-560

Self-knowledge, 205, 309, 405
and all-knowledge, divine, —

plenitude of, 445
higher, — seven steps of, 621-
622

Self-manifestation, limitation
of consciousness and the
awakening to integrality
of consciousness both a
process of, 287

Self-observation, results of the
Yogic process of, 279-281

Self-offering and surrender, of
ourselves and of our parts
of nature to the Divine
Being is the most central
way to get through all the
intervening vital stuff to
the psychic centre within
us, 806-807
to the Divine, different ways
of, 615-616

Self-Power, 321, 323, 529, 562,

575

Self-realisation three steps of,
—560-562

Self-status, pure, — description
in the Upanishads of, 403-
404

Self-transcendence, inherent
sense of Nature's univer-
sal urge of, 648-649

Self-transcendence, triple

movement in Nature's
method of, 657

Self-transcendent, manifesta-
tions of the, 336

Shakespeare, 272

Shakti, Ch. XXX, 74, 78, 79,
80, 130, 294, 295, 314,
321, 322, 510, 513, 561,
562, 575, 622; see also
Divine Puissance, Force,
Tapas, etc.
supramental, 322

Shankara, 9, 679
and Buddha, tremendous in-
fluence of their philoso-
phies and the impress of
the three great formulas
— the chain of Karma, es-
caper from the wheel of
rebirth, Maya — on the
thought, religion and gen-
eral mentality of India,
.374-375
his conception of the world
and the reason for posit-

ing an unreal reality of it,

415-416

his explanation of cosmic
experience creates an am-
biguity which extends be-
yond itself and touches all
that is not the pure exist-
ence, 414-415

in his philosophy one feels
the presence of a conflict
of intuition and reason
stated with full force
rather than solved with
any finality, 413-414

Qualified Illusionism of, see
Maya, 407-409
Shape, 108
Shiva, 74, 78
Sight, 116

Silence, 9, 23, 27, 29, 30, i43>
210, 287, 321, 322, 451,
568, 671; see under Pas-
sivity

and emptiness, is part of the
inner spiritual experience,
912

and movement, see Spirit,

304-305

complete, — result of, 761

Self felt as a status in, see
Self, 313-314

superconscient, 519

transcendent, 683
Sin and evil, uses of the sense

of, 542-543
Sixth sense, 688
Sleep-wakefulness, surface
subconscient as our, 380-
381
Sleep life, 382

see also under dream; Sub-
conscious as a dream-
builder ; Subconscient in
sleep; Subliminal as a
greater dream-builder

dreamless, 380-381

dreamless, — description of,
see Yajnavalkya, 405 f

in it the waking activities
are in abeyance but the
inner consciousness is not
suspended, 379

meaning of, 81

state and dream state, 405-
406

self, description in the
Upanishads of, 404, 405

self, the superconscient de-

scribed by the Upanishad
as the, 383-384

Social being, 932

Social machinery, see Machin-
ery
or political machinery, lim-
ited achievement of, 906
order, 917-918

Society, economic, 932, 935
human ideal of its perfecti-
bility, and the function
of the individual in this
view, 927-928
past formations of, 934

Socrates, 207

Soldier of the spirit, 784; see
Actor

Sole and Identical, the, 672
Existence, 283, 398

Soma, 240
Wine, 813

Someone, a recognisable, 883

Something, 31, 117, 193

by knowing which all is

known, meaning of, 508

that is behind the world,

it is in silence that we

feel most firmly the, 411

Somewhat, divine, 905

Son of Man, 46

Sons of Darkness and Divi-
sion, 437

Sound, 432

Source, 209, 888

Soul, 9, 44, 96, loi, 103, 130,
161, 175, 216, 294, 314,
319, 323, 360, 572, 625,
684, 760, 883, 935; see
also under Psychic

Soul-being, limited, 333

Soul-consciousness, when we
get back to it the obsta-
cle to unity finally ceases
to exist altogether, 516

Soul-life in the body, inter-
natal resort an inevitable
consequence of the very
origin and nature of, 716

Soul-nature, 638

Soul-person, 711

Soul-personality ; conditions
of its persistence without
the support of the ma-
terial body, 721-722
see Psychic being

Soul-sympathy, 337

Soul and Immortality, Ch. L
Ishwara, see One and the
Many

mind and life, can grow but
cannot be cut or made,
906
Nature, 399, 573» 889
Nature, biune character of,

313-314, 317
Nature, dichotomy of, 301
Nature Sankhya dualism of,
283, 31S-317

Soul entity, crude ideas of, —
in early man, 770

Soul in becoming, urge of, 589
man, see Spiritual element

in man, 759-761
Nature, 509 f

Nature ; its evolutionary
growth influenced by pre-
formations of good and
evil, 697

Soul in the Becoming, culmi-
nation of, 588
the condition when it ar-
rives at self-knowledge,
588
the evolution of Supermind
and the triune aspects of
Sachchidananda part of
the destiny of the, 591-
592

Soul in the universe, need for
the, 590

Soul personality, see under
Psychic personality, 798

Soul principle, inmost, — in
outer fact often one or
other of the part beings
in us mistaken for the,
799
a combination of all the
three approaches made by
it — the approach of the
mind, the heart and the
will — to a direct contact
with the spiritual Reality,
creates a spiritual or
psychic condition of the
surface being and nature,
803-804
a first attempt made by it
to achieve contact in the
surface being with the
spiritual Reality mainly
through the thinking
mind results in a spiritual
change on the summits,
but not the integral
transformation, 801-802
a first condition of its com-
plete emergence is a di-

INDEX

rect contact in the surface
being with the spiritual
Reality, 801-802
»/a plane of pure psychic ex-
istence must be the last
normal stage of its after-
death passage in which it
would await rebirth, 713-

714

a second approach made by
it to a direct contact
with the spiritual Reality
through the heart results
in a considerable change
of nature, but not the
integral transformation,
803

as seeming to our view in
this present world, 433

character of its new life
decided by itself in a re-
sort to its native habitat,
715-716

determining character of its
internatal dwelling in the
supraphysical, 711-712

double appearance of, 242-

243

double, in Man, 203 ; Ch.
XXIII

entirely dependent on Mat-
ter for the continuity of
its manifested existence
in the view of the physi-
cal universe regarded as
the sole manifested world,
706-707

first apparent view of, 684

has descended into the In-
conscience and assumed
the disguises of Matter
for tasting the surprise
and adventure of the Ig-
norance but all this en-
terprise of life would not
cease by its entry into
the gnostic consciousness,

946-947

human, see Human Soul

hypothesis of its temporary
or apparent creation by
some power of the origi-
nal Unity, 664-666

immortahty of the, see Im-
mortality of the soul

in its liberation the first
foundation is the peace
and silence of the Eternal
and Infinite, 878-879

1019

in the ordinary view of its
evolution into the ac-
tion and its involution
into passivity, 513-514
• in the theories of the Eter-
nal Existence supposed to
be a vital Becoming or
an immutable spiritual
Being or a nameless Non-
Being, can only be a
changing stream of phe-
nomena of consciousness,
665-666

infinite, 433

intellectual and emotional,
nature of, 198

its birth into the human
form and the question of
its repeated rebirth in
that form, 709-710

its descent into the Igno-
rance can be thought of
as an abrupt precipitation
from its spiritual Reality
into the first inconscience
and the subsequent evolv-
ing phenomenal life of
material Nature: but this
idea cannot outlive a
wider view of the complex
nature of existence, 682-
683

its hampered expression in
the present state of our
living, 874-875

its immortality or eternity
need not be admitted by
the developing \-italistic
theor>', 668-669

its nature when not yet
fully developed, 800-801

its object in entering into
rebirth, 725-727

its power of choice increas-
ingly felt as we go deep
within, 720

its seeking for self-expres-
sion and experience by its
rebirth into the body ne-
cessitates the presence of
two elements — Karma as
an instrument and the
secret Consciousness and
Will within as its user,
720-721

its various states giving rise
to different theories of
rebirth, 707-70S

may be described as a trav-

1020

INDEX

eller and climber who
presses towards his high
goal by step on step, 849
not a perishable cell but has
its original immortal re-
ality in the Transcend-
ence, 590

not bound by the formula
of mental humanity it
had a prehuman past, it
has a superhuman future,
677

occult seat of, 803

only its full emergence can
effect the evolutionary
miracle of transforming
the race, 937-938

part of its work to influ-
ence mind and heart and
vital being and turn them
in the direction of what
is divine, 796

possibilities of its internatal
journey, 713

real meaning and signifi-
cance of its evolving on
earth successively the
physical, the vital the
mental, the spiritual be-
ing, 715

real or subliminal, see
Psychic entity

rebirth of the, see Rebirth
of the soul

regarded as a constructed
personality evolved by
Life or as a persistent
unevolving reality or a
persistent evolving entity
and the nature of the
survival of human per-
sonality and rebirth based
on them, 667-668

Self and Being, supreme, —
of the Gita, 454-455

surer discrimination of, see
Good and evil, 542-544

the view of the old rehgious
myth and mystery of a
God who constantly cre-
ates immortal souls in-
volves two paradoxes,
662-663

to learn the results of the
Ignorance necessary for
the, 3.65-366

true object of its birth in
the human body, 527

true reason for its entering

into the Ignorance, 717-
718
two legitimate presumptions
of the philosophic reason
and various possibilities
of the nature of the soul
according to them, 662-
664
two possible alternatives of
it on the basis of the
admission that the human
personality survives the
death of the body and
moves between other
planes and this universe,
666-667
various possibilities of its
temporary dwelling in the
supraphysical planes and
the nature of the after-
death passages leading to
its pure psychic habita-
tion, 711-714
veiled seat of, 911
Souls, multiplicity of, — Igno-
rance not inherent in the,
S16-517
Space, 16, 40, 45, 64, 68, 71,
73-74, 76, 106, 124-126,
127,129,133-135,137,153,
15s, 163, 179, 180, 244,
270, 294, 298, 306, 325-
327, 343, 399, 431, 451-
453, 455, 459, 463, 494,
503, 567, 623, 756, 847;
see also Time
Space-circumstance, 458
Space-extension, subjective,

326-327
Space-Field, 459
Space-Time, 270

physical, 326
Space and Time, 416

conceptions of, 324-327
Space, infinite, 298
nature of, 503
physical, 336

physical, — its nature and its
relation with Time, 325-
326
physical, its origin or basic
reality begins to become
apparent when we go be-
hind the, 326-327
spiritual, 326
Spaceless, 222

Sphinx of the Inconscience,
dark, 611

Infinite Consciousness, lu-
minous veiled, 611
Spirit, 6, 8-10, II, 18, 23, 24,
26, 27, 31, 36, 99, 120,
136, 141, 147, 149, 185,
190, 202, 209, 210, 211,

212, 215-216 f, 2l6f-2l7,

221-225, 229-230, 233,
235, 236, 237, 243, 247,
249, 252, 254, 259, 262,
288, 289, 290, 294, 295,
296, 303, 308, 313, 314,
•316, 317, 318, 319, 320,
321, 322, 323, 325, 326,
357, 359, 367, 410, 413,
425, 431, 434, 438, 444,
487-488, 492, 501, 503,
506, 507, 517, 519-529,
571, 590-593, 594, 606,
607, 611, 618, 622, 623,
624-625, 627, 629, 634,
644, 648, 652, 660, 664,
672, 673, 674-678, 680,
683, 684, 685-688, 697,
700-701, 720, 726, 733,
734, 736, 739, 743, 745,
756, 757, 763, 766, 767,
777, 781, 784, 789, 790,
791, 792, 802, 807, 810,
816, 824, 827, 834, 83s,
844, 847, 855

Spirit-worship, 623

Spirit and Matter, dichotomy
of, 301
irrationality of the supposi-
tion of the sole existence
of, 687
the two terms in the un-
folding of knowledge,

570-571
Spirit and Nature, 316-318;
see also Being and its Con-
sciousness-Force ; Puru-
sha Prakriti

born into the material uni-
verse, task imposed on
the, 527

in man, divine, 368

in Matter, 672

in Nature, its way of creat-
ing a higher type of be-
ing, 644

in the manifestation here,
possibility of putting a
construction on its work-
ings which is neither tele-
ological nor evolutionary,
736

in things involved in the

INDEX

I02I

Nescience, evolution of its
nature self in a succession
of physical forms and the
universal and individual
aspects of this develop-
ment, 676-677

(or Oversoul), 501-502

or Self, result of an exclu-
sive concentration on the,
582
Spirit, an evolution beyond
our present status can
only come by an ascension
to the native heights of
the, 656

cosmic, 48s, 537, 589, 590,
668, 673, 687, 720

complementary aspects of
the silence and dynamis
of, 304-305

description of, 23, 222

evolving, 868

figure of the law of, 885

free, native kingdom of, 818

higher evolution of the as-
cending powers of, see
Higher evolution of the
ascending powers of the
Spirit

immanent, 517

is a final evolutionary emer-
gence because it is the
original involutionary ele-
ment and factor, 759

its conquest supposes the
execution in one life or
a few lives of a process
ordinarily involving the
procedure of centuries or
of millenniums and the
reason for this increased
rapidity, 828-829

its consciousness-force man-
ifests itself in many kinds
of energies each with its
appropriate consequence,
721-722

its power presiding over
each grade of our being
and the function of the
different beings in us, 797-
798

its subjection to a lower
law of life not a funda-
mental condition of
things, 920-921

its trinities would be real
to the gnostic individual,
863

its truth a truth of being
and consciousness and not
a truth of thought, 789

mind and body are subordi-
nate terms of its being
and are to be finally
transformed into its visi-
ble forms and instru-
ments, 676-677

nature of its essential
awareness by identity,
487-488

nature of the delight of, 947

not a slave in the hands of
Karma, see Karma, 720-
721

nature of its progressive
self-manifestation in evo-
lution, 629-630

our conception of, 677

pure, 18, 26

reason for its making itself
Matter, 876

result of creation with
something of the direct
power of the, 786

self-expressing, — see Inte-
gral view, 605-606

self determination of, 287

secret, — imperishable nature
of the divinity of, 731

secret, — the turning down-
ward of the eye of knowl-
edge and will with a view
to an all-round heighten-
ing, is its way from the
beginning, 637-638

submerged, 757

supramental power of, 628-
629

supreme, 360

timeless, 324, 32S

transcendent and cosmic,
577

three stages of the cycle of
its self-expression in life
and their significance, 607

universal, 736
Spiritual-mental being, 513

being, has to rise fully to
supermind and bring
down its powers to estab-
lish it here, 792

degrees, higher, — possible
nature of their manifesta-
tion here in the supra-
mental evolution, 897-S98

planes, are the highest the
evolving being can inter-

natally inhabit and the
condition in which its re-
turn here is at all possible
after having attained
them, 713-714
powers, higher, — undergo
the same disabilities as
mind or life when they
descend into life and mat-
ter, 815

Spiritual — pragmatic truth of
the dynamism of the uni-
verse, 322

Spiritual-supramental idea-
force, 870

Spiritual absolutism, pure, 764

Spiritual and supramental be-
ing and life, the inherent
law and necessity of the
passage from the purely
mental and material being
to the, 916-918
supramental being, nature
of the chanse the espe-
cially evolved human be-
ings will underso by this
evolutionary culmination
and what vriW be the
status of the rest of hu-
manity, once this is done,

750-751

supramental being. ob\-ious
method of Nature for the
evolutionary production
of, 749-750
Spiritual ascent, 885, 888

Awareness, gradual emer-
gence of, 493

awareness, supreme, — ad-
mits within its essential
awareness by identity a
subordinate and simul-
taneous awareness by in-
clusion and by indwelling,
and this is' the triple
knowledge of Self formu-
lated in^ the Upanishad,
487-488
Spiritual being, 292, 447, 495»
631, 649, 651-652, 656,
761, 762, 777, 903, ?ii.
912, 918; see also Spirit-
ual man etc.

Buddhist ideal of universal
compassion and Christian
emphasis on love indicate
the dvnamic side of the,
7S6f '

character of, 871

1022

INDEX

conditions for the emer-
gence of, 782-783

evolution of the, see Evolu-
tion of the spiritual being
etc.

foundation of his freedom
from law, 892

if its evolution out of the
mental being to be ac-
cepted as the intention in
Nature, two questions call
for a definitive answer:
(i) the exact nature of
the transition and (2) its
process and method, 758-

76s
Spiritual call, reason why it
must be accepted as im-
perative, 560
Spiritual change, 560; see also
under Spiritual transfor-
mation

its beginning not sufficient
for a radical transforma-
tion, 643-644

nature of, 793

reason for its having been
individual and not collec-
tive, 787-788

unfolding of the psychic en-
tity the first step towards
a, see Psychic entity, 793
Spiritual conception, nature

of, 488
Spiritual consciousness, 587,
648

imperatives of, see Truth,
789

integral, see Integral spir-
itual consciousness

is the larger and greater
consciousness — universal
as well as transcendent by
opening to which alone
mind and life themselves
can grow into their full-
ness, 604-605

its presence testifies to the
existence of a spiritual be-
ing in us other than our
surface mental personal-
ity, 761-762

reverses the principle of a
constructed building of
unity dependent on ex-
ternal association with
others, 912-913

to cease to be identified with
the body is the first neces-

sity for its liberation, but
in the gnostic being this
is no longer imperative
875-876

using the mind, has to work
within restrictions and the
necessity of bringing in a
higher dynamic principle
native to it for the spir-
itual fulfilment of life and
body, 830-831
Spiritual element in man ; diffi-
culty of distinguishing it
entirely from his mental
and vital formation in
which it appears so long
as the emergence is not
complete, but its decisive
emergence is the inevi-
table next step in our
evolutionary destiny, 759-
761

emergence, decisive, — one
sign of, see Spiritual evo-
lution, 760-762

dual tendency in the, 763-

76s
Spiritual entity, 903
Spiritual evolution, 652, 682,
707, 776, 777, 904; see
also under Evolution,
New Evolution

after-life a help to, 712

because still only beginning
its main preoccupation
has been to affirm a basis
of spiritual consciousness,
788

conditions in which it can
place by a comparatively
swift conscious change,
820

effect of the interdependence
of different worlds on the
process of, 709

difficulty created by the cir-
cumconscient conscious-
ness in the, 852-853

first admission to its su-
perior tanges attended
with dangers if without
the full psychic emer-
gence, 809-810

importance of intellect in,
780-781

is the central motive of the
terrestrial evolution, 734-
735

is the link needed for the

reconciliation of life and
spirit, 603-605

is the principle of becoming
in this universe, 607

its first view and the need
to bring out a clear dis-
tinction between the spir-
itual and the mental, 759

its idea only implicit and
not explicit in ordinary
notions of reincarnation,
709

its theory not identical with
the scientific theory of
form-evolution and phys-
ical life evolution — but
must stand on its own
inherent justification,

743-744

its true character becomes
evident only through the
liberations of the spiritual
part in us, 762-763

liberation of the spiritual
part in us the decisive
steps of, 760-761

materialistic view of, 779-
780

materialistic view not the
standpoint from which its
true significance can be
judged, 785-786

method and result of, 660

not indicated in ancient
theories about reincarna-
tion, 741-742

obeys the logic of a succes-
sive unfolding by taking
up a new decisive main
step only when the previ-
ous main step has been
sufficiently conquered,
828-829

of the individual being,
statement of the view
that it is not an inevitable
consequence of the admis-
sion that creation is a
manifestation of the
Timeless Eternal in a
Time Eternity, that there
are seven grades of Con-
sciousness and that the
material Inconscience is a
basis for the reascent of
the Spirit and that rebirth
is a fact, 736-737

reason why no decisive but
only a contributory re-

suit has been its conse-
quence and why there has
been no life-transforma-
tion, 786
rebirth an indispensable
condition of, see Rebirth,
671-672; Human birth,
679-680
value of reward or punish-
ment in, 725-727
Spiritual existence, some
colourless purity of, — de-
mand for, see Spiritual
consciousness, 604-605
Spiritual experience, 293, 377,
420, 421
critical control of the intel-
lect over it can be ham-
pering and unreliable, the
true controlling power be-
ing an inner discrimina-
tion, 782
indispensable for the crea-
tion of the spiritual be-
ing out of the mental
man, 783-784
its first truth of being has
at once an impersonal and
a personal aspect, 295
its fundamental truth one
but, based on that, num-
berless variations possible,
although the overpassing
of variations also possible,
789
method aim and field of, see
Evolution of the spiritual
being, 765-766; Man, 766-
767
past, — perils of the inner
life and seeking well-
known to it and the vari-
ous means employed to
meet these perils, 804-806
Spiritual force, its pure touch
is the first necessity for
change and how this can
be done, 830
force; its action through a
larger mentalisation and
vitalisation by the open-
ing up of the inner being,
can lessen but does not
get rid of the Ignorance,
832-833
freedom, inner, 916
individual, 619, 620
individual or individuals, iso-
lated appearance of, 939

INDEX

Spiritual individual, centre of
the action of, 310

nature of the action of, 912-
913

the, 333, 336

universalised, 943
Spiritual individuality, mean-
ing of, 309-310

intelligence, its growth an
intermediate necessity of
great importance, see
Spiritual, 781-783

intuition, 293

knowledge of self; three
steps of its self-achieve-
ment and their resulting
liberation, 560-562

knowledge, first origin of its
tertiary powers when the
subject draws a little back
from itself as object, 488-
489

knowledge its nature and its
difference with other
knowledge, 907-908

law of consciousness, 320
Spiritual life, 904, 913, see
Divine life
ascetic spareness cannot be
binding as a law of, 944-

945
collective, see Collective

spiritual life
supreme ideal held up in the
passage to the, 889-890
Spiritual life; need for it to
take up and re-create the
whole being, mind, life
and body, 903-904
living; the inner life is the
thing of first importance
in it but this antinomy
between the inner and the
outer disappears in the
gnostic living, 868-869
man, 758, 904; see also un-
der Spiritual being; Spir-
ituahty
Spiritual man, evolution of
the, see Evolution of the
spiritual man
is Nature's supreme super-
normal effort of human
creation, 642-643
many stages and a great
variety of individual for-
mations in the evolution
of the, 789-790

1023

nascent, — making his ap-
pearance in the emotional
nature as the devotee by
a transformation through
the heart, 803
his main business and his
service to the race, 786
Spiritual mind, 642

mind to supermind, lines of

transition from, 818
nisus, 932

opening, in it the awakened
inner being readily re-
ceives the higher influ-
ences, and the reason why
the external self is slower
to receive, 852-853
opening; possible for it to
take place and its action
to proceed before the
psychic change is com-
plete, but the supramen-
tal change does not admit
of any premature descent
of the highest Light, 828
or gnostic consciousness, 943
psychic condition of the sur-
face being and nature, see
Surface being and nature,
803-804
perception, 488
philosophy; its origin and
the method and lines of
its development in the
East and in the West and
its necessity for the full-
ness of our total inner
evolution, 781-7S3
philosophy, its place in na-
tional or tribal reUgion,
see Religion, 773-774
method, aim and field of, see
Evolution of the spiritual
being, 765-766; Man, 766-
767
plane of Nature, 652
planes beyond the supra-
mental, nature of the ex-
istence in, 290-291
preoccupation of man. East-
ern ideal of, see Eastern
ideal
principle, 65S

realisation and experience
work and aim of. 765, 767
realisations, distinct or ex-
clusive,— value and weak-
ness of, 347, 34S
reality, 320

1024

seeker, first and foremost
preoccupation of the, 765

self, 915

self-realisation and self-ex-
pression, pure, need not
be a single white mono-
tone, 789

silence, 378; see under Pas-
sivity

status, supreme, 317

transformation, 829, 838

transformation its difficul-
ties due to the complexity
of the process of Nature
and the need to work out
this change separately in
each part of the being in
its own nature, 813-814

transformation, as the sec-
ond of the three trans-
formations it unites the
manifested existence with
what is above it, 810-812

transformation, condition
under which it might be
rapid — even facile, 813

transformation, effected lit-
tle by little or in a suc-
cession of swift definitive
experiences, achieves itself
and culminates in an up-
ward ascent by which in
the end the consciousness
fixes itself on a higher
plane and from there sees
and governs the mind,
life and body, 811-812

transformation, first stages
of, its perfection already
realised though only by
a small number, 817-818
Spiritual transformation, full,
— what is needed for, 811 ;
its schematic logical or
ideal account looked at as
a succession of separate
steps, each accomplished
before the passage to the
next commences ■ — but
evolutionary Nature being
a totality of ascending
powers of being which in-
terpenetrates and exercise
in their action on each
other a power of mutual
modification, there is not
actually a series of simple,
clear-cut and successive [

INDEX

stages in the individual's
evolution, 833-850

limitation of the overmind
power and the need to
call in the supramental to
complete it, 815-816

necessity of its intervention
on the psychic or psycho-
spiritual change, and the
way by which this can be
done, 809

reason for the imperfection
and limitation in the re-
sults of, 814-S15.

third motion of, 811-812
Spiritual truth, nature of, see
Mystic, 787-789

unity, 913

urge in man, two sides of,

753-754

vision and feeling, 488-489

vision, new, 422
Spiritualised mental being, 741

mind; its tendency to go on
upwards and the results
of its entering into a vast
formless impersonality,
802-803

see Absolute, utterness of
the, 420-421
Spirituality, at first its truth
not self-evident to the
mind but the need to em-
phasize its distinct char-
acter, 762

cannot be called upon to
deal with life by a non-
spiritual method, see Spir-
itual evolution, 786

its achievement up till now,
and its need to establish
supermind here possible
only by a triple trans-
formation, 792-793

its two sides and the in-
dication they contain of
the urge of the occult
spiritual being within to
emerge in earth-nature,
753-754

real work of, see Spiritual
evolution, 785-786

reason why its tendency has
been to look more beyond
life than towards life and
its result successful in the
man but unsuccessful in
the human mass, 786-787

subjective, see Subjective

spirituality
surface view and real signif-
icance of the emergence
of, 759-760
tentative beginnings and a
slow evolution and the
highest emergence of, 783-
785
Sruti, 66

Stability, meaning of, 70
"Stable lightnings," in San-
skrit poetic figure intui-
tion might be called a sea
of, 842
Self, see Self, stable
State, nature of its demand on
the individual, 928, 936
the, 943
Static and dynamic aspects,

312-313
Status and dynamis, reality
and spontaneity of, see
Reality, 410-412
sthdnu, 70
Stoic systems, 781
Strife, 182

Subconscience, 380, 381, 441,
493, 525, 618, 825
cave of, 433
Subconscient, the, 62, 81, 82,
97, 196, 197, 199, 205, 206,
236, 239, 380, 381, 497,
500-501, 584, 621, 622,
623, 639, 714-715, 780,
827, 830, 837, 838, 843
mind, 80-81
meaning of, 81
and subhminal, their influ-
ence over surface con-
scious existence, 195-196
in sleep, deeper and heavier

stratum of the, 380-381
means by which its control
possible and its impor-
tance, 654-655
province and character of
the, 653-655
Subconscient; a dark knowl-
edge by identity is its
basis, but it does not re-
veal itself or its secret, 486
its nature and its relation
to our surface and our
subliminal being, 498-500
reason for its being so called
and the vastness of its
sphere, 496
Subconscient being, 520

parts, 850

physical, — function of the,
277

transformation in the gnos-
tic being of the, 875
Subconscious as a dream-
builder, 379, 380-381

mass mind, see Mass mind
subconscious

existence, what we ordi-
narily mean by, 498

the, 381, 382, 383

the real, 205 f
Subjective and objective ex-
periences, not valid in
Brahman - consciousness,

399

domains of our being, see
Integral knowledge, 581-
582

experience; its easy liabil-
ity to error which is also
an appanage of the objec-
tive method is no reason
for shutting it out, 689-
690

experience, three movements
of cognition can meet to-
gether in, see Surface
mind, 471-472

movement, double knowl-
edge of, 469-472

spirituality aloof from the
world or self-protected
against it, — easier to es-
tablish but if the inner
spirituality is to be ob-
jectivised in a free world-
action this cannot be dy-
namically done without
receiving the world influ-
ences through the circum-
conscient being, and the
two ways in which the
inner spirituality has to
deal with them and the
need of this more difficult
perfection for the integral
transformation, 852-853
Subjectivity and objectivity,
are not independent re-
alities but depend upon
each other, 578-579
Subliminal, 81, 195, 197, 203,
205, 205 f, 207, 243, 379,
381, 382, 383, 386, 405,
406, 501, 502, 546, 617,
621, 653, 654, 657, 689,
727

INDEX

a valuable element in the
constitution of our being
upholding and embracing
the waking consciousness,
655-656

and the supraphysical, main
character of the, 490-491

assimilation, 729

being, 380, 383, 477,_ 694,
703 ; see also Cosmic en-
ergies, 485-487
Subliminal being, dangers of
entry with vital ego-mo-
tives into the, 477, 479

has also a larger direct con-
tact with the world, 479-
480

its power to enter into a
direct contact of con-
sciousness with other
consciousness or with ob-
jects, 479-480

its recollection of past lives
cut off from the surface
mind and emerging only
under certain conditions,
729-731

nature of its interaction
with the surface personal-
ity, see Internatal inter-
vals, 714-715

reason why it is described
as the Dream Self by the
Upanishad, 381-382

result of an exclusive con-
centration on the, 582

the concealed method of
knowledge by identity be-
comes clear when it enters
into the cosmic conscious-
ness, 483-485
Subliminal collective being,
618

contact and experience, an
element of it also present
in the traditional account
of other worlds, 699

cognition, 4S2-484

cognition, dynamic func-
tions and primary values
of, 477-482, 493
inner, 383

consciousness, 480-483, 503,
538, 919

consciousness as a witness to
truth, 689 ; its action on
the development of the
surface structure, see Sur-

1025

face conscious structure,
546-547

existence, 388

experience, 714

experience ; its vision of su-
praphysical prolongation
of earth conditions and
of formulations, 696-697

experience, need for the
early man to rely on the
aid of, see Early man,
769-771

experiences ; reason for their
limitations and their dan-
gers without the full
emergence of the psychic,
808-809

forces, 805

image-building power of
consciousness, 468

inner being, 870

its experience of Time, 502

mind, 280, 641

nature, 804

nature of, 203-204

necessity, 810

not the supreme or the
whole sense of our being,
501

life, 195, 203-204

memory, 467

mind, 80, 170, 195, 203-204,
205, 262

occult science the science of,
see Occultism, 777-779

opposition, 838

parts, 716, 859, 919

parts of our nature, their

ignorance can easily result
in our mistaking some-
thing of the inner mind
or vital self for the psy-
chic, 797

physicality, 82, 204

reality, 581
Subliminal self, 253, 496, 498,
501, 502-503, 504, 520,
526, 691, 704

and consciousness ; nature
of its formation in the
previous stages of evolu-
tion, S59

its character, range and
power, and its influence
over our surface self, 3S3-
384

its real nature in relation
to the surface being and
the sense in which only it

1026

INDEX

can be called subcon-
scious, 499-500

its reception of universal
Mind, Life and subtler
Matter-forces and turning
them into formations
powerfully affecting our
existence, 655-656
Subliminal subconscient and
the superconscient, 497-
498

vital being, 640
Submental, 82, 830, 832

character of distinction be-
tween, 499
Substance, 155, 203, 216, 222,
232, 234, 247

antinomy between gross and
pure spirit, 233

ascending series of, 234-235,

239
nature of, 221-222
material, status of, 232, 236-

237

nature of, 219, 235

limitation not essential na-
ture of, 235

mental, nature of, 236-237

pure, nature of, 218, 232,

233
Sankhya classification of,

232-233
vital, nature of, 235-236

Subtle body, 710, 732

Subtle-physical being, inner, —
nature of, 477

Suffering, a consequence of the
limitation of conscious-
ness, 364-365; see also
under Evil
its character in different
stages of evolution and
a deliverance from it at a
certain stage in the gnos-
tic evolution, 877-878

Sufi, 443

suksma deha, 19 f

suksma drsti, 19 f

suksma indriya, 19 f

Sun of Knowledge, 432
Truth, Vedic image, 255

Sun-God, 594

sunya, 427

Superconscience, 289, 383, 388,
393, 403, 404, 416, 426,
441, 443, 444, 492, 500-
501, 573, 617, 618, 619,
627, 687, 700, 742, 810,
860, 89S» 899. 918

in it are included the higher
planes of mental being as
well as the native heights
of supramental and pure
spiritual being, 656-657

its comparison with the sub-
liminal and the subcon-
scient, 501

its state in an absolute sense
and what we ordinarily
mean by it, 311

perfect state of conscious-
ness is to us a state of,
902

reason why it is described as
the Sleep Self by the Up-
anishad, 383-384
Superconscient and the Incon-
scient, the two terms of
the, see Knowledge and
the Ignorance, 570-571

being, 520

Brahman as the status of a
free, 404

contact with it established
by a descent of the higher
into the lower nature,
811-812

Eternal, 665

immobility, 398

our real being in the cosmos
is the, 502

parts, 829

ranges, superior, 486

Self, 493, 503, 526

sole-existing, — creation of
individual soul-life in the
theory of a, 664-665

status of the, 428

the highest occult province
of our nature, 498

two types of contact with it
— opening and ascent — by
themselves insufficiently
effective for the full spir-
itual transformation, 810-
811

status, 368

Truth, 441
Superconscient, the, 62, 63, 82,
77, 205, 196, 199, 239, 243,
405, 406, 433, 497, 501-
503> 573, 576, 584, 621,
622, 623, 653, 654, 657,
665, 685, 688, 735, 780 _
Superhuman formation, possi-
ble for the Reality to as-
sume after or in man, 929
Superior planes of existence,

see Planes of existence,
superior
Superman, 193, 248, 740

a forceful domination of
humanity by him would
be no evolution but a re-
version to an old strenu-
ous barbarism, 945-946

infraspiritual, 906
Supermanhood, 639

mental idea of, 945

spiritual and supramental,
735, 945-946
Supermind, 8, 14, 57, 115-117,
120, 121-122, 123, 125,
126-129, 130, 131, 134-
138, 140, 146, 152, 155,
161, 162-163, 174-176,
181, 185, 195, 196, 197,
198, 202, 209, 212, 217-
218, 223, 229, 235, 236,
241, 242, 243, 245-248,
255, 257, 258-260, 264,
284, 289, 317, 341, 422,
431, 444, 527, 530, 592,
593, 626 f, 629, 630, 633,
634, 638, 656, 672, 701,
737, 740, 753, 763, 792,
833, 835, 848, 858, 899

a wide calm and deep de-
light of all-existence are
among its first steps of
self-realisation but they
rise together and culmi-
nate into an eternal ecs-
tasy, 878-879

as Creator, Ch. XIV

as the direct power of mani-
festation of the Tran-
scendence, 847

ascent towards Ch. LIV

can alone overcome the dif-
ficulty of the fundamen-
tal Nescience, 854-855

can descend into the mate-
rial existence without los-
ing its full power action,
815-816

cognition nature of, 286-287^
288

consciousness of, 902

consciousness, 890

consciousness, 255; person-
ality and impersonality in
the, 881

double faculty of, 241

functions and powers of,

120, 229, 245-246, 250

evolutive, 895
first operative principle, 127
first major results of the
spiritual transformation
that follow as a necessary
consequence of the nature
of, 863-880

Mind and the Overmind
Maya, Ch. XXVIII
Supermind gnosis, 858

in it all powers are infinite
to each other and act as
one, 893

the stage at which it can
take over the lead of the
evolution and build the
first foundations of its
own characteristic mani-
festation, 858-859
Supermind in its descent and
evolutionary working out
of the diversity of the in-
finite it does not lose its
unitarian and integralising
and harmonic conscious-
ness, 861-862

in the transition towards it
a centralising action of
overmind tends towards
the discovery of a true
individual replacing the
dead ego, 825

its action on the evolution
will not annul the evolu-
tionary principle but har-
monise its emergence,
861-862

its infinite poer of a free
self - determination, and
possible consequence of
this in manifestation, 858-
859

its movements beyond the
ordinary human mental
conception, 817-818

law of, 862

meaning of, 133, 134

nature of, 528

secondary poise of, 130, 136-
137

self-awareness of, 218

significance of the concep-
tion of, 140

third poise of, 136-137

the sense in which it merges
into the Ananda, 878

transition from overmind
to, — impossible for any

INDEX

effort of the mere Mind
to achieve without the
descent of the beings and
powers of the supercon-
science into us, 819
triple status of, 862
triple status of Ch. XVI
triple formula of, 129-130,

135, 138
Vedic description of, 116-
117, 245-246
Supernature, 320, 322, 562,
616, 619, 624, 778, 819,
863, 864, 868, 874, 888,
890, 891, 892, 893, 913,
915, 916, 918, 922, 923,
942, 947
a first condition of the tran-
sition from our present
state of being to a state
of, 821-822
a first opening towards con-
scious participation in its
action is a condition of
the turn towards supra-
mental transformation,
824-825
a second condition which
has to be accomplished
before the supramental
transformation can be-
come at all possible, 825-
826
a supreme power of the
spirit in Time and in
Space and beyond them,
623
can work through us even
before the dynamic
Knowledge-Ignorance is
removed, 561-562
in the evolution towards it
the initial power of con-
scious participation by
the mind in the universal
working would enlarge in
the individual into a more
and more intimate and
extended vision of her
workings, 822-823
its potencies are without re-
striction except its own
Truth and self-law, 823
its unity, mutuality and
harmony contrasted with
the constructed knowl-
edge in the mental being
whose disorders can only
be dissolved by a greater '

1027

light than that of mind-
nature and life-nature,

918-919

gnostic, 886, 910

gnostic, — evolution of, 921

— rudiments of spiritual
powers belonging to it
present in our ordinary
composition, 923

man's finding of, 623

nothing irrational in the
new evolution of a greater
power of consciousness
and life in the, 924-925

spiritual and supramental,
938

the biune reality of the Ab-
solute repeats itself in the
Ufe of the spirit in it, 886-
887

what is true behind the con-
flicting ideals of the mind
will remain in the life of,
942-944

why this greater nature — al-
though our own true na-
ture— is spoken of as, 916
Supernatural, the sense in
which occultism might be
described as the science
of the, see Occultism, 777-

779

the, 923
Supernormal faculties, powers
of telepathy, clairvoyance,
second sight, etc., — pos-
sessed by the subliminal
in reality and not by the
outer mind, 479
Superreason, 922
Supracosmic, 39

the, 377

Absolute, see Absolute su-
pracosmic

and intracosmic, Ishwara as
both, 318

Existence, 294

ideal, 601-602

self-awareness, 290

transcendence, 335

view of existence and its
corresponding mental at-
titudes and ideals, 59S-
600
Supramental and spiritual
worlds; their pressure is
preparing to develop here
the manifest power of the
spirit and that can alone

1028

INDEX

liberate from the apparent
Inconscience, 695-696

ascent, 785

being, 584, 629, 630, 656,
741, 792, 858

being and his existence,
evolved, 926

being, action of, 229-230
Supramental being, conscious-
ness with the Real-Idea in
its governing everything
in, 875

must be a new and inde-
pendent manifestation ac-
cording to the view which
holds that the teleological
element is not visible in
the cosmic structure, 739-
740, 740-741

no place in it for the relative
and dependent happiness
and grief, 866-867

the three mysteries of exist-
ence would find a unified
fulfilment of their har-
mony in the life of, 863-
866

what will be nature of its
existence and conscious-
ness here in Matter, 870-
871
Supramental change, see also
Supramental transforma-
tion

a unification of the entire
being by a breaking down
of the wall between the
inner and the outer na-
ture and an opening up of
the individual into the
cosmic consciousness is
another condition for it,
827-828

its first condition is that
mental Man should in-
wardly become aware and
in possession of his own
deeper law of being and
its processes, 820-821

of the whole substance of
the being, takes place
when the involved super-
mind in Nature emerges
to meet and join with the
supramental light and
power descending from
Supernature, 855
isychic and spiritual trans-
formation must be far ad-

vanced before there can
be any beginning of it,
825-827

proceeds by the same proc-
ess of evolution as in the
rest of the movement Of
Nature — an assumption
and new integration of
the existence by a supe-
rior power of Being — but
the demand for integra-
tion becomes at this high-
est stage of Nature's
workings a point of cardi-
nal importance, 830-831

reason why it does not ad-
mit any premature de-
scent of the highest Light,
828
Supramental cognition, 290
Supramental consciousness,
330, 626, 752

characteristic mark of, 867

Force, alone capable by its
emergence of transform-
ing the evolutionary na-
ture of Ignorance and its
basis of Inconscience, 628-
629

must be fundamentally a
Truth-consciousness, 890-
891
Supramental creation, 762

energy and action, 762

evolution, 899

results of, 860-862

see Supramental transfor-
mation, 871-872

existence, evolutionary, —
certain deduction possible
which might vaguely con-
struct for us an idea of
the first status of, 858

Force, see Force, supra-
mental

gnosis, 858, 896, 897-898,
899, 944

gnosis, a complete self mas-
tery and self-knowledge
the gift of, 864

gnosis is a twofold Truth-
consciousness, 894-895
Supramental gnostic being, see
also Gnostic Being Gnos-
tic individual, etc.

nature of the working of,
862

order of, see Gnostic Being,
890-891

Supramental gnostic individ-
ual, will be a spiritual
Person, 881, 882-884

nature, would have no need

of the mental rigid way,

887-888

Supramental gnosis, thought a

derivative moment in, 894

instrumentation, 752

its power to establish har-
mony between spirit as
status and world dy-
namism, 210, 212

knowledge, 921

knowledge, will liberate and
restore the spoiled intui-
tive instincts in the body,
876-877

life in Matter, 713

life, would relate in the
light of integral Reality
its own truth of being
with the truth of being
that is behind the Igno-
rance, 895-896

life; a knowledge by iden-
tity using the powers of
the integrated being for
richness of instrumenta-
tion would be its principle
order, 893-894

manifestation, in its ascent
would have as a next se-
quence a manifestation of
the Bliss of the Brahman,
878-879

Nature and mental Nature,
impossible for the mind
to forecast in detail what
the supramental change
must be in its parts of life,
856-858

nature, general formulas of,
856-857

or overmental state, condi-
tion in which alone return
from either possible, 713-
714

power, 903

principle, 942

principle and its cosmic op-
eration; when it is once
established, the interven-
ing powers of Overmind
and spiritual Mind could
found themselves securely
upon it and become a
hierarchy of states of
consciousness — mental hu-

manity remaining as one
step of this evolution, 855

principle on earth, nature of
its influence on the life of
the Ignorance, 942

race of beings, its nature
would be determined by
the law of supermind,
861-862

regard on being and things,
the other side of, see Ab-
solute, 287-288

status, 406, 945
Supramental transformation,
conditions of the turn
towards, see under Super-
nature, 821-825

condition when the turning
of the spiritual transfor-
mation towards it com-
mences, 833

finishes the passage of the
soul through the Igno-
rance and bases its form
of manifestation on a
complete and completely
effective self-knowledge,
815-816

first major results of, 863-
880

individual is its first field
but his isolated change
will have a cosmic signifi-
cance only if he becomes
a centre for the establish-
ment of the supramental
Consciousness-Force as an
overtly operative power
in the same way as the
thinking Mind, and the
significance of this change,
855

no conclusive validity in the
reasoning that because
this is a world of Ig-
norance it can only be
achieved in a heaven be-
yond or not at all and
that the demand of the
psychic entity must be
replaced by a merger of
the soul in the Absolute,
748
Supramental transmutation,

nature of, 793
Supramental Truth- Conscious-
ness, 255, 284-286, 290-
291

INDEX

truth-consciousness, fourth
principle of, 606
Supraphysical, its knowledge
a part of the complete
knowledge, see Integral
knowledge, .581-582

Beings, Powers or Forces, —
possible to receive help or
harm from them, 691-692

fact, demand for its physi-
cally valid proof illogical,
688-689

plane of being, a miraculous
speed of process quite
possible on a, 748

realities, 579, 580

worlds, see also under
Higher worlds ; Other
worlds

worlds, the explanation that
man himself creates these
worlds which he inhabits
after death not valid, 692-

693
Supraphysical worlds, theory
of their creation subse-
quent to the material
world to aid the evolu-
tion is possible but not
supported by our experi-
ence and vision of them,
694-697

three interrelated questions
based on the acceptance
of their existence dis-
cussed, 687-705

traditional belief in their
existence and possibility
of communication with
them rejected in the last
rationalistic age, 687-690
Supraphysical world-realities,
subjective character of
our experience of, 690-691

subjective — objective expe-
riences, 691-692

their character and the na-
ture of the two main or-
ders of experience in our
contact with them, 690-
692
Suprarational, the, 296, 298

mystery, 270, 283, 296
Supraterrestrial existence,

truth and the limited
typal character of, see
Integral view of existence,
558, 590, 596, 602, 605,
607

1029

hereafter, 918

ideal, 601-602

view of existence and its
corresponding mental at-
titudes and ideals, 598-
600
Supreme Being, 283, 321, 399,

514, 823, 826
Supreme Brahman, 294, 295

called the Absolute in West-
ern metaphysics — but an
Absolute taking all rela-
tivities in its embrace, 294
Supreme Consciousness, 409

Existence, 284, 293, 400, 868

the Inconscient and Super-
conscient aspects of, 289-

290,311

Nature, 533, 826

Reality, 212, 606, 841

Reality, ways of approach-
ing the, 420

Self, 313

Gita's description of the, 514

status of the, 428

the, 38, 39, 48, 138, 144,
284, 293, 297, 507, 557,
588, 590, 596, 602, 605,
607, 613, 614, 615, 620,
686, 776, 879
Surface and the subliminal
consciousness, 477-482 ;
see also under Waking;
outer
Surface being, 455-456, 645,

654

and nature, a combination
of the approaches of the
mind, will and heart to
contact with the spiritual
Reality creates a spiritual
or psychic condition of
the, S03-S04; see Surface
existence

its relation to the subcon-
scient and the subliminal,
497-500

need to convert it into a
perfect power of the inner
life of the spirit, 906

the consciousness has to
shift its centre from it to
the inner being for the
change to arrive at its
widest totaUty, see Inner
being, 804-805

inner mental, \atal and
subtle physical influences,
as they come up, mingle

1030

and create an aggregate,
see Psychic being, 796-
798
Surface being; a heterogene-
ous compound, not a har-
monious whole, and there-
fore our coordination of
its multifarious elements
by reasoning and will in-
complete and a half-
measure, 798-799

conscious structure, reasons
for the indirect influence
on it of the subliminal,
its earliest formation and
gradual development and
. the contribution of the
human intelligence to the
animal basis, 545-546
Surface consciousness, 336 ; see
Evil and falsehhood, 543-
544

a judgement of ourselves
from what appears now
in it fallacious, 495-496

and stable Self, 457-458

constantly adding to or re-
jecting from its experience
and modified by every
addition as well as by
every rejection, 458

if it were always open to the
action of intuition error
would not be possible,
547-548

limited nature of, 912

nature and facts of, 458-459

the conclusion of Buddhist
Nihilists a result of living
in the, 457-458
Surface cognition, derives in
different degrees from a
fourfold order of knowl-
edge, 469-470

cognition, reason for the ob-
jective nature of, 482-484

ego ; self - imprisonment

within its bounds is the
cause of our ignorance,
474-475

evolution, 468

existence, a small and di-
minished representation
of our secret greater ex-
istence, 467-468

existence externahsed — con-
trasted with the inner
spiritual life, 904-905

imagination, a selection

INDEX

from a more effective
subliminal image-building
power of consciousness,
468

individuality, 417

memory, a fragmentary ac-
tion of inner subliminal
memory, 467

mental being, 455

mental entity, fleeting as-
pect of, 454-455

mental individuality, ego-
centric nature of, 495

mental man, 911

mind, a knowledge by
identity, a knowledge by
direct contact and, de-
pendent upon them, a
separative knowledge can
meet together in our, 469-
472

mind, its ignorance of its
past and future, 502-503

mind, appearance of exist-
ence to it a flux or a con-
struction by conscious-
ness, 573-574

nescience, see Conscious Be-
ing, 548-549

personality, 477-478

self and consciousness, its
formation in the past
stages of evolution and
its division from the sub-
liminal self and conscious-
ness, 859

self; the subliminal is the
concealed origin of almost
all its activities, 382-383,
383-384

state, at best a state of
mixed knowledge-igno-
rance, 473-474

state, cause of the limitation
and imperfection of, 473-
475, 480-484

universalisation on the, see
Universalisation on the
surface

Vital being, see Vital being,
surface

will and the subliminal urge,
497-498
Surrender, see under Self-of-
fering

and self-giving to the Su-
preme, see Individual,
620-621; see Divine Be-
ing, 322-323, 32-1

Survival of mind, life and
body, aspiration for it
could only succeed if they
could put on something
of the immortality and
divinity of the indwelling
spirit, 731-733

susupti, 665

svabhdva, 151, 162, 285, 740

svdrdjya, 1 7 f

svadharma, 301, 740

svarupa, 142 f, 285, 301

sve dame rtasya, 432 f

Swabhava, 861

Swadharma of Swabhava, 885,
861

Swetaketu, 65

Swetaswatara Upanishad, 15 f,
42, 50, 76, 201, 292, 394,
431, 448, 609, 661, 706

sydd vd na sydd vd, 372

Symbol-images, see Dream
analogy, 384-386

Symbolic value of things;
valid as a dynamic mental
representation, but they
do not make the things
themselves mere signifi-
cant counters, 576-577

Symbols; in a certain sense
all things are symbols
through which we have
to approach That by
which we and they exist,
575-576

Symposium, 272

Synthesis, evolutionary, — as
attempted in the ancient
Indian culture and the
reason why it eventually
collapsed, 602-603

Synthetic view of existence,
see Integral view

Taboo, 772

Taittiriya Upanishad, transla-
tion from, 8, 26, 28, 86,
148, 161, 191, 201, 213,
232, 249, 292, 505, 531,
706, 716 f; see also In-
ternatal resort, 715-716
meaning of Asat or the
Non-Existent of the, 507

Tamas, the Indian word for
the principle of inertia of

consciousness and force,

745
Tamasic intelligence, has its
seat in the physical mind,

551

tama dslt tamasd gudham, 491

Tantras, ampler maturity ar-
rived at by occult knowl-
edge in Egypt and the
East still preserved intact
in the remarkable system
of the, 779

Tantra ; its implied conception
of the vegetable and
animal life-forms as the
lower steps of a ladder
and humanity as the last
development of the con-
scious being, 745-746

Tantrik, 80, 238

Tapas, 217; see also under
Concentration ; Con-

scious-energy ; Exclusive
concentration, 519-521
522-524, 525, 529; also
Force ; Conscious-force
and the Ignorance, Ch. XLI
is the nature of action of
the consciousness of Sach-
chidananda as of ours, —
but with a difference, 510
is the character of both the
passive and the active
consciousness of Brahman,
S11-512
its character as passivity
and as activity of Brah-
man, 512-513
its literal and later mean-
ings, 509 f
origin of Ignorance must be
sought for in some self-
absorbed concentration of,
S17
the question of its role in
regard to a status where
there is no play of en-
ergy, 510-511
separative movement of,
523

tapasyd, 509 f, 826

tdthastu, 321

Telepathy, see under Super-
normal faculties
significance of the phenom-
ena of, 15

Telepathic phenomena, signifi-
cance of, 497

Teleological cosmos ; objec-

INDEX

tions based on it on sci-
entific and metaphysical
reasoning and the inval-
idity of these two objec-
tions, 742-743
Teleological element in exist-
ence; statement of the
view that it is not visi-
ble in the cosmic struc-
ture, see Creation, 737-
738; Evolutionary terres-
trial existence, 12>1-12>^'^
Gradations and types of
being, 738-740; man, 739-
742 ; Spiritual evolution,
736-737

element in existence reasons
for the statement of the
objection to, 742-743

in existence, objection to it
based on (i) a scientific
reasoning proceeding on
the assumption that all
is the work of an incon-
scient Energy which acts
automatically by mechan-
ical processes and (2) a
metaphysical reasoning
which proceeds on the
assumption that the In-
finite and Universal has
everything in it already
and therefore there can
be in it no element of
emergent purpose, 742-
743

metaphysical objection to it
and the grounds by which
it can be met, 743-744

no conclusive validity in
the reasoning that because
this is a world of Igno-
rance a supramental trans-
formation can only be
achieved by a passage to
a heaven beyond or can-
not be achieved at all, be-
cause Ignorance is not the
whole meaning of the
world-manifestation, 752-
753

scientific objection to it not
valid if there is a secret
Consciousness in or be-
hind the apparently in-
conscient Energy in Mat-
ter, 742-743
Temporal ignorance, removal

1031

of the, 621 ; see Ignorance,
temporal

Terrestrial being, see Man
existence, its object and the
means by which it can
be achieved, see Integral
view, 605-606
existence, spiritual evolu-
tion the significant motive
of, 734-735
ideal, its value and limita-
tion and the spiritual ev-
olution as the condition
for its fulfilment, 600-604
ideal, value of, 600-601
view of existence, see Cos-
mic-terrestrial

Thaumaturgy, 765

Theos ouk estin alia gignetai,
356

Theistic explanation of exist-
ence starting from an
extra-cosmic Deity, diffi-
culty of, 276
conception of the Many, 323

That, 10, 13, 23, 29 f, 40, 41.
65, 72, 95, 96, 119. 138,
142, 190, 248, 254, 300,
301, 303, 307, 354, 356,
358, 360, 416, 419, 421-
422, 427, 505, 509, 5i4f
569, 570, 576, 577, 589,
670, 801, 802

"That am I," our I is not that
spiritual being which can
say, 611

"That being known all will be
known," 583

"That One," Veda speaks of
the fundamental Truth as,
432, 438

"That Truth," see "That One"

Thinker, 152

Thinking mind, see Intellect
a higher endeavour through
it does not give us the
integral transformation,
802-803
joy of existence for, 872
nature of, 373

reason for the unbuilding of
all its affirmations, 373-

374
the soul's first attempt to
achieve contact in the
surface being with the
spiritual Reality mainly
through the, 801, 802

1032

Thought, 9, 10, i8, 26, 37
109, 216, 273, 840

a secondary and a not in-
dispensable process in the
spiritual order, 839-840

greater, — its nature con-
trasted with the limping
action of our reason, 835-
836

higher, 839

in the Higher-Mental being
and in the supramental
gnosis, 894

its dominance the special
character of the Higher
Mind, 834-837

nature of the spiritual con-
ception which is the orig-
inal substance of, 488-489

nature of its manifestation
when the overmind de-
scends, 844

separation of the thinker
and the thinking is more
difficult in it but still pos-
sible, 471
Thought-speech, 323
Thought-mind, certainly not
the last word of con-
sciousness, 901-902
Three great formulas in the
philosophies of Shankara
and Buddha, 374-375
Time, 16, 29, 37, 40, 43, 45,
64, 68, 71, 72-74, 78, 79,
95, 106, 107, 119, 124-
126, 127, 129, 133-13S,
137-138, 141, 142, 153,
154, 155, 157, 163, 178,
179, 180, 244, 248, 271,
294, 298, 306, 324, 328,
339, 343, 396, 400, 408,
409, 411-413, 414, 416-
417, 424, 427, 429, 432,
443, 448, 449, 451-453,
454-455, 458-459, 461-
463, 464, 466, 487, 494,
502-503, 513, 521, 526,
566, 573, 578, 583-585,
597, 621, 622, 623, 624,
658, 664, 665, 670, 671,
675, 727, 731, 829, 882,
901,

eternal, 658

mental conception of, 346-
347

Illusion as a puppet show
in, 403

its relation to the timeless

INDEX

Spirit, see Non-Manifest
and the Manifestation

is the great bank of con-
scious existence turned
into values of experience
and action, and the func-
tion of the surface mental
being and of Ignorance
in it, 455-456

Reality involved in incon-
scient emerging in us
through life and con-
sciousness towards super-
conscience as a self be-
coming in, 900-901

sharp distinction made by
our mind between the
present, past and future,
453-455

superconscient and sublim-
inal regard on, 502
Time; observation and Time
movement relative, but
Time itself real and eter-
nal, 326, 327
Time and Space, 326, 327, 451,
459, 567, 583, 624

as appearing to the human
mentality, 494

categories of consciousness,

71
meaning of, 124
unreal, 398-399
Time Infinite, 298
manifestation, 658
statuses, 327
Time-activity, 455
Time-Eternity, 284, 324, 329,
400, 410, 411, 588, 658,
736
Time-experience, 178, 452, 455,

464

Time-expression, 325

Time-existence, 487

Time-immortality, realisation
and result of, 658

Time-manifestation, 873

Time-measure, 327

Time-movement, 326, 328, 455

Time-observation, 327

Time-perception, 521

Time-point, 458

Time-process, 425

Time-relation, different in
each state of conscious-
ness, 327

Time-self, 454, 458

Time-sense, 521

Time-Space, 326, 327

Time-structure, 597
Time-vision, 328, 521
Time-world, 414
Timeless, 72, 222
and Time, the same Eternal
in a double status, 324,
325
Eternal, 324, 736
eternal and a Time Eternity,
no impossibility in the co-
existence of a, 329
eternal being; without its
consciousness there can be
no fullness of spiritual
existence, 909
Existence, oneness of exist-
ence and consciousness in,
486-487
Spirit, 325

the, 294, 328, 417, 427
what we mean by the, 325
Timelessness, 325, 417
Titan, 294, 537, 906, 946
Titanic Forces, 692
tiiiksd, 102
To tje fully, see under Fullness

of being
Totality, Divine perfect as a
Whole but imperfect in
its parts can be only a
present, not an ultimate,
355-356
Totemism, 772
Trance, 405, 513

ascent of the mind to higher
planes taking place for
many in, 811
opens the gates of the sub-
liminal to us, 383, 384
of pure superconscient exist-
ence, 420
Transformation, see also un-
der Change
conceivable without the de-
scent by a long evolution,
but for a real compara-
tively swift conscious
transformation a direct
and unveiled intervention
from above and a total
surrender of the lower
consciousness needed, 819-
820
entire, — can only be by the
full emergence of the law
of the spirit, 628-629
future, — character of evo-
lution in a, see Evolution,
648

integral, see Integral trans-
formation
Transmigration, old popular
theories of, — their view of
an animal rebirth of a
soul once lodged in man
as a normal movement
not tenable, 678-679
Transformation, psychic or
psycho-spiritual, see Psy-
chic Change: Psychic
transformation

spiritual, see Spiritual trans-
formation

supramental, see Supramen-
tal transformation

to get back to the psychic
entity inmost within us
essential for it, and the
strongest way to do it
is to found all methods
on a surrender of our-
selves and of our parts of
Nature to the Divine Be-
ing, 806-807

triple, see Triple transfor-
mation
Transformation of earth-life,
the first touch of spirit-
ualisation must be fol-
lowed by an awakening
to the higher sources and
energies proceeding step
by step till the stair of
the ascension is tran-
scended, 830

of the lower grades of our
existence, way of, 644

through the mind, achieves
a spiritualised conscious-
ness but does not give
us the integral transfor-
mation, 803

through the heart, see Soul,
803

through a consecration of
the pragmatic will when
it is added to the experi-
ences of the heart, 803
Transcendence, 37, 54, 142,
283, 295, 319, 324, 325,
334, 395, 410, 414, 41S,
421, 532, 567, 589, S90,
619, 659, 676, 685, 785,
804, 823, 847, 863, 865,
866

being of, 910

gnostic being living in the

INDEX

light of the will of the,

943
individual and universal as

terms of, 909-910

the luminous sanction of

the, 872

Transcendent, the, 23, 38, 39,

133, 142, 294, 336, 338,

347, 349, 415, 42s, 617

and the cosmic, truth of

the, 342
and Universal Being, 845
and Universal, the, 913
Divinity, 685
Existence, 309
Self, 40
Transcendental, the, 303

Reality, 590
Transcendentalist, 119
Tree; explanation of its
growth out of the seed,
277
Science not able to explain
its growth out of a seed,
272
Trinity, 120, 163, 244

each of the primal powers
and aspects of the Abso-
lute reposes in its first
action on a, 286, 287
Triple transformation, Ch.
LIII
transformation, necessity
and character of, 792-793
True, the, 803

Truth, 3, 5, 9, 10, 13, 30, 31,
32, 34, 42, 47, 48, 54, 56,
57, 66, 68, 96, 107, 108,
109, 112, 114, 120, 122,
126, 127, 137, 141, 142,
143, 144, 147, 149, 150,
157-159, 161, 162-163,
166 f, 191, 192, 193, 194,
199, 204, 208, 210, 216,
241, 246, 248, 249, 250,
254, 256, 257, 259, 260,
261, 262, 263, 264, 270.
274, 278, 285, 286, 287,
289, 301, 310, 323, 352,
355, 374, 377, 39i, 397,
401, 419, 421, 432, 437-
439, 442, 443, 448, 467,
528, 532, 533, 537, 542,
543, 565, 583, 611, 623-
625, 672, 725, 743, 777,
781, 788, 802, 803, 805,
807, 808, 818, 823, 825,
826, 836, 840, 84s, 860,

1033

866, 882, 886-888, 890,
8qi, 926, 930, 943

common, 915

consciousness, 388, 393

cosmic, 446

divine, 376

Good and Beauty; as pri-
mary and potent figures
of the Reality, 801-802

good and beauty, ideal of,
— its pursuit was the
higher creative element in
ancient times, 931

ideal divine, 435

intellectual notions of it as
a single idea which all
must accept is an illegiti-
mate transference from
the limited truth of the
physical field to the more
complex field of life and
mind and spirit, and this
has been responsible for
much harm, 789

is relative to us because
our knowledge is sur-
rounded by ignorance but,
unlike ignorance, rises by
an independent birth from
our depths where it has
a native existence, 533-

534

latent, 389

original, 286, 444

physical or supraphysical, —
must be founded not on
mental belief alone but
on experience appropriate
to its order, 689-690

spiritual, 825, 914; see Spir-
itual truth; Truth

suprarational, 416

supramental, 437, 528

supreme, — its self-law above
all standards, 543

ultimate, see Ultimate truth

universal spirit of, 10
Truth and error, live always
together in the human
evolution and truth is not
to be rejected because ac-
companied by error which
has to be ehminated, 769

experience, relativity of all,
— testifies rather to_ the
infinity of aspects of the
Infinite, 421-422

falsehood, contradictory na-
ture of the relation of, see

1034

Good and evil, S34-S3S;
Truth, 533-534
Good, absoluteness of, 532-

533
Good supreme, 893
Knowledge, supreme, 409
Right, 437
Truth discernment, 826
Light, 840
of being, 444, 60S
of being, ideal, 352
^ of being, must govern truth
of life
of Being, 27, 743
Truth of the Being, 577
existence, 587
knowledge, 915
life, 915

things, an ultimate, 614
things inherent imperative,

274
things supreme, — cannot be
arrived at by an outward
inquiry through the sen-
ses, but must come
through a knowledge by
identity, 788
spirit and truth of life, be-
come one in the gnostic
being, 890
Truth sight, 826, 840
Truth-action, 255
Truth-awareness, 684
Truth-aspect, supreme, — na-
ture of, 293
inherent law of, 915
Truth-conscious, meaning in

Rig Veda of, 109
Truth-conscious Reality, 151
supramental, — in it the im-
peratives of existence
would be apparent, 285
"Truth-conscious," 116
"truth-conscious" soul, two
primary faculties of, 116
Truth-Consciousness, 109, 117,
119, 120, 121, 123, 127,
130, 131-132, 133, 137,
141, 143, 146, 148, 150,
152, 158-159. 161, 162,
163, 209, 210, 217, 250-
251, 254, 255, 424, 557,
562, 566, 575, 591, 592,
736, 753, 762, 768, 815-
816, 826-827, 859, 865,
870, 875, 891, 896, 914
suprarational, 298
Supreme, Ch. 15
Supreme and mental con-

INDEX

sciousness, contrast be-
tween, 121-122

Truth-dynamis, 891

Truth-expression, 888

Truth-feeling, 255, 891

Truth-Force, 255, 921

Truth-Knowledge, 212, 891,
893

Truth-Light, 255

Truth-nature, 844

Truth-necessity, 743

Truth-power, 196, 804, 860

Truth-powers, 753

Truth-Presence, 804

Truth-sense, 255, 821, 891

Truth-Sight, 255, 891

Truth-thought, 255

Truth-vision, 255

Truth-Will, 212, 804, 891, 892

Tudors, 392

tucchyena, 261

turlyam dhdma, 246 f

turlyam svid, 246 f

Two terms of our being — the
One and the Many etc.,
see Knowledge and the
Ignorance, 57o-S7i, 57i-
572; Brahman, 571-573

Type of being, see also under
Gradations

Type or pattern of conscious-
ness and being in the
body, each faithful to its
own law of being, — but
part of the law of the
human type may be its
impulse towards self- ex-
ceeding, 748-750

Typal world, the total sense
of the Spirit's self-expres-
sion in the cosmos not
found in any unchanging,
606
and evolutionary worlds,
nature of — their different
life-principles, 607

U

Ultimate aim of our being, see

Self, 333-335
Ultimate, God as man's su-
preme, 614
penultimates of the one, 421
truth, cosmic Illusion not
the obligatory end of a

scrupulous enquiry into
the, 422
Unanimism, conscious, — a
growing basis and struc-
ture of, would be char-
acter of total gnostic liv-
ing, 921-922
Unborn, 41
Uncreated, the, 404
Undelight, see Pain and suf-
fering
Undivine, the Divine and the,
Ch. XXXII

life, mark of, 350-3S1
Unity, 16, 27, 34-35, 67, 96,
117, 129, 143, 180, 194,
256, 289, 352, 421

divine, 50

exclusive, see Self, 333-335

indivisible, three statuses of,
119-120

mutuality, harmony, 916,
917-918, 922, 934-936

original, — theories based on
the hypothesis of the cre-
ation of a temporary or
apparent soul by some
power of: rebirth is not
an absolute necessity in
them, 664-666

pure and blank, — no place
for harmony in, 922

real, — a real diversity brings
out the, 308

secret, 589

of all aspects, its nature in
supermind, in Overmind
and in Mind, 288-289

with others, external, see
External unity
Universe, 360-361, 589; see
also Evil and suffering,
365-366; Divine Govern-
ment of the Universe;
also under Maya; Mani-
festation; World, etc.

and its ob)ects, are not a
mere image or figure,, 576

and the individual, relation
between, 45

as existing in the individual
consciousness, fragmen-
tary truth of, 590

becomes true and not a
mere phenomenon or il-
lusion if there is a cosmic
spiritual Existence, 39S-
396

basis of the refusal to rec-
ognise it as real, 411-413

constant mutual pressure
and influence of the seven
principles interwoven in
every part of its system
must be inherent in the
very nature of it, 704

condemned as ultimately
unreal, 409-410

creation of, 509

is a reality of the sole ex-
istent Real, 416-417

is one of the rhythms of the
Brahman and not the
whole reality, 408-409

its action and significance
beyond our reason, 296-
297

Lord of a real, 418

material, — consequences of
the view which regards it
as the sole and the whole
field of manifestation of
the infinite Reality, 699-
700

material, — its apparent In-
conscience holds in itself
darkly all that is eter-
nally self-revealed in the
luminous Superconscient:
to reveal it in Time is the
slow and deliberate de-
light of Nature and the
aim of her cycles, 573

material, — the idea of its
sole existence not tenable,
see Pantheism, material-
istic evolutionary, 686-687

material, — if we once admit
the Will of the supreme
and cosmic Being as its
indispensable condition it
is no longer possible to
accept Desire as the cre-
ative principle or to sup-
pose a sole material uni-
verse and its evolution
there as the solitary and
limited possibiHty of the
manifestation of the All-
being, 686-687

material, — its origin by the
spiritual impetus of the
Many imply a previous
first Will in Sachchida-
nanda to that end, 685-
686

INDEX

meaning of, 42

nihilistic view of the, 507-
508

no reason to regard it as an
unreal reality because of
its pragmatic truth, 410

not abolished but taken up
and transformed by an in-
tegral spiritual conscious-
ness, 562

phenomenal, — its foundation
in Nescience and the im-
portance of birth as the
sole condition of the ev-
olutionary persistence of
Life in it, 674-675

physical, — nature of the ev
olution of, see Spirit in
things involved in the
Nescience

principle of the building of
308

Sankhya view of, see Being
and Consciousness, 574-

575

Shankara view of the ex-
istence of, 413-415

subjective and objective
views of, see Knowledge,
also under Reality etc.,

573-574

suprarational character of
its mystery and the imi-
tations in the Buddha and
Shankara conceptions of
it, 41S-416

the Absolute holds in itself
the permanent truth of all
that is fundamental to
our or the world's exist-
ence, and it is this truth
deploying its possibihties
that we see as the uni-
verse, 569

the idea of an essentially
unreal, see Absolute, 569-
570

the question whether it is a
figment of consciousness
or a true formation of be-
ing, 394-395

truth of, 320-321, 322, 324,
929

unreality cannot be its fun-
damental character, 417-
418
Universal, the, 107, 243, 296,
891

1035

Universal, the,— opening to it
on a basis of ego and di-
viding mind leads to a
universalised confusion
and discord, 933-934

and the individual, truth of
the, 341-342

and individual, see Individ-
ual and the universal

being, 306

consciousness ; its power
of absolute self-obUvion,
524-525

Force, see Force, universal

existence of the, 335

existence, two terms of, 309

function in evolutionary de-
velopment of the, see Ev-
olutionary development,
676-677

individual, 845

reason for the reality of
the, see, Absolute Reality,
587-588

self, man's ignorance of his,

. 503-504
Universalisation on the sur-
face, a construction and
not the real thing, 912-913

inner living a first step to-
wards, 912-913
Universality, results of the ex-
ternal attempt at, 910-911
Universal-individual ; Purusha

as the, 314-315
Unknown, 14, 64

the, 613, 768, 770
Unknowable, the, 11, 13, 14,
29-31, 34, 35. 43, 95. 141.
143, 287

meaning of, 27-31

and this manifest knowable,
even accepting their co-
existence it is still possi-
ble to pass a final verdict
of condemnation on the
Becoming and decide to
return into the absolute
Being on the basis of the
distinction between the
real reality of the Abso-
lute and the partial re-
ahty of the relative uni-
verse, 570

different views of the, 506-

507
true meam'ng of the, 508
Unmanifest, the, 576

1036

unmattavat, 211 f
Upanishad, 524, 906, 911; see
Vedantic thought of the
Upanishad
according to it a veil exists
between mind and super-
mind, 527-529
debates in, 65-66
description of Oneness in,

304

describes the subliminal be-
ing as the Dream Self,
the superconscient as the
Sleep Self, the incom-
municable Self or One-
Existence as the fourth
state of the Self, 383-384

its declaration that the
Spirit first formed animal
kinds and finally man into
which the gods entered
for their cosmic functions
is a clear parable of the
development of more and
more evolved forms till
one was found that was
capable of housing a de-
veloped consciousness, 745

one existence of the self
translated into our way of
consciousness becomes the
triple knowledge formu-
lated in the, 487-488; see
Vedantic thought of the
Upanishad

significance of its description
of Brahman as both the
Knowledge and the Ig-
norance, 452-453

trans, from, 294, 307, 439

the Unknowable is some-
thing which being known
all is known in the words
of the, 508

the Unknowable may be the
absolute and uncondi-
tioned bliss of the, 507
Upanishad(s), 8-9, 10, 13, 14,
i5> 23, 29 f, 35, 62, 65-66,
67, 95, 100, 138, 144, 162,
174, i77> 178, 210, 294,
29s, 353
Upanishads, admit the survi-
val of the personality af-
ter death and its passage
into other worlds, 671 f

fourfold status of Brahman
as Self in the, 403

gods in the thought of the,

INDEX

— are powers of Con-
sciousness and powers of
Nature, 745

method of intuitive expres-
sion in the fathomless
thought and profound
language of the, 781-782

nature of the affirmation of
the Absolute in the, 566-
568

their assertion that the
world is a becoming of
the eternal Being is not
accepted in the view of
the double status of Brah-
man-Consciousness, 398

three declarations of, 65

teaching. Dr. Schweitzer's
view of rebirth in, 671 f

the lower threefold status
of Brahman is nowhere
laid down as a condition
of illusion in the, 405

the universal Inhabitant of
the, 634

Vedanta of the, 596

Vidya and Avidya in the,
446 f
Upward evolution, see Evo-
lution, upward
Unreality, distinction has to
be made in our concep-
tions of it so as to avoid
a possible confusion in
our dealings with the
problem of the Ignorance,
429-430

it is in the power of the
Mind to conceive things
that are not real or not
wholly real, 428-429

Vaishnava heaven, 24 f

Vanity of life, see under Su-
pracosmic view

Varuna, Bhrigu son of, see un-
der Bhrigu

Vast, the, 122, 432, 818 — , a
formless, 151

vasudhaiva kutumbakam,
786 f

Vayu, 247, 294

Veda, 48, 66, 438, 830
and the Upanishads, intui-
tively metaphysical and

revealingly poetic lan-
guage of the, 292-293

and Vedanta, entire reliance
upon intuition and spir-
itual experience by the
sages of, 65-66

ancient seers of the, — what
they meant by Knowledge
and Immortality, 611-613

atheism cannot be the final
Veda because it does not
correspond with the Veda
within, 614

conception of the gods in
the, 144, 257

unbaked jar of the, 813

mystic parables of the, 434
Vedic clues of Supermind, 116-
117

formula Earth as the sym-
bolic name of the m.aterial
principle in the, 232

Gods and their opponents,
significance of the contest
between, 537

its cryptic verses contain the
gospel of, 115-116

mystics, 438

Restrainers, 14

Rishis, 159, 246

sages, path of the ancient,
102

terms, see Knowledge and
the Ignorance, 438-439
Vedic seers, 432-433

large Truth and Right
hymned by, 143

ranges of cosmic existence
which to them were the
worlds of illuminated di-
vine existence, 236

Rays spoken of by, 243 f

two primary faculties of
Sight and Hearing of the
"truth-conscious" soul
spoken of by, 116-117

triple world of, 15

what Maya meant for, 108
Vedanta, 451, 509, 567, 574,
see Upanishad, 383-384

a saying of, 119

ancient or earlier, 63, 66, 67,
106; see also Vedanta,
original; Veda and Ve-
danta ; and under Vedanta

ancient, experience of Brah-
man in, 56

ancient, its formulation of

the message of the Intui-
tion in the three great
declarations of the Upan-
ishads, 65

ancient, 671 f

ethics in the ancient legend
of the, 885

has sought through knowl-
edge of the Self the
knowledge of the Uni-
verse, 62

illustration given by it to
represent the identity in
difference between the rel-
ative and the Absolute, 72

Force constituting the atom
is fundamentally the Chit-
Shakti or Chit-Tapas of
the, 171

of the Upanishads, 596 ; see
also under Supracosmic
view

that movement is an aspect
of something other than
itself seems to be asserted
by, 70

Sachchidananda of the, 89
Vedantic conception, original,
see Knowledge and the
Ignorance, 439-441

affirmation, integral, 102

analysis, last concept at
which it arrives in its
view of the universe, 64

conception of Asat, Bud-
dhism goes back to, 35

expression, see Vedanta,
original, 15

experience, the fundamental
Reality behind all appear-
ances discovered by, 64;
see also Vedanta, original

formula, 24

idea of liberation, 88$

knowledge, method of, Ch.
VIII

knowledge, oldest, five de-
grees of our being spoken
of in, 238

philosophy, not denying the
eternal dependence of the
Many on the One, 138

Prithivi, 695

Sachchidananda, 90

Scriptures, ancient and eter-
nal truth preserved in, 107

Seers, need in their percep-
tions for an Asat, 35

INDEX

solution, necessary to accept
to explain the evolution
of Life and Mind in Mat-
ter, 5

theory of cosmic origin,
ancient, 75, 87

thinking of the Upanishads,
65

thought of the Upanishad,
antinomy of Vidya and
Avidya in the, 438-439

thought, earliest, — compre-
hensive affirmation of the
Absolute in the, 566-568

thought, see Buddhists, 596

Vidya and Avidya, 452

view of man, ancient, 452-

453

Vedantins, primary, ultimate
and eternal Existence as
seen by the, 86
ancient, 25

Verification of truths, train-
ing of capacity needed for,
580

Vidya, 39, 41, 152, 438, 439,
443

Vidya and Avidya, 446 f, 452 ;
see also Knowledge and
the Ignorance ; — not ex-
clusive of each other, 35-

. 26 .

Vidya and Avidya, the opposi-
tion between the things
denoted by the two terms
becomes absolute in a
later rigidly analytic and
dialectical view, 439-440
Vishnu, 434

Narayana a name of, and
the meaning of the name,
16 f
fulfilled perfection of the
luminous Emergence of
the highest step of the
world-pervading, 42
Purana, translation from,

114

Vision and Power, indwelling,
each thing governed by
an, 126-127

Vision; possible results of its
opening in the process of
spiritual evolution to
what is above us, 810

visvamdnava, 16

Vivekananda, 930-931 I

1037

Vivekachudamani, trans, from,

394, f^or)
Vital and physical being, see
Physical and vital being,
498-499

physical individual, 544
Vital being, 317, 525, 796, 806,
.859

circumstances in which its
survival possible, 731-732

inner, see Inner vital being

its character and the reason
for its acceptance of the
moral demand upon it,
723

its element not earth but
air, 800

its recoil from life not con-
clusive, see under World-
negation, 374-376

outer, — distorting influence
of, 476-477

subliminal, 640

surface, — is not concerned
with truth or right action,
but with self-affirmation
and all satisfactions of
desire, 552-554

surface, — is not primarily
concerned with truth and
good, but it can have the
passion for them as it has
more spontaneously the
passion for joy and
beauty, 553-554
Vital consciousness, present in
us, in animals and in
plants, and in the consti-
tution of its self-experi-
ence different from the
mental being, 82, 83

ego, 794, 935, 945, 946; see
also Ego; pose of, 477

ego-motives, dangers of en-
,try into the subliminal
with, 477, 479

egoism, self-assertive, —
raises a mass of reaction
against itself, 724-725

life, limitation of, 909

man, see Man, 643

man; when the vital self
dominates the mind, the
will, the action, then is
created the, 799-Sco

man, has a stronger dy-
namics of action than the

1038

mental man because of
his use of mind, 920
mind, reason for the disgust
and disappointment of,

373
mind, as the creator of the
fact and the sense of evil,
541
mind, nature of, 372-373,

640-641
personality, 859
self, 799

the, — giving up of its cher-
ished desires etc. necessary
in order to be replaced by
a desireless free and yet
automatically self - deter-
mining force, 826
worlds, the natural home of
the powers that most dis-
turb human life, 696
worlds, man may be held
there for a period on his
internatal journey, 713

Vital-intuitional sense-under-
standing, 922

Vitalism, materialised, 649

Vitalistic and materialistic hu-
man being and his life,
rational and scientific
formula of, 935

Vitalistic theory; even in its
widest development, need
not admit the real exist-
ence of a soul or its im-
mortality or eternity, 668-
669

Vitalistic view of things, gives
a considerable importance
to our individual experi-
ence and actions even
though there is no ever-
enduring Purusha, 670

Voice, 803

Void, 271, 307, 395, 397, 410,
427, 569, 574» 592; see
silence and emptiness
the, 72, 92, 109, 119
or Zero of the Buddhists,
29 f

Yoid of the Infinite as the sole
enduring Reality, Bud-
dhist and other views of
the, 395-396
no such thing as the abso-
lute, and what we mean
by Void, 234

Vrindavan, see Goloka, 24 f

INDEX

w

Waking consciousness, 496
Waking individual conscious-
ness, see under Surface
consciousness
mind and ego, see Mind and

ego
see also under Surface
self, conscient, — character

of, 633
state, see Surface self;
Dream, sleep and waking
states
self of, 404
War and political strife, could
have no ground for exist-
ence in a life governed by
gnostic consciousness, 944
dictum of Heraclitus on, 261
Weakness, only a particular
working of the one divine
Will-Force, 444
West, see also East and West
West, occultism in the, see Oc-
cultism in the West
Western knowledge, new, 107
metaphysics, term for Su-
preme Brahman in, 294
philosophy, 671 f
Whole, see Divine Whole
Whole-consciousness, 328
Will, 16, 54, 115, 132, 146, 158,
168, 177, 180, 181, 224,
229, 241, 273, 275, 278,
286, 299, 300, 322, 400,
404, 417, 449, 508, 686,
701, 719, 743, 744, 823,
886, 890, 892, 913, 919,

943 ,

as the Knowledge-Force of/
the Conscious Being, 120

material force a subcon-
scious operation of, 168

active, 143

all-determining, 135

all-informing, 134

cosmic, 235, 244, 391

divine, 128, 803

inner, 913

meaning of, 908

mental, 224

Lord of the, 286

object of the, 286

one vast action of, 122

predetermining, 112

secret, 90

subconscious, 163

of the collectivity, conscious,

16
of the Divine, 181
of mankind, collective, 16
of the universal Supermind,
175

Will, pragmatic, — a larger
change can be partly at-
tained by adding to the
experience of the heart a
consecration of the, 803

Will and Consciousness,
emerging, its fulfilment
must be assumed to be
the conclusion of the
world, 221; see also Con-
sciousness and Will

Will and Guidance, secret,^—
nature and source of, 720

Will and Knowledge, divine,
see Divine and the un-
divine existence, 354-356

Will and Knowledge, see
Knowledge and Will

Will and Knowledge, 432

Will and Knowledge, superior
to Mind and creative of
the worlds, 114, 133, 134,
135 ; see also Knowledge
and Will

Will of the Infinite in the
supernature, 890

Will-Force, 875

Will-Force, divine, 444

Will-Force of Sachchidananda,
177

Will-not-to-be, 180

Will-power, 743

Wireless telegraphy, signifi-
cance of, 17

Wisdom, 33, 392, 611, 624, 882

Of^^-'-'i-rn, cosmic, — the law de-
lving us of the memory
past lives is a law of,
729
divine, 356
eternal, 836
supreme, 724
Wise beyond our wisdom, the,

30-31
Without and the within, the
present and the past self-
consciousness, — our sharp
distinctions made between
them are tricks of the
Hmited unstable action of
mind, 453-455
Witness, 218, 280

his nature, if he exists, is not
organised mind but that
which broods equally in
the living earth and the
living human body and to
which mind and senses are
dispensable instruments,

21

Witness, immobile, 361

its earliest formula promises
to be its last, 3
Witness, new, 750
Witness, results when the
Purusha in us becomes
aware of itself as the, 315
secret, 242
Self, 359, 461
the eternal, 614
the view that action cannot

proceed without the, 20
universal, Consciousness as,
20
Witness and control, con-
cealed, 207
of creation, conscious but
uninstructed, — not pos-
sible for him to discover
the clue of the unfolding
of evolution, 755-758
Word, 288
Word, proceeding out of the

Silence, 27-28, 143
Words, seven, see Seven words

of the ancient sages
Work of works, 42
Work, divine, 45
World, 45, 95, 904-905; see
under Universe, see also
World-Existence
cognition, 394

created by Maya, spiritual
justification for the idea
of a, 406
of Ignorance, hope for a
victory of the human en-
deavour in this, 432-435
of Ignorance, possibility of
a greater manifestation
here if our ignorance is a
half-knowledge evolving
towards knowledge, 429
of the Ignorance, see under
Universe etc.
World, divine government of,
see Divine Being, 319-320
human, — and a greater
world beyond as con-

INDEX

ceived by the Vedic seers,
431-433

material, — its intercommu-
nication with planes of
higher being implied in
the gradations of the in-
volution which precede
the evolution, 682-683

nature of its foundation and
beginning, its real char-
acter in the middle and
what would be its con-
clusion, 26

not a creation of the in-
dividual mind, 684, 685

real, — cannot be known if
we consider Mind alone,

443-444
the nature of a given world
will depend on whatever
self-formulation of the
Consciousness-Force of
the eternal Existence ex-
presses in that world, 257-

259
three layers of, 147
whatever comes into it seeks
to arrive at the intended
form, 106
Worlds beyond, their existence
and their influence on our
physical existence and
physical body, 20
higher, see Higher worlds
order of the, Ch. XLIX
other, see Other worlds
supraphysical, see Supra-
physical worlds
typal and evolutionary, see
Typal and evolutionary
worlds
World-being, 335, 342, 429,

441, 447
World-conquerors, secret of
success behind the great,
617-618
World-creation, not a contra-
diction of the Infinite's
unitarian consciousness,
424-425
World-Energy, 314, 382
World-enigma, nature of the
triple movement which is
the whole key of, 106
World-Existence, drive of set
purpose characterising the
operations of, 84 I

1039

different dynamisms of one,
167
World-Existence, its three gen-
eralisations starting from
the conceptions of Maya,
Prakriti and Lila and rep-
resenting themselves in
our philosophical systems
as mutually contradictory
systems, are complemen-
tary and necessary in
their totality to an inte-
gral view of life and the
world, 95-97
World-Force, 923
World-illusion, see Mayava-
dins, philosophies of the
World-knowledge, A12>-A1A
World-manifestations, Igno-
rance not the whole
meaning of, 752-753
World-Mother, 824, 863
World-nature, 441, 480, 557,

578, 752, 868

World-negation, formulation

by Buddha and Shankara

of the philosophy of,

374

World-negation reasons for,

373-374, 374-376, 375-376

World-order, new, see New

world-order
World-play, continuation of
the limited individual in
the action of the world
an imperative need of the,
38
World-Purusha, 333
World-self, psychic being at
some stage might become
passively subject to,
209
World-spirit, 929
World-Transcendent, the, 2>^
Wrong and evil, see also E\-il;
Falsehood and evil ; Good
and evil, etc.
as necessan,' circumstances
of the evolution they are
products of life-discord
and disharmony, 555
in the errors of an egoistic
self-affirmation they first
arise, 558-559
Wrong-doing and evO, see
Vital being, 552-554

1040

Yajnavalkya, 405 f

Yajur Veda, translation from,

626
Yoga, 620, 644

a change into a higher con-
sciousness the whole aim
of, 648
experience of double con-
sciousness in, 312

INDEX

Yoga-Maya, 294

Yoga trance, 170

yogaksema, 876

Yogi, 783

Yogic consciousness, 827

Yogic process of quieting the
mind itself, by following
it a profounder result of
self-observation becomes
possible, 280-281

Yogin, the, 643

Zero, 284, 569, 573

infinite, 396

of the Buddhists, 29 f
Zoroastrian Double Principle,
537

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